United Kingdom

If statistics are to believe, the ‘love affair’ between the British and their once favourite dish, the curry, has strained seriously. Its place, according to the same source of data, has been won over by Chinese stir-fry.

As we approached Friday 13th, a sense of inexplicable apprehension swept through the United Kingdom on multiple fronts: firstly, there was the looming threat of the break-up of the union that stood for 300 years, as Scottish nationalists started demanding a referendum on the issue; then, there was the risk of being hit by a Russian spacecraft which, according to sky watchers, is out of control and at the mercy of gravity in its downward spiral; on political-security front, there was an implicit accusation by Iran of the alleged British involvement in the assassination of one of its top scientists by a magnetic bomb, attached to his car by two passing motorcyclists.

In England, we are familiar with the well-hackneyed phrase, ‘it is raining cats and dogs’ – when it is raining very heavily, of course. The mystery surrounding the origin of the phrase deepened further on Monday evening, when the residents of Coventry, a metropolitan borough in England, witnessed the ‘fruity’ equivalent of the phenomenon, much to the amazement of the folks in the city and beyond its borders.

The experiments that led to the recent headlines about the speed of light being ‘broken’, have stirred up the enthusiasm in the field of particle physics, both among the researchers and mere novices alike. The excitement among the observers, who chose to be open-minded about the whole project, has been elevated to a new level, as the ambitious move put Albert Einstein, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time, at the centre of attention as never before.