MUNICH, October 6: Munich has mopped up after its traditional two weeks of beer drinking - and discovered that although there were far fewer visitors to this year's October festival they were much the thirstier. Around 6.4 million people visited the festival, billed as the largest in the world, about half a million fewer than last year and well below the record of 7.1 million in 1985. But Munich's beer-sellers were more than happy after selling 5.2 litres of beer, 100,000 litres more than in 1996 - thanks partly to glorious late summer weather, say the organisers. During the festival, the police and Red Cross were called to deal with 2,300 drunks and injured and the lost property office collected 6,000 items of lost property, including four sets of false teeth.Dirty donationsMEXICO CITY: Donations to the Catholic church from drug traffickers should not be rejected on the grounds that the money has been earned illegally, a Mexican church official said. ``If we take away from them this manner of compensating, we send them to perdition,'' Manuel Talamas, Archbishop Emeritus of Ciudad Juarez, told the weekly magazine Proceso. Nevertheless, Talamas said his diocese had never accepted such donations under his leadership. Not all church officials agree with his open policy on contributions. Hector Gonzalez Martinez, Archbishop of Oaxaca, said his diocese has a rule of not accepting donations from people who seek to cleanse their conscience in this way.Killer cancerBERLIN: Every ten seconds someone dies of lung cancer somewhere in the world. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that almost half a million people die from the disease each year in Europe alone. Doctors speaking in the run-up to the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Berlin last week said smoking had reached epidemic proportions. A survey of 250 European lung specialists conducted in 1997 found that 90 per cent were in favour of a pan-European ban on all kinds of tobacco advertising. Medicos from the Heckeshorn Lung Clinic in Berlin warned that the rate of lung cancer among women had almost doubled in the past ten years.Cyclists' woePARIS: Cycling can lead to sexual problems according to a report from the home of the Tour de France. Writing in the Quotidien Du Medecin, United States urologist Irwin Goldstein of the Boston Medical Centre warned that saddles fixed at too much of a backward slant could crush arteries in the genital area. This could lead to impotence in men, though women were less likely to face problems. Occasional cyclists were just as much at risk as professional racing cyclists. Goldstein recommended that to avoid the problem saddles be fixed horizontally or even sloping slightly forwards.Gazing gameCOLOGNE: Women are better at visual response than men. A university of Cologne study, the findings of which have just been published, found that on average, women respond after only 0.4 of a second to the gaze of a man, whereas men take three times as long to react to a female look. When it came to gestures, women were four times as quick as men, taking a mere 0.3 of a second to react physically to a man's movements. On the other hand, women had to wait an average of 1.2 seconds for a man to budge. Cologne University Department of Psychology conducted its survey of non-verbal communication culture between the sexes through tests on 20 couples.
