A walking stick used to bludgeon its spy owner to death more than 100 years ago is to be sold at auction.
The intricately carved stick once belonged to William Gill, a British spy and multi-millionaire explorer. But in 1883 it was used by Bedouin tribesmen to murder Mr Gill in the Sinai desert after Mr Gill escaped a firing squad when he and his colleagues were shot.
Mr Gill had been gathering secret intelligence for the British government.
The walking stick is being sold by an anonymous vendor and is expected to fetch £400 in the Lyon and Turnbull sale in Edinburgh. (PA)
Mayonnaise spill causes auto pile-up
A load of mayonnaise falling off the back of a lorry in Japan caused an eight-vehicle pile-up, leaving three people injured, police said yesterday.
The accident, involving a motorcycle, two trucks and five cars, closed part of a two-lane highway for five hours early on Saturday in Hyogo prefecture, said police official Masaaki Miyazaki. None of the injuries were serious.
According to witnesses boxes filled with bottles of mayonnaise fell off the back of the truck, he said.
“What probably happened is that cars travelling behind the truck squashed the bottles of mayonnaise, spreading it on the road,” he said.
The sauce’s ingredients of eggs, vinegar and oil mean “it is more slick and dangerous than snow”, he said. (AFP)
Freudian slip?
France’s former justice minister Rachida Dati explained yesterday that she was simply speaking too fast when, in a slip of the tongue that became an internet hit, she confused fellatio with inflation.
“I just spoke too quickly but, well, if that lets everybody have a laugh, then that’s fine,” she said in a radio interview. She had confused oral sex with rising prices as she launched an attack on foreign investment funds.
“When I see some of them looking for returns of 20 or 25 per cent, at a time when fellatio is close to zero, and in particular in a slump, that means we are destroying businesses,” she told Canal Plus.
The French for fellatio is “fellation”, which shares some syllables with inflation, which in French is the same as in English. (AFP)
Emergency 999
A man dialled 999 when a cat wandered into his home, police have revealed.
The worried householder phoned police to say that the large moggy had walked through his back door into his kitchen. The caller, from Gloucester, was politely advised to pick up the cat and remove it from the house and warned the situation was not an emergency.
The bizarre call was one of 4,000 inappropriate emergency calls received by Gloucestershire Police force this year. (PA)
Hard habit to break
Twenty years after German unification, Chancellor Angela Merkel said yesterday she has found some habits of her communist East German upbringing hard to break, such as stockpiling consumer goods.
The 56-year-old German leader told Superillu magazine that she tended to overstock her cupboards “because you used to just get what you could in an economy where things were scarce”.
Merkel, who lives in private apartment with her chemist husband in Berlin’s city centre, said she also still has a hankering for typical foods in the German Democratic Republic, as the repressive state was known.
Germany on Sunday will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the unification of east and west after 40 years of division, prompted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in a peaceful revolution in November 1989. (AFP)
Royal expenses
Buckingham Palace officials spent almost £100,000 of taxpayer’s money cleaning chandeliers.
The work was part of £1.5 million spent on various main-tenance and up-keep projects at royal residences during 2004 to 2005.
A staff canteen and a function room were refurbished at Buckingham Palace for £808,000 while turning a private cinema into another room also used for official events cost £458,000, according to documents seen by the Daily Mail. (PA)
Meating his end
A top Russian spy who defected to the US choked to death on a piece of meat, an autopsy report revealed.
Sergei Tretyakov died suddenly in June. He had run the Russian espionage operation from the United Nations before he defected in 2000.
Mr Tretyakov later said his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq. (PA)
Knockout show
A man dressed as the Sesame Street character Elmo was attacked at a Florida music store where he had been hired as a children’s entertainer.
Police said the attacker began throwing punches at Elmo and the performer fought back, even breaking a few fingers on the other man’s hand.
Officers broke up the fight and took the attacker to the hospital, where he was treated and detained for a mental health evaluation. (PA)