Banned Nando's Mugabe Commercial : "Last dictator standing".

Incentive for Parents ... Restaurant's Well-Behaved Kids Discount

"To Laura King, her three children were acting normal while enjoying dinner at an Italian restaurant in their hometown in Washington state. But staffers of the restaurant Sogno di Vino in Poulsbo were so impressed with her children's table manners during their Feb. 1 dinner that they thanked her kids and gave the family of five a bowl of ice cream.It wasn't until King got home that that she noticed a $4 "well behaved kids" discount on her receipt to cover the dessert. A friend posted a picture of the receipt on the website Reddit, and the story took off," the AP reports.

"The server said staff didn't even know there were kids at the table," said King, whose children are 2, 3, and 8 years old ...Sogno di Vino owner Rob Scott said servers have the discretion to offer a discount to customers, adding that this wasn't the first time well-behaved kids have been rewarded. What was different this time was that one of the staffers wrote it out in the receipt.

Caption Contest: Biden and the Trooper

Celebrating the First Flush?

"For parents, milestones worthy of commemoration in a young child’s life can include the loss of a first tooth or the first trip to the barbershop. Training a child to use the toilet, however, is often met with much less enthusiasm," the New York Times reports.

To market its Huggies Pull-Ups training pants for toddlers, the Kimberly-Clark Corporation has opted for an advertising campaign that focuses on celebrating that first flush with fanfare in the hope of making the potty training process more enjoyable for parents and their children ...
For a television ad for English-speaking mothers, Ogilvy cast a family with a child who was about to go through toilet training, not actors, said Dave Metcalf, group creative director at Ogilvy. The ad, which was shot in Vancouver, features a toddler who flushes the toilet at his parents’ encouragement and then hears a commotion outside the house.
The family opens the front door and sees a parade celebrating the child’s first flush, replete with floats, acrobats and a marching band. The family was not told about the parade, Mr. Metcalf said, so their reactions of surprise were genuine.

Singers on the Subway: Pella Singers

SNL: The StandOff

Mass Killing of Non-Native (Rats)

"The unique bird and reptile species that make the Galapagos Islands a treasure for scientists and tourists must be preserved, Ecuadorean authorities say — and that means the rats must die, hundreds of millions of them," the Washington Post reports.

A helicopter is to begin dropping nearly 22 tons of specially designed poison bait on an island Thursday, launching the second phase of a campaign to clear out by 2020 non-native rodents from the archipelago that helped inspire Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

'Students' Steal The Masters

"A 10-fold increase in the value of South Africa’s best-known art spurred the biggest heist in the country’s history when thieves stole five paintings worth a combined 17.5 million rand ($2 million)," Bloomberg reports.

A man posing as an art teacher along with two people he said were students held a security guard at gunpoint and forced him to help locate and steal the paintings at the Pretoria Art Museum yesterday morning, Pieter de Necker, a spokesman for the local mayor, said by phone today. The heist included works by South African artists Irma Stern, Gerard Sekoto, J.H. Pierneef, Maggie Laubser and Hugo Naude, he said. Images of the criminals’ faces weren’t recorded because the gallery’s closed-circuit television system broke down on Nov. 8 ...The thieves sound like “an incompetent lot,” Hundt said, after it was reported that they left Irma Stern’s “Two Malay Musicians,” a painting valued at 12 million rand, on the sidewalk due to lack of space in the getaway car. While Stern’s work was the most valuable piece in the museum, other works by some of South Africa’s best-known artists, including those by William Kentridge, Walter Battiss and Robert Hodgins, were left untouched.