Also will check out the Christmas Market, which is a pale imitation of the Strasbourg one.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Police officers who forced teenage students to strip, some of them completely naked, in the hunt for a stolen €5 at a school in Munich are now being investigated themselves after pupils and their parents complained.

Teachers stood by while the children were strip-searched, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Monday.

Police offers were at the Friedrich-List Economics School last Tuesday to talk to a class of 27 students aged 13 and 14 about moral courage in a public setting, when one girl complained that €5 was missing from her jacket pocket.

This prompted the youth liaison officer to call for back-up and organize a strip-search of the teenagers. Four officers split the pupils according to gender and searched them in separate classrooms.

"Some of the schoolgirls had to briefly open their bras, while some schoolboys had their underpants searched," police spokesman Wolfgang Wenger told the paper.

One 14-year-old boy told the paper a police officer had looked up his backside with a torch - after he had initially refused to take his underpants off.

(...) The police stressed that none of the students were forced to take off all their clothes, and that the strip-search had taken place only after checking with the school authorities.

looks like people who wandered off after a sauna, to have a little think in peace...

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman

Lord Monckton is an excellent showman. No one - not even himself - would begrudge him that. He has that rare ability to captivate a crowd and bedazzle them with his famous (some would say infamous) slideshows detailing his unique interpretations of climate science. He actively courts attention and many people, particularly in the US and Australia, oblige him with feverish adoration.

Somewhat inevitably, his bombast and grandiosity act as a magnet for satire and send-up. In 2009, a Melbourne-based English MC called Hugo Farrant brilliantly lampooned both Monckton and his nemesis Al Gore in a spoof "rap battle", which is still harvesting hits on YouTube.

But now someone's gone a step further by dragging Monckton himself into the joke - albeit without Ukip's head of research seemingly realising that he is the object of mockery. An Australian comedian called Craig Reucassel has produced a sketch for ABC's The Chaser, a popular team of TV satirists who have a tradition of "punking" famous faces. It only aired in Australia two days ago as part of a new series called The Hamster Wheel and - at the time of writing - has already attracted nearly 300,000 views on YouTube.

PS. involved in a deal, no time for ET Sadly, except short review.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

I have the setting "do not allow cookies from ad sites or third parties" but that seems completely inefficient (why? Am I missing something?). You can do "refuse all cookies" because then most sites are then closed to you.

So anyway, I've deleted all 3,000 sites with cookies or other stuff, and expect to do the same more regularly (already 100 back now), but is there a better way?

(What annoyed me in the first place is that I went to read an article on some random local US paper about a piece of wind power news, and saw at the bottom that I was offered to comment with my facebook identify. I haven't logged in on facebook on weeks, and yet, here I was, already pre-identified (and presumably facebook knows I went to that site too)

Is there nothing to do which is not completely radical?

Wind power