Now this one’s a strange story …

Little 10 year old Huang Li was watched by her father as she saw in the chilly southern China river, Xiang River, for three hours on October 2nd with her hands and feet bound! Her father believes the task will help his daughter achieve her dream of swimming across the English channel.

Huang Li managed to swim more than a mile in the river in early October. She traveled with the current as she swam moving like a dolphin through the water.

“Her swimming skills are perfect and she insisted on doing this,” Huang Daosheng said in a telephone interview. The girl, who lives in the city of Zhangjiajie in Hunan province, got the idea after seeing something similar on a local television program, he said.

With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, sports is grabbing greater attention in an already sports-crazed country. Huang Li’s swim is at least the second time in recent months that a child athlete has drawn media attention.

Huang swam in a skirted swimsuit with her hands tied with string and her feet bound with a strip of cloth. Her face had a blue tinge due to the cold.

“It’s not dangerous because, first, her swimming skills are really good and second, I was swimming with her, staying close to her,” the father said. “I had her when I was 35, so she is my heart. I would never play around with her life.”

The father, a teacher who enjoys swimming, coaches his daughter and said the family does not have enough money for her to have a better coach. The girl started the sport when she was six and her father said her goal is to one day swim across the English Channel.

“She asks me every day, ‘Can I achieve this? Is the English Channel wide? Are the waves really big?’” Huang Daosheng said.

Two German teenagers in Berlin weren’t all that smart when they robbed another teenager.

The girls stole a 15 year olds shoes, money and mobile phone. I suppose they felt sorry for the girl though, because they ended up giving her their old mobile phone.

The two girls, both 17 years old, forgot that they old mobile contained photos of themselves smiling and striking poses.

Police were quick to publish the photos of the thieves online Tuesday in an effort to catch the girls. The girls ended up turning themselves in when their pictures appeared on the evening news.

“One girl was brought down by her father after he saw her on the television,” said police spokesman Frank Plewka. “Today the pictures were in the papers, so the father’s phone has been ringing all day, because everyone recognized them.”

Neither girl had ever been in trouble with the law before.

Did you hear the true story about how a woman lured her husband from a self made box that was perched on top of a 72 foot pole? No? Well he’d been up there protesting a looming jail term when his wife lured him down with a topless picture of herself that she’d included in the lunch that she’d sent up to him.

The hope and promise of a romp does it every time it seems.

Fred Gregor, 45 of Germany, was trying to have his 15 month conviction for fraud over turned by staying in his small cubicle which was perched high up on a converted television mast.

When interviewed over the telephone, he told Reuters that he wanted a new trial. His wife Susanne, 25, had originally backed up his protest until she eventually decided she’d had enough. Susanne is a former stripper. No wonder that topless photo worked! Together she and Fred are the parents of five children.

Perhaps now he’ll appeal his conviction just like most other people do when they feel that they’ve been wrongly convicted.

A court in China has ordered a Chinese television production company to pay damages to a man who received more than 3,000 nuisance messages after his mobile phone number was used in a police TV drama.

The court said the Runshi Rongguang Film Production Co. should have made sure the number was not in use before having a villain say it aloud on-screen, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The company was ordered to pay $256 to the mobile phone customer, Chen Bing.

Chen, 39, says he started receiving a stream of text messages in July 2004.

“It was so annoying, and for a long time I wondered why I was getting all these text messages,” he said.

Chen discovered that his number had been used in a TV series called “Chinese Police - September Storm,” broadcast between 2004-06 and later released on DVD. A villain spoke the number slowly, to allow another character to write it down.

The company said it made up the number from a staff member’s birthday and did not mean to cause trouble, according to Xinhua.