■ United States
No fake girlfriends on eBay
Need a girlfriend but want none of the hassle of actually spending time together? You'd better act fast if you want to find her on eBay. A crop of crafty eBay entrepreneurs are offering "imaginary girlfriend" services to the highest bidder, staying just ahead of the Web auctioneer's efforts to ban such listings, which it now deems inappropriate. The latest bid, with nearly six days to go, is US$11.50. EBay started pulling the "imaginary girlfriend" listings, which have run the gamut from the very naughty to the mostly nice, late last month. The company had initially allowed the imaginary girlfriend listings -- which had numbered in the low hundreds -- then decided that they had crossed the line "into something that was clearly inappropriate," said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.
■ Great Britain
BBC's pot tips a blunder
A Scottish radio phone-in gardening program gave new meaning to the term "potting shed" when its experts unwittingly offered listeners useful tips on how to cultivate cannabis. A caller had cheekily asked for advice on growing a hybrid species of cannabis called Northern Lights, but the experts thought they were being asked how to propagate a type of cabbage with the same name and eagerly offered a range of tips. Cannabis was downgraded to a Class C from Class B drug in Britain last week, making possession not an automatically arrestable offence. "When you listen to the show it is quite clear they are not giving advice on how to grow cannabis but how to use a propagator," a BBC Scotland spokesman said.
■ Great Britain
Brits know pop, not Bard
Shakespeare's most famous quotations are less memorable than the painful sayings of TV boss David Brent in The Office, a British survey found on Wednesday. More than one-third knew it was Brent who said "Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days you are the statue" in the award-winning comedy. But only one in 10 aged between 25 and 44 knew "Now is the winter of our discontent" came from Richard III, one of the Bard's most popular plays. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also proved tricky. Some thought Mark Anthony's eulogy called for "friends, Romans, countrymen" to lend him money rather than their ears.
■ Sweden
Cat feces poisons vet
A veterinarian sent to inspect a strong stench coming from an uninhabited rural cottage in southwest Sweden collapsed, poisoned by fumes from the feces of some 20 cats locked inside for months, a newspaper reported Tuesday. The regional daily Goteborgs-Posten said the vet spent three days in the hospital with hydrogen sulphide poisoning.
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