Weather Watch

Those of you in and around Mainz today will have no doubt noticed that the weather's been behaving a bit strange. Strong wind and rain early this morning, followed by a bit of sunshine and blue sky at lunchtime, with an extra dose of a horizontal snowstorm from 2pm !! Seems like a scene out of Notting Hill (the film, not the place).

With so much news, I don't know where to start, so let's get on with something serious.
A Durham boy of 13 has been given life for raping a teacher after a lesson. Taking place at the age of 12, it just doesn't bear thinking what the youngsters of today are capable of (trying not to sound like an old man...).

For the sixth time in three months, a gang of bank robbers have got off with a cash machine, this time using a tractor to smash through the bank's wall. What happened to those horse raids like in the movies, I don't know.

Again a repeated event. For the third time in four months, a brazilian football star's mother has been kidnapped, probably hoping for a large ransom from her famous son. So I suppose one has to be careful what type of trade to go into nowadays.

In another major success against drugs, the colombian government has extradited the former leader of the Cali Cartel to the US to stand trial, after it was persuaded by the evidence collected by the DEA, that he continued his leadership from within prison after his capture (and thus negating his immunity from extradition). This comes soon after a similar case, whereby the Farc rebel 'Sonia' has also been extradited to the US to face drugs charges.

Police in Colombia have now freed (after three days in captivity) Pacho the donkey. He was arrested after apparently causing a traffic accident (not for aiding and abetting his friend 'danny the donkey' who strapped explosives to himself in an attempt to blow up the police, apparently).

How would you feel if whilst reading the morning paper one morning you were to find that the US had performed nuclear tests in your area? Well, that's what the sudanese government had to wake up to, when they saw that on the US Congress website. Fortunately, it was just a typing error. But Sudan is still conducting tests just to make sure.

A chemistry student from the US has managed to defeat the plethora of Microsoft lawyers that went after him when they saw him selling one copy of Windows XP and one copy of Office XP on eBay. Apparently, he bought the software with a large student discount, and when he decided he didn't want it, and Microsoft refused a refund, he put them up for auction on the site. When MS filed a suit against him for this act, he filed a counter-suit, involving the ineptitude of it's staff and decptive practices. Eventually they settled out of court.

If you judge how much people hate a program, by how many viruses have been written to infect it, Internet Explorer has to be one of the most hated out there. And so it would be of no surprise then, that even users of alternative browsers (such as the very good Mozilla Firefox) can now visit a malware site that infects IE. Yes that's right, you don't even have to be using it to get riddled with malware. Whatever next.

Forget all those researchers that found cows feel emotions, and sheep remember faces. This one takes the biscuit. A scientist from the Netherlands has found a duck who likes to get it on with another male duck. Fine, you might say, we've already found homosexual sheep, that's not new. The fact that the duck was already dead though, adds a new twist. Yes, we have a necrophilic gay duck.

Well, I'm sure you have enough to talk about now, whilst entertaining some friends at dinner, so I'll leave it there then.

Wrap up well