A Malaysian woman woke up to a real-life nightmare, discovering that the naked man who had slipped into her bed in the middle of the night was a thief, not her husband, a newspaper said yesterday.

The 36-year-old housewife was asleep when the thief, noticing that her husband was fast asleep on the couch, quietly stripped off and lay down beside her, the Star newspaper said, quoting a police report filed in the eastern state of Terengganu. The dozing woman's suspicions were raised when she spoke to him and his voice sounded strange, the paper said.

"She then went to another room and found her husband fast asleep on the couch. That's when she screamed, causing the thief to flee by leaping out from the window together with the stolen items," it added.

Flight spent in toilet

A New York man who says he was denied a seat on a five-hour jetBlue flight and was instead told to "hang out" in the plane's bathroom has sued the airline for $2 million, saying he suffered "extreme humiliation".

When Gokhan Mutlu arrived to check in for a jetBlue flight from San Diego to New York in February he was told the flight was full, according to the lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court. But Mr Mutlu was allowed to board after a jetBlue flight attendant agreed to give up her seat and travel in an airline employee "jump seat". It was not clear in the lawsuit whether the flight attendant was working.

However 90 minutes into the flight, the pilot told Mr Mutlu the flight attendant was uncomfortable and he would have to give up his seat and "hang out" in the bathroom for the remainder of the flight, the lawsuit said.

The pilot "became angry at (Mr Mutlu's) reluctance" and said Mr Mutlu "should be grateful for being onboard," the lawsuit said. When Mr Mutlu volunteered to sit in the "jump seat", he was told it was reserved for airline personnel.

Barbers turn health educators

An eastern Indian state is recruiting around 4,000 barbers to give free haircuts to poor children to improve hygiene and stop the children "looking funny", a senior government official said. The barbers, paid a monthly wage of 1,500 rupees (around €24), will work in some 45,000 primary and middle schools in Jharkhand.

"We are hiring thousands of barbers as health educators in schools," Jharkhand Human Resources Development Minister Bandhu Tirkey said yesterday. "There are many poor children who can't afford to have regular haircuts and attend school with long hair which looks funny... neat hair is also hygienic for students," the minister added.

Jharkhand is one of India's poorest states with a strong tribal population.

Green aliens said to visit UK

Aliens from outer space have been visiting Britain for years and UFO sightings doubled after the film Close Encounters was released in 1977, according to secret files collating reports by members of the public. The alien craft come in all shapes, sizes and colours but their occupants are uniformly green, the Ministry of Defence files show.

The archives at www.national archives.gov.uk/ufos are the first batch of a four-year release programme of all the ministry's UFO files from 1978 to the present day. The ministry dismisses 90 per cent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leave 10 per cent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defence threat.

A 1983 report from a 78-year-old out fishing at midnight tells of following aliens in green overalls on to a spaceship and then being told to go away because he was too old and decrepit for their purposes.

The ministry has files on 11,000 sightings dating back to the 1950s. A few of the sightings made it into the national press and all were checked out in case they were Soviet aircraft probing Britain's defences during the Cold War.

Viagra may help heart

A Canadian study involving mice shows that anti-impotence pills might protect the hearts of people with a common form of muscular dystrophy, researchers said.

Canadian researchers gave sildenafil, the active ingredient in drug maker Pfizer Inc's Viagra, to mice with an animal version of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and found that it improved their heart performance.

They said it would be premature to give Viagra to people with the disease, but said the results indicate the drug potentially could be used to prevent or delay heart failure in children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

The mice were given doses of the drug comparable to those administered to treat erectile dysfunction in men. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that sildenafil cut the levels of damage to contracting heart muscle cells.

Artist goes for virtual gallery

Scottish artist Jack Vettriano, loved by the public but dismissed by the critics, has set up a virtual gallery on the internet after parting with the Portland Gallery last year. New paintings, news of exhibitions and a selection of past works are available at www.jackvettriano.com.

"I've had some very flattering approaches but I've no plans to join another gallery just yet; when I'm ready to announce my next exhibition, subscribers to my site will be the first to know," Mr Vettriano said in a statement. "I'm often dragged into the debate about whether my work should be shown in public collections and while I feel that this is for others to decide, I'm delighted that fans of my paintings will now be able to see a body of work of which I'm very proud."

Paintings by the self-taught former miner, whose works are often dark and brooding with strong sexual undertones, have been rejected by art critics as derivative. Major art galleries also refuse to hang them. But his pictures now sell regularly for six figure sums and he makes a fortune every year with the sale of prints and postcards of his work.

Copies of The Singing Butler, one of Vettriano's most recognisable pictures which was sold in 2004 for just under £750,000 (€938,000), now regularly outsell those of any other painting in Britain.