Nutty News in Brief

A run-down of Nutty News in Brief:

Researchers at the University of St Andrews have discovered that chimpanzees are capable of passing information on down the generations by means of teaching and learning. Well if that's the case, what's with the flinging of faeces thing? And perhaps more important, when are those Complete Works of Shakespeare gonna be ready?

• A three-year-old girl in Taiwan is in serious condition in hospital after being attacked by an eel. Her father had caught several eels which he stored in a tank. As he was preparing to kill and eat them, one slipped his grasp and dived into the child's mouth to escape. Father pulled the creature out, but not before it had seriously injured the child's oesophagus.

In related news, Dutch authorities have decided to allow babies to be shown with their mouths hanging open in passport photos, overturning a recent ruling that even tiny-tots had to stick to the rules on how you need to look on your passport pic. A small amount of drool is also permitted, a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry said, but strictly no eels.

• A Frenchman hunting wild boar in Trausse in the south of the country accidentally shot his mother in the face during the hunt, killing her. Police investigating the incident said it was a simple case of mistaken identity, and started preparing a sauce of shallots and red wine, with perhaps some prunes.
  

A man in New Zealand was stopped by police after he was clocked driving at 120 km/h in a built-up area. Imagine Plod's surprise when it was discovered that not only did 31-year-old Colin Smith have no driving licence, he also has no arms, and was steering with one foot. Smith escaped prosecution after he gave an undertaking that he would get a licence and only drive in a vehicle adapted to his disability. A policeman said they might have pressed ahead with charges, but Smith did have a leg to stand on.

• A 43-year-old London man will have to live for the rest of his life with the spelling errors of his tattooist. Brainless tit Martin Nolan wanted to honour his mother Breda with a piece of doggerel tattooed on his back. But the tattoo artist had trouble with difficult words like strength and wisdom, giving the following result: God give me the strenght/to accept the things/I cannot change, the courage/to change the things that/I can and the nisdom to/know the difference/BREDA.
  

A bank robber turned up for a bank hold-up in New Jersey armed with a pistol and neatly kitted out in wig and sunglasses -- but forgot to bring along a bag marked Swag to carry off his haul. Cashiers handed over $1385, but when the robber tried to escape holding the loot in his bare hands, he lost at least $1195 of it, which was later recovered. The remaining $190 will go towards a sturdy hold-all and a packet of Post-It notes.

• Police in Zurich, Switzerland, were alerted that the burglar alarm of a fitness centre had gone off. To check the alarm was not a mistake made by cleaners, the police called the centre, and the burglar picked up the phone. To make matters worse, the man and his girlfriend seemed to think nothing of this call from the police, and carried on robbing the place. And were still occupied when police arrived.
  

Okay one more. A would-be bank-robber in the Austrian town of Poggersdorf knew it had all gone wrong when the cashier in whose face he was waving a fake gun pointed out that she was a municipal worker, and he was in the process of trying to rob the town hall, situated not far from the town's bank. The robber took to his heels, and was captured later when he came back to recover his getaway car -- still parked right outside the town hall door.

More Nutty News in Brief coming soon!