Cocoa

Coastguards in Dover and France say a large crocodile sighted in the English Channel was actually a piece of wood.

Officials have said that the wood probably did look like a crocodile from a distance.

Bathing in the sea in and around Boulogne-sur-Mer in France was suspended on Friday as a precaution while a search was conducted.

The claim of a crocodile sighting was made in a message which had been sent to a local newspaper, La Voix du Nord.

According to the newspaper, an animal rescue charity which had not been told directly of any sightings asked for the water to be cleared while a search took place.

A spokesman for Boulogne-sur-Mer town hall had previously said it was thought that the claim was “a joke”.

~ BBC News

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Workers have misspelled the word school on a road approaching a high school in North Carolina in the United States.

Crews painted “shcool” on the approach road to Southern Guilford High School.

The road had been recently repaved and crews were working to mark out the school zones.

The company which was responsible said it had “made a mistake” and it would be fixed. A spokesperson said the paint was “interim paint” that is used before the final paint is applied.

~ BBC News

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Development of Proteus 5 is rocketing along very happily. Now contacts appear in the contact list and a message centre pops up when needed. Now conversations are being worked upon as are status images.

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A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria after making a rude gesture at a group of Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang members, hurling a puppy at them and then escaping on a stolen bulldozer.

German police said on Monday that after making his getaway from the Hell’s Angels club, the 26-year-old dumped the bulldozer, causing a 5 km (3 miles) traffic jam near the southern town of Allershausen, local police said. He then fled to his home nearby where he was apprehended by the police.

“What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear,” said a spokesman for local police, adding that the student had lately been suffering from depression.

The puppy was now in safe hands, the spokesman added.

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A man with foul body odour was removed from an Air Jazz flight from Charlottetown, P.E.I., to Montreal, Que., earlier this month, Charlottetown’s The Guardian newspaper is reporting.

Penny Walsh of Charlottetown was on the flight. She told the newspaper she had a cold and couldn’t smell the man, but other passengers weren’t happy about the odour.

“The guy next to me said, ‘It’s brutal,’” Walsh said.

Walsh said she observed as the flight crew escorted the man from the plane and said she thought it was for the best.

“It’s a very uncomfortable situation. I honestly think in this situation they handled it appropriately,” she said.

Air Canada did not immediately return QMI Agency’s request for comment.

~ Canoe Travel

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A McDonald’s outlet in the Netherlands was wrong to sack an employee for giving a colleague a piece of cheese on a hamburger, a court has ruled.

The waitress was fired last March after she sold a hamburger to a co-worker who then asked for cheese, which she added.

The fast-food chain argued this turned the hamburger into a cheeseburger, and so she should have charged more.

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Australian scientists have said they are hoping to breed sheep that burp less as part of efforts to tackle climate change.

The scientists have been trying to identify a genetic link that causes some sheep to belch less than others.

Burping is a far greater cause of emissions in sheep than flatulence, they say.

About 16% of Australia’s greenhouse emissions come from agriculture, says the department of climate change.

Australia’s Sheep Cooperative Research Council says 66% of agricultural emissions are released as methane from the gut of livestock.

“Ninety per cent of the methane that sheep and cattle and goats produce comes from the rumen, and that’s burped out,” John Goopy from the New South Wales Department of Industry and Investment told ABC.

“Not much goes behind – that’s horses.”

~ BBC News

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Police in the US state of Minnesota are planning to auction off a specially modified and motorised lounge chair whose owner crashed it while drunk.

Dennis LeRoy Anderson, 62, pleaded guilty last Monday to driving the La-Z-Boy while drunk in August last year.

The chair was impounded after he smashed into a parked car as he returned from a bar in Proctor.

The chair comes with a stereo, nitrous oxide booster, parachute and a “hell yeah it’s fast” sticker.

Local police chief Walter Wobig told Agence France-Presse news agency the chair would be posted on eBay next week with no reserve price.

Minnesota police can auction off vehicles seized in drink-drive cases or keep them for official use.

~ BBC News

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Dalton Chiscolm is unhappy about Bank of America’s customer service — really, really unhappy.

Chiscolm in August sued the largest U.S. bank and its board, demanding that “1,784 billion, trillion dollars” be deposited into his account the next day. He also demanded an additional $200,164,000, court papers show.

Attempts to reach Chiscolm were unsuccessful. A Bank of America spokesman declined to comment.

“Incomprehensible,” U.S. District Judge Denny Chin said in a brief order released Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

“He seems to be complaining that he placed a series of calls to the bank in New York and received inconsistent information from a ‘Spanish womn,’” the judge wrote. “He apparently alleges that checks have been rejected because of incomplete routing numbers.”

~ Reuters

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A Dorset prison has removed anti-bacterial hand gel pumps, which contain alcohol, after an inmate reportedly got drunk on them.

The gel was made available on Monday at HMP The Verne in Portland to help combat the spread of swine flu.

But the Prison Officers Association (POA) said within hours there had been an incident with an intoxicated inmate.

The Prison Service said the pumps were removed as a “precautionary measure” and an investigation was under way.

It is believed the gel was mixed with a drink before it was consumed.

~ BBC News

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