New labour laws in France now make it illegal for workers in the digital and consultancy sectors - including the French offices of Google, Facebook, Deloitte and PwC - to respond to work emails after 6pm. Staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones, and companies must ensure that their employees come under no pressure to look at work-related emails or documents on their tablets or computers.

France's strict labour laws saw Apple fined for making staff in France work nightslast year, as the law forbids shifts between 9pm and 6am unless the work plays an important role in the economy or is socially useful. Its 35-hour week, introduced in 1999, has come under threat from the increasingly widespread use of smartphones.

Chairman of the General Confederation of Managers, Michel de la Force, said: "We must also measure digital working time. We can admit extra work in exceptional circumstances but we must always come back to what is normal, which is to unplug, to stop being permanently at work."

Sometimes the news is just so drearily awful that you have to sit back and almost appreciate the pure comedy induced by it.

Take this item from Washington, Iowa, where the local police have recently acquired an MRAP vehicle (short for Mine Resistance Ambush Protected) through a Defense Department program that donates excess vehicles originally produced for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to local police departments across the United States, including other Iowa towns such as Mason City and Storm Lake.

The MRAP weighs an impressive 49,000 pounds, stands 10-feet tall, and possesses a whopping six-wheel drive. Originally designed to resist landmines and IEDs, it sure seems like the MRAP will come in handy for the notorious war zone otherwise known as Washington County, Iowa.

If you're having a bad day, I highly recommend watching a video produced by the Des Moines Register in which Washington police officials try to justify the possession of a vehicle it clearly has no use for. The excuses range from school shootings (which are an actual concern but an MRAP seems like overkill) to a terrorist attack happening in central Iowa (because if there's any place that seems ripe for a high-profile terrorist attack it's Washington, Iowa, population 7,000).

I mean if the police were realistic, they could come up with actual reasons to use their MRAP/machine of doom. Drunken high-school house parties could be broken up by ramming the MRAP into the side of the building. Clearly, people who have been trying to curtail underage drinking have not seriously considered the serious deterrents to slamming down a few Hamms in your parents' house caused by a soulless war machine demolishing your kitchen.

Well-known physicist Michio Kaku and other members of the American Physical Society asked Congress to appropriate $100 million to harden the country's electrical grid against solar flares. As shown below, such an event is actually the most likely Armageddon-type event faced by humanity.

Congress refused.

Kaku explains that a solar flare like the one that hit the U.S. in 1859 would - in the current era of nuclear power and electric refrigeration - cause widespread destruction and chaos.

Not only could such a flare bring on hundreds of Fukushima-type accidents, but it could well cause food riots globally.

Kaku explains that relief came in for people hit by disasters like Katrina or Sandy from the "outside". But a large solar flare could knock out a lot of the power nationwide. So - as people's food spoils due to lack of refrigeration - emergency workers from other areas would be too preoccupied with their own local crisis to help. There would, in short, be no "cavalry" to the rescue in much of the country.

In fact, NASA scientists are predicting that a solar storm will knock out most of the electrical power grid in many countries worldwide, perhaps for months. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

Nevada's governor is criticizing a federal cattle roundup and what he calls "intimidation" in a dispute with a rancher who claims longstanding grazing rights on open range outside Las Vegas.

Federal Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service officials didn't immediately respond Wednesday to Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval's call for the BLM to "reconsider its approach."

Sandoval says he's most offended that federal officials have tried to corral people protesting the roundup into a "First Amendment area."

Federal officials say 277 cows have been rounded up since Saturday from a 1,200-square-mile area that it has closed to the public for the operation about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

For 20 years, a tough-as-leather Nevada rancher and the federal government have been locked in a bitter range war over cattle grazing rights.

This weekend the confrontation got worse, when the feds hired contract cowboys to start seizing Cliven Bundy's cattle, which have been grazing on public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The government officials brought a show of force that included dozens of armed agents in SUVs and helicopters.

Bundy, 67, who has been a rancher all his life, accuses BLM of stampeding over on his rights.

Government urged to rethink fees and loans system after study finds average student will graduate more than £44,000 in debt

The majority of undergraduates now at university will be paying off their student loans well into their 40s and 50s, with three-quarters of them unable to clear the debt before it is written off after 30 years, according to an analysis published on Thursday.

The report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Sutton Trust estimates that the average student will leave university more than £44,000 in debt.

A middle-earning graduate will still owe about £39,000 at today's prices by the age of 40, and will still owe about £32,000 by 50.

"For many professionals, such as teachers, this will mean having to find up to £2,500 extra a year to service loans at a time when their children are still at school and family and mortgage costs are at their most pressing," said Conor Ryan, the Sutton Trust's director of research.

What to get the eight-month-old who has everything? A lapis lazuli orb decorated with a silver cross of Edward the Confessor, the 11th Century English King who was made a saint, of course.

The unusual, and not very child-friendly, gift was presented to the Queen by Pope Francis at their first meeting at the Vatican this afternoon.

Pope Francis gave the Queen a present for her great-grandson Prince George as she apologised for a delay in meeting him at the Vatican.

The Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, shook hands with the leader of the Catholic Church and said: "Sorry to keep you waiting, we were having lunch with the president", before heading into a private meeting with the pontiff.

The private conversation between the royal couple and the Pope lasted around 17 minutes and was followed by a formal exchange of gifts.

After 20 years of battling the US government for use of his family's land, a Nevada rancher's "one-man range war" may soon end. The family says heavily-armed federal agents have surrounded the ranch as "trespass cattle" are removed from the disputed land.

Cliven Bundy - the "last rancher in Clark County, Nevada" - has since 1993 refused to pay fees to the federal government for the right to raise cattle on land his family has ranched since the 1870s, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

After years of legal wrangling, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) attained a federal court order to have Bundy's nearly 1,000 head of cattle removed, according to the family.

Bundy says the government is taking the task seriously, arming the agents with military-style weaponry.

"They're carrying the same things a soldier would," he told the Free Beacon. "Automatic weapons, sniper rifles, top communication, top surveillance equipment, lots of vehicles. It's heavy soldier type equipment."

Carol Bundy, Cliven's wife, said hundreds of armed BLM and FBI agents are set up around their property, as helicopters circle the area, and nearby roads remain off limits.

"We're surrounded," Carol Bundy said. "We're estimating that there are over 200 armed BLM, FBI. We've got surveillance cameras at our house, they're probably listening to me talk to you right now."

This was going to end badly.

My boss screamed at me in front of my colleagues. I had done something wrong of course. I had sent a product to the client without debugging it thoroughly. It was my fault. But I don't like being yelled at.

And fortunately I was sitting on a job offer that I decided to take that moment. So the next day I said the magic words, "I quit."

And then a few years after that, I quit again, and never went back to work in the corporate world.

And now it's too late. Now the course of history has finally written its next chapter. There's no more bullshit. I'm going to tell you why you have to quit your job. Why you need to get the ideas moving. Why you need to build a foundation for your life or soon you will have no roof.

Rhino poaching is on the rise in South Africa, with 277 of the endangered animals killed this year despite government attempts to clamp down on poaching, the environment ministry said Wednesday.

Illegal hunting is up more than a third compared to the same time a year ago, when 203 of the giant animals were slaughtered by poachers, the ministry said in a statement.

More than half of the attacks were in Kruger National Park, where 166 animals were killed in the first three months of 2014, despite the deployment of troops to protect them.

Authorities in the vast national park, which borders Mozambique, have been battling to curb the scourge of rhino poaching that threatens to drive the endangered species into extinction.