Mick McCarthy’s three-year reign at Sunderland came to an end on Monday when the former Ireland manager was sacked by the club, currently anchored to the bottom of the English Premiership. McCarthy (47) guided Sunderland back into the the top flight as Championship winners last season.
Japanese researchers have succeeded in making the sweet smell of vanilla come out of the last thing people could imagine — cow dung. In a world-first recycling project, a one-hour heating and pressuring process allows cow faeces to produce vanillin, the main component of the vanilla-bean extract.
Nearly 120 pro-Taliban militants have been killed during three days of clashes with Pakistani forces in a remote tribal town, the military said on Monday. ”According to latest information, the death toll in fighting last Saturday has gone up to 100,” military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan told Agence France-Presse.
Horrors such as the Rwandan genocide, in which 800Â 000 people were killed in 100 days, are an appalling indictment of man’s inhumanity and must be told, said British actor John Hurt. He was talking ahead of the release of his latest film, Shooting Dogs, which opens in France on Wednesday.
Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, is in fact an elephant, according to a Scottish palaeontologist. Neil Clark, curator of palaeontology at Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum, told The Times on Monday that the idea for Nessie was dreamt up as a ”magnificent piece of marketing” .
The impoverished West African nation of Benin was counting votes on Monday after the first round of its presidential election dragged on late into the night under the shadow of fraud claims. Polling, which had been due to end at 4pm on Sunday, was prolonged until past midnight in some areas because of logistical problems.
It’s a tribute to modern vehicle manufacture that the biggest problem I’ve encountered since buying a car last year is to describe its colour. ”Oyster silver” means little to anyone beyond the motor trade, while ”brown” requires several adjectives, such as ”light” and ”silvery”, to remove the look of horror from the faces of friends and relatives.
Government’s energy policy is a mess because it is top-down, favours the big over the small, all but ignores renewables and puts all its eggs in very few baskets, critics say. They say the ”big is beautiful” strategy ignores the fact that individual households can meet their own energy needs while contributing to national needs.
The Ethiopian Ministry of Health has announced that it will provide free anti-retroviral therapy (ART) for 58 000 HIV-positive people until the beginning of July. The ministry said on Friday that some 23 000 people had already benefited from free ART provision since January 2005.
![]()
The woman at the centre of the Jacob Zuma rape trial has told the Johannesburg High Court about her ordeal. The complainant in the state vs Zuma said she was already asleep when the former deputy president entered her room. It is against the law to name a rape victim, unless she gives consent.. He offered to tuck her in and massage her.