RIO DE JANEIRO: Elcio Berti, mayor of tiny Bocaiuva do Sul in southern Brazil, announced he would be handing out Viagra in hopes of spurring population growth, the Estado news agency reported.

Berti got national attention in 1997 by banning condom sales in his town in another effort to boost his town's 10,000 population and get more federal aid. Town doctors were prepared to hand out Viagra prescriptions, and Berti said that he personally would pay for the anti-impotence drug to avoid any legal troubles. ``This product is being offered in Brazil and around the world, and helps those whose 'socks are falling down,'' Berti said on Wednesday.

Brother on Diana

LONDON: The brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, described in a television interview on Wednesday his admiration for her sister's two sons as they followed her funeral cortege through London. Speaking to the BBC, Earl Charles Spencer said the self-control shown by Princes William, now 16, and Harry, 13,was the ``most amazing display of courage I'll ever see''.

``My admiration for those two boys is without bounds now. How they could have got through it...'' He added, ``I'd have been in tears if they hadn't been there and, being a generation senior to them, I couldn't cry if they weren't.'' Spencer also spoke of his own feelings as he followed his sister's coffin through London last September.

``I was walking down a tunnel of grief and you could feel the intensity of that grief every footstep. ``And you'd walk a hundred yards in complete silence, but with this grief bearing down on you, and then somebody would scream -- almost in tortured pain they'd bellow -- which was just awful.``And then other people would be sobbing, others would applaud and then silence again. It just seemed endless to me''.

Unabomber's biography

NEW YORK: Theodore Kaczynski, a hermit mathematician serving a life sentence for bombings that killed three and injured 23, has contacted a publisher about writing his biography,sources said.

``We have received an unsolicited proposition from someone who presented himself as Theodore Kaczynski and we have sent to this person a letter of refusal,'' said Simon and Schuster spokeswoman Wendy Nicholson.