A monkey urinated on Zambian president Rupiah Banda as he spoke at a news conference last week.
Banda shouted: "You have urinated on my jacket," and paused as he looked up to see the animal playing in a tree just above his chair. "Perhaps these
are blessings," he said continuing his address amid laughter from the audience of journalists and diplomats at the State House presidential offices.
SARAH JESSICA PARKER AND MATTHEW BRODERICKA woman carrying twins for Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick has given birth to healthy girls.
Marion Loretta Elwell Broderick weighed 5lbs 11oz, and Tabitha Hodge Broderick weighed 6lbs, when they were born at a hospital in Ohio. Parker, the 44-year-old star of the TV show and film Sex And The City, and Broderick, her 47-year-old husband and fellow actor,
have been unable to conceive since Parker gave birth to a son who is now six.
DANIEL HAUSERA 13-year-old boy with cancer who fled Minnesota to avoid chemotherapy said he was angry about a judge's ruling that he must continue receiving the treatment after court documents showed his tumour has shrunk significantly.
"I get really sick when I do it," Hauser said during an interview at his family's farm at Sleepy Eye. "You get so dizzy and I get a headache right away."
Daniel said he believes his tumour's improvement comes from alternative treatments such as supplement drinks and pills. His parents also remain concerned about the risks of chemotherapy.
AUSTRALIAWallabies snacking in opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around creating crop circles.
Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.
Tasmania attorney-general Lara Giddings told a budget hearing yesterday that she recently read about the wallabies in a brief on the state's large poppy industry.
Giddings said: "We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles. Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."
INDIASecurity forces are planning to mix one of the world's hottest chilli powders in hand grenades to control riots and during insurgency operations in the remote north-east.
India's defence scientists say they will replace explosives in small hand grenades with a certain variety of red chilli to immobilise people without killing them.
"We are working on a project on how to use the hottest chilli in different applications in defence forces," said R B Srivastava, a senior scientist at the state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
The bhut jolokia chilli is said to generate 1,000,000 heat units on the Scoville scale, at least a thousand times more than a common kitchen chilli.
RUSSIACommunists have put up giant billboards of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in a southern city, promoting his tough methods as the best remedy for the world economic crisis. "Everybody knows that under Stalin our country achieved the highest rate of economic growth and development in other spheres, and the great victory (over Nazi Germany]," said Sergei Rudakov, a senior Communist party official in the town of Voronezh.
Local communists paid an advertising agency 80,000 roubles ($2,534) to plaster Stalin's image for one month on ten huge billboards around the city.
GERMANYA toy nuclear power plant built by two six-year-olds sparked a public alert in Germany, only for authorities to discover the would-be security threat was the shell of a computer with a radiation warning sign stuck to it. Fire services and police cordoned off several streets and told residents to stay indoors in the western town of Oelde after the two boys left their mock power station on the street when they went home for dinner in the evening.
