Can this note stamp out corruption in a land where it’s the norm?

In the secret language of corruption in India, an official expecting a bribe will ask for Mahatma Gandhi to “smile” at him. The revered leader of the independence movement is on all denominations of rupee notes.

With rampant dishonesty ingrained in the bureaucratic culture, an anticorruption group has decided to interpret the euphemism literally by issuing a zero-rupee note.

A direct copy of the 50-rupee note, including Gandhi’s portrait, it is designed to be handed out to officials who demand backhanders.



In the place of the usual promise of redemption by the central bank governor, the new pledge is: “I promise to neither accept nor give bribe.”

5th Pillar, the organisation behind the initiative, says that the note will allow ordinary Indians to make a statement against corruption without provoking a confrontation with people in authority.

It has printed 25,000 notes and is distributing them in the southern city of Chennai as part of a wider mission to stamp out corruption “at all levels of society”.

Thailand hopes holy sour candy will stop road accidents

Thai police on Monday started distributing "super sour" sweets blessed by a Buddhist abbot in the hope of curbing road accidents by keeping motorists awake with the lip-puckering treats.

Police began distributing 140,000 of the hard sweets ahead of the Buddhist New Year celebrations that run over five days starting Friday.

It's the most important holiday and biggest party time in Thailand, but also a time of carnage on the highways due to the heavy incidence of drunk driving.

An abbot in the southern province of Prachaup Khiri Khan donated 200,000 baht (5,700 dollars) to make 140,000 packets of sweets to give to drivers nationwide.

"The taste is very sour, which can keep you awake. The candy was also blessed by the monks, which makes people more comfortable and confident when driving," said regional highway police chief Colonel Panya Pinsuk.

Get A Free House - With A Catch

There's a man in Ohio who wants to give away his house. But there is one big catch.

It's in Bellevue, about 45 miles southeast of Toledo, and whoever takes it will have to get it out of there.

Mike Bassett's house is a big one. It's 3,600 square feet, with a fireplace, built-in cabinets, a bay window, two full bathrooms and walk-in closets. He estimates it's worth between $125,000 and $150,000, not including the land on which it sits.



One woman offered to buy it for $200,000, if Bassett would leave it in its place. But he said no. And, if he doesn't find a taker by July 1, he said he will raze the structure.

It's estimated moving the house could cost $50,000 to $80,000, depending on where it's going.

With news video and slideshow.

Turkish band faces jail for exam protest

Five Turkish punk rockers and their agent face up to 18 months in jail for insult after a bureaucrat took offence at their song criticising the country's unpopular university entrance exam.

The head of Turkey's central examination board, OSYM, Unal Yarimagan reportedly smiled when he first saw a clip of OSYM, Kiss My Arse by Deli (mad), a group from the western city of Bursa.

"I'm a tolerant person, but that didn't stop me doing my duty and checking it wasn't breaking any laws," he said. Last month, an Ankara prosecutor said it was, and a court case is due to begin on May 2.

"It's ridiculous," says the lead singer and lyricist, Cengiz Sari, 24. "I was 17 when I wrote that song. I was just your typical rebellious teenager."



Turkey's understanding of freedom of expression surfaced again last month when a judge ordered the website YouTube to be blocked. YouTube has a central role to play in Deli's story. Until last June, few had heard of the band. It was then that a fan uploaded a clip of himself lip-synching his way through OSYM. "Let me tell you something:/ screw your exam system," Hako mouthed over a sound track reminiscent of the Sex Pistols.

Posted days before 1.5 million Turkish teenagers took the much-criticised university entrance exam, Hako was an overnight sensation.

Filial piety key to Chinese jobs

Working hard is no longer enough to warrant a promotion in one Chinese county, according to state media.

New rules state that government employees in Changyuan county, in Henan province, must be nice to their parents as well as being good at their jobs.

Assessors will interview relatives and friends of employees, to see if they espouse the values of filial piety.

Filial piety was one of the main criteria for the selection of officials as early as the Han Dynasty (from 206 BC to AD 220).

Now it looks set to gain importance again. Special investigators in Changyuan county will grill relatives, friends and colleagues on each official's behaviour, including their family values and whether they have any drinking or gambling habits.

Only those with a perfect record will be promoted.

