THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE ECONOMY

Nissan has announced plans to cut its Sunderland workforce by 1,200. Thousands of unsold cars are stored around the factory's test track.

Honda is halting production at its Swindon plant in April and May, extending the two-month closure announced before Christmas to four months. Honda and Japanese rival Toyota are both cutting production in Japan and elsewhere. Pictured, Hondas await export at a pier in Tokyo.

Earlier this week Jaguar Land Rover said 450 British jobs would have to go.

The open car storage areas in Corby , Northamptonshire, are reaching full capacity.

Imported cars stored at Sheerness open storage area awaiting delivery to dealers.

Newly imported cars fill the 150-acre site at the Toyota distribution centre in Long Beach , California.

Sales of new cars in the UK have slumped to a 12-year-low and production of cars at Honda in Swindon has been halted for a unprecedented four-month period because of the collapse in global sales and represents the longest continuous halt in production at any UK car plant.

The announcement comes on a day when the EU's Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen warned the outlook for the European car industry was 'brutal' and predicted not all European manufacturers would survive the slump.

Contributed by: Aldred Loh.

Giant Man-Eating Cat Fish

Each year, a few people will be drowned mysteriously in Huadu's Furong Reservoir. It was not until recently when the brother of a certain official went swimming in the reservoir with his friend and were drowned that the secret was unravelled!

It's a 3 metre long man-eating catfish whose head alone is 1 metre wide! After cutting up the catfish people were surprised to find the remains of a man inside!

Because this was a huge incident, and the local government was afraid of the impact on local tourism, they imposed an embargo on the news, but people came away with these pictures taken on their cell phones of the man-eating fish!

Swimming in the reservoir is now forbidden because it is feared another similar man-eating catfish is still lurking in the waters.

Now we're not experts on aquatic life and can't confirm to you if that is really some mutant form of the clarius batrachus (walking catfish) as suggested (where are the whiskers?), but some netizens have already raised doubts saying this is a whale shark instead.

Now you decide for yourself: Does it look more like the walking catfish or the whale shark?

And if it is the whale shark, which is "vulnerable to extinction" according to Wikipedia, why did they kill it? Well, perhaps because they thought it killed a bunch of people.

But how did they find it, and catch it, and why did they kill it and chop it up in such a public manner, we wonder?

We bet scientists would have liked to see this alive first (we imagine saltwater whale sharks don't pop up in freshwater reservoirs too often ... nor, we guess, do 30cm catfish regularly turn into three-meter mutants).