Forgetful travellers accidentally leave a massive 10,000 mobile phones in London black cabs each month, it has been revealed. And in December - as more people go Christmas shopping and out on Xmas parties - taxis divers say there will be even more l...

The tax and regulatory troubles that we’re told beset London’s hedge fund industry may apparently be benefiting Switzerland (quite a few firms are at least opening offices there) but it seems they have produced little benefit for Paris’s small hedge fund community. London’s financial community has a large number of French professionals, but for now at least few are using tax rises on high earners and non-doms as reason to return home, as may have been expected. While Quant Invest 2009 here in Paris is well attended with around 140 delegates, French-based funds say there is little sign of the industry growing much at present.

But the sudden chill will be shortlived and snow will turn to rain tonight in higher areas of Wales, Scotland and the north of England, according to MeteoGroup UK. Stephen Davenport, senior forecaster with MeteoGroup UK, said Braemar in Aberdeenshire was the coldest place in the UK last night with temperatures plunging to as low as minus 8.9C (16F). Send us your pictures of winter weather in Britain and we'll include the best of them in a picture gallery.

Italian police were left embarrassed after one if its officers wrote off a £150,000 Lamborghini patrol car in a road smash. The 200mph Gallardo ploughed into parked cars after it swerved to avoid another vehicle that had just pulled out of a petrol station. It was being driven back from a special show for students when the accident happened near the city of Cremona.

Workers at Paris' modern art center Pompidou are already on strike over planned job cuts, but those at other French museums and landmarks could join in their fight tomorrow. Seven unions are threatening to walk off the job on December 2nd if their demands aren't met by the MInistry of Culture. They're boycotting the government's plan to cut cultural positions, which would replace only one out of every two civil servants who retire.

Italian police have broken up a major mafia clan, arresting 74 people and seizing businesses, land, race horses and a London-based online betting company, officials said Tuesday. Local politicians and businessmen in the southern Italian city of Bari were among those implicated as part of a three-year operation, called "Domino," for collaborating with the Parisi clan, police said. Lt. Col. Salvatore Russo, the police official in charge of the operation, said 74 people were arrested, while an additional nine warrants were issued for suspects already jailed on separate charges.

That's an awful lot of wine. Stretching far and wide this is Europe's largest wine warehouse which holds 57million bottles. Of that number 36million will head out of its doors between now and Christmas Day. The vast complex in Avonmouth, near Bristol, which resembles a small town under a roof, bottles and stores 9.5million gallons of wine - enough to fill 15 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Denis Avey is a remarkable man by any measure. A courageous and determined soldier in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a camp connected to the Germans' largest concentration camp, Auschwitz. But his actions while in the camp - which he has never spoken about until now - are truly extraordinary. When millions would have done anything to get out, Mr Avey repeatedly smuggled himself into the camp.

At the Piyalepasa animal bazaar there is a sense of anticipation. Buyers carefully make their way through crowds of people and livestock, the ground sodden with blood. Millions of sheep and cattle were slaughtered in Turkey over this past long weekend of Eid al-Adha — in Turkish, Kurban Bayrami. Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, is a three-day festival that is celebrated after the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

The Swiss and European establishment united today in deploring yesterday's decision by Swiss voters to outlaw the construction of minarets but conservative leaders warned that the referendum showed genuine fear over Islam on the continent. Swiss officials, media and business leaders voiced shame over a vote that they say will stigmatise the country's 400,000 Muslims and stain Switzerland's name in the Muslim world. In contrast, hard right leaders in France, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands hailed what they depicted as a triumph for the people against the elite.

What would you tell your younger, travel-innocent self? Over at Anderson Cooper 360, Chris Guillebeau wrote a post about the things he wishes he’d known...

Irek Murtazin, photo by Sergey Varshavchik On Nov. 26, the Kirov district court of Kazan, which is the capital of the Republic of Tartastan, convicted Irek Murtazin, a 45-year-old journalist and...

Daredevil inventor and pilot Yves Rossy has crashed into the ocean after trying to fly from Africa to Europe with a winged 150mph jetpack. It is thought a malfunction with his jet wing caused Rossy - dubbed Rocket Man - to crash land in the Straits of Gibraltar shortly after his launch.

It was 2am on a bleak Belgian Sunday in November when Fina Nicolaes received the news that every mother dreads. Her son Rom, 20, was in hospital in Liège with life-threatening injuries after a Saturday night car crash. The phone call that woke her up in the Flemish village of Kanne near the Dutch border was 26 years ago. Her son and the four friends in the car with him survived. But six months later, unable to move, speak or signal any kind of understanding, the second-year engineering student was written off as a vegetable, paralysed, brain-dead, awake but not aware.

John Mark Felton, 45 flew to the state capital to Anchorage to have sex with a 6-year-old boy whose father was purportedly offering his children for sex. Dr Felton, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, worked in Boston as a senior research scientist at a vaccine development company Acambis. US officials said Dr Felton planned to dress the 6-year-old boy up as Spider-Man and had bought Hannah Montana toys for his sister.

A rare first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is expected to be sold at auction for around £60,000 -- after it was found in a toilet. The book, one of the first 1,250 copies ever printed, was discovered in an Oxford toilet where it had been left on a shelf.

Fun: the best motivator for change. Recently, The Fun Theory, a group promoting behavioral and environmental change, turned an average subway staircase in Stockholm into a giant,...

British designer Kyle Bean’s latest creation shows the evolution of mobile phones, matryoshka style. class I vaguely remember my parents having a gray version of the second phone from the left in...

The recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Soile Lautsi, who was offended by crucifixes displayed in her child's school in Italy, states: The compulsory display of a...

The diplomatic incident, which occurred amid mounting tensions in the sea around the British colony, was triggered when the crew of a Civil Guard vessel reported spotting the fast patrol boat Scimitar firing at the "Spanish colours" during a military exercise in international waters. Giles Paxman, 58, the younger brother of the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, was summoned to Spain's foreign ministry less than a month after taking up his new post as British Ambassador.