Edible Ants, FBI Faults, Anglo-Franco Bridge and Murder in the Chatroom

With the widely acclaimed British entrepreneurial spirit, a company has finalised an order for 500 kilos of colombian culonas "fat-ass" ants. What are they going to do with these creatures? - make them into lollies and crispy snacks of course.

After the atrocity in Madrid, not much else has become public knowledge except for the blowing up of the suspects when the police got too close. Well, in an effort to show how the reliance on technology over good old intuition has become too much - even to the scale that the bombings could possibly have been foiled beforehand, check out this article at TheRegister. Basically, when detonators were found, and the local police could not find any leads, the FBI were called in, who used a badly scanned copy of the fingerprints to match up an American who has not even been to Spain ! Feeling safe in the knowledge that they had their man, the real terrorists were able to carry on with their plotting in peace, to the end of the carnage that we saw on march 11th. Afterwards, the spanish police managed to match the fingerprints to one of the bombers that blew himself up. But what if they had found this link beforehand, with a real look at the fingerprints, could it have been averted? I'll let you decide.

Now onto France where a bridge constructed to cross a river has broken records by being taller than the Eiffel Tower. Yes, yet another example of British and French cooperation in making another marvel come to light (previous firsts include the Channel Tunnel and Concorde).

Something a bit macabre now, in that a boy of just 14 wrote, over months, an intricate story of online friendships and spying which resulted in him and a friend going to a store in Manchester to buy a kitchen knife whereby the friend killed him. The fact that it was already planned out on his home computer shows that he was obviously escaping reality with his pennings and then, fatefully, trying to make them into reality itself.

Onto a few hellos and goodbyes. Susi who was here for a while, left yesterday morning to go back to Valencia where she is looking for work. Luca also came over to visit recently and goes home later this afternoon to his home town in Italy. Andrea (the colombian) left yesterday to go and visit a friend in Madrid, so here's hoping that she enjoys the great weather and hospitality that Spain offers. We say hello again to Pili (from 2002) who is coming over to visit Fabrizzio today for a break from her work in Italy.

Okay, I think that's most of the news from this end, time to go out and enjoy the hot weather.

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