Kate Moss, the English supermodel, is launching a range of jam made from fruit grown on the land surrounding her home in the Cotswolds. "It started as a hobby," a friend told the media, "but she's taking it a lot more seriously after glowing feedback from friends and family. She's hoping her plum conserve will be a hit with the public." Lila Grace, the model's seven-year-old daughter, has helped her mother to jar her preserves, but Moss, 36, is now turning to a friend for advice on how to get her jams into shops - Sir Philip Green, the billionaire retail magnate, whose interests include Marks&Spencer, the British clothes and food chain.
The "reasonable likelihood of dormice being present" is disrupting plans to build a £12 million supermarket and other outlets near Wadebridge, a town in Cornwall, southwest England. The dormouse is a protected species in Europe and, although none of the animals has been seen within two kilometres of the site, planning officers have recommended permission should be refused. "These companies are very powerful," a spokesman for the campaign group Love Wadebridge told The Daily Telegraph. "They want to ignore us, but it seems they cannot ignore our dormice."
A Swedish driver caught breaking the speed limit in Switzerland in his Mercedes SLS AMG gullwing sports car may have set a world record - for the largest speeding fine ever. The current record, which stands at US$290,000 (Dh1.06 million), was set in January in the same country by a Swiss driver. Now the 37-year-old Swede, who was driving at 290kph - 170kph over the limit - has had his car impounded and faces a fine of US$1 million. It could have been worse - slightly. The speed of the US$200,000 supercharged V8 car, the pace car for this year's Formula One races, is limited electronically to about 317kph.
It took him two and a half years and he endured a range of inconveniences including 50,000 mosquito bites, the ravages of tropical diseases and attacks by hostile tribesmen, but a former captain in the British army has become the first person known to have walked the length of the Amazon river from its origins in Peru to the Atlantic. What should have been a 6,400-kilometre journey became half as long again when floods forced Ed Stafford, 34, to take lengthy diversions through the rainforest. On the way, said his team, he had been "wrongly accused of murder on two separate occasions, been imprisoned, had concrete stuffed in his mouth by hostile tribes people, been chased by Ashaninka Indians with bows and arrows [and] been stung by hundreds of wasps".
A computing project that harnesses the collective power of idle personal computers via the internet has scored its first triumph, identifying a rare astronomical object by sifting through a mass of data which is too vast for even the largest supercomputer to digest. Three users - one in Germany, the others in the US - have been credited with the discovery of a "disrupted binary pulsar", the signature of a massive star that has collapsed. Their history-making desktops are among 500,000 receiving and analysing data on behalf of the US-based Einstein@home project, to which any computer user can subscribe.
Facebook fans have been saluting the spectacular resignation of flight attendant Steven Slater, who quit his job with the US airline JetBlue after 20 years in the business by hurling abuse at passengers over his aircraft's public address system, deploying an emergency chute and sliding on to the tarmac at New York's Kennedy Airport. Slater, 38, was later arrested at his home in New York and has been charged with criminal mischief and reckless endangerment.
jgornall@thenational.ae