Polar Pub

Five crates of whiskey and brandy belonging to polar explorer Ernest Shackleton have been recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice. The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton's Antarctic hut which was built in 1908. "To our amazement we found five crates, three labeled as containing whiskey and two labeled as containing brandy," said Al Fastier of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. Shackleton's expedition ran short of supplies on their long trek to the South Pole in 1907-1909 and they eventually fell about 100 miles short of their goal. No lives, however, were lost in the expedition.

Superbowl Delay

A New Orleans judge has postponed a trial because he is convinced that everybody in the city will be too distracted by the local American football team's forthcoming performance in the Superbowl championship. Judge Michael Bagneris ordered a delay in a hearing of an asbestos lawsuit until so-called Saintsmania -- local excitement over the Superbowl contenders, the New Orleans Saints -- had died down. "Many prospective jurors for the parish of Orleans, several attorneys involved in this litigation and court personnel plan on travelling to the promised land-the Superbowl in Miami, Florida," the judge wrote in his court order.

Mouth of discovery

A new species of chameleon was discovered in an African forest living in the mouth of a snake. The tiny lizard came out of the mouth of a twig snake disturbed by Dr Andrew Marshall in Tanzania's Magombera forest.
He said, "I was doing conservation research when I came across this snake.
It saw me and fled, and as it did so spat out a chameleon. I took photos and showed them to a local herpetologist, who instantly recognised that it was a new species.''
The creature, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand, was named as Kinyongia magomberae by scientists.