Australia politician urges golf with cane toads
Australians in the country's Northern Territory should start smashing cane toads to death with golf clubs and cricket bats in a bid to stop the spread of the toxic creatures, a government politician has urged.
David Tollner, the member for the Northern Territory seat of Solomon, said on Monday the cane toads -- which have highly poisonous sacs behind their head that quickly kill native animals that prey on them -- should be eradicated by "any means possible".
Australia has for decades fought unsuccessfully to stop the spread of cane toads, imported from Hawaii in 1935 in a failed attempt to combat greyback beetles which were threatening the country's tropical northern sugar cane fields.
"(When I was a child) we hit them with cricket bats, golf clubs and the like. Things were a bit different, most kids had a slug gun or an air rifle and we would get stuck into them with that sort of thing as well," Tollner said.

'That's no camel, that's my baggage!'
A baggage handler wearing a camel suit taken from a passenger's luggage has left Qantas Airways red-faced, with Australia's national carrier investigating a potentially embarrassing security lapse.
Passenger David Cox complained after he saw a baggage handler driven across the Sydney airport tarmac last week wearing the camel suit that had been packed into the baggage he had checked in only minutes earlier.
Cox, a marketing manager, had checked the camel suit and a crocodile costume onto Qantas flight 425 from Sydney to Melbourne in a large bag which had been marked to say it was carrying animal costumes.
He said he was standing near his boarding gate and at first thought nothing when a child said "there's a guy with a moose head." But then he looked up and saw his camel costume.
"I obviously was flabbergasted. My jaw dropped to the ground," Cox said.
 

San Jose State Suspends Sexy Dance Team
San Jose State in California has suspended its dance team after a sexy routine at a basketball game triggered a confrontation involving an elderly alumnus and and a 20-year-old dancer.
The team is suspended until it develops guidelines to represent the university "at the highest possible standard," the division of intercollegiate athletics decided last week.
The confrontation, captured on videotape by a parent, erupted after a dance during a March 5 home game to the raunchy lyrics of "Move Somethin'" by LL Cool J.
"It was vulgar," said Ray Silva, 74, a San Jose businessman and major university booster. "It was like a burlesque, with bumps and grinds. I just came unglued."
Silva said he shouted at the dancers: "Trash, that's trash. Get off the court."
Dancer Tarah DiNardo confronted Silva at the end of the game, gesturing emphatically as the two shouted at one another. John Glass, an associate athletic director, stepped between them and grabbed DiNardo's arm, apparently bruising it.

 

Indiana man wins 'Village Idiot' award
The competition was fierce and foolish, but a man who accidentally sawed through a live wire and topped that by wrecking his truck hours after buying it more than earned the honorary title "Village Idiot."
Mark Carmichael's blunders won him the good-natured award that's been handed out for years in the tiny Brown County town of Story. The winner is whoever gets the most votes from regulars at the Story Inn's saloon.
Carmichael, the inn's maintenance man, won in part for an incident in which he cut through a live wire while using a circular saw to replace the inn's galvanized steel roof. But he also damaged his just-purchased 1998 Dodge truck — the day after he got it — by getting it stuck atop a whiskey barrel planter outside the inn.
His foolishness earned the 27-year-old a $100 bar tab at the Story Still.
Rick Hofstetter, who owns the inn about 40 miles south of Indianapolis, said the competition for this year's award was fierce.
 

Finger in chilli
Reports of a severed human finger in a bowl of chilli at a Wendy's restaurant in San Fransisco have hit the firm's sales in the San Francisco area, a company spokesman says.
"We've had a severe sales impact from this, particularly in the San Francisco-San Jose bay area," said spokesman Bob Bertini from Wendy's corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, on Saturday.
"It's very important to us to find out what happened in this incident. We believe someone knows exactly how the piece of finger got into the chilli bowl," he said.
The company has offered a $50,000 (26,520 pounds) reward to the first person offering verifiable information about how the finger found its way into a bowl of chilli at a franchise in San Jose, California, on March 22.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week that police has searched the home of Anna Ayala of Las Vegas, who filed a complaint about biting into a human finger after spooning up a mouthful of chilli at the San Jose Wendy's on March 22.
 

UAE to replace child camel jockeys with robots
The United Arab Emirates, under pressure to stamp out the use of children as camel jockeys, plans to introduce robot riders this year.
"The mechanical jockey is light in weight and receives orders from the instructor via a remote control system fixed on the back of the camel," an official statement said.
It said President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan was behind the initiative. The Gulf Arab state last month enacted new laws to crack down on the trafficking of under-16 camel jockeys, a practice internationally condemned as a form of slavery.
The first prototype mechanical jockey was tested on Saturday and the first batch would go into service in August in the lucrative sport, popular among Bedouin Arabs.
Rights groups say several thousand boys, some as young as four, work as jockeys in the sport in the oil-rich country, many after being abducted or sold by their families.
They say the boys, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, are kept in prison-like conditions where they are deliberately underfed to keep them light so the camels can run faster.




 

Tailpiece

Hole in the fence
Little Johnny, Billy and Tommy were walking home from school one warm spring day. As they were cutting through the alleys and backyards, they happened to look through a hole in the fence of one of the yards where a woman was sunbathing in the nude.
As they looked through the hole, Johnny suddenly started to scream, left his friends and took off running for home.
The next day, as the three boys came home again, they found the same hole in the fence and started to watch the woman. Again, after just a few minutes, Johnney started screaming and ran off quickly.
On the third day, the boys were peeping into the hole in the fence again after school, when Johnny turned around and started to run again. But this time, Bill and Tommy grabbed him and demanded to know what was wrong.
Johnny replied, "My mother told me that if I ever looked at a naked woman, I would turn to stone...
And I started to feel a part of me getting awfully hard… "