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Welcome to Belper

With its busy shopping streets packed with unique independent businesses, its history and heritage, its parks, reserves and beautiful spaces, Belper in Derbyshire is a great place to visit.

Find out more about this thriving, historic market town here: belper.madhm.uk.

Welcome to Belper

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Hard Times

Experts studying the original manuscript for Charles Dickens' classic novel Hard Times have made an extraordinary discovery hidden beneath the fading ink. Paper in the nineteenth century was an expensive commodity and even writers of Dickens' standing would frequently reuse old manuscripts. Now a team at Cambridge have developed a new x-ray technique which allows them to decipher the original content of the pages, and it has revealed some interesting information about one of the author's more divisive works.

Hard Times is one of Dickens' shorter novels and deals with social and economic issues in an increasingly industrialised society, and the rise of materialism amongst the new factory-owning elite. But the team discovered an earlier draft of the novel which was significantly different. In this version, Hard Times is predominantly a children's book about a farmyard full of talking animals called Henry the Happy Pig, and the thorny issue of the indoctrination of children with utilitarian values hardly gets mentioned at all.

Time Capsule

A time capsule buried almost seven days ago is to be unearthed tomorrow at a special ceremony presided over by the mayor. The week-old time capsule is believed to contain a varied selection of items representative of life in the early twenty-first century and should be of inestimable value to antiquarians piecing together a very poorly understood time in our history.

"We're very excited about the prospect of unearthing invaluable documentary evidence," said archaeologist Colin Trowel. "I personally am particularly eager to get my hands on a copy of last week's local paper, which I'm sure will make fascinating reading."

No doubt many people will find some of the attitudes and lifestyles of our ancestors intriguing and unusual, which is why the local authority have announced that they will be incorporating some of the recovered artefacts into a display in the town library. "I'm really excited that we're getting the opportunity to put this material on display," said Chief Library Thing, Margaret Binding. "I think people are really going to be astonished. For many it will be the first proper opportunity they have ever had to experience what life was really like last Tuesday."

Mr Woofy Junior

For several years now Mucktech, an agricultural technology firm based in Des Moines, has enjoyed considerable success with the Woofy 5000 Cybernetic Sheep Dog. The fully autonomous unit is capable of herding a broad range of different farm animals thanks to its in-built GPS, fully integrated livestock recognition capability and laser-guided anti-wolf missile system.

Now the company is branching out into the domestic market with a version for the home. The Mr Woofy Junior is a smaller unit, with fewer features than the industrial version, but the company claims that it is capable of keeping track of up to eight cats, can successfully corral an escaped hamster and will round up all your various remote controls and leave them in a neat little pile in front of the TV.