B>Churchill's cigar up for auctionLONDON: A cigar which once belonged to Winston Churchill is to be auctioned next month to aid cancer sufferers, exactly 54 years after it first went on the block. The cigar, the trademark of Britain's wartime prime minister, was originally auctioned on February 4, 1944, to aid Russian victims of Nazi Germany. It is expected to fetch at least 500 pounds (800 dollars) the second time around. "Winston Churchill's name is famous throughout the world and you never see a picture of him without his trademark Havana," auctioneer Martin Lambert said, "It really is a little bit of history."
Cloning revolution?
MOSCOW: First there was Dolly, the cloned sheep. Then came George and Charlie, the cows. So the question naturally arises: Is the world ready for a Vladimir Lenin clone? Probably not, but officials of what is left of Russia's young Communist union, Or Komsomol, spent a wistful moment thinking about it on Thursday during an otherwise tendentious news conference
about cloning.
"If the experiment succeeds, I would be happy," said Darya Mitina, first secretary of the Komsomol and a member of the Communist faction in the Duma, Russia's Lower House of Parliament.
Beast in the beauty
CARACAS: Miss Universe for 1996 from Venezuela, Alicia Machado, has been accused of aiding the kidnapping of a one-year-old boy, authorities in the capital said on Thursday. The chief defendant in the case is Juan Reggeti, the boyfriend of the beauty queen.
Reggeti has been charged with the kidnapping two months ago of his nephew and the shooting of the boy's father, Francisco Sbert. Reggeti wounded Sbert with two shots, according to the charges. Machado has been accused of driving Reggeti's getaway vehicle.
The apparent motivation for the kidnapping was the suicide of the boy's mother, for which Sbert was blamed by his attacker.Mad cow disease
BEIJING: Seven people died in Hong Kong after being injected with a medical reagent possibly contaminated by the protein
which causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) - the human form of mad cow disease, newspapers reported on Friday. The seven were among 108 heart and lung patients injected upon at six hospitals between July to December to test the radioactive reagent made in Britain for investigating heart and lung ailments.
Embalming proof
NEW YORK: An Egyptian mummy from about 2150 BC shows the earliest known evidence of embalming, extending its known use by 1,000 years, German researchers reported. The mummy is the skeleton of Idu II, secretary general of the Pine Wood Trade Office in the old kingdom of Egypt. It was found in 1914. The researchers examined fragments of the mummy's clavicle and found pine wood compounds and sodium, indicating a treatment that preserved the bone so well that a natural enzyme was still present in active form, the researchers said in the journal Nature.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
