Newt Gingrich is promising to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2020 if he is elected president.

Mr Gingrich, the former House speaker, told an overflow crowd gathered on Florida’s space coast that he wants to develop a robust commercial space industry in line with the airline boom of the 1930s.

He also wants to expand exploration of Mars.

Florida’s space coast is still suffering from a recent round of federal cuts to the space programme.c

Toilet water for manageress

A designer who filled his manageress’s water bottle up with water from the toilet after she criticised his work has escaped a jail sentence.

Jonathan Oliver, 40, of Hampshire, pleaded guilty at Portsmouth Crown Court to administering a poison or a noxious substance with intent.

The court heard that Mr Oliver, who creates designs for gravestones, had snapped when his boss Annabelle Ryan had criticised his work. He then filled her drinking bottle with water from the toilet.

Mrs Ryan swallowed the liquid and realised something was wrong. She could smell a chemical and threw away the water.

Ceausescu memorabilia

Gifts and memorabilia belonging to late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu are being auctioned off more than 20 years after his death.

Among the items up for grabs in today’s auction are a pen that will go under the hammer for at least €2,000 which Ceausescu received during a visit to Japan in 1975, a bronze yak given to Ceausescu by China’s Mao Tse-tung and gold-plated silver and enamelled doves that Ceausescu received from the Shah of Iran in 1977.

Ceausescu was overthrown during the 1989 anti-communist uprising and executed with his wife Elena after a summary trial on Christmas Day, 1989.

A trunk of underwear

Police in Thailand said they had apprehended a thief with more than a thousand pairs of women’s underwear in the trunk of his car.

Police also found more than ten thousand pairs at the house of the 48-year-old Thai suspect, who was arrested late Tuesday with an accomplice after breaking into a building in Bangkok’s Chinatown.

They said the man admitted to stealing and collecting women’s underwear since the age of 18.

The suspect will be charged with stealing property, though not the underwear for now because there is no plaintiff, police said.