KEY POINTS:
You can understand Monique's frustration when looking for a park outside an Auckland inner- city school at 3pm for pick-up duties.
When approached, the response from the traffic warden was, "I'm here on business", as he continued writing tickets, she says, exasperated.
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Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2007, as voted by visitors to its website, isn't respectable enough to be included in the actual Merriam-Webster dictionary but it's on its online Open Dictionary.
This year's winning word is w00t (interjection): expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); like "yay" first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak, a computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters.
Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team" - again stemming from the gaming community.
Facebook, used as a verb as in "Did you facebook today?" comes in at number 2. (Source: www.m-w.com
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Twin sisters Doris McAusland and Dora Bennett are 80 years old, live in Madison, Wisconsin, apparently like the same foods, met their husbands on the same day, from the same church group, had hysterectomies at the same time, always get their hair done together and, ever since they were toddlers, have worn identical outfits every day (except for one time when they had different shoes), according to a November CBS News report.
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An Israeli judge has ordered the country's prison authority to pay an inmate over US$1000 ($1308) in compensation after he complained of having to share a cell with cockroaches.
Mordechai Yehudai filed a lawsuit complaining of poor hygiene, a lack of fresh air, broken windows and inmates who smoke in a handful of cells, a spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service said.
"The Prisons Service mistreated the plaintiff in a number of ways, including ... broken windows, cockroaches as well as incarceration with smokers," Judge Irit Cohen wrote in her verdict, according to newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Yehudai has been held in three different prisons and has had complaints about conditions in all of them.
