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SURVIVAL KITS
Birmingham City Council is advising families to buy a "hurricane" survival kit usually needed only in disaster-prone foreign countries. The £100 kits have to be bought by residents themselves and are being recommended in case of hurricanes or floods. Items on the survival list include a sleeping bag, camping stove, first aid box and wellington boots. Spare batteries, candles, a battery-powered radio, rubber gloves, waterproof clothing, long-life food and bottled water are all listed as other "essential" items. Survival experts branded the idea ridiculous and said they would be only appropriate for foreign countries prone to natural disasters.

Lawrence Clark, who was trained by Ray Mears for five years, said the measures were totally over the top. He said, "These measures seem very extreme for a city, you need this kind of kit if you lived in a country prone to natural disasters. It seems like an over-reaction to encourage people in the middle of England to buy expensive things like this." A spokesman for Birmingham City Council defended the advice, saying, "To have a camping stove is maybe a bit extreme, but the other items we think are just common sense. We're trying to help people deal effectively with emergencies. Birmingham was hit by a tornado five years ago and when homes were flooded these kind of items would have been very useful." (Source: Ananova, Mar/10)

GROUP TO HELP ESSEX GIRLS
Essex girls are victims of so much prejudice that they should be treated as a special group. The Essex Women's Advisory Group has formulated a three-year plan to 'empower' Essex women. According to the group's website, which uses a pink font and is headed EWAG, the organisers say that the stereotyping has led girls living in Essex to feel "disadvantaged and disenfranchised".

Project leader Daphne Field said they set up the group because a lot of girls were "suffering so much from this image". She said, "A lot of the girls we were helping were suffering so much from this image, so we decided to do something. There are so many successful girls in Essex and we wanted to promote this." She added that Essex girls will often claim to be from Kent, or "just outside London" to avoid any potential embarrassment.

She added, "Nobody talks about the Kent Girl or the Hampshire Girl, we just ended up with this tag, but there is nothing wrong with being an Essex girl." Elizabeth Hart, the Chairman of Essex County Council, who is also patron of the group, said, "I am sick and tired of people putting Essex Girls down. Our girls are bright and fun, but then you see them crumble when people start putting them down for where they come from." (Source: Ananova, Mar/10)

CALL THAT A KNIFE?
A soldier did a Crocodile Dundee with a machete when yobs confronted him with a tiny penknife. Veteran Charles Cardwell pulled out his 2ft jungle blade and told them, "That's what you call a knife." Cardwell was set free by a court after he had been arrested for waving the blade at the yobs by his front door. In the 1986 Crocodile Dundee film a New York mugger pulls a flick-knife on the Aussie hero.

Dundee asks, "You call that a knife?" before taking out his big hunting knife and telling them, "This is a knife." Cardwell, who had faced months of anti-social behaviour, said the youths fled after he produced the machete. He admitted using threatening words and behaviour and possessing the knife, known as a golok, in public. He got four months' jail suspended for a year and 100 hours' unpaid work. (Source: The Sun, Feb/10)