Marriage on the cheap

A couple enjoyed a lavish champagne wedding reception for just £51 after the bride bid for the event on eBay.
Colette Palin, 25, and Lee Clark, 34, could not believe their luck when the cut price bid for the reception at the three star Buckatree Hall near Telford, Shrops, was accepted. The hotel put the event up for auction on the website after a last minute cancellation.
Staff laid on a red carpet arrival for the happy couple followed by a champagne reception, a three-course wedding breakfast with wine for 35 guests and an evening buffet for 50 people. The pair were able to start married life without debts from a lavish wedding,

Nearly half-a-million road accidents a year are caused by women drivers applying make-up behind the wheel, a new survey discloses.
Around one fifth of the female motorists confess they have touched up their mascara on the move ­ equivalent to 3.2 million of Britain's 15 million women drivers. The poll of more than 4,000 drivers by women's motor insurance group Diamond comes a year after the introduction of a new offense of causing death by careless driving, which carries a prison term of up to two years. Previously, careless driving offenses ­ including applying make-up, eating and map-reading ­ were punishable only by a fine.

Mini-hunter

A five-year-old boy on a hunting trip shot dead a 12 ft, 800-pound alligator in Texas. When Simon Hughes and his rancher father Scott Hughes came across the massive reptile, the boy grabbed his junior sized .410-gauge shotgun and fired at the creature which was 20 times his size and is one of the biggest ever seen in Texas. "I wasn't afraid for a second. Next year, I'm going to kill a bigger alligator," Simon said later. Simon's father had a permit to kill two of the 40 alligators on his 5,000-acre ranch near Houston.

Bee bomb

Specially trained sniffer honey bees are being used in a successful new prototype that is about the size of a hand held vacuum cleaner. Training the bees is simply a matter of bribing them with sugary treats. Trainers expose the bees to the odour, like the smell of explosives, for a few seconds and simultaneously give the bees a sugar syrup reward.
After 4 or 5 exposures the bees associate the odour with the reward.Consequently, if the bees are exposed to an air sample containing the substance, the bees demonstrate the Proboscis Extension Reflex response, that is they stick out their tongue in expectation of food, which the trainers can observe and then they can respond to the threat.