Melbourne, Oct 21: Men should stay miles away from mobile phones if they don''t want to screw up their plans of fathering a child, for a new research has shown that males who talk for hours on cellphones may damage their sperm.

An experiment on semen revealed evidence of DNA damage after 16 hours of exposure to radiation similar to the output of a mobile phone.

To reach the conclusion, researchers at the University of Newcastle built a device to irradiate sperm at the same radio frequency as mobile telephone calls.

Rudy Ray Moore, a raunchy 1970s comedian died Sunday evening at an Akron nursing home from complications of diabetes. He was eighty-one.

Moore, who featured as a fast talking pimp in a 1975 film called Dolemite, in later years also collaborated with 2 Live Crew, Big Daddy Kane and Snoop Dogg.  Featuring blunt sex routines onstage, his subject matter along with his style and swagger made him a cult figure in the world of hip-hop.  Yet, unlike his contemporaries - Eddie Murphy, Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor, he never quite managed to cross over to mainstream white audiences.

Perth, Oct 21: A New Zealand biotech firm has been given the go-ahead to inject pig cells into humans as part of a trial to tackle diabetes.

New Zealand Health Minister David Cunliffe has given green light to the ASX-listed Living Cell Technologies to conduct the two-year controversial trial.

"It is extremely exciting for lots of people, especially the diabetics, because it gives them new hope," Perth Now quoted company founder David Collinson, as saying.

He said the 2 million dollars would kick off at Auckland''s Middlemore Hospital with eight patients in Feb 2009.

Collinson hopes that by 2010, drugs used in the trial would be made available in some parts of the world.

Seoul - Shares plunged Tuesday on the Seoul stock exchange on concerns over the economy despite a government stabilization package worth 130 billion dollars to prop up the troubled financial market. South Korea's currency dropped against the US dollar.

The benchmark Kospi index fell 11.53 points, or 1 per cent, to close at 1,196.1.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers 496 to 325.

The main index of the technology-heavy Kosdaq market declined 2.12 points to 350.97.

London, October 21 : An English man is dragging a furniture company to court, claiming that a “toxic sofa” they had sold to him left him with a permanent heart condition.

Barry Green, 63, a resident of Plymouth in Devon, claims that he had to spend a week in hospital with blisters, breathing problems, pneumonia, and eventually heart failure.

The father-of-four bought the brown leather couch worth 545 pounds from Land of Leather a year ago, but soon began to suffer health problems.

He is now seeking damages from the firm and its manufacturers, Chinese firm Eurosofa, via a High Court legal action.

Washington, Oct 21: A couple of days after former US secretary of state Colin Powell crossed party lines to commit his support for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the latter has said that if he won the election, he would invite the former to be one of his key advisers at the White House.

“Powell will have a role as one of my advisers,” the Daily Times quoted Obama as saying in a TV interview last evening.

Obama said that Powell was welcome to campaign for him and might have a place in his administration, if he won the poll.

On Sunday, Powell had endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate on NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme