Poor Mojo Newswire

Then there's this high-tech doozy from a government veterinarian: Zap these mouse-like animals called voles with earsplitting ultrasound, using a cross between the Pied Piper ploy and a military pincer movement to herd them together for a collective death blow with water or fire.

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Voles give off a characteristic odor and the plague is so intense you can smell the critters — live ones, not rotting bodies — as you drive around, he said.

"The other day I was driving along the highway and the smell was overpowering," Pinero said from Valladolid, the regional capital.

Grain crops have been devastated and the voles are now turning their appetites to summer crops like potatoes, grapevines and beets.

And this won’t be the first time Wilde has played a role in comics. Several of Wilde’s short stories like “The Selfish Giant,” “The Star Child,” “The Young King,” “The Remarkable Rocket,” “The Birthday of the Infanta,” “The Devoted Friend,” and “Nightingale and the Rose” were adapted into comic book format by multiple Harvey and Eisner Awards winner P. Craig Russell in a series of collections entitled Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde.

Wilde himself has “appeared” in multiple award-winning creator Dave Sim’s postmodern comic book epic Cerebus in a multi-issue chapter entitled “Melmoth” which presented a fictionalized telling of the death of Wilde.

"He built a bike from five tricycles," said the man. "Melted down in a solar-powered furnace. With foam pedals. In Yonkers."

"I'm talking," said the woman, "about one from a warehouse in Queens, a warehouse taken over violently by the Modern Agrarians and turned into a nine-level sustainable farm. This bicycle is made from aluminum pipes from the dumpster outside a nuclear laboratory. The handlebars are bamboo and the rims are nanocarbon buckysteel."

Suddenly they see my factory bicycle, bought in this store two months ago, and I materialize behind it. I hold up the broken chain, the product of yesterday's lazy repair work ("Please," I said, "I'd rather you fixed it." "No," said the man, "it won't break again.")

Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues surveyed 113 teenagers at around 17 years of age, asking them to complete questionnaires about their conduct and mood and to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions.

The lovestruck teenagers showed many behaviours resembling "hypomania" – a less intense form of mania. For example, they required about an hour less sleep each night than teens who didn't have a sweetheart. They were also more likely to report acting compulsively, with 60% saying they spent too much money compared with fewer than 30% of teenagers who were not in love.

Moreover, the lovestruck teens were more than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy. Worryingly, they were also more likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road.

Under the rules now being prepared, if a state requested it and Gonzales agreed, prosecutors could use "fast track" procedures that could shave years off the time that a death row inmate has to appeal to the federal courts after conviction in a state court.