Winstanley Johnson will probably go down in history for the fact that earlier this year, he became the first elected mayor in 30 years of Sierra Leone’s capital — Freetown. As he picks his way around the rubbish heaps in the city, however, there may well be times when he wonders whether it’s worth having this honour.
Wu Wei, president of one of China’s largest makers of adult sex toys, says it is only a matter of time before couples accept ”marital aids” as being ”just like drinking water”. ”In five or 10 years, Chinese people will be richer and they will be living a better life and will also want more sexual pleasure,” said Wu, part-owner of the Sino-Japanese Wenzhou Lover Health Product Company.
Forget waiting for ET to call — the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia. Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.
Swazi police clashed at the weekend with protesters demanding political reform in Swaziland, where King Mswati III wields absolute power, witnesses, anti-monarchist activists and reports said on Sunday. A gunbattle broke out after police fired tear gas during a protest held on Saturday in a township in Matsapha in central Swaziland, eyewitnesses said.
Fatigue is largely in the mind, not the muscles, research by South African scientists has discovered. The brain steps in and makes the body feel weary to stop it being overworked, thanks to a signalling molecule that seems to tell the brain when it is time to slow the pace of the body.
British experts are backing a massage oil that has a miraculous effect on women. Zestra, which is made of plant extracts, is said to rekindle arousal in women who have lost the ability to enjoy sex. Doctors have found it can even help women taking antidepressants and beta-blocker drugs or suffering from physical problems such as diabetes.
South Africa will on Monday begin culling about 30 000 ostriches to control an outbreak of avian flu in the Eastern Cape. Police and soldiers have set up roadblocks in a 32km radius around Middleton in the Somerset East area, to prevent exposed birds being transported around the country.
Salem Chalabi, the man organising the trial of Saddam Hussein, was facing a murder charge himself on Sunday night after an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for his arrest. Another was issued for his uncle Ahmed Chalabi, the founder of the Iraqi National Congress and a former key ally of the United States. He is accused of money laundering.
Paul ”Red” Adair, whose firefighting exploits made him a household name around the world, has died at the age of 89. Adair risked his life many times in a career that spanned six decades. He is credited with extinguishing more than 2 000 land and offshore oil well fires, including the explosion on the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea in 1988, which killed 167 men.
Sudan won help from Arab countries on Sunday in its attempt to head off sanctions the United Nations has threatened to impose if it fails to rein in militias accused of atrocities in the Darfur region. The Arab League said on Sunday night that Sudan needed more time to end the crisis and that sanctions would ”only result in negative effects for the whole Sudanese people and complicate the crisis in Darfur”.
AU mulls sending force to Darfur