British veteran actor Bob Hoskins’ is retiring after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
The 69-year-old actor has starred in Hollywood hits such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the classic The Long Good Friday. His role as George, the petty criminal who becomes entangled with a high-class hooker, in the 1986 hit Mona Lisa won him an Oscar nomination for leading actor. He was also seen earlier this year playing one of the seven dwarves in Snow White & The Huntsman starring Kristen Stewart.
His agent announced that he was withdrawing from acting after a “wonderful career” and would be spending time with his family. Parkinson’s is a neurological condition which is thought to affect around 127,000 people in the UK and has no known cure.
E-mail kisses are office bugbear
Kisses on e-mails to business contacts are Britain’s biggest office bugbear, according to a new survey.
Two-thirds (66 per cent) of 1,000 people questioned found kisses on work e-mails annoying while half objected to being called honey or dear in business e-mails (54 per cent) and complained about abbreviations like OMG (50 per cent).
More than four out of 10 (44 per cent) felt smiley faces on work e-mails were inappropriate while almost three out of 10 (28 per cent) objected to cheesy greetings like “happy Friday” or questions about their weekend plans (17 per cent).
1,000 people were questioned in the survey by OnePoll.
Ennis’ vandalised postbox repainted
A British postbox that was painted gold in Jessica Ennis’s home city of Sheffield to celebrate her Olympic triumph has been repainted after it was tarnished with graffiti.
“Go Jess” was written in small letters on the box in Barkers Pool near Sheffield City Hall within 24 hours of it being painted. Royal Mail said it applied a new coat of paint quickly as “a point of pride”.
It added that it was “extremely disappointed that someone has chosen to vandalise the gold postbox”, which has become a tourist attraction since it was transformed the day after Ms Ennis won gold in the heptathlon.
Minister in shark fins campaign
UK Fisheries minister Richard Benyon has been swimming with sharks to highlight his desire to tighten the European ban on “finning”.
Mr Benyon took the plunge into a tank of sharks at Sealife London Aquarium to launch a Shark Trust initiative calling for support to close loopholes in the EU ban on slicing off shark fins and discarding the bodies at sea. Spain and Portugal continue to cut them off and land fins and bodies separately.
‘Grey parrots are smarter than kids’
African grey parrots not only learn to talk, but outperform human two-year-olds in a test of intelligent reasoning.
No other animals apart from great apes match the birds’ ability to understand noise-related causal connections, say scientists.
Human children only do as well as the parrots from about the age of three, researchers discovered after testing six African greys housed in a parrot rescue centre in Vienna, Austria.