Today's other stories in brief
Bush presses Sudan to let UN troops in
WASHINGTON - President Bush has urged Sudan to live up to its pledge to allow UN peacekeepers into Darfur and said he was shipping emergency food to ease the humanitarian crisis in the African country.
Mr Bush called Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whom he has previously accused of aiding genocide in Darfur, to press him to allow UN troops, and some from Nato, to take over from an African peacekeeping mission. - (Reuters)
UK servicewoman killed in Iraq
LONDON - The first British servicewoman killed in action for more than 20 years was among those who died when a British helicopter was shot down by Iraqi insurgents in Basra on Saturday, the UK ministry of defence revealed yesterday.
Flight Lieut Sarah-Jayne Mulvihill (32) was taking a flight intended to help brief Wing Commander John Coxen (46), who was arriving to take over command of the helicopters supporting British troops. He is the most senior British officer to have been killed in the conflict. - (Guardian service)
German TV loses dispute on imam
POTSDAM - A German court ruled against state-funded television broadcaster ZDF yesterday in a dispute over whether it had been right to label a controversial former imam a "hate preacher".
A regional court in the eastern city of Potsdam ruled ZDF had distorted and simplified quotations it attributed to Yakup Tasci, who is Turkish, from a sermon he delivered in late 2004 at the Mevlana mosque in Berlin's Kreuzberg district. - (Reuters)
Afghan politicians hit colleague
KABUL - A female politician was verbally and physically attacked by her colleagues after saying on the parliament floor that some of Afghanistan's mujahideen leaders were criminals who shouldn't be lawmakers, officials said yesterday.
Malalai Joya said several female colleagues hit her with empty water bottles and male politicians made death threats and lobbed insults at her after her speech.
Moderate members of the 249-member lower house formed a circle around Ms Joya to protect her. She said: "I said there are two kinds of mujahideen in Afghanistan. One kind fought for independence, which I respect, but the other kind destroyed the country and killed 60,000 people." - (AP)
Keith Richards has brain surgery
WELLINGTON - Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards had surgery to relieve a blood clot on his brain caused by an accident while holidaying in Fiji, local media reported yesterday.
The 62-year-old rocker was recovering in New Zealand after "brain surgery", Australian and New Zealand media reported. - (Reuters)
Scented clues to sexual attraction
LONDON - Sex pheromones, the chemicals some scientists believe waft off the body to help attract sexual partners, are processed differently in the brain depending on our sexuality.
Scientists found that a potent chemical lurking in male sweat causes a rush of electrical activity in the brains of straight women and gay men, while lesbians and straight men treat it like any other common odour.
Ivanka Savic, a neuroscientist at the Stockholm Brain Institute who led the study, said the finding suggested specific brain circuits were engaged when we were exposed to chemicals we found sexually stimulating. She added that the scans did not reveal whether sexual behaviour was learned or hard-wired in our brains at birth. - (Guardian service)