Sideswipe

From our obscure but true files ... Kiwi shoe polish inventor William Ramsay named the product in honour of his wife, Annie Elizabeth Meek Ramsay, a native of Oamaru. In 1906 Ramsay invented Kiwi "boot polish" and began marketing it in Melbourne. Ramsay would load boxes of his boot polish on his horse and wagon and sell it to ranchers to protect their boots. During World War I and World War II, Kiwi shoe polish's popularity spread throughout the British Commonwealth and into the US. A few years after World War II, the Australian company opened a manufacturing plant in Philadelphia, making only black, brown, and neutral shoe polish in tins. Kiwi is the best-selling shoe polish in the world.

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Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania has explained how the Iraq war helped America avoid terrorist attacks by using LOTR. The US senator said America had avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the "Eye of Mordor" had instead been drawn to Iraq. Santorum used the analogy to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand. "As the hobbits are going up Mt Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth. "It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the US," he continued. "You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States." (Source: The Herald Standard)

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A 59-year-old German man who has spent the last 34 years in jail has turned down offers to be let out, an official said on Saturday. "He rejected an offer to leave in 1992," Thomas Melzer, a spokesman for the Brandenburg Justice Ministry, told Bild newspaper. "We can't do anything if someone sentenced to life in prison doesn't want to leave." The man, identified only as Gerold H, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1972 when the area was part of communist East Germany. German prisoners have no obligation to agree to leave jail before their sentences have been completed. (Source: Reuters)