World Vignettes –Diagnosis on the Net

Russi `butterflies’

MOSCOW: Muscovites call them `night-time butterflies’ and all evening long, they flutter along the Capital’s central thoroughfare. But before Moscow celebrates its 850th anniversary later this summer, the city’s most visible sex workers will be swept up in a police net and deposited along a desolate stretch of the Moscow river. Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov said he hatched the plan after he drove along Tverskaya Street one evening and counted about 500 sex workers. They nearly dragged me out of the car,” Kulikov complained at a news conference on Friday.

Tony Blair show

WORCESTOR: Vandalism, youth drinking and witness intimidation in law courts: questions the British Prime Minister faces each week at Parliamentary question time. But on Friday, they came from the public, not the politicians.

Tony Blair paid the first of what he said would be regular visits to `Middle England’ to answer voters’ concerns, replicating the famed House of Commons Prime Minister’s question time. Britain’s press has dubbed the exercise the `Talk to Tony Show’. Blair’s first foray was to the Guild Hall in Worcester, 240 kilometers northwest of London, where he fielded queries from an invited group of 130 people.

Soothing siesta

BONN: ARE you tense, irritable and forgetful after lunch? Your mother used to tell you to go lie down and take a nap and she was right, according to German sleep researchers, who say an afternoon siesta is good for adults and children alike. Even a brief nap in the afternoon restores vitality and concentration and should not be dismissed as a waste of precious time, say findings published on Friday by the sleep laboratory of the Association of German Psychologists (BDP). On the contrary, people who take naps often out-perform those who do not.

Wedding bells

WASHINGTON: Former US Secretary of State George Shultz is engaged to be married this summer to San Francisco’s chief of protocol. The 76-year-old widower will marry twice-widowed Charlotte Maillard Swig, 63 on August 15. “We sort of made an impact on each other and we started to see quite a bit of each other about a year ago,” he was quoted as saying in Friday’S Washington Post. The couple met when he returned to California from Washington and Swig came to his Stanford University office to discuss a dinner in his honour. Shultz was Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989.

T-Rex ousted

PHILADELPHIA: The usurper to the title `King of the Dinosaurs’ has taken its place of honour in a Philadelphia museum and left the T-Rex sulking in the background. The first reconstructed skeleton of a Gigantosaurus, a fearsome, flesh-ripping predator whose bones were discovered in Argentina in 1993, went on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The dinosaur was an estimated 14 metres long and weighed about eight tonnes when it roamed what is now South America about 100 million years ago. It eclipses Tyrannosaurus Rex as the largest meat-eating dinosaur ever known.

Longest bean

ORLANDO: A 132 cm legume from Brahmachari Yoganand’s backyard garden may just qualify as the world’s biggest bean. Yoganand, a native of Trinidad, has to stretch out both arms to display the lengthy green bean. It easily beats the 122 cm bean listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.