Something Different

A German para glider has been thrown to a height beyond Mt Everest by a storm and has survived to tell the story

Ana Wisnerska, 35, was carried to 30,000 feet (9,144 metres) while free-flying near Tamworth, 280 km (173 miles) northwest of Sydney, in a practice run on Wednesday ahead of an international competition next week.

A 42-year-old member of the Chinese team, He Zhongpin, died in the sudden storm, which struck while around 200 people were flying their parachute-style canopies.

A Woman skydiver sabotaged her love rival's parachutes and watched her plunge thousands of feet to her death, police have said.

Els Clootemans, 22, is alleged to have hatched the mid-air murder plot after learning her skydiving partner Els Van Doran, 37, had been having an affair with her boyfriend.

The terrifying death leap happened after the two Belgian women, the boyfriend named only as Marcel and a fourth parachutist all took off for a joint skydive from an airfield in Zwarteberg, Belgium.

The four linked hands in midair for a 'star-formation' skydive at 12,000ft.

Volvo: Britains No. 1 "shaggin waggon"The much derided "mums car", the Volvo station wagon, has been voted Britain's best car for having sex in, according to a survey by a UK Insurer.

The online poll, conducted for yesinsurance.co.uk by research company onepoll.com, placed the Mercedes Benz Sprinter Van in second place, with the surfers' favourite VW Camper Van in third.

The stylish BMW 3 Series Saloon and the old school Ford Escort complete the top five. Sixty eight per cent said they have had car sex.

U.S. growers produce nearly $35 billion worth of marijuana annually, making the illegal drug the country's largest cash crop, bigger than corn and wheat combined, an advocate of medical marijuana use said in a study released on Monday.

The report, conducted by Jon Gettman, a public policy analyst and former head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also concluded that five U.S. states produce more than $1 billion worth of marijuana apiece: California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii and Washington.

California's production alone was about $13.8 billion, according to Gettman, who waged an unsuccessful six-year legal battle to force the government to remove marijuana from a list of drugs deemed to have no medical value.

Secret mens' business at the Brisbane Tatts

Male bastion Tattersall's Club in Brisbane has voted against its committee's recommendation to admit female members for the first time in its 141-year history.

A leading businesswoman lamented the decision by one of Australia's oldest men's clubs.

While the club's chief executive Michael Paramor refused to comment on the ballot, Eric Oxenford - a member since 1966 - confirmed the vote had narrowly gone against full membership for women.

A new report has found hangovers account for more than 2.6 million work days, costing more than $430 million each year.

The study also found it is not the long-term heavy drinkers who are the sick leave culprits, but infrequent drinkers who cannot cope.

The Flinders University study, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, looked at more than 13,500 Australian workers and found the extent and cost of alcohol-related absenteeism was far greater than first previously thought.

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A Finnish mathematician has claimed he has created the world's hardest sudoku puzzle, a brain-teaser that required three months' work and a billion combinations to produce. "AI Escargot is the most difficult sudoku puzzle known so far," the puzzle's 37-year-old creator and applied mathematician Arto Inkala said. "I called the puzzle AI Escargot, because it looks like a snail. Solving it is like an intellectual culinary pleasure. AI are my initials," Inkala added. According to a rating published on a sudoku website, AI Escargot claims the top spot for sudoku's most baffling puzzles. Escargot demands those tackling it to consider eight casual relationships simultaneously while the most complicated variants attempted by the general public only require people to think of one or two combinations at any one time, Inkala said.

The many uses of Miso (veretec consulting)Bill Gauley of Veritec Consulting Inc. and his (toilet testing) team eventually found a material that eerily replicates the density, moisture content, and other properties of the real thing: a brownish soybean paste imported from Japan in 20-kilogram containers. It's better known as miso.

Usually they disintegrateReuters reports via Yahoo that a fire that destroyed a cottage near Bonn and injured a 77-year-old man was probably caused by a meteor and witnesses saw an arc of blazing light in the sky, German police said on Friday. Burkhard Rick, a spokesman for the police in Siegburg east of Bonn, told Reuters the fire gutted the cottage and badly burnt the man's hands and face in the incident on October 10. "We sought assistance from Bochum observatory and they noted that at that particular moment the earth was near a field of meteoroid splinter and it could be assumed that particles had entered the atmosphere," he said.