Minimalist poet, minimalist lifestyle

Man faints during testicle tale

A man fainted at the mention of a testicle jab during a talk by a fertility expert.

Professor Robert Winston interrupted his presentation and leapt from the stage to help the man, reports the Mirror.

Lord Winston rushed to his side and shouted for attention. He looked on as a colleague intervened before resuming his talk at the Hay Literary Festival.

Back on stage, Lord Winston - the presenter of the BBC's Human Body - said: "In all the operations I have done, no one has ever passed out."

He had been talking about a boy who had been injected in the testicle to prevent his future children developing anaemia.

The man came to and remained in the audience for the rest of the talk in Hay-on-Wye, Powys.

Germans convicted of stealing 4 km of railway line

A court in Germany has convicted three men of stealing over four km of rail track, weighing nearly 500 tonnes, to sell as scrap metal.

The court in the city of Marburg said on Tuesday the men, aged 26 to 29, pretended to be working for the national rail operator Deutsche Bahn when they began carving up a disused line between nearby Niederwalgern and Lohra with blowtorches.

"They even went around handing out leaflets to locals asking for understanding about the noise," a court spokesman said.

"The stolen tracks were worth about 170,000 euros (£116,390) altogether, but they'd collected less than 100,000 euros by the time they were caught."

The crime has become so famous that the regional education ministry has used it as a model for a maths exam, asking pupils to calculate the weight, volume and value of the stolen steel.

The three suspects, all Germans born in the former Soviet Union, had removed 476 tonnes of steel track by the time they were caught when a local man contacted Deutsche Bahn to check their story.

Two suspects confessed and received 18-month suspended sentences. The third was given two years and one month in jail.