The couple had been quarrelling for years, and that evening Wang had told his wife they should separate before he checked into a hotel. Li tailed her husband to the hotel, and Wang refused to let her into the room. The receptionist refused to open the door for her.

That led Li to call the police on her husband and eventually landed herself in detention.

An existential question

A migrant worker in China is experiencing 15 minutes of fame after using social media for help finding a publisher willing to take his translation of an academic book about German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

While Chen Zhi’s search proved futile due to a lack of interest in the 20th-century philosopher, he became a mini-celebrity when people discovered he was a Western philosophy researcher in his spare time, according to Red Star News.

The book Chen translated was Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction, which provides a basic understanding of a German philosopher who was notoriously difficult to understand.

Chen, 31, is from a rural family and dropped out of college in 2008 because he was not interested in continuing his major in mathematics.

He said he first read philosophy books when he was a college student and, “I did not understand some of the content, but this subject was amazing to me. It has opened a new world for me.”

Chen, who regards philosophy as his “passion and mission”, said he usually reads books in the library or on his second-hand Kindle. He said he read English-language books to improve his English.

Earning some cash by saving the day

Five students of a university in eastern China were awarded a combined 120,000 yuan (US$18,780) for helping save critical lab equipment, including a quantum computer, from being destroyed during a major water leak.

The equipment they saved was worth 24 million yuan (US$3.75 million) and was part of a national laboratory centre in Hefei, in Anhui province in eastern China, according to The Paper.

Without the students’ timely effort, the centre said the experiment running on the quantum computer, called Jiuzhang No 3, would have been delayed for at least one year.

The leak was first spotted by a PhD student from the University of Science and Technology of China, who went to the laboratory building to do data tests on the early morning of November 21.

He then called on four students who were doing experiments in a nearby room to help him drain the water.

They also asked for help from the property management workers to kick in the door of a room by force to close a tap to stop the leaking.

The lab centre said that, except for a desktop computer, no other equipment was destroyed.