German police has taken action against a German woman after receiving complaints from her neighbour that she was laughing too loudly. Not only did she laugh a lot, her neighbour (a 52 year old man living with his mother) complained, she even invited friends over to laugh with her.
Barbara, who works for an architectural firm in the German capital, said her neighbour was exaggerating.
She said: "I invited some of my colleagues to dinner on one occassion and after a couple of glasses of wine we all started to enjoy ourselves."
She said the next thing she knew the police were knocking on her door and a couple of days later she received a fine for 25 euros in the post.
"It was laughable," she said.
Careful about that, or it'll cost you another €25.
Kofi Annan had a bad day on the job defending UN corruption on Meet the Press. I don't fully agree that Annan "self-destructed," as Glenn's correspondent Tucker Goodrich says, but it is obvious that the Secretary General was sweating in his chair and had real problems.
You've probably read elsewhere that rabid anti-war activist Micah Ian Wright has been going down in flames over his own lies. He pretended to be a former Army Ranger who had seen action in Panama before turning peacenik, but he simply made all that up.
After his own Likud party gave Ariel Sharon an astonishing 60-40 referendum defeat on the Gaza pullback plan, Israel's government is being forced to rethink the plan. Reportedly, Sharon will go ahead with a modified version of the plan.
Ironically, the hawkish Sharon is now being opposed by his own traditional right wing supporters, and his disengagement plan has widespread support by Israelis generally, and would probably go through in the Knesset. Still, Sharon can hardly ignore his own party's decision.
So what changes are Sharon proposing? I have not seen anyone come up with any ideas. The plan calls for pullback of all Israelis, all settlements, from the Gaza strip. If Sharon should deicde to keep some of the settlements, he will lose his liberal supporters, and he's hardly solving the problem as long as the settlements need to be protected and continue to draw terrorist fire.
It adds up to the second Bush-backed Middle East peace plan that runs into serious setbacks.
EUrocrats are threatening that if Britain rejectes the EU constitution in a referendum, which looks very likely at this stage, then Britain's status in the EU will be reduced to that of Switzerland, still in the free trade area but only an associated member of the core club.
But is that such a horrible prospect? It is worth noting that the fringe members of the EU are doing far better economically than core states like Germany and France. And countries like Norway that has only negotiatied agreements with the union - market access but no voting power in Brussels - are all better off than the EU countries.
There is already quite a lot of precedent for such a dispensation. Norway, for example, is a member of the European Economic Area, bound by single market rules, but not by the common agricultural and fisheries policies. Switzerland relies on 13 sectoral treaties with the EU, covering everything from mutual recognition of qualifications to maximum weights of lorries. Iceland, a member of the European Free Trade Area, has a slightly different deal, and Liechtenstein yet another.
Even our own Channel Islands have a special status, outside the EU but within the customs union. What all these states and territories have in common, of course, is that they are far wealthier than the members of the EU. Some of them have secured better terms than others: Norway, for example, has to accept a great deal of Brussels regulation. But even the poorest of them is better off than the richest EU state, Luxembourg.
Obviously, there may be some confusing of cause and effect here, but it should be food for thought for the EUrocrats that membership in the more tightly integrated European Union has not increased the members' prosperity in the way it should.
