Tom Baldwin
The TimesWed, 21 Mar 2007 08:59 UTC
The world's biggest manufacturer of household and grooming products voiced hopes yesterday that an urban myth linking it to Satanism was being crushed after four men were ordered to pay almost $20 million (£10 million) in damages for spreading the rumour.
At the end of a 12-year legal case in Salt Lake City, Utah, a US District Court jury found against a group of distributors from a rival company who had left voicemail messages alleging that part of Procter & Gamble's profits went to devil-worshipping cults.
P&G - which owns brands such as Pampers, Gillette, Head & Shoulders and Ariel - has long been in despair over the stubborn refusal of such claims to go away.
The clumsy phrases you basically like, hate
Like some Crufts for ugly mongrels, hundreds of linguistic pet hates were sent in by readers yesterday. It started with a criticism by Noel Pepperall on Thursday's Letters page of draw down applied to withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Chief among the breeds you loathe are empty speech-markers, equivalent to er, such as, basically, you know and I mean. Tudor Gwilliam-Rees counted Tony Blair saying "Y'know" 40 times during a Today radio interview.
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©Telegraph
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The miniature that Dr Starkey believes is of Lady Jane Grey
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Thirteen-year-old Katharine Tuck's sneakers smell as bad as they look. Now, at least, the Utah seventh-grader can afford some new ones.
On Tuesday, she out-ranked six other children to win $2,500 in the 32nd annual National Odor-Eaters Rotten Sneaker Contest, stinking up the joint with a pair of well-worn 1½-year-old Nikes so noxious they had the judges wincing.
"I'm so proud of the little stinker," said her mother, Paula Tuck.
Ah, the foul smell of success.
Katharine has used the sneakers to play soccer and basketball, hiked in them, even waded into the Great Salt Lake, where they were infiltrated by brine shrimp.
The contest, founded in 1975 as a sporting goods store promotion and now sponsored by the manufacturer of anti-foot odor products, pits children from around the United States who have won state-level competitions for the generally cruddy condition of their footwear.
Police arrested a French urban climber who calls himself "Spiderman" as he attempted to scale Malaysia's 88-storey Petronas Twin Towers with his bare hands Tuesday for the second time in 10 years.
Alain Robert was detained as he made it to the 60th floor of Tower 2, where he unfurled a Malaysian flag to a cheering crowd below before being led away by authorities, Fire Department spokesman Christopher Chong said.
"We asked him to stop, he said OK," Chong said. "He tried to climb further, but we told him no."
A decade ago, Robert was also stopped on the same floor, where there is a ledge for officials to climb onto, and was charged with trespassing.
It was not immediately clear whether he will be charged this time, and police were not immediately available for comment.
McDonald's, home to the McMuffin and the McNugget, is fed up with being home to the McJob.
The UK arm of the fast food chain is starting a campaign to get British dictionary publishers to revise their definitions of the word "McJob", a term the Oxford English Dictionary describes as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector".
LONDON - A first-class passenger on a flight from Delhi to London awoke find the corpse of a woman who had died in the economy cabin being placed in a seat next to him, British Airways said Monday.
The economy section of the flight was full, and the cabin crew needed to move the woman and her grieving family out of that compartment to give them some privacy, the airline said.
Cologne- Seven hand-written letters in which Czar Alexander II of Russia and his mistress, Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, explicitly describe sex are to be auctioned this Friday in the German city of Cologne.
British Airways has apologised after First Class passengers on a flight from Delhi awoke to find crew had placed a corpse in their cabin.
Businessman Paul Trinder, 54, had dozed off in his £3000 First Class seat on the flight from Delhi to Heathrow, but awoke to a "commotion" in the darkened cabin.
He told how crew were moving what he later established was a person "like a sack of potatoes", positioning her in a seat on the other side of the cabin and seatbelting her in.
A German man has been arrested after he climbed into an emergency postbox for unwanted babies while drunk.
Heinrich Mueller, 28, slid down the chute and ended up in an emergency incubator, triggering alarms among medical staff.
But instead of another unwanted newborn baby, they found Mueller smoking a cigarette.
He then fell asleep as staff worked out how to get him out of the incubator at the hospital in Dortmund.