British pupil gains marks for exam expletive

A British student who scribbled an expletive on an English language exam paper was awarded 7.5 % for accurate spelling and effective communication, The Times newspaper reported yesterday. The pupil, who wrote fuck off? after being asked in an English exam to ?describe the room you are sitting in?, got 2 marks out of 27 and would have got more if he had added some punctuation, chief examiner Peter Buckroyd told The Times. ?It does show some very basic skills we are looking for ? like conveying some meaning and some spelling,? said Buckroyd, who works for the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance examinations board. ?It shows some nominal skills but no relevance to the task.If it had had an exclamation mark it would have got a little bit more because it would have been showing a little bit of skill?. According to The Times, to gain minimum marks in English GSCE papers ? an exam taken by hundreds of thousands of 16-year-olds across England every year ? pupils must demonstrate ?some simple sequencing of ideas? and an ability to put ?some words in appropriate order?.

Woman thief falls into slurr and lees naked

A woman trying to make ?manure bombs? using stockings slipped into a slurry tank and fled the scene naked, German police said. Two women entered a farm in the northern village of Eberholzen on Wednesday evening and started to fill stockings with manure. ?One of them slipped into the manure tank, right into cowdung,? said a spokesperson for the local police. ?The other one helped her out. We found their clothes in a field. One seems to have run off completely naked, the other in her underwear,? said the spokepsperson. The police said it was unclear what the women intended to do with the?manure bombs?, but added that the incident could be linked to victory celebrations surrounding the Euro 2008 semi-finals evening when Germany beat Turkey 3-2.

In Australia, drinkers invite crocodile

Drinkers at an Outback watering hole found a crocodile at the door ? and brought it inside for their session. The saltwater croc in question was just 60 centimeters long and more a curiosity than a threat to drinkers at the Noonamah Tavern on Sunday, though the species can grow to more than 5 meters.

Barmaid Sarah Sparre said that three patrons spotted the saltwater crocodile outside the pub grabbed it and brought it inside. ?You could say we were a bit surprised,? Sparre said.

?He was pretty complacent, easygoing. But we weren?t going to test it out.?

The three men taped up its mouth, took some photos of them holding it and then put it in a box near the bar. Sparre said the croc may have escaped from a farm for the animals that was several kilometers away. Wildlife officials took the croc to the farm. Noonamah comprises little more than a gas station and a bar on the main north-south highway through Australia, about 40 kilometers from the Northern Territory capital of Darwin. Saltwater crocodiles, once hunted to near extinction by skinners, have flourished in Australia?s tropical north since they became a protected species in the 1970s. They are aggressive hunters who have been known to attack people.