Panda poop

Beijing, March 26 (PTI): Giant pandas maybe one of the cutest animals but they also poop a lot, leading researchers to develop “panda paper” souvenirs from their excrement.

Pandas mainly feed on bamboo and the fibre in their stool can be turned into a pulp to make a rough paper to produce greeting cards, bookmarks, notebooks and even fridge magnets, say researchers.

God speed

Lisbon (Reuters): A Portuguese group campaigning for safe roads has asked the Vatican to ensure that a priest who owns a souped-up Ford Fiesta “resist the temptations of speed”. Father Antonio Rodrigues, Portugal’s only owner of a 150-horse-power Ford Fiesta 2000 ST, has boasted of his car’s rapid acceleration to 210 km per hour.

Dead proof

Bucharest (Reuters): A cashier for Romania’s state-owned railway has been asked to pay a month’s worth of wages to receive government confirmation that she is alive. Filoftea Popescu discovered when she applied for a passport that the Romania’s People Registration Service had mistakenly declared her dead in November 2005.