DEURNE: They say he loves them tender: A bust of Elvis Presley in this south-eastern Dutch town reportedly is ``weeping'' salty tears for his fans. The white statuette, decked out in a fur-trimmed cloak and framed by two pink candles, started weeping last week, owner Toon Nieuwenhuisen said in an interview that made front-page news yesterday across the Netherlands.

Far from being all shook up about it, Nieuwenhuisen has a simple explanation. ``He is crying for his fans all over the world. He knows how much they love him,'' Nieuwenhuisen, an Elvis impersonator, said in an interview published in the Dutch daily De Telegraaf. Nieuwenhuisen, wearing a late-Elvis era white satin jump suit and 1970s sunglasses in front-page photographs, said he'll throw his house open to pilgrims tomorrow. Hundreds of fans already have trekked through his tiny bedroom, bedecked with posters advertising Nieuwenhuisen's Elvis show, and interest is rising as the 20th anniversary of the king's death approaches.

Aspirin history

TRENTON: Felix Hoffmann simply wanted to relieve his father's pain from crippling rheumatism. But the aspirin medication he invented 100 years ago became a wonder drug, curing headaches, reducing fever and even helping to reduce the chance of strokes and heart attacks in some people.

``If it were half as effective, 10 times as expensive, and on prescription, maybe more people would take it seriously,'' says Dr Charles H Hennekens, a Harvard medical school professor and chairman of the Aspirin Strategy Group.

In the 1800s, European chemists extracted an ingredient from the willow plant called salicin. On August 10, 1897, Hoffman, a young researcher at Germany's Bayer Chemical Company, synthesised a stable form of the compound called acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin's active ingredient. Bayer Corporation soon was distributing aspirin powder to physicians and within three years introduced the first aspirin in water-soluble pills.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.