LOS ANGELES: Mickey Mouse, the animated rodent in short pants known as one of the century's top pop icons and an enduring source of revenue for US entertainment giant Disney, turned 70 on Wednesday. To mark the occasion, Disney said it planned a four-hour special birthday broadcast to be shown on two of its cable television channels in honour of Mickey and his faithful friend Minnie. And the company, which also has diversified holdings in the media and recreation sectors, said it would unveil a new tableau by John Hench, the official portrait artist of Mickey Mouse. Hench first immortalised the mouse on canvas in 1953 for Mickey's 25th birthday. Mickey Mouse was born on November 18, 1928 in a cartoon entitled Steamboat Willie in which his creator, Walt Disney, also provided his voice.

UN's new member

UNITED NATIONS: United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Wednesday unveiled a bronze elephant statue in the UN grounds, where specially-plantedbushes conceal its life-size sexual organ. ``The sheer size of this creature humbles us,'' said Annan at the inauguration of the five-tonne Sleeping Elephant. ``It shows us that some things are bigger than we are,'' he said. Annan explained that Bulgarian-born sculptor Mihail Simeonov tranquilized a wild bull elephant and took a cast of it before releasing the beast unharmed into the wild. The tranquilizer's effect is reportedly responsible for the size of the elephant's member, which caused one senior UN official to express concern that children visiting the United Nations might be upset. Annan referred to ``painstaking negotiations'' during the 18 years that it took to bring the cast to the United Nations. He did not mention, however, last-minute discussions at UN headquarters about what to do about the elephant's member, which included a proposal for radical surgery. Annan said after Wednesday's ceremony that the beast had been spared such a fate, saying: ``Nature made him like that. I'm not going tochange nature.'' On Wednesday, the elephant was surrounded by carefully-planted bushes.

Charming the jury

NEW YORK: Author Alice McDermott won the prestigious National Book Award for fiction, beating heavy-weight competition from Tom Wolfe and Robert Stone with her novel Charming Billy. The prize, presented at the 49th annual National Book Awards ceremony held in New York on Wednesday, was clearly a surprise to McDermott, whose novel describes the lives and loves of a tightly knit Irish-American community. Other finalists for fiction included Wolfe, for A Man In Full, his first novel in 11 years, and Robert Stone, for Damascus Gate, about a bomb plot in Jerusalem.