car's headrests. When they confronted him, they saw another screen in the passenger-side visor facing Gainey, allowing him to watch the movie while driving.
■ United Kingdom
Pigeons prefer roads
British researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads. Some pigeons stick
so rigidly to the roads that
they even ignore short
cuts, instead following a succession of intersections before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts. Animal researchers at Oxford University were surprised by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. "It really
has knocked our research
team sideways to find that ... pigeons appear to ignore their inbuilt directional instincts," said Tim Guilford, a professor at the university's department of zoology.
■ United Kingdom
Cocaine tied to memory loss
Scientists are paving the way for medicines that could
help remove cravings in
drug addicts and improve
the education prospects
of people with learning difficulties. They believe that similar molecular changes
in the brain help cause
cocaine addiction and
impair learning and memory processes. Researchers reported the "previously unappreciated" link in the journal Neuron. Seth Grant, professor of molecular neuroscience at Edinburgh University, said: "The protein molecule is important in the type of learning to do with people, places and things, so cocaine strikes at the kinds of learning which would include ... studying for examinations."
■ Uganda
Refugees slaughtered
Rebel fighters armed with assault rifles, artillery and rocket-propelled grenades massacred more than
190 refugees at a camp
in northern Uganda on Saturday. Some of the refugees were gunned down while they fled, and others were burned alive when the rebels torched their grass huts, according to a local politician, Charles Anjiro. The attack on the Barloonyo camp in Lira district, more than 240km north of the capital, Kampala, is one of the worst in recent years by the Lord's Resistance Army, which has been fighting the Ugandan government since 1994.
■ Iran
Election turnout disputed
The conservative Guardians Council yesterday accused the reformist-dominated interior ministry of "playing with figures" to lower the politically sensitive turnout rate in Iran's parliamentary elections. The council disputed the official 50.57 percent turnout rate for Friday's poll, the lowest for a major election in the 25-year history of the Islamic republic, and claimed that the real figure was closer to 60 percent. The elections produced the expected large majority for supporters of the hardline Islamic regime, but many reformists had called for a voter boycott and hoped for a weak turnout to discredit the result.
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