Hamburg is often known as an idyllic port city of book publishers and media giants. Lately, however, the city's peace and quiet has been interrupted by a sickening natural oddity. Over 1,000 of the city's greenish-brown toads have swelled up to almost four times their normal size and then -- BANG! -- exploded, sending horrific entrails and body parts several feet into the pristine air. Stunned residents have nicknamed their city's once bucolic lake the "pond of death" and officials have cordoned off the area for investigation. Vets and animal welfare agencies have spent days puzzling over the deeply troubling and downright disgusting mystery. Is it a fungus? Is it a virus? Are the toads simply suicidal?

Now, one amphibian specialist in Berlin, Dr. Frank Mutschmann, has come up with a clear -- albeit frightening answer. "It was probably crows," he said. Apparently, the nasty black bird's favorite treat is tasty foie de frog. The birds likely have been attacking the toads, pecking out their livers and then flying away. The rightly-terrified toads have then tried the only defense nature has given them -- they've puffed up in hopes of scaring the attacking bird away. But, with a hole in their bellies and no liver left, the "the lungs burst and the rest of the organs shoot straight out of the toads," Mutschmann said. The truly scary part is that about three to five hungry crows may be responsible for all the deaths. "Crows are very intelligent animals," Mutschmann said. "They learn quickly where, in just a short amount of time, they can come across lots of delicious livers." Perhaps it's time for a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." (2:30 p.m. CET)

Austria's never-ending horror film

Austria's political enfant terrible, Joerg Haider, is back. To tell the truth, this frightening guy has made so many comebacks, he's starting to remind us of Freddy Kruger. Just a few short weeks ago, Haider, still governor of his hometown stronghold -- the xenophobic state of Carinthia -- announced he was splitting off from the racist, far-right party he founded, the Freedom Party, and creating a new one. He is now the head of the freshly-minted Union for the Future of Austria, and insists he will work hard to recapture the fancy of disillusioned, disenfranchised voters, many of whom brought him and his racist, anti-foreigner rhetoric to power in 1999.

That's not all. Haider also masterminded a below-the-belt coup in which he bottomed out the Freedom Party by snatching 17 of its 18 ruling ministers for his new party. That has left the Freedom Party -- which thanks to Haider's former popularity -- still serves as junior coalition partner with the nation's conservative Austrian People's Party -- in complete disarray. In order to maintain some sort of order, Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, who is Haider's archenemy, has agreed to plow forward and -- to keep the newly-aligned ministers in place. Meanwhile, in keeping with his ego-centric past, the gregarious Haider is setting his stakes high. He told the German newspaper Mannheimer Morgen that he still dreams of being chancellor one day. "The goal is still reachable," he told the paper. Being a governor, he said is a "good warm-up from which to launch another full attack." At least he doesn't mince words.

So far, Haider's new Alliance party doesn't have much of an agenda. It is, however, trendy enough to have already picked a color (orange -- like the successful Ukrainian revolution). Surprisingly, Haider has also indicated he might tone down some of his famous anti-foreinger vitriol in his new political incarnation. (The shift is less likely due to a personal change of heart than the fact that Austrians seem to be growing tired of bile. A recent Freedom Party attempt to stir up anti-Turkish sentiment backfired after posters screaming "Vienna must not become Istanbul!" were ridiculed.) Now, says Haider, he hopes to focus on domestic issues, such as jobs and families. Those were some of Freddy's favorite haunts as well. (1:30 p.m. CET)

I scream, you scream...

Eating ice cream makes you happy. Scientists have spoonfuls of proof. It seems the delightful cold stuff lights up the brain's pleasure center and offers a natural high. This may seem like something every three-year-old with a cone knows, but now neuroscientists at London's Institute of Psychiatry have clear data. A group of them scanned the brains of vanilla ice cream eaters using functional magnetic resonance imagining and found that their brains reacted in the same way as when good things -- such as winning money -- happened. (Just imagine if they had tested with Chunky Monkey!) Just one spoonful of ice cream was enough to affect the major processing center at the front of the brain, known as the orbitofrontal cortex, the experts said. Now, they are gathering again, this time in Cardiff, to see if the same technique can be used to help understand disappointment. What will they use, bites of Aunt Ethel's Christmas fruitcake? (11 a.m. CET)

No More Nukes

Germany's liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) is calling for the withdrawal of all Germany-based US nuclear warheads, insisting that they are a relic of the Cold War and should be dismantled. In an internal FDP document -- called "Strengthening the Credibility of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - Pulling out US Nuclear Weapons from Germany'' - the FDP parliamentary faction is urging the German government "to press the American ally" to withdraw its tactical nuclear weapons from Germany. FDP parliamentarian Werner Hoyer told SPIEGEL ONLINE that "It's time to think about if such stationing -- in today's world -- has any purpose." Berlin, however, has been reluctant to push Washington on the nuclear issue, especially now, two months after Bush's goodwill mission through Europe, and a time when German-US ties seem to be back on track again after a period of deep frost over the Iraq war. The US has ruled out a major reduction of Europe-based nuclear warheads.

According to the Washington-headquartered Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), there are 480 American nuclear warheads in Europe, of which 130 are stored at the US's Ramstein Air Base in southwestern Germany. Twenty others are stashed in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. That's a lot less warheads than there were during the Cold War, when the US had an astonishing 7,000 US stored in Europe, but it is still large number to make us, at least, a tad uneasy. Especially if information from the German section of the international group, Doctors for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), is true. They say each bomb stored by America has six times the explosive power of the bomb that decimated Hiroshima.