Yakuza yarn
The high cost of fuel may have reduced the number of cars on the road, but it has not eased traffic.
Motorist Chairat Sompong was driving on a highway in Thailand’s coastal Chonburi province when he came upon a traffic jam on 7 April.
Daily TribuneThe high cost of fuel may have reduced the number of cars on the road, but it has not eased traffic.
Motorist Chairat Sompong was driving on a highway in Thailand’s coastal Chonburi province when he came upon a traffic jam on 7 April.
“At first, I thought it was an accident but when I drove close, I saw an ostrich running in the middle lane,” he said, Agence France-Presse (AFp) reported.
Chairat said he forced the ostrich to run in the left lane where it stopped. A man then corralled the bird and called its owner, Itsara, from the resort town Pattaya.
Itsara said his pet, named B1, escaped from its enclosure after it was disturbed by a loud noise from a construction truck, according to AFP.
The six-month-old male ostrich was then seen racing along the three-lane highway, slowing down traffic as cars tried to avoid it.
Meanwhile, Japan’s punctual train arrival and departure schedules were shattered on 7 April, when an incident stopped part of its service, delaying passengers.
The operator of the Shinkansen bullet train suspended the service at 4 p.m. in the afternoon at Shizuoka Station, located in the middle of the heavily used Tokaido Shinkansen line that connects Tokyo with Kyoto and Osaka, Japan Today (JT) reported.
The reason: someone was walking on the tracks, according to JT.
The 39-year-old Brazilian national with the Japanese family name of Yamaguchi was seen hopping off the Shinkansen platform at the station and walking on the tracks to the next station, where security guards apprehended him, according to JT.
JT reported that service was suspended for bullet trains traveling in either direction on the nearby sections of the track for roughly 70 minutes while safety inspections were carried out, affecting 64 trains and approximately 56,000 passengers.
During questioning, the resident of Higashi Hiroshima City in Hiroshima Prefecture told police he hopped onto the tracks to avoid members of the organized crime group Yakuza who were chasing him.
Police are still investigating the veracity of his claim, as there were no witnesses to corroborate it.