Dead Parrot sketch is 1,600 years old

Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot sketch is actually a lot older than thought - 1,600 years older.

An ancestor of the comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict has been translated from Greek manuscripts.

Among the 265 jokes is one where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.

'When he was with me, he never did any such thing!' is the reply.

In the 1969 Python comedy sketch, the shopkeeper, played by Michael Palin, tells irate customer John Cleese, that the dead parrot is 'pining for the fjords'.

The jokes are attributed to Hierocles and Philagrius, who may have been the Laurel And Hardy of their day, but about whom very little is known.

Comedian Jimmy Carr said some of the jokes in Philogelos are 'strikingly similar' to modern ones, with subjects including farts, sex and ugly wives.

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Hoax call to Zardari "put Pakistan on war alert"

Pakistan put its forces on high alert after someone pretending to be India's foreign minister made a phone call to President Asif Ali Zardari threatening war after the Mumbai attacks began, Dawn newspaper said on Saturday.

"It's true," a diplomat with knowledge of the exchanges told Reuters when asked whether the report was correct.

Dawn said the Nov. 28 caller threatened military action unless Pakistan acted immediately against the perpetrators of the slaughter in Mumbai, launched two days earlier.

For the next 24 hours nuclear-armed Pakistan's air force was put on "highest alert" as the military watched anxiously for any sign of Indian aggression, the report said.

Tensions have been running high since India blamed Islamist militants based in Pakistan for the three-day rampage in its financial capital, which killed 171 people.

"War may not have been imminent, but it was not possible to take any chances," Dawn quoted a Pakistani official as saying.

WAR BY ACCIDENT?

The episode triggered intense international diplomacy, with some world leaders fearing India and Pakistan could slip into an accidental war, the newspaper said.

Dawn said the caller, posing as Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee, also tried to telephone U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but due to specific checks by U.S. officials the call was not put through.

According to Dawn, Rice called Mukherjee in the middle of the night to ask why he had adopted such a threatening tone, but he assured her that he had not spoken to Zardari.

Pakistan's senior envoy to Britain confirmed that Pakistan had feared an attack.

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U.S. is losing global cyberwar, commission says

The U.S. faces a cybersecurity threat of such magnitude that the next President should move quickly to create a Center for Cybersecurity Operations and appoint a special White House advisor to oversee it. Those are among the recommendations in a 44-page report by the U.S. Commission on Cybersecurity, a version of which will be made public today. The bipartisan panel includes executives, high-ranking military officers and intelligence officials, leading specialists in computer security, and two members of Congress.

To compile the report, which is entitled "Securing Cyberspace in the 44th Presidency," commission members say they reviewed tens of thousands of pages of undisclosed documentation, visited forensics labs and the National Security Agency, and were briefed in closed-door sessions by top officials from Pentagon, CIA, and British spy agency MI5. From their research, they concluded that the U.S. badly needs a comprehensive cybersecurity policy to replace an outdated checklist of security requirements for government agencies under the existing Federal Information Security Management Act.

The report calls for the creation of a Center for Cybersecurity Operations that would act as a new regulator of computer security in both the public and private sector. Active policing of government and corporate networks would include new rules and a "red team" to test computers for vulnerabilities now being exploited with increasing sophistication and frequency by identity and credit card thieves, bank fraudsters, crime rings, and electronic spies. "We're playing a giant game of chess now and we're losing badly," says commission member Tom Kellermann, a former World Bank security official who now is vice-president of security at Boston-based Core Strategy.

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Wikipedia article censored in UK for the first time

For the first time, U.K. Internet Service Providers have censored a Wikipedia article, one that includes an album cover image of a naked and possibly underage girl.

An unintended side effect of the block left U.K. users of the online encyclopedia unable to edit other articles, Wikimedia said.

The article concerns the album "Virgin Killer" by German band The Scorpions. The record has generated controversy due to its cover photo ever since it was released in 1976.

The URL (uniform resource locator) of the article was added to a blacklist published by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a nonprofit group that works with law enforcement to block and remove child pornography from Web sites.

Some 95 percent of U.K. ISPs use IWF's blacklist, although non-residential Internet connections are not affected, according to the Wikimedia Foundation.

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Demonstrators occupy Greek consulate in Berlin

A group of 30 demonstrators has occupied the Greek consulate in Berlin in protest against the killing by police of a teenager in Athens on Saturday night that sparked violent protests in the Greek capital. The Berlin protesters are behaving peacefully.

A group of demonstrators occupied the Greek consulate in Berlin on Monday morning in protest at the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy by Athens police on Saturday that triggered the worst rioting Greece has seen in 25 years.

Some 30 people pushed their way into the lobby of the consulate at Wittenbergplatz in western Berlin at around 9.40 a.m. local time, said SPIEGEL TV reporter Martin Heller, who is on the scene.

Around 120 German police cordoned off the area outside the consulate and negotiations are underway with the demonstrators, who were behaving peacefully and had made no demands, police said. At around 11 a.m., 10 people wearing hats and scarves to mask their faces appeared on the balcony of the consulate and shouted: "Police Assassins" and "Alexandros, That Was Murder!"

The Greek embassy in Berlin, located in the east of the city, has not been occupied.

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