World briefs

US President George W. Bush donned a cowboy hat and sang an early goodbye to Washington on Saturday night with a performance that lampooned White House journalists and Vice President Dick Cheney among others. Mr Bush surprised Cabinet secretaries, diplomatic officials and journalists at the annual Gridiron dinner by taking the stage and giving the first public singing performance of his eight-year presidency, which ends in January 2009.

To the tune of country song Green Green Grass of Home, Mr Bush sang of longing for his ranch in Crawford, Texas and his dog Barney. "And there to meet me is my mama and my papa, down the lane I look and here comes Barney, heart of gold and breath like honey; it's good to touch the brown brown grass of home."

President Bush, singing only slightly off key, then turned to some of the long-term members of his team including Mr Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. "For there's Condi and Dick, my old compadre, talking to me about some oil rich Saudi, but soon I'll touch the brown brown grass of home."

"That old White house is behind me, I am once again carefree, don't have to worry 'bout a crisis in Pyongyang. Down the lane I look, Dick Cheney is strolling with documents he'd been withholding, it's good to touch the brown brown grass of home." The audience erupted in applause and gave him a standing ovation.

Survival of pygmy hippos

Rare pygmy hippos are surviving hidden in Liberia's forests against all odds, despite two civil wars that have ravaged their habitat, British scientists said yesterday. The creatures, which are almost never seen in the wild, were spotted in Liberia's Sapo National Park using special camera traps.

The West African country is one of the last refuges of the endangered pygmy hippopotamus but conservationists had feared recent forest destruction and poaching might have wiped them out.

In fact, a team led by Ben Collen of the Zoological Society of London recorded images of pygmy hippos just three days after setting up their camera traps among the trees. The animals - whose closest living relatives, besides the common hippopotamus, are whales - hide themselves away in the rapidly shrinking Upper Guinean forest ecosystem.

775 Russians trapped on ice drift

Russian helicopters yesterday rescued 775 fishermen stranded on ice sheets drifting into the Pacific Ocean. The men had walked a few kilometres across the ice pack surrounding the remote island of Sakhalin in Russia's far-east to fish over the ocean, news agencies quoting local emergency services reported. Ice fishing is a popular hobby in Russia. Groups of men head out over frozen lakes, rivers and seas during the long winters carrying their fishing lines, a drill to bore through the ice and a stool. Vodka is often taken to ward off the cold and to toast success.

The ice fishermen drill a hole in the ice, dangle their fishing line through it and then sit and wait. During the spring thaw fishermen are often trapped on chunks of ice floating out to sea or fall into rivers through the thinning ice.

Top US 'mental athlete'

A 31-year-old software engineer recalled the correct order of an entire deck of playing cards in two minutes and 27 seconds over the weekend to take the title of having the best memory in the US. Chester Santos of San Francisco beat two other finalists to win the USA Memory Championships in New York that saw dozens of "mental athletes" over age 12 battle through seven rounds of competition in a Manhattan auditorium.

"I'm in a good mood," Mr Santos said after his win, in which he correctly recalled the 10 of diamonds to qualify for the World Memory Championships scheduled to take place later this year in Bahrain. He attributed his win to spending a few hours each night after work practicing his memory.

Championship challenges included memorising a long and previously unpublished poem, recalling the names of 99 people whose photos had been shown 15 minutes earlier and retaining a list of numbers 20 digits wide and 25 rows long.

A car that parks itself

Wouldn't it be nice to drive a car into town without worrying about finding a parking space? Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised just such a vehicle, a futuristic "City Car" that could even drive itself.

Once at your destination, the vehicle's computers would, at the press of a button, look for a parking spot behind others like itself, then fold roughly in half so you could stack it there as you would a shopping cart.

"We have reinvented urban mobility," said Bill Mitchell, director of the project at an MIT think tank in Cambridge, just outside Boston.

The vehicle hasn't yet been built. But a miniature mock-up version has gone on display at a campus museum, and there are plans to build a full-scale model this spring.

Drunken driver in war tank

A Russian tank crashed through a villager's house after the crew stopped to buy more vodka at a nearby shop. Footage from a mobile phone camera showed the tank hitting a corner of the house and a laughing, and apparently drunk, driver awkwardly trying to clamber aboard with two bottles of vodka.

"Get him out of the tank," screamed a woman in the village in the Urals.

The army has promised to pay compensation and said the tank must have been broken and fallen behind a column heading to a test site for exercises. Earlier it said the vehicle slid on melting ice.