In Practice Obiter

Soapy Grounds for Divorce

An Indian woman successfully divorced her husband after he refused to allow her to watch television soap operas. The situation led to daily arguments between the couple from Pune, southeast of Mumbai, and she filed for divorce. Granting her application, a family court judge said the husband had been picking arguments with his wife for more than four years “on the ground that she was seeing Hindi serials on TV channels”.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

A Sicilian builder transferred from prison to house arrest tried to get himself locked up again to escape arguments with his wife at home. Santo Gambino, 30, did time for dumping hazardous waste before being moved to house arrest in Villabate, outside the Sicilian capital, Palermo. Gambino went to the police station and asked to be put away again to avoid arguing with his wife, who accused him of failing to pay for the upkeep of their two children. Police charged him with violating the conditions of his sentence and made him go home and patch things up with his wife.

Courting Trouble

A Maryland judge has pleaded guilty and apologised for engaging in a bit of vigilante justice when he let the air out of the tire of a courthouse employee who parked in a restricted area.

Porn Tip-off Pay-offs

Chinese authorities have offered rewards of up to 10,000 yuan (USD1,465) to Internet users who report websites that feature pornography. Rewards ranging from 1,000 yuan to 10,000 yuan will go to the first person to report each website, the Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre said in a notice, adding a committee would review the tipoffs to determine what award was appropriate.

However, the censors’ latest campaign against content that harms public morality appears to have encouraged Internet users to look for porn online. Within the first 24 hours, a hotline was flooded with more than 500 phone calls and 13,000 online tips, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Earlier this year China threatened to sanction major websites, including search engine giants Google and Baidu, alleging that pornography and other material that could corrupt young people was turning up in search results.