World Briefs

Canada's Supreme Court yesterday dismissed the case of a man who said he lost interest in sex after he found two dead flies in an unopened bottle of drinking water.

Waddah Mustapha sued the bottling company, saying he had suffered psychological damage, including depression, phobia, anxiety and damage to his sex life after the unpleasant 2001 discovery.

He had previously won C$340,000 (€216,376) in damages in a lower court, but the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had not proved his case.

PM apologises for use of "F" word

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen apologised yesterday for swearing after a heated parliamentary session that prompted criticism of his leadership style just two weeks into the job.

Mr Cowen, who took over as prime minister on May 7, ended a question time session with opposition deputies on Wednesday when a microphone in the Dail lower chamber picked up a conversation with Deputy Prime Minister Mary Coughlan.

"Ring those people, get a handle on them... We've seen all those f...ers," Mr Cowen was heard saying, although it was not clear whom he was referring to.

Exam papers with answers on back

It sounds like every student's dream - turning over an exam paper and finding the answers on the back. But that was what happened to 12,000 lucky teenagers when they sat their GCSE music exam last week.

The OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA) examination board admitted yesterday that, because of a "printing error", papers sent to schools had answers to questions on the back page. "All exam papers have a copyright statement dealing with source material on the back page," an OCR spokesman said. "This one in particular had more detail than is usual in a music paper."

The exam board said only five per cent of the overall marks on the paper were possibly affected and students would not have to do a re-sit as most pupils seemed to have been unaware of their good fortune.

Woman strips for wolf-whistle

Road workers in a small New Zealand town got their wish granted when a woman stripped saying she was fed up with their wolf-whistles.

The Israeli tourist was about to use an ATM in the main street of Kerikeri, in the far north of the country, when the men whistled, the New Zealand Press Association reported.

She calmly stripped off, used the cash machine, before getting dressed and walking away. The woman told police she didn't take too kindly to the whistling from the men repairing the road.

Fishermen save stranded whales

Senegalese fishermen dragged dozens of stranded pilot whales back out to sea on Wednesday night but at least 20 more died on the beach after mysteriously coming ashore.

More than 100 pilot whales, which have bulbous foreheads and can grow to over four metres long, beached themselves overnight at Yoff, a traditional Lebou fishing community on the Cap Vert peninsula, mainland Africa's most westerly point.

Local fishermen struggled through the night to drag the animals back to sea from the sloping sandy beach, using their brightly coloured open wooden boats known as "pirogues" and attaching ropes around the animals' sleek, black bodies.

Grenade-toting man nabbed

A retired Colombian soldier toting a grenade threatened to kill himself and several hostages at a Bogota office on Wednesday before undercover police acting as reporters wrestled him to the ground.

Local CityTV showed images of the ex-soldier, who demanded a pension at the benefits office as he paced about nervously clasping a hand grenade in front of a group of hostages sitting in chairs and reporters allowed in to interview the man. "I am basically asking for my pension," the man told the CityTV reporter inside the office. "Stay calm. Everything will turn out fine," he told the camera in a message to his family.

Stamps of Hitler deputy

German mail company Deutsche Post has inadvertently issued stamps bearing the image of Adolf Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, the company said yesterday.

Deutsche Post printed 20 stamps with Mr Hess next to a bouquet of flowers as part of a service which allows clients to order custom-made envelopes, a company spokesman said.

"It is very unfortunate. But it happened," the spokesman said. "I presume it came from the far-right scene. But those 20 envelopes won't shake up German democracy."

€3.6 million for surrealism texts

The only known manuscript of French poet Andre Breton's Manifeste du surrealisme, which had a profound influence on 20th century art, was sold this week with eight other works for €3.6 million.

Mr Breton's 1924 text launched the Surrealist movement, which inspired generations of painters, photographers and film makers of the calibre of Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali, Man Ray and Luis Bunuel.

Auctioneers Sotheby's in Paris said the Manifesto was sold together with seven preparatory notebooks for Mr Breton's Poisson soluble ("Soluble fish") collection of poems, and a manuscript of the collection itself.