■ SINGAPORE
Soldiers told to slim up
Overweight soldiers have been told to trim down or risk getting the boot, a report said yesterday. The Straits Times said obese soldiers, sailors and airmen have received letters since early this year from the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) urging them to shed at least 10 percent of their weight within a year. Those who fail to shape up will be given a warning and have up to three years to trim down or risk being kicked out, the report said. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the SAF has been implementing a weight management program since 1992, but made no direct reference to expelling those who remain unfit.
■ SINGAPORE
Olympic certificates bungled
Sports authorities apologized yesterday for handing out 45,000 Youth Olympic Games certificates containing mock signatures of International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge. When the commemorative documents for participants and volunteers were designed, simulated signatures of Rogge and another official were used in the layout — and remained in place when they were sent to the printers. They should have been replaced with facsimiles of the men’s actual signatures, but the one above Rogge’s name reads “Des” instead. The organizing committee of the inaugural Youth Olympic Games, held last month, blamed an “oversight in the checking process” and said that correct appreciation certificates would be sent in batches worldwide.
■ NEW ZEALAND
Experts study smelly birds
Scientists say they are hoping to develop a deodorant for the country’s native birds to stop them falling prey to introduced predators. The country has an abundance of native bird species, including the famous kiwi, but no native land mammals, meaning introduced animals such as cats and stoats have had a devastating impact on bird numbers. University of Canterbury researcher Jim Briskie said yesterday it appeared birds suffered from body odor, making them an easy target for predators. Briskie said unlike their overseas counterparts, who evolved alongside mammals, local birds emitted a strong smell when preened to produce wax to protect their feathers. The Marsden scientific research fund has given Briskie a NZ$600,000 (US$440,000) grant to study native bird body odors over the next three years in the hope of making them less exposed to predators.
■ AUSTRALIA
Asylum seekers leave roof
A group of Chinese asylum seekers who staged a two-day protest on the roof of a Sydney detention center came down peacefully on Thursday night, officials said. The five men and four women had been on the roof since Wednesday morning, demanding Australian authorities give them refugee visas. The protesters threatened to jump off the two-story building if officials didn’t comply. It was the second such protest at Villawood Detention Center this week. Negotiators persuaded the group to come off the roof, but did not offer the detainees any special deals regarding their visa applications, the Department of Immigration said in a statement.
■ PHILIPPINES
Presidential tastes defended
President Benigno Aquino III’s spokesman yesterday defended the leader’s culinary tastes after newspapers showed him eating hotdogs in New York, where he attended a UN summit. The 50-year-old bachelor came in for heavy criticism on social networking Web sites for his street-side food trips. Aquino, who comes from a wealthy family, has sought to portray himself as the opposite of predecessor Gloria Arroyo, once criticized for treating her entourage to a US$20,000 meal at the famous New York restaurant Le Cirque. Aquino had pledged to be frugal in his ongoing US visit, his first foreign trip as leader, bringing only a small delegation with him. However, visitors to Aquino’s popular Facebook account begged to differ. “Do we really need this?” wrote one anonymous commentator. “What if the food is poisoned?” Lacierda said Aquino spent US$54 to treat himself and members of his Cabinet — as well as Filipino reporters — to hotdogs, while stressing that the president has also since gone to a steak house and eaten pasta.
■ PHILIPPINES
Man gets 14,400 years
A court has sentenced a father to 14,400 years in prison after he was convicted of the near daily rape of his teenage daughter over the course of a year. A trial court originally condemned the man, a rickshaw driver, to die in March 2006 after he was convicted of 360 counts of rape — allegedly carried out during the year his wife worked in Hong Kong. However, the Court of Appeals in Manila commuted the sentence to 40 years for each count, according to a court decision obtained yesterday. The defendant can still appeal to the Supreme Court. It was not clear if he would. The then-13-year-old victim, now 22, said her ordeal began in January 2001, when her mother left for work in Hong Kong as a domestic helper and left her three children with their father in Los Banos, a township just south of Manila.
