Employee checks salary - and finds $3.2m in his account

What would you do if you found $3.2 million had been deposited in your bank account?

Would you (a) withdraw all the money and head to the Maldives? Or (b) tell the authorities you were wrongly paid?

A British engineer chose the honest option, repaying the £2 million mistakenly given to him by his employer in Exeter, the BBC reported.
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The man, who makes turbine blades, was shocked when his £2000 ($3200) monthly salary suddenly increased to £2 million.

He reported the mistake even before his employers, manufacturer Alcoa Howmet, realised the money was gone, drawing praise from them.

"We are obviously very pleased that the person acted in such an honest and immediate way and showed so much integrity," a spokesman for Alcoa Howmet said.

"It is a good example of the quality of people we have at our company. The sum of money involved was a significant amount.

"We are very happy that this employee acted so quickly but we are also looking into the incident."

Can't let an argument go? Blame your parents, not your partner

If a lovers’ tiff leaves your blood boiling for hours afterwards, don’t blame your partner. Blame your parents.

The better relationship you had with your mother and father as a child, the better you are at getting over arguments as an adult, scientists claim.

So whether you can’t help holding a grudge or are happy to bury the hatchet has more to do with your childhood than your partner’s failure to empty the bin.

Scientists from the University of Minnesota in the U.S. monitored a group of babies born in the mid-1970s until they reached adulthood.

They found that those who had a secure relationship with their parents or carers as infants were better at recovering from conflict 20 years later.

The researchers concluded that if a parent or carer helps regulate negative emotions in a young child, they will grow up to be more capable of regulating their own negative emotions after a disagreement or argument.

But even those who had an insecure upbringing can pick up these skills from an emotionally-equipped partner, the scientists claim.

Researcher Jessica Salvatore said: ‘We found that people who were insecurely attached as infants but whose adult romantic partners recover well from conflict are likely to stay together.

‘If one person can lead this process of recovering from conflict, it may buffer the other person and the relationship.’

The ‘most exciting finding’, she added, was the evidence that romantic partners may play a role in reducing the effects of negative experiences in early life.

During the study, researchers observed the participants with their parents in the 1970s, when they were between 12 and 18 months old. Once they reached the age of 20, they were asked how they dealt with conflicts in their relationships and what subjects they fell out with their partners about, the journal Psychological Science reports.

The researchers noted that some couples had intense conflicts, but made a clean transition to chatting about something they agreed on, while in other couples, one or both partners became stuck on the disagreement and were not able to move past it.

However, according to another study, it may be easier to let bygones be bygones if you’re a woman.
Though it may come as a shock to any husband who has ever forgotten an anniversary, women are more forgiving than men because they are more capable of empathising with others, according to research from the University of the Basque Country in Spain.

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Man marries pillow

True love can take many forms. In this case, it has taken the form of a Korean man falling in love with, and eventually marrying, a large pillow with a picture of a woman on it.

Lee Jin-gyu fell for his 'dakimakura' - a kind of large, huggable pillow from Japan, often with a picture of a popular anime character printed on the side.

In Lee's case, his beloved pillow has an image of Fate Testarossa, from the 'magical girl' anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

Now the 28-year-old otaku (a Japanese term that roughly translates to somewhere between 'obsessive' and 'nerd') has wed the pillow in a special ceremony, after fitting it out with a wedding dress for the service in front of a local priest. Their nuptials were eagerly chronicled by the local media.

'He is completely obsessed with this pillow and takes it everywhere,' said one friend.

'They go out to the park or the funfair where it will go on all the rides with him. Then when he goes out to eat he takes it with him and it gets its own seat and its own meal,' they added.

The pillow marriage is not the first similarly-themed unusual marriage in recent times - it comes after a Japanese otaku married his virtual girlfriend Nene Anegasaki, a character who only exists in the Nintendo DS game Love Plus, last November.