Mystery cat takes regular bus to the shops

Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat Macavity,after the mystery cat in T.S Elliot's poem, after it has started using the No 331 several mornings a week.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings - he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.



Since January, when the cat first caught the bus he has done it two or three times a week and always gets on and off at the same stops.

Passenger, Paul Brennan, 19, who catches the 331 to work, said: "I first noticed the cat a few weeks ago. At first I thought it had been accompanied by its owner but after the first stop it became quite clear he was on his own.

"He sat at the front of the bus, waited patiently for the next stop and then got off. It was was quite strange at first but now it just seems normal. I suppose he is the perfect passenger really - he sits quietly, minds his own business and then gets off."

Police order boy, 5, to stop chalking hopscotch 'graffiti' on the street

A boy of five playing hopscotch with friends looked up to find himself confronted by two police officers.

They ordered Ryan Badland and his five playmates to stop because chalking the grids on the road in their quiet cul-de-sac was "graffiti".

Ryan and 10 pals aged three to 11 were playing outside their homes in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, after his mother, Lisa gave them special pavement chalks.

Two police officers then lined them up for a lecture on graffiti and road safety.



Lisa said: “Ryan was petrified. He saw their handcuffs and thought they were going to take him away. It got totally blown out of proportion.”

A spokesman said: "Officers attended because anti-social behaviour is a priority. When they got to the scene they realised that it was chalk on the road and therefore no crime had been committed."

The road was later washed clean by the rain.

More here.

How boffins cooked up the perfect bacon sandwich

Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty.

Experts at Leeds University discovered the secret to the ideal sandwich lay in how crispy and crunchy rashers were.

They found that two or three back bacon rashers should be cooked under a preheated oven grill for seven minutes at about 240C (475F).



The bacon should then be placed between two slices of farmhouse bread, 1cm to 2cm thick.

Four researchers at the Department of Food Science spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variations on the traditional bacon sandwich.

The formula is: N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.

Slam trunk

A chihuahua with attitude

The Belt Flip

A little dance move you can practice at home.

A lady on a treadmill

A fox playing on a trampoline

I may have posted this before.

How the naked lady of the woods stopped the bulldozers in their tracks

Like the hundreds of thousands of other trees being cut down to make way for the £371million road tunnel, the ancient beech was destined for the chop.

That was until foresters pointed out the wartime carving of the naked woman and the inscription etched on the trunk.

Now the Highways Agency has agreed to alter the path of the tunnel to keep the lady in her place.



After discussions with conservationists, they shifted the boundary slightly so the tree remains untouched.

A Highways Agency spokesman said: "It's an interesting little piece of history and we have managed to amend the boundary so that the tree can stay."

Although Forestry Commission rangers had known about the tree for many years, they kept it a secret because they did not want it attacked by vandals.

Florida Preacher Starts "Pull Up Your Pants" Campaign

A Florida preacher has become the self-proclaimed chief of the fashion police to stop young men from wearing baggy pants.

Jacksonville pastor Diane Robinson said every time she sees a young man wearing sagging pants, she is personally offended. So, she started a belt collection for young men called "Pull Up Your Pants!"

Robinson and other organizers said the belts are mostly symbolic, but they are a way to get to something much deeper and more serious.

"We're trying to get these guys to pull up their pants and act like young men. You don't have to curse. The rap music [and] killing everybody and selling drugs, that's not life," said belt campaign organizer Levale Ellis.

The belts will be given away at a Jacksonville high school to all young men who want them.

With news video.

Madonna has bad brush with artist

Do not expect it to grace the walls of Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s Wiltshire mansion or their London townhouse.

A new painting of the couple depicts the singer, grotesquely muscled, lying naked on a bed as her husband paws her thigh. It is a highly unflattering portrait of the couple and it marks the second round in an apparent skirmish between Ritchie and Peter Howson, the artist.



According to Matthew Flowers, Howson’s dealer, Ritchie, who prides himself on his robust “diamond geezer” persona, was unhappy about two earlier paintings, completed four years ago, which also showed the singer nude.

“Peter’s a bit obsessed with Madonna,” said Flowers. “There are strong rumours that Ritchie was very jealous of the earlier pictures and wanted to knock Peter’s block off.” He suspects these rumours reached Howson, who has provoked Ritchie further by returning to the subject.



