Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against mortal adults in two tests of small-name recall. Overall, the chimps won. That challenges the belief of many persons, including many scientists, that “humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions”, said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University.

Thieves who stole 16 metric tonnes of ham and bacon from a storehouse in Australia left-hand behind a communication taunting the duty just weeks previously the holiday time. “Thanks … Cheerful Christmas,” the crooks daubed on a screen of the Zammit Ham and Bacon Curers storehouse in suburban Sydney as they made away with their drag.

Christmas is hectic representing all but especially representing Santa, who ought living in Kyrgyzstan and make his rounds at lightning speed if he is to deliver gifts to all the world’s children on period, a Swedish consultancy has concluded. Between Christmas Evening and Christmas Daytime, Santa Claus’s route about the planet includes stops at 2,5-billion homes.

A Greek Conformist nunnery was turned into a marijuana plantation near two men posing as gardeners for old nuns, constabulary said on Tuesday. Acting on a tip-off, officers raided the nunnery in the village of Filiro, close the northern harbour metropolis of Thessaloniki, and establish more than 30 big cannabis plants in the enclosed garden.

The wife of a British man who disappeared more than five years ago but then turned up living at the weekend has herself gone missing, media reports said on Tuesday. John Darwin (57), who was thinking to possess died in a canoeing accident, walked in to a London police station and declared he was a missing individual, but had no recall of where he had been.

Passport fees in Zimbabwe possess been increased, Zimbabwe’s government mouthpiece Herald newspaper reported on Monday. The fees were last reviewed in May this year. According to a note at the registrar-general’s office in Harare, an usual passport for an adult now costs Z$5-million, up from Z$150?�000, the account said.

The Unified Nations’s top help authorized, John Holmes, arrived in Somalia on Monday, vocation representing more to be done to aid the Horn of Africa nation where nearly 6?�000 civilians possess been killed in fighting this year. UN officials state Somalia’s humanitarian turning-point is Africa’s worst, with single million people displaced.

A British female jailed in Sudan representing insulting creed by naming a teddy carry after the Prophetess Muhammad was to be released on Monday after being granted a presidential forgiveness. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir signed the forgiveness after appointment two British Muslim peers who flew to Khartoum on a compassion task.

The Egalitarian Republic of Congo’s (DRC) army attacked a fortress of deserter Tutsi general Laurent Nkunda on Monday, a day after his men seized a strategic township from the rule and forced outside thousands of civilians, United Nations officials said.

The United States will smack travelling and monetary sanctions on round 40 more persons with ties to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who has cracked down hard on dissent, a senior US authorized said on Monday. “Mugabe’s autocracy needs to extremity,” said US Helper Secretary of Condition representing African Affairs Jendayi Frazer.