World Briefs

Mexican Manuel Uribe, the world's fattest man in the 2007 Guinness Book of Records, said he would wed this month, after losing nearly half his original weight.

"It will be a hefty wedding, on a large scale, but with a low-calorie banquet," the 43-year-old said. He said that on October 26 he would be marrying a widow named Claudia, to whom he has been engaged for two years.

The wedding will take place at his home in Monterrey, northern Mexico.

The media-friendly Mexican expanded his wedding plans after offers of sponsorship from international magazines, TV stations and local mayors who offered a cake for 400 guests.

Mr Uribe, who lives in his bed, last February said he had dropped 230 from 590 kilos.

Boy wreaks havoc while feeding croc

The parents of a seven-year-old boy who broke into an Australian outback zoo and fed a string of small animals to its resident crocodile are likely to be sued after police said the boy was too young to be held responsible.

A turtle, four western blue tongue lizards, two bearded dragons, two thorny devil lizards and a 1.8-metre adult female Spencer's goanna were fed or led into the jaws of a three-metre, 200kg saltwater crocodile named Terry.

Security camera footage at the Alice Springs Reptile Centre showed the smiling youngster also bludgeoning to death a small blue tongue lizard and two more thorny devils during a half-hour of breakfast-time havoc last Wednesday.

Centre director Rex Neindorf said many of the animals fed to the croc were rare or mature and would be difficult to replace.

Mr Neindorf said he was now looking at suing the parents of the pint-sized terror, who could easily have been taken by Terry himself as he fed the croc from a small landing at his enclosure.

Chicken droppings as cheap fertilizer

For Kansas farmer Jeff Fowler, planting and fertilizing a new wheat crop this autumn is a fowl job. Literally.

As he prepares his southeast Kansas farm fields for planting hard red winter wheat, the primary bread-making grain, Mr Fowler is mixing chicken droppings into the soil.

The reason? Money. Poultry waste, or chicken "litter", is a cheap alternative to the nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers that are key to growing a good wheat crop.

The benefits of poultry waste as fertilizer have long been known and valued by farmers. But the practice has traditionally been limited to those close to poultry operations. But now, with commercial fertilizer prices so high - over $100 an acre in some cases - farmers far from poultry operations see the economic benefits of buying bird waste, even in light of transportation costs.

'Ig Nobels' awarded for unlikely research

A researcher who figured out that Coke explodes sperm and scientists who discovered that people will happily eat stale chips if they crunch loudly enough won alternative "Ig Nobel" prizes yesterday.

Other winners included physicists who found out that anything that can tangle, will tangle and a team of biologists who ascertained that dog fleas jump farther than cat fleas.

The Ig Nobels honour real research, but are meant as a funny alternative to next week's deadly serious Nobel prizes for medicine, chemistry, physics, economics, literature and peace.

Awarded by the editors of the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humour magazine, the prizes are based on published research, some intended to be humorous but often not. Usually the "honoured" researchers go along with the joke.

Wild boars on the increase in Germany

Wild boars are breeding at a huge rate in Germany and wreaking greater havoc than in any other European country by destroying crops, killing pets and even attacking people, according to a new study. Findings by the Hanover-based Institute of Wildlife Research show that Germany's boar population rose by 320 per cent last year because of better access to food and bigger litters of young.

Increasingly encroaching on suburban areas, boars have been reported attacking people, killing pets, and digging up corpses in cemeteries. Graveyards and gardens are being ravaged daily, police say.

"It's impossible for their habitat to adapt to a surge of this degree," the institute's Gunter Sodeikat said. The surge has also caused mounting destruction of crops and raised the risk of swine fever spreading, Mr Sodeikat said.

According to the institute, the boar boom is exceptional in Germany, though it is not yet clear why. "German litters have six to eight piglets on average, other countries usually only about four or five," the study said.