Don't Panic! Lighten Up!S

Star

Fastest chippy in the west

An Edinburgh chip shop owner has bagged a world record after wrapping ten portions of chips in a minute.

Wine

Mona Lisa sparks strike

Guards at the Louvre in Paris are to strike for more pay because of the stress of looking after Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

The security guards have voted for industrial action in support of their claim for an extra ยฃ100 a month.

Crusader

California Pastor Stole the Whole Church

RIPON, Calif. - For nearly a decade, members of Ripon's First Congregational Church bared their souls to Pastor Randall Radic. But clearly it didn't work both ways. There were certain things he wasn't telling them.

Crusader

Religious TV channel on carpet

A religious television channel that has encouraged viewers to liquidate their retirement savings and charge up credit cards to make donations in the name of God may learn on Monday whether it answers to Canada's broadcast regulator as a higher power.

Comment: The 11th Commandment: Thou shalt use all means of coercion, deception and manipulation to fleece your elderly flock out of their life savings, so that like Jesus, they can die penniless and alone.


Bizarro Earth

Angry German tourist drops pants at airport X-ray machine

MANILA, Philippines - A 66-year-old German tourist, annoyed by stringent security at Manila's airport, dropped his pants before walking through an X-ray machine, newspapers said Monday.

Authorities were not amused.

Instead of boarding a flight to Frankfurt on Friday, Hans Jurgen Oskar von Naguschewski was detained after police filed a complaint of lasciviousness against him, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star newspapers reported.

HAL9000

Talking Urinal Cakes Offer Drinking And Driving Advice

SANTA FE -- New Mexico has taken its fight against drunken driving to men's restrooms around the state.

The state has ordered 500 talking urinal cakes that will deliver a recorded anti-DWI message to bar and restaurant patrons who make one last pit stop before getting behind the wheel.

The top of the devices feature the state DWI slogan -- "You drink, you drive, you lose."

Sheeple

Traveller held after Manila strip

A German man who was so angered by airport security in the Philippines that he took off his trousers has been arrested for lasciviousness.

Hans Jurgen Oskar von Naguschewski, 66, performed the impromptu strip after being asked to go through the X-ray machine twice at Manila airport.

Instead of boarding his flight to Frankfurt, he was detained by police and is due in court on Monday.

Padlock

Jail me, urges chocolate-eating Dutchman

A Dutch journalist asked an Amsterdam court on Friday to convict him for eating chocolate, saying by doing so he was benefiting from child slavery on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast.

Teun van de Keuken, 35, is seeking a jail sentence to raise consumer awareness and force the cocoa and chocolate industry to take tougher measures to stamp out child labour.

"If I am found guilty of this crime, any chocolate consumer can be prosecuted after that. I hope that people would stop buying chocolate and thus hurt the sales of big corporations and make them do something about the problem," van de Keuken said.

Wolf

Deputies find alligator during drug bust

Pierce County sheriff's deputies were startled when they entered a house near here during a drug bust and found- an alligator.

"It's alarming in that it's big enough and its mouth looked big enough, that if it were to bite it would definitely do some serious damage," sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said of the 4-foot-long alligator.


Heart

Missing for 25 years after getting on wrong bus

BANGKOK - A 76-year-old Malay Muslim woman from southern Thailand who got on the wrong bus 25 years ago and ended up living at the other end of the country has been reunited with her family, officials and domestic media said on Tuesday.

Unable to speak, read or write Thai, Jaeyaena Beuraheng boarded a bus in Malaysia thinking it was bound for Narathiwat, one of three Muslim-majority provinces in Buddhist Thailand's far south.