Here are twelve news stories that caught our eye through 2013. Each appeared at the end of the news section over the year, providing a light-hearted take on current affairs. Full credit to Alex for tracking these stories down and coming up with an amusing quip for each one. The Monday Briefing is taking a break until Monday 6th January. In the meantime the economics team - Ian, Debo and Alex - wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
* Malian authorities have promised to give French President Francois Hollande a "bigger and better-looking camel" after a camel presented to the President was eaten by a family in Timbuktu it was left with – gift gaffe
* UK retailer Poundland said that it plans to cut its prices to 97 pence in some stores as a response to the increase in 99 pence shops – small change
* Booths, a supermarket chain with 29 branches in the north of England, has had to withdraw 300 bags of own-brand monkey nuts from its stores having been alerted that they had failed to declare they may contain peanuts – shell shock
* Sandwich chain Pret a Manger revealed that the most popular item on their menu is the banana, selling around 75,000 of the fruits every week – Pret a Peel
* Samoa Air has become the world's first airline to introduce a pricing policy which charges passengers, with passengers required to enter their weight along with the weight of their baggage at the time of booking – light aircraft
* Lincolnshire County Council has halved the number of people who hang up while on hold by replacing traditional hold music with "beige-pop" hits by acts such as Lighthouse Family and Billy Ocean – "got a hold on me"
* The small town of Bethel, in Alaska, is considering criminalizing "drunk walking", with economic research suggesting that on a per mile basis walking drunk is eight times more dangerous than driving drunk – one step ahead
* A team of scientists from the National University of Singapore have created a simulator which they claim allows people to taste food on the internet by "manipulating the magnitude of current, frequency and temperature" to create salty, sour and bitter sensations – megabites
* A small toilet room in Kensington, West London, advertised at £150,000 with a 107-year unexpired lease, failed to sell at The Cumberland Hotel auction despite its sought-after location – flash in the pan
* Shares in Tweeter, a bankrupt electronics retailer, briefly rose 1,800% on October 4th as some investors mistook its trading ticker symbol "TWTRQ" for "TWTR", the shorthand chosen by Twitter ahead of its stock market flotation – twit who?
* Best-selling author Stephen King is to release his next book 'Joyland' in a paperback-only format to encourage readers to visit book stores rather than downloading content – is paper back?
* Dairy Crest, one of the UK's largest milk suppliers, is to transfer around 20m kilograms of maturing cheese to its pension fund, to fill its pension gap – cash cows
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