After rescuing stranded people in mountains and hilly terrain and guiding the blind, dogs are now being used in German schools to boost performance in the classroom. Despite a grainy, gray September morning, the mood is upbeat in a class in Karlsruhe in Germany: and that's largely because Paula, a six year-old Golden Retriever, is here. Some parents were skeptical at the start, said teacher Bettina Brecht who has been bringing her dog to the classroom the past five years. Dogs are being brought into schools since the end of the 1990s and there are about 120 institutions welcoming canines.

Arrested Croc

German police were called to make an unusual arrest, seizing a crocodile peacefully going about its business on the streets of the small town of Gross-Rohrheim.Police received a call at around 2am from a worried resident swearing there was a crocodile in the street. Initially suspicious of a hoax, police who went to investigate were surprised to find that the reports were accurate.
"It is true that the officers were not especially well trained to catch crocodiles, but they were gutsy," police said in a statement.
"With a great deal of finesse – according to the officers' report – they managed to outsmart the reptile, temporarily bind up its jaws and take it into police custody," added the statement.
Suspicion quickly fell on a small circus that was visiting the town at the time. Police took the offending crocodile back to the circus and its grateful owners

Hitler help

A council in Austria is attempting to block the sale of the house where Adolf Hitler was born over fears it could fall into the hands of neo-Nazis who would turn it into a shrine to his memory and again propagate his ideals. The owner of the house in Braunau-am-Inn wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million. But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property and the council plans to appeal to the government. Hitler was born in the house on April 20, 1889. His mother Klara and father Alois, rent ed a suite of rooms above the pub and lived in the apartment until 1892 when they moved to Linz.

German fake

A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo Da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million.The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as "La Bella Principessa," was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio -- a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13 1/2-inch-by-10-inch work.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo's "St. Jerome" in the Vatican. Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence, including carbon dating, had art ex perts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the "Mona Lisa."The discovery of the finger print convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery put him at the centre of best-sellers as "The Da Vin ci Code" and "The Lost - Symbol."
Biro examined multispec tral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Tech nology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital , scanner to show successive layers of the work so as to not damage the painting.