A 15-year-old boy in Brazil recovered from a normally deadly rabies infection, becoming one of a handful of survivors of the virus worldwide and the first in the country, the health ministry said yesterday.
The teenager, who was bitten by a blood-sucking bat in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, was found to be clear of the virus after more than a month of hospital treatment using a combination of drugs.
The case is one of only three known in which a person survived a confirmed rabies infection, the ministry said in a statement. There are five other cases of people surviving suspected rabies infections, a ministry spokesman said.
The virus - transmitted by infected animals such as dogs, cats or bats through their saliva when they bite, scratch or lick humans - causes inflammation of the brain and usually leads to death if left untreated.
Greeks pre-empted Dead Parrot sketch
"I'll tell you what's wrong with it. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it."
For those who believe the ancient Greeks thought of everything first, proof has been found in a fourth century AD joke book featuring an ancestor of Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch where a man returns a parrot to a shop, complaining it is dead.
The 1,600-year-old work entitled Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, one of the world's oldest joke books, features a joke in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died, its publisher said yesterday.
"By the gods", answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing!"
In a British comedy act Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch, first aired in 1969 and regularly voted one of the funniest ever, the pet-shop owner says the parrot, a "Norwegian Blue", is not dead, just "resting" or "pining for the fjords".
Satellite suffering from flat battery
Nigeria's government said this week that its $340 million communications satellite was not lost in space, as reported by the local media, but that it was simply suffering from a flat battery.
The Nigerian Communication Satellite, or NIGCOMSAT-1, blasted off from a launch pad in China in May 2007 to great fanfare, with Nigeria hoping it would offer advanced telecoms, broadcasting and broadband multimedia services for 15 years.
Minister of state for Science and Technology Alhassan Zaku said engineers at ground stations in Abuja and China had noticed the satellite's solar-powered battery was not recharging and feared it could smash into other satellites if left unrepaired.
"After looking at the options we decided that the best thing to do was to park it, like you park a car," Mr Zaku said.
Man returns stolen relics
A man has returned relics to a Russian Orthodox monastery in Moscow eight days after they were stolen and then turned up in an antiques store, church officials said yesterday.
The relics of six saints were in a silver reliquary that went missing on November 5 after an evening Mass at the 16th-century Donskoi monastery in central Moscow. Many of Russia's prominent citizens are buried there, including Nobel Prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
On Thursday, a man in his 30s wearing a black jacket and whose head was covered with a hood handed the relics back to the monks, police said.
Resort plans nude 'anything goes' party
An Australian holiday resort will hold a month-long, nude "anything goes" party to combat an expected economic downturn, media reports said yesterday.
"Tough economic times call for stiff measures," Tony Fox, the owner of the White Cockatoo resort in Mossman, in tropical Queensland state, told the Courier-Mail newspaper. "It will be a hedonism resort, where anything goes for a month. It doesn't take rocket science to work out what it means," Fox said, naming March as the risque party month.
The controversial "clothes optional" resort made headlines three years ago when police were called to end partner-swapping parties after a swathe of public complaints. "You've got to wonder what sort of people go and why. Where is the moral code of behaviour and how do you stop jealousies and fights?" Cairns Catholic Bishop James Foley said after Fox's announcement.
Fishing show in rough water
The host of a Canadian fishing show was reprimanded this week for broadcasting political propaganda during an election campaign, the first time that a show for anglers has landed in hot water for being partisan.
Darryl Cronzy, who presents Going Fishing, had been wrong to urge viewers to vote for the opposition Conservatives in an October 2007 election in the province of Ontario, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council said. Mr Cronzy also mocked the Liberals, the province's ruling party.
Mr Cronzy's problems began after Conservative leader John Tory appeared on the show in September 2007, during the campaign. "Towards the end of the programme, Cronzy said, 'Listen, I'm not telling you who to vote for' and then contradicted his verbal statement by pointing at John Tory in an obvious and exaggerated manner," the council said in a formal ruling. Mr Cronzy also said Tory would be "hopefully, in a couple of months, the head honcho of Ontario." The two men also joked that one particular fish "went down, just like the Liberals."
Unfortunately for Mr Cronzy, the Liberals won the election.