World Vignettes

It's no more a dog's lifeMUELHEIM: For the dog who has everything, there is now something else: A special ice cream for dogs. Available in e...

It’s no more a dog’s life

MUELHEIM: For the dog who has everything, there is now something else: A special ice cream for dogs. Available in either chocolate or vanilla flavour, Pfiffi Meistereis comes in the shape of a dog’s head and is being launched in the Tengelmann chain of shops in Berlin. The idea for the canine ice cream came to its inventor, Henry Wiczorek, when he saw dog owners letting their four-legged friends take licks of their own ice creams under the table. “It made me mad to see the stains on the terrace, and then I thought that all that sugar could not be good for the animals,” Wiczorek, a soft drinks maker, said. With this in mind, Wiczorek created an ice cream for dogs with advice from veterinarians, reducing the sugar content to a level more suited to a dog’s diet though humans can eat the ice cream too.

Food for thought

WASHINGTON: Even a simple breakfast of toast and margarine may be too fatty for the body to handle and it could be there are no“good” fats in a high-fat diet, Dutch researchers have said. A single high-fat meal can cause elevations in a blood-clotting factor known as factor viia, which has been associated with heart attacks, they wrote in a report in the journal of the American Heart Association.

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Louise Mennen and colleagues at the Agricultural University in Wageningen, Netherlands, said it did not matter what kinds of fats people ate — all fat was bad.

Diana grave

LONDON: A six-metre-high urn is to be built over the grave of Princess Diana, her brother Earl Spencer has said. She is buried on an island in a small lake at Althorp, 100 kilometres north of London. The precise spot where she is buried has not been marked so far, but is known to her brother who also plans to erect an imitation temple as a memorial on the island. The temple would contain two marble tombstones with inscription on them, he said. A Diana museum would be set up off the island in a 260-year-old stable that is listed as a precious ancientbuilding.