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The six-ton elephant learnt to swim 40 years ago to help work for logging companies there.

For years the elephant felled trees with Nasru, his 58-year-old driver.

But in 2002 logging was banned in the islands and most of the 200 elephants were sent back to the Indian mainland.

However, Rajan was kept on by a wealthy owner who had no desire to see him leave Havelock Island, and enjoyed a blissful existence eating bananas and swimming in the crystal clear water.

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House Republicans, meet the World Wide Web.

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For the first time the Roman Catholic Church in Italy has admitted that about 100 cases of paedophile priests have been reported to church authorities during the past 10 years.

But the Italian Catholic bishops’ conference refused to reveal how many priests in the country had subsequently been defrocked under canon law.

It also did not say how many priests had been prosecuted by police.

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And despite the Pope’s promise of zero tolerance in the future to crimes of sexual abuse by clergy, the Vatican continues to claim diplomatic immunity from prosecution in lawsuits arising from cases of sexual abuse by priests in the United States.

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Selling off the public’s transportation infrastructure to pay off government debt has no “ideological opposition” in London, if a recently published report is to be believed.

A plan to privatize the UK’s motorway network, giving toll firms access to large swaths of road, would take place under the guise of paying down the government’s debt, British media reported Tuesday, citing a number of key officials who support the scheme, proposed to all major political parties by NM Rothschild, one of the world’s oldest, most influential and little discussed investment banks, founded by the Rothschild family.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said over a week ago that the scheme would be Britain’s way forward.

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A diver swims in the shadow of a 16-feet wide manta ray. Diver and professional photographer Franco Banfi snapped this in the water off the coast of the Socorro and San Benedicto Islands in the Pacific Ocean

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During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.

One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

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The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

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The ideas were patently ridiculous, said the other former agency officer.

“They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia” and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region.

“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East — nobody cares,” agreed a third former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”