Washington, Nov 2 : Soccer ace David Beckham feels honoured to be called the ‘gayest straight man in Britain’ and ‘blackest white man’ in history.

In an interview to GQ magazine, the 33-year-old midfielder said he loves to be called a gay and black icon.

“When people talk to me about being a gay icon I think of it as a great honour,” the Daily Star quoted him, as saying.

“To have that kind of affect on so many people around the world, I was honoured,” he added.

Washington, Nov 2 : Frequent urination at night can help protect against bladder cancer, says a new study.

A team of Spanish and American scientists suggests direct association between the number of times people get up at night to urinate and protection against bladder cancer.

Juan Alguacil, a researcher from the University of Huelva and one of the authors, suggest that night-time is usually the period during which there is the longest time interval between urination.

“The length of time carcinogenic agents, such as those from tobacco for example, are present in the urine, constitutes an important factor towards the likelihood of developing bladder cancer,” Science Daily quoted Alguacil as saying.

Washington, Nov 2 : Last summer, while on a European tour, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama paid a whopping seven lakh dollars to a Berlin-based event management firm for erecting a stage for him to deliver a speech.

The job included staging, sound and lighting services to help Obama deliver a speech last summer in Berlin, where he declared himself a “citizen” of both the US and the world, the Daily Times quoted a Washington Times report as saying.

Washington  - Every four years, Americans lay claim to a right found nowhere in the US Constitution - that the presidential campaign not only inform, but also entertain.

The US vote is less than three days away and Republican John McCain's numbers are down in the polls, but the senator laid aside his campaign invective against Democrat Barack Obama and appeared on the weekly comedy show Saturday Night Live.

With running mate Sarah Palin's look-alike comedian Tina Fey at his side, McCain pitched a series of fake, cheesy campaign souvenirs to the public to help his famously underfunded campaign.

"I'm a true maverick - a Republican without money," McCain quipped.

Washington, November 2 : A Dalhousie University mathematician has a mystery as to why the opening chord to The Beatles’ "A Hard Day''s Night" is completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date.

Jason Brown’s work attains significance as no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing for 40 years.

He has found that there was a piano among Harrison’s 12-string Rickenbacker, John Lennon’s six-string guitar and Paul McCartney’s bass guitar, and that they collectively accounted for the problematic frequencies.

Washington, November 2 : A study conducted by British researchers suggests that office workers can be helped in staying more alert and less sleepy during the day by changing traditional white-light lighting to blue-enriched white light.

Researchers from the Surrey Sleep Centre at the University of Surrey, who partnered with Philips Lighting for the study, said that this approach can lead to significant improvements in subjective measures of positive moods, work performance, fatigue in the evening, irritability, ability to concentrate and focus and eye strain.

The workers exposed to blue-enriched white light during the study also reported improved sleep at night, the researchers say.