A former Australian prisoner liked his jail cell so much he has decided to buy it.
Graeme Alford, who spent several years in Melbourne's former Pentridge prison for embezzlement and armed robbery in the 1970s, will buy his old cell, number 43, as part of a commercial redevelopment of the jail, local media reported yesterday.
Pentridge, one of Australia's most notorious prisons and site of the country's last hanging, is being redeveloped into a wine block that will eventually house A$50 million (Lm12 million) worth of rare wines.
Lovers brought down to earth
Singapore Airlines, the first operator of the new Airbus A380, has dashed the hopes of sexual thrill-seekers planning to engage in amorous activity aboard the world's biggest jumbo jet.
The carrier said it would ask passengers on the A380 to refrain from sex while ensconced in one of its 12 first-class suites, which boast the world's first airborne double beds.
While private, the double cabins are neither sound-proofed nor completely sealed.
Fathers baby from prison
One of Italy's most infamous mobsters has fathered a daughter more than two decades after being jailed for life without the right to conjugal visits. The miracle of sorts is thanks to a legal battle that allowed Raffaele Cutolo, a former boss of the Naples-based Camorra crime organisation, the right to father a child through artificial insemination.
It was a first for Italy, where mob bosses are expected to serve "hard time" once they are brought to justice.
Mr Cutolo married his wife, appropriately named Immacolata or "Immaculate" in prison in 1983, but the two never consummated the marriage, according to news reports. On Tuesday, at a Naples hospital, she delivered a baby girl named Denise.
Oldest recipe for sausage
A hobby historian has discovered the oldest known recipe for German sausage, a list of ingredients for Thuringian bratwurst nearly 600 years old.
According to the 1432 guidelines, Thuringian sausage makers had to use only the purest, unspoiled meat and were threatened with a fine of 24 pfennigs - a day's wages - if they did not, a spokesman for the German Bratwurst Museum said yesterday.
Historian Hubert Erzmann, 75, found the ancient recipe, inscribed with pen and ink in a heavy tome of parchment, earlier this year while doing research in an archive in the eastern town of Weimar, museum spokesman Thomas Maeuer said.
Russian schools ban Halloween
Moscow schools have been ordered to ban students from celebrating Halloween despite the widespread popularity of the imported festival to Russia.
Halloween is being forced underground because it "includes religious elements, the cult of death, the mockery of death", a spokesman for the city's education department Alexander Gavrilov said on yesterday.
Pumpkins and images of witches are widespread across Russia, with many bars organising special fancy dress parties, despite the efforts of the Kremlin, and especially the Russian Orthodox Church, to curb enthusiasm for non-native festivities.
PM disowns lesbian daughter
Women's rights campaigners in Cambodia lashed out at Prime Minister Hun Sen yesterday for trying to disown his adopted daughter because she is a lesbian.
"You do not have to agree with her decision, but you have to respect her rights," said Theary Seng, executive director of the Centre for Social Development in the war-scarred southeast Asian nation's capital.
Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, told a graduation ceremony this week he was "disappointed" that his 19-year-old daughter, whom he adopted in 1988, was a lesbian. "I have my own problem - my adopted daughter has a wife," he said. "Now I will ask the court to disown her from my family."
Baroque painting inside old sofa
A Berlin student who bought a second-hand sofa bed at a flea market learned she had been sitting on a small fortune when she found a baroque painting hidden inside the couch.
The artwork fetched €19,200 (Lm8,240) in Hamburg after the student discovered it stashed between the folding sections of the couch she had paid €150 (Lm64) for last year, the auctioneers said.
The student got about €16,000 (Lm6,867) from the sale.
Experts believe the work, entitled Preparations for the Flight to Egypt, was painted between 1605 and 1610 by an unknown artist with ties to Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni.