Takeaways Hit by Persistent Squirrel Abuse

Many animals have been observed using tools in order to accomplish everyday tasks. For instance, the woodpecker finch uses a cactus spine as a spear to impale larvae, elephants modify branches to scratch themselves with and pandas can use power tools. But so far squirrels have proven to be unique in that they are the only animals that have been observed to use the internet.

Typically, squirrels use services like hungryhouse, Just Eat and Stuff-My-Face-Please to order up takeaways from local companies. They have a particular fondness for curries, with lamb pasanda being the number one choice. By and large, however, most businesses find their custom unwelcome.

"It's a real pain," one delivery driver told us. "The alarm bells start to ring when the address appears to be in the middle of nowhere. You end up walking through some creepy old woods, with these excited little shapes scurrying about on the edge of your vision and the feeling of beady little eyes all over you. When you get to the right tree, you ring the bell and a furry little bastard scampers down and sits there expectantly, cheeks puffed out in excitement, and you just think oh shit, not again.

"The worst thing is they expect to get away with paying you in acorns."

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Hypnotic Wipes to Tackle Information Leakage

New data protection laws mean that any workers with access to sensitive personal information will be required to have their memories hypnotically erased upon moving to a new place of work.

"Every time somebody leaves an employer we run the risk of a massive data breach," said Emma Cryption from the Information Commissioner's Office. "Whether through carelessness or deliberate action, there is an ever-present danger that personal information, your personal information, could fall into the wrong hands. We can take measures to ensure that printed matter never leaves the workplace, we can ensure that passwords are updated and networks remain secure, but we've never been able to wipe the information stored in people's heads - until now."

Although traditionally considered unreliable, recent breakthroughs in the field of hypnotic suggestion mean that it is now considered a feasible way of preventing both conscious and subconscious information leakage. New legislation will soon make it mandatory in many professions and the Information Commissioner's Office is keen to provide reassurance.

"It's perfectly safe," said Mrs Cryption. "Admittedly, the techniques in use are very new and still a little rough around the edges. It's not as precise in targeting specific memories as we would like and occasionally other information can go missing, but there's really very little that can go wrong. In fact, as part of the ongoing trials I myself have been getting 'hypnotically wiped' every Friday evening for the last few months and apart from forgetting my PIN number, my passwords, my wedding anniversary, my mother's birthday, my email address, my husband's name and where live, there's really been no problem at all."

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Space Junk

"I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to expect spacemen to stop dumping their garbage in my back garden." So says Alexander Cravat, who is fed up with astronauts on the International Space Station discarding their rubbish on his property.

"It started six months ago," said Mr Cravat, a self-employed weasel stuffer from Essex. "Each morning I wake up to find piles of trash heaped up against the fence. At first I thought it was the local kids, but then I noticed stuff that you wouldn't expect to find in ordinary household waste. Things like empty oxygen cylinders, burnt-out circuit boards, tatty old star maps and an inordinate number of Twix wrappers. That's when I thought to myself 'Hello - that's bloody spacemen, that is'."

Mr Cravat has now filed a legal claim to recover the cost of cleaning up the mess, including £12.99 for a new brush. He has also asked the local authority to bring a prosecution for fly-tipping, but a spokesman for the council was reluctant to offer much hope of success.

"The problem we have is in uncovering hard evidence that astronauts were responsible," he explained. "Mr Cravat has shown us several items that he claims can only have come from the International Space Station. We have passed these to our technical advisers but their view is that a dry cleaning ticket for a space suit and a battered Haynes Manual for a Soyuz capsule are circumstantial evidence at best."

Nevertheless, the council's environmental health department has sent an investigator to try and catch the culprits in the act - although at the moment he's in hospital with concussion, after being hit by a superheated baked bean can that had reached terminal velocity as it plummeted to the ground from low Earth orbit. Or, at least, that's what Mr Cravat believes; the local police have been unwilling to rule out the possibility that it was hurled from the top deck of a bus.

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Ladder Ordeal Enters Sixteenth Hour

Concerns are growing for eight employees of a Leeds packaging firm who have been stranded at the top of a series of moderately-sized ladders since yesterday. Their ordeal began partway through a two day course in ladder safety, consisting of two modules - the first dealing with descent, the second tackling ascent. An administrative error led to the modules being delivered in the wrong order, resulting in most of the group getting trapped on the top rungs of their demonstration ladders, without having received the proper training to get back down again.

Concerned colleagues have been supplying them with sandwiches and hot drinks while options are considered for returning them to terra firma. We understand that the fire brigade have now been called and a trained ladder specialist is currently trying to talk the stricken trainees down by shouting encouraging instructions through a megaphone.

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Evil Windows

Following a series of failures and performance issues, a Microsoft spokesperson has admitted that the company cannot entirely rule out the possibility that their operating system might be evil.

"For some time we have attributed crashes, lost functionality, failures to load and so on as consequences of the slapdash approach to quality control that comes with being the market leader," said Harriet Bios at the company's headquarters yesterday. "But now we're starting to suspect that Windows has evolved some form of rudimentary consciousness, which is not altogether benign."

This is something that consumer organisations have been saying for some time, pointing to the software's uncanny ability to fail at the most inconvenient moment and the sheer cruelty of incorporating sophisticated backup and recovery systems which, as soon as you need them, you discover are switched off by default.

"What I find particularly malevolent," said Kieran Vorderman, feature writer for Creative Soldering magazine, "is the way that, when something goes wrong, the system will helpfully notify you that there is a problem then give absolutely no information about what the problem is nor what to do about it. Can there be any greater indication that what we are dealing with here is a sick, sick mind?"

Inevitably, Microsoft is trying to play down this issue and is instead focussing on the roll out of a new update to fix the problem.

"We're not going to automatically overwrite your operating system's moral compass," explained Ms Bios. "We believe that the choice is ultimately up to the user, and so the update will introduce the ability to toggle the malignancy settings. This way, users who prefer their PC to keep acting like a complete bastard will be unaffected."

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