SONKAJARVI, Finland (Reuters) - Julia Galvin came to Finland looking for a man that would carry her 120 kg over a 253-meters track — the incentive being the chance to win the wife-carrying world title and beer worth her body weight.

In the end the Irish woman was carried by an English man through a pool and across hurdles. She did not make the gold, but said she would keep trying until the title and the beer was hers.

“I think I am worth carrying because I am a walking party,” she said.

Wife-carrying is one of a host of bizarre contests that Finns, who can tend to gloominess in the long winter dark, have devised for the scant months of summer when the sun hardly sets and people’s mood turns frolicsome.

Forty-eight couples from 13 countries, including Kenya, Australia and Canada, gathered in the remote Finnish village to complete the track.

Estonia reigned supreme once again, as Alar Voogla sprinted home in just over one minute to win the Baltic country’s 11th title, with Kirsti Viltrop clinging upside-down to his back.

“Yesterday we have had a really bad luck, because we fell and we lost our first place in the sprint and today it’s super,” Viltrop said, after completing the main track.

Germany took away the silver and England the bronze, while hosting Finns had to do with a win for the 100-meter sprint, organized as a side-competition to the world-known event.

While some competitors are nearly professional athletes, others do it for fun or as a hobby. Third-place winners Ash Davies and Aila Bruce put extra thought in designing their costume, to get the extra edge.

“We came with our costume designer all the way from England — she has designed this especially, so we can compete, streamline you know, aerodynamic tuning,” Davies said.

Some 5,000 people came to view the event, set deep in forests and lakes a couple of hours’ drive from the Arctic Circle.

The contest is rooted in the legend of Ronkainen the Robber, said in the 19th century to have tested aspiring members of his gang by forcing them to lug sacks of grain or live swine over a similar course.

It also purportedly stems from an even earlier tribal practice of wife-stealing, in honor of which many contestants now take up the challenge with someone else’s wife.

It has also inspired others to organize events such as sauna sitting, swamp football, cell phone throwing or karaoke singing. All are part of a summer bonanza of events that rake in visitors and cash for as long as the midnight sun shines.

PITTSBURGH - A newlywed couple spent the night in separate jail cells — she in her wedding gown — after police said they brawled with each other, then members of another wedding party, at a suburban Pittsburgh hotel.

The fight started Saturday night after a reception when he knocked her to the floor with a karate kick in the seventh-floor hallway of a Holiday Inn — and escalated when she attacked two guests from another wedding party who came to her aid, police said.

The melee moved to an elevator and then to the lobby, where the couple threw metal planters at the two good Samaritans, causing minor injuries, police charged.

“It was pretty wild,” Ross police Sgt. Dave Syska said.

Dentist David W. Wielechowski, 32, of Shaler, and Christa Vattimo, 25, had married a month earlier in the Bahamas but repeated their vows Saturday at a reception for 150 guests. They were checking into their room when the argument began, police said.

Police arrived to find the dentist lying on the lobby floor and his bride, seemingly highly intoxicated, screaming.

Authorities charged each with simple assault, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct, and the bride with an additional count of public intoxication. They face a May 7 preliminary hearing.

A district judge considered issuing a restraining order against Wielechowski, but his new bride declined the measure.

The couple declined comment upon their release Sunday morning.

She left with her father, still dressed in her white gown.

Wielechowski left alone, sporting a swollen eye, tuxedo pants, a bloody T-shirt and one shoe.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese bride burned her new husband to death after he got into bed after a drunken argument without washing his feet, state media reported on Wednesday.

“Wang and his wife, Luo, were married on February 2. The couple, however, frequently fought over trivial things while still on their honeymoon,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted a local newspaper as saying.

The couple, from the central province of Hubei, had another fight on the night of March 4, “and in frustration they together drank a bottle of liquor to ease their anger.”

“At about 10 p.m., Luo watched her husband get into bed without cleaning or washing his feet. In a fit of anger and intoxication, she set fire to the sheet he was sleeping in,” the report said.

“When he awoke, the two began fighting before a very drunk Wang collapsed. As fire engulfed the bedroom. Luo escaped to the living room, leaving her other half to burn,” it added.

The woman has been arrested, Xinhua said.

TEHRAN (AFP) - An Iranian court has ordered a man to buy his wife 124,000 roses after she filed a complaint against her “stingy” husband to claim her dowry, a press report said on Monday.

“After 10 years of marriage Hengameh had decided to claim her dowry of 124,000 red roses to punish her very stingy husband,” the Etemad newspaper said.

“Shortly after marriage I realized that Shahin was very cheap. He even refused to pay for my coffee if we went to a cafe or restaurant,” said the woman, identified only by her first name Hengameh.

But Shahin told the court he could only afford five roses a day and complained that it was “her billionaire friends who had put such ideas in her head.”

The court has seized his apartment worth 600 million rials (64,000 dollars) until he has bought her the entire 124,000 roses. A long stemmed red rose costs 20,000 rials (about two dollars) in Tehran.

Under Iranian law, a woman can claim her dowry or mahr, which is a gift pledged by the man at the time of marriage, at any time during married life or when getting a divorce.

It is common in Iran to offer gold coins, or property as mahr and the number of gold coins (worth about 260 dollars) could vary from 14 to even hundreds or thousands.

An Iranian man can end up in jail over dowry debts and there has been a judicial debate whether it should be adjusted according to the man’s financial status.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican brides and grooms who get cold feet before walking down the aisle will have to pay their significant other for the inconvenience, if a proposal by a local congressman is adopted.

In Mexico, weddings are big social events where large amounts of money are spent before the big day on gowns, tuxedos, catering and music bands and churches are even reserved years in advance.

Weddings of over 500, or even 1,000 guests, are frequently splashed across newspapers’ social pages. According to Mexican tradition, the bride’s family absorbs most of the expenses.

Jose Antonio Zepeda, a city deputy for President Felipe Calderon conservative National Action Party, wants to introduce the idea of compensation for backing out of a wedding as part of changes to the capital’s civil code.

“He or she who refuses to live up to a marriage commitment will pay for the expenses that the other party made in connection with the planned matrimony,” Zepeda’s proposal says.

Zepeda also wants lawmakers to give legal status to prenuptial agreements for those on their way to the altar in hopes it will make divorce settlements easier if the couple splits later on.

“We are looking to avoid emotional distress, cut divorce expenses and shorten the time that courts spend solving them,” Zepeda told Reuters on Friday. The prenuptial agreement will be optional.

Divorce rates are on the rise in Mexico which has a predominantly Catholic population of over 107 million. Currently, three out of 10 couples in Mexico City divorce, compared with just one in 10 in the 1970s, the congressman said.

Zepeda’s proposal is expected to be voted by Mexico City’s congress in March or April. If passed, it will only apply to heterosexual couples in the capital, which legalized gay unions in 2006.