KEY POINTS:
An exercise to help Northland prepare for a bird flu epidemic left at least one participant distinctly underwhelmed. Whangarei Girls High drama student Amber Andrews, 16, said playing a comatose bird-flu patient was not her most challenging role. "I lie down, close my eyes and convulse slightly." While all this acting is going on, the local hospital is grappling with a real virus outbreak. Norovirus, or viral gastroenteritis, has closed one ward and put more than 30 staff off work, as well as infecting 19 patients. Happily, there have been no new cases for several days.
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Something to look forward to when Auckland's trains are electrified? Hundreds of passengers on a train in India were asked by the driver to get out and push. The train, in the state of Bihar in eastern India, came to a halt when a passenger pulled the emergency cord, reports Metro. But it stopped in a "neutral zone" - a small section of the track where there's no electrical current in the overhead wires. The passengers had to get off the train and it took them half an hour to push it the remaining 4m into the powered stretch of the line. A spokesman for Indian Railways commented: "In so many years of service in the railways, I have never come across such a bizarre incident." (Source: Ananova.com)
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A Queensland teenager has painted a portrait of the Queen in Vegemite. Sixteen-year-old Stef Chard, from the south-east Queensland town of Gympie, said she did not deliberately set out to capture the likeness of the monarch in yeast extract. "When you run out of paint, you really turn to the next best thing - it just happened to be here," Ms Chard told Network Ten. The Queen would not be offended, she said. "She's had a lot of portraits done of her over the years, so this probably won't faze her that much." Ms Chard has also painted a Mona Lisa and a self-portrait in Vegemite. The portrait - A Toast to Australia - captures the Queen in her younger years. It won second prize at the Gympie Art Show.
(Source: AAP)
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Sweet-toothed thieves in England have made off with 140,000 chocolate Flake bars. A lorry carrying a container packed with the chocolate bars was towed away from outside Fredericks Dairies on Siding Lane, near Kirby in West Lancashire, by thieves who brought their own tractor to aid the heist.
(Source: PA)
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