Lingerie creator Heather Thomson got a jump-start on the New York Fashion Week, turning to some of the city's best pole dancers to display her new line of Yummie Tummie underwear on Thursday.
Clothes designers will present their spring collections at the annual fashion show along catwalks under tents in New York's Bryant Park. However, Ms Thomson chose a novel way to promote her lingerie. She held a competition of dancers who perform gymnastics-like routines on brass poles at some of Manhattan's most poshy strip clubs and picked eight to model her Yummie Tummie Shapewear.
The lower level of the West End Cafe near Times Square was transformed into a gentlemen's club where the dancers - four at a time - climbed the poles and turned upside down, this way and that, wearing long-line tank tops and camisoles.
The models represented a cross-section of skin colours and body sizes - from "AA" bra cups to "C" and up.
Unique Bacon portrait on sale
A portrait of Francis Bacon by Lucian Freud - one of only two he ever painted of his friend and the only one whose whereabouts is known - goes on sale next month with a price tag of up to seven million pounds (eight and a half million euro).
The two men, among the greatest post-war British artists, were firm friends. But while Freud frequently sat for Bacon the latter returned the favour for only two portraits. The first of the two portraits dating from 1952 has been missing since 1988 when it was stolen from an exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie.
The portrait which goes on sale on October 19 dates from 1956/7. The two men sat knee-to-knee for the painting which captures an introspective expression on Bacon's face, and while Freud painted Bacon grumbled about the enforced lack of movement. The painting is unfinished, showing only Bacon's face from forehead to chin. It is believed that he left abruptly when he finally rebelled against the strictures of the sitting.
Former SS member to go on trial
Germany will try an 86-year-old former SS member next year who confessed to killing three Dutch civilians more than 60 years ago but has escaped a death sentence and avoided jail.
Heinrich Boere will be tried in Aachen in early 2009, Susanne Wernerus, chief justice of the city's district court, said on Thursday. Mr Boere was captured by US forces in the Netherlands after the war and confessed to killing the Dutch civilians as a member of an SS hit squad targeting anti-Nazi fighters.
He then escaped and fled to Germany, before being sentenced to death in absentia in the Netherlands in 1949.
Taiwan shuts last legal brothel
Authorities in central Taiwan have turned off the red light at the county's last legal brothel after the death of its pimp aged 87, newspapers said yesterday.
Ai-Le was the last legal brothel in Nantou county in central Taiwan, and police revoked its permit because the 48-year-old business could not be transferred.
Prostitution has been illegal in Taiwan since 1997, and licensing of new brothels stopped in 1974, but isolated illegal brothels can be found all over the island.
Brothels licensed prior to 1974 were allowed to keep operating. The closure effectively leaves Ai-Le's two prostitutes, aged 40 and 50, jobless.
MP in jungle cocaine drama
A British MP trekking in Colombia was held at gunpoint in the jungle and forced to eat coffee whitener from a jar in his backpack after soldiers mistook it for cocaine.
Michael Fabricant was on a walking holiday in South America with a friend when they were stopped by a group of gun-toting men in camouflage uniforms.
The soldiers found a container full of coffee whitener in their bags and immediately suspected it was drugs.
"In order to demonstrate that it wasn't cocaine, I had to take a whole pile of it and throw it down my throat," the Conservative member for Lichfield in Staffordshire told BBC TV.
"They waited a few minutes to see whether I collapsed or went delirious and said something completely ridiculous like 'Gordon Brown's got a great personality'.