As I was scrolling through Google News, an article titled “Microsoft vs. Google” added 9 hours ago caught my eye. How could a title like that not?

Clicking through, I was taken to this article:

Now hang on a second, Google can’t even crawl the latest news properly anymore? Surely it’s smart enough to carry out a date check?

A gorilla at a zoo in the German city of Muenster is refusing to let go of her dead baby’s body several days after it died of unknown causes.
The gorilla at a German zoo has been carrying around her dead baby since he died last week.

The gorilla at a German zoo has been carrying around her dead baby since he died last week.

Allwetter Zoo spokeswoman Ilona Zuehlke says the 3-month-old male baby died on Saturday but its 11-year-old mother continues to carry its body around. Zuehlke says such behavior is not uncommon to gorillas.

Zuehlke says the mother “is mourning and must say goodbye.” The mother gorilla is named Gana.

Signs were posted near Gana’s enclosure Wednesday to explain the situation to visitors. A staff member is also present to answer questions.

The baby was named Claudio and was Gana’s second baby. She had a female baby in 2007 that now lives at the Stuttgart Zoo.

A monkey stopped morning commuters in their tracks at one Tokyo’s busiest subway stations this week, as it curiously peered down at them from its perch atop the departures and arrivals board.

Monday marked the third time a monkey has been spotted in the capital this month — surprising, because the beasts usually live in the mountains and hills outside Tokyo, more than a two-hour train ride away from the city center.

Surprised commuters snapped cell phone pictures of the simian, while about 30 police officers scrambled to rope off the area.

They held up green nets and tarps, trying to coax the animal down from the overheard electronic board.

The monkey jumped over the officers’ heads, leaped into the crowd and scampered out fo the station, with police in hot pursuit.

In the end, the monkey got away. But it was enough to make Japanese media go bananas.

Reporters looked for the animal throughout Shibuya, an entertainment district most familiar to Western audiences as one of two locations where the movie “Lost in Translation” was filmed.

Bloggers posted their cell phone videos online, with comments such as, “Poor little guy looks scared to death.”

A monkey was spotted in metropolitan Tokyo’s Koganei city on August 12 and in Setagaya on Monday.

Officials do not know whether it is the same sightseeing simian wandering around Tokyo.

Japanese law requires a license to keep a monkey as a pet. A check of license holders in Tokyo revealed that no one had reported a monkey missing, a city spokeswoman said.

Officials are hoping people will call in additional sightings. They worry that while the animal looks cute, it could pose a danger to commuters — as all wild animals might.

A 27-year-old Egyptian woman gave birth to septuplets early Saturday in the coastal city of Alexandria, family members and the hospital director said.

Ghazala Khamis was in good condition after having a blood transfusion during her Caesarean section due to bleeding, said Emad Darwish, director of the El-Shatbi Hospital where she gave birth.

The newborns, four boys and three girls, weigh between 3.2 pounds and 6.17 pounds and are in stable condition, Darwish said. They have been placed in incubators in four different hospitals that have special premature baby units, he said.

“This is a very rare pregnancy — something I have never witnessed over my past 33 years in this profession,” Darwish told The Associated Press by phone from the hospital.

Darwish decided to carry out the Caesarean section at the end of Khamis’ eighth month of pregnancy due to the pressure on her kidneys. He said Khamis, who already has three daughters, took fertility drugs in an effort to have a son.

Khamis, the wife of a farmer in the northern Egyptian province of Beheira, was admitted to the hospital two months earlier, Darwish said.
“From the initial checkup, I say that none of the babies have any sort of deformities or incomplete organs,” Darwish said.

The woman’s brother, Khamis Khamis, said even though his sister was trying to conceive more children so she could have a son, the family was astonished when they found out she would give birth to multiple babies.

“We thought about an abortion, but then we felt it’s religiously forbidden. So we said ‘Let God’s will prevail,’” he told the AP by phone.

Egypt’s health minister announced that the seven babies will receive free milk and diapers for two years, the brother added.

A man with a black hood pours water on the face of a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit strapped to a table: no, it’s not Guantanamo Bay naval base, but New York’s Coney Island amusement park.

The scene using robotic dolls is an installation built by artist Steve Powers to criticize waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique the United States has admitted using on terrorism suspects, but that rights group say is torture.

“Waterboard Thrill Ride” beckons a sign along with cartoon character “SpongeBob SquarePants” who appears tied down and exclaiming: “It don’t Gitmo better!”

The public can peek through window bars and feed a dollar into the slot to bring the robotic dolls into action, one more attraction in the beachfront amusement park in the New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.

“Anyone can see this is painful from 50 feet away,” said Powers, who had previously been painting signs and storefronts in the area. “I wanted people to understand the psychological ramifications of this.”

Marion Tracey, 57, from New Jersey, said she found the installation disturbing. It made her think of her father who had nightmares after returning from World War II. “In all wars, horrible things happen,” she said. “I’d rather not see it.”

Alex Soto, 23, said he thought it was a good thing for people to learn about waterboarding, but he added: “It is pretty twisted.”

The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today.

It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton Thursday.

A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

The oldest British joke dates back to the 10th Century and reveals the bawdy face of the Anglo-Saxons — “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.”

“Jokes have varied over the years, with some taking the question and answer format while others are witty proverbs or riddles,” said the report’s writer Dr Paul McDonald, senior lecturer at the university.

“What they all share however, is a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion. Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humor can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research.”

The study was commissioned by television channel Dave. The top 10 oldest jokes can be viewed at www.dave-tv.co.uk.

A 73-year-old Dutch man was astonished to learn from police that the begonias he had lovingly tended on his doorstep concealed a secret marijuana plantation.

“Police officers suddenly noticed marijuana plants sprouting from his begonias,” a police spokeswoman in The Hague said on Friday.

The Hague pensioner promised to destroy the marijuana plants, which he believes were planted by local youngsters, while preserving his begonias.

Earlier this month the Dutch government set up a task force to crack down on marijuana cultivation in the country.

Growing marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands, but sales of it and other cannabis-related soft drugs in coffee shops have been tolerated for decades.

I currently have a handful of Demonoid invitation codes to give away. Just leave a message with your email and I’ll send one to you.

Demonoid is a website and BitTorrent tracker. It was the second largest and second most used public tracker for over a year, the 403rd most popularly ranked website in July 2007 according to Alexa, and had an estimated 3 million peers in September 2007.

The website features a publicly accessible search tool. Previously, membership had been required to download more than 3 torrents per week or to download torrent files older than a few days. Registration is opened periodically when resources permit. Users have the ability to create a limited number of invitation codes to send to others during closed registration periods.

A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead, the New York Daily News reported on Monday.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the newspaper.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment’s front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said.

Police told the newspaper that the Saturday blaze also caused smoke damage to the apartment above.