In the news today....

• another foot and mouth outbreak in Surrey, England. The first one, in August, was in Normandy, where I got my gorgeous first dog, Arran, from. This one is in Egham, very close to which I lived whilst gardening for the Queen. There's some concern for the Queen's deer (didn't know there was any space in that area for something as free as deer), and Windsor Great Park has been closed. No doubt leading to a loss of revenue, and of a handy shortcut from Englefield Green (where I lived) to Windsor.
• in Vilnius a little plane belonging to SAS crashlanded, following the failure of half its landing gear. Another plane of the same model belonging to the same airline had crashlanded for the same reason a couple of days earlier (in Denmark). Gives you confidence in SAS, no? Now they have grounded all the planes of the same make, cancelling 112 flights. During the first incident the propeller, on hitting the ground, broke off and sliced into the fuselage, and a passenger, though he was not badly hurt. So this time, apparently, the crew knew what to do and got all the passengers onto the non-affected side of the plane prior to landing. I'm trying to visualise that given that worry always over being attached to your seatbelt. These Canadian-made planes are not big - so did people have to sit on other people's laps? Or were they standing up and hanging on to other seats in a plane anticipating a very rough landing? Not a single person was hurt, apparently, which is great news. How long did it take to unfankle the luggage?
  
• Dresdner Bank has admitted unfairly dismissing an Australian manager. The story is that he was 'not German enough', and he is complaining that he was excluded from major conversations when the German managers went off and talked .... German. Though another native English-speaker who spoke German did not have that problem. Is there a message in this, I wonder. Now that the bank has admitted this, he'll get oodles and oodles of money no doubt, though perhaps not the 10 million GBP he is hoping for. I don't suppose he feels any inclination to spend the money on language training - especially not German...