London, Oct 21 : Gay sex can produce offsprings, at least in the case of beetles, says a new study, which found that the ‘kinky’ activity gives males a chance to indirectly fertilise females they may never encounter directly.

Biologists have speculated that homosexual copulation in beetles might help males practise for straight sex, or they might offer males a way to assert dominance over one another.

In order to test these explanations, Sara Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist at Tufts University in Boston and colleagues investigated flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum)

London, Oct. 21 : A former American pilot has revealed that more than 50 years ago, he was ordered to shoot down a UFO in British airspace.

Recalling the event, 77-year-old Lieutenant Milton Torres told The Times that on May 20, 1957, he received an order to fly his Sabre jet from the Royal Air Force base in Kent and fire on sight at an unidentified object that his superiors had judged to be hostile and probably Russian.

The dot indicated an object about the size of a B52 bomber about 24 kilometres away and Torres set a course, rockets at the ready, to catch it. But thereafter, the aircraft vanished. The blip on the radar was gone too.

Torres spoke about his top secret mission following the declassification of Ministry of Defence files.

London - It is the job of David Smith to keep on top of his box of index cards marked "serious buyers."

But as tight loans and tumbling prices keep a stranglehold on Britain's once buoyant property market, hardly any of his clients bother to ring back.

Estate agents like Smith are nostalgic about the days of the property boom when interested viewers would rush to compete for appointments to see the best properties as soon as they were advertised.

Britain's obsession with home ownership in a market distorted and overheated by a drastic disproportion between supply and demand has come to a sudden stop with the credit crunch.

Amsterdam - Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, who was convicted for the so-called Lockerbie disaster, is terminally ill with cancer and expected to die within "weeks or months," a Dutch documentary filmmaker told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa early Tuesday.

Libyan former intelligence agent al-Megrahi, 56, was sentenced for life imprisonment in 2001 for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

A terrorist bomb on board the aircraft brought the plane down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing some 270 people.

The Dutch documentary maker says he was given the information about al-Megrahi by "reliable sources close to a Libyan delegation."

London/Johannesburg - Former Botswana president Festus Gontebanye Mogae, who received the 5-million dollar Mo Ibrahim African leadership award Monday, is a British-educated economist credited with using his country's mineral wealth to advance the lot of the poor.

He is also a champion of struggle against HIV/AIDS and was the first African leader, in a bid to combat the stigma around the pandemic on the continent, to publicly test for the virus.

Kabul - Taliban fighters killed a Western female aid worker for "spreading Christianity" on Monday as she was going to her office in the western part of Kabul, officials said.

Gayle Williams, 34, who had dual British-South African citizenship and was working with Serving Emergency Relief and Vocational Enterprises (SERVE) was killed while she walked to work in the Carte Say area of Kabul, police and the aid agency said.