The French, known for their mistrust of banks, are not just stuffing money into mattresses in these anxious days of recession and minuscule interest rates. They are also putting their cash into cows.

For Pierre Marguerit, 60, cows make a safe, secure investment, allowing for long-term growth from a renewable resource. The cow contracts are hardly new, but go back to Richard the Lionheart; the French word for livestock, cheptel, is the root for "capital."

In the dungeons of Zul'Gurub, frequented by online game enthusiasts, a giant winged serpent called Hakkar the Soulflayer may offer important clues to epidemiologists trying to predict the impact of a pandemic.

In September 2005, a plague called "corrupted blood" caused mayhem in the hugely popular online game World of Warcraft. What happened next illustrates the kind of issues policymakers will have to grapple with now that the swine flu outbreak has spread beyond Mexico.

When I was a child growing up in England in the 1960s, my mother's dream for me was that I would become a bank clerk, with ambitions to be a bank manager, the epitome of all that was best in the world, safe, reliable, honest, looking after people's hard-earned savings, helping business and the world to grow. A bank manager could countersign your passport application, that's how trusted he was.

April 20 (Bloomberg) -- UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank, agreed to sell its Brazilian unit UBS Pactual to Andre Esteves, the former head of the unit, for USD2.5 billion to reduce risk and strengthen its balance sheet.

The sale of the business, which UBS agreed to buy for USD2.6 billion in 2006, will lead to a “small loss,” the Swiss bank said today from Zurich. The price represents a premium to book value and will be paid in cash and partly through the assumption of liabilities by Esteves’s BTG Investments, UBS said.