Browsing the World News category

Claims relating to the UK's June floods will total £1.5bn, the insurance industry estimates.

The Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters (CILA) calculates domestic claims will reach £825m, while those from businesses will add up to £680m.

Gordon Brown, who will visit affected areas, pledged to do everything in his power to help victims of the flooding.

A Florida man awoke with a severe headache and asked his wife to drive him to a hospital, where doctors found a bullet lodged behind his right ear, sheriff's deputies said.

"The nurse looked at him and said, 'It appears that you've been shot,'" the Fort Pierce Tribune quoted St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara as saying. "And he said, 'No way.'"

The wife, April Moylan, fled the emergency room when the bullet was discovered but later told deputies she had accidentally shot her husband as he slept early on Tuesday. She was jailed on a weapons violation charge while deputies pursued additional charges.

The husband, 45-year-old Michael Moylan, woke up with a head pain so severe he suspected he was having an aneurysm and asked his wife to take him to the emergency room, deputies said. They arrested the wife after obtaining a search warrant and finding a gun and bloody rags in the couple's home near the Atlantic coastal town of Port St. Lucie. The husband was hospitalised in stable condition.

Ref: Reuters

A grandmother was alarmed to find a condom in a happy meal gift pack bought for her 7-year-old granddaughter at a McDonald's (MCD) restaurant in New Zealand, local media reported Thursday.

The condom was discovered Tuesday night in a bag that came with Maia Whitaker's meal, which her grandparents bought at a McDonald's outlet in the city of Wellington.

A cat helped spare a family in the US state of Indiana from death by carbon monoxide poisoning by jumping on the bed and meowing wildly as fumes filled the home, the owners said.

Eric and Cathy Keesling said their 14-year-old cat, Winnie, played a crucial role in saving their lives on March 24 after a petrol-powered water pump in their basement caused the odourless, but deadly, gas to build up.

Inventors have created a soap infused with caffeine which helps users wake up in the morning.

The soap, called Shower Shock, supplies the caffeine equivalent of two cups of coffee per wash, with the stimulant absorbed naturally through the skin, manufacturers say.

An Algerian woman has given birth to seven babies in the capital Algiers, but one of them, a boy, died almost immediately, a Health Ministry official said on Thursday.

A Malaysian teacher who was caned by the principal of her school after being mistaken for a student idling outside the classroom has complained to authorities in a bid to stop the incident from happening again.

"I was ashamed because all the students in Form One saw the incident," national news agency Bernama quoted the 28-year-old teacher as saying, after she was hit on the buttocks along with several students on Wednesday morning.

A small white mouse running around a Boeing 777 delayed a Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo for more than four hours, newspapers reported on Monday.

A passenger saw the mouse on the aircraft, which had arrived in Hanoi from the central city of Danang at 10 p.m. (4:00 p.m. British time) on Saturday and was scheduled to continue to Japan.