The second 2002 portrait, in which she is also naked, shows her squatting in a churchyard. “It should remind her of her own mortality,” said Howson at the time. “She could have just risen from the grave or be about to return to it.”

Howson, who was a body-building fanatic, nearly always portrays people in his pictures as highly muscled and almost grotesque. Although Madonna is lean and muscular, the picture exaggerates her bulk.



He admits that in the latest picture he superimposed his own face on the body of the singer. The Ritchie figure has been compared with Shrek, the cartoon ogre. The painting is on sale for £15,000 at an exhibition of Howson’s work at the Gatehouse gallery, Glasgow, which opened last week.

Ritchie may be particularly irritated to hear that Howson’s sole motive for selling the portrait was to raise some quick money to buy a new house.

Ritchie could not be contacted.

Mother gets earful from her car thief

Police said a Jacksonville mother who left her sleeping toddler in the car while ducking into a store came outside after a few minutes to find both gone.

But the thief got more than he bargained for. When he saw the 1-year-old, police said he quickly returned the car and the child before giving the mother a parenting lecture.

"That's what you get for leaving your kid and keys inside of your vehicle! You got what you deserved!" he told the 25-year-old woman outside the auto parts store before running away, according to the Sheriff's Office incident report.

Witnesses described the thief as a black male with gold teeth and braided hair. He was wearing a white tank top, black pants with the word "G-Unit" on the side, and an orange baseball cap turned backward. He had driven away in the woman's bronze 2002 Nissan Altima before coming back.

The woman said that the incident was the first time she ever left her son alone in the car and she will never do it again.

Penguins on treadmills the latest way to save the planet

King penguins struggling on a treadmill could help to save the planet.

Scientists from Birmingham University have fitted 50 of the birds with special heart-rate monitors in an experiment designed to measure global warming.

They will record how much energy the birds are using in order to feed themselves. If the data shows they are making longer trips further into the oceans to find fish, it may prove waters are warming up and climate change is taking place.

The 'guinea pig' penguins live on the Crozet Islands, in the southern Indian Ocean, about 1,500 miles north of the Antarctic.

The monitors record each penguin's heart rate, location, the surrounding pressure and hence water depth, and the temperature at the back of its throat, telling the scientists when it has swallowed a cold fish.



The problem for the scientists was working out the relationship between the penguins' heart rates and how much energy they were expending.

To do this, ten penguins were placed on treadmills so their heart rates could be measured at the same time as breathing rate - calculated by putting the treadmill in a sealed, clear plastic box and monitoring how much oxygen they used.

The treadmill was speeded up and slowed down to find out how the penguin's heart rates changed at different levels of activity.

Then their height, weight and flipper length were compared to the heart rate and energy use.

This can be compared with birds living in the wild to see how much energy they use.

The flying saucer snapped up by US army

The age of the British amateur inventor toiling away in his humble garden shed lives on - and Geoff Hatton is proof of it.

The former hovercraft engineer has designed and patented a flying saucer from his workshop in Peterborough that has grabbed the imagination of the American military establishment.

"My son said it was a bloody silly idea,' said Mr Hatton. "Now I've proved it works, he says sorry, he was wrong."



The 68-year-old has won a contract with the US government for his 3ft-wide contraption, a cross between a hovercraft and a helicopter. It is being considered for surveillance sorties.

"Unlike a helicopter, though, this is aerodynamically neutral and you can bump into walls and not smash the rotor,' said the inventor, and, unlike a hovercraft, you can fly it as high as you want."

The device, which was rejected by the Ministry of Defence, was funded partly by a £43,000 development grant from the Department of Trade and Industry five years ago.

You can see a demonstration video here.

Spamalot bids to 'clip-clop' into the record books

The cast and creators of Monty Python musical Spamalot are hoping to set a new record for the world's largest coconut orchestra.

The Guinness World Record attempt will take place in London's Trafalgar Square on St George's Day, 23 April.

The public will be given a pair of coconuts to "clip-clop" in time to the Python classic Always Look On The Bright Side of Life.

The current record of 1,789 was set in March last year, in New York.

Here is Michael Palin demonstrating the fun you can have with a coconut.