■■ NEW ZEALAND
Man impaled by canoe
A truck driver was in a critical condition after being impaled by a canoe that smashed through his windscreen in a freak road accident in the North Island, police said on Thursday. Police said the 64-year-old was traveling along a highway near Levin, north of Wellington, on Thursday when a canoe being towed by another vehicle came loose and went through his truck’s cabin, hitting him in the midriff. The truck then crashed though a paddock and blocked a railway line, police said. Fire crews cut the man from the truck with a piece of canoe still embedded in him and he was airlifted to Palmerston North. “It was a freak accident,” a Fire Service spokesman said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Spray-on clothes unveiled
As the fashion pack leave London for Milan, Manel Torres and Paul Luckham, a visiting academic at Imperial College London and an Imperial College professor of particle technology, unveiled their own unique collection made in one afternoon with spray-on fabric. Torres approached Luckham to help him realize his dream of a spray-on garment that can be taken off, washed and worn again. He demonstrated the process in a lab at Imperial College, spraying a T-shirt onto a model in a matter of minutes, an experience the unnamed model described as “nice, actually.” “It’s like second skin,” she said.
■ GERMANY
Surgeon fined for assault
A surgeon has been given a suspended jail sentence and told to make a donation to charity after assaulting two colleagues during an operation, a press report said on Thursday. Hakan B., 44, an ear, nose and throat specialist, punched anesthetist Thomas S. to the ground and then kicked him, when he was meant to be operating on a patient’s nasal cartilage, the Bild daily reported. A 60-year-old nurse tried to intervene and received verbal abuse and an elbow in the chest. The incident happened on April 10 this year. “I had already done five operations that day. I am very, very sorry,” said the surgeon, who was given a three-month suspended sentence. “A doctor should behave differently,” the judge said in Wednesday’s trial in Nuremberg.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
London Blitz remembered
The Aldwych subway station, used as a shelter during the Nazi bombing campaign has been recreated to look as it would have done in 1940 and opened to the public on the 70th anniversary of the Blitz. Visitors will this weekend get the chance to tour the recreated station — which has been out of use since 1994 — one of the first to be used as an air raid shelter during the Nazi campaign, as part of events to commemorate the bombing of Britain from 1940 to 1941. Thousands of lives were saved when London’s Underground train system was transformed into an impromptu network of shelters.
■ ITALY
Mafia cashes in on lotto
Police say mobsters are buying winning lotto tickets to launder millions of euros in cocaine profits. Carabinieri investigators in southern Calabria said on Thursday that an 8 million euros winning ticket in the national Superenalotto numbers game was sold in a smokeshop owned by the father-in-law of a suspect jailed in a drug probe. The winner avoided taxes on interest due had the windfall been deposited in a bank. The mobsters got an excuse to open a mega-account. Italian law requires those making big deposits to prove the funds are not illegal.
■ NORWAY
Russian extremist arrested
Authorities say a right-wing Russian extremist who escaped from a mental institution has turned himself in to police and applied for asylum. Einar Aas of Oslo’s organized crime division said on Thursday that Vyacheslav Datsik showed up at an Oslo police station on Tuesday, handed over a gun and was arrested. Aas wouldn’t comment on the charges. Datsik escaped from a mental institution outside St. Petersburg in August. He was convicted in 2007 for a series of armed robberies, but later diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to a low-security mental institution. In a video posted on the website of a banned neo-Nazi group, Slavic Union, Datsik said he wanted to seek political asylum in “the land of the Vikings.”
■ UNITED STATES
Singer Eddie Fisher dies
Singer Eddie Fisher, a teen idol in the 1950s who sparked an international scandal when he left his wife Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, has died at the age of 82. Fisher died in Berkeley, California, on Wednesday due to complications and a decline in health from recent hip surgery, his family said in a statement on Thursday. His actress daughter Carrie Fisher highlighted his ailing health earlier this year when she wrote Twitter messages saying her father, who was confined to a wheelchair, was “kind of losing it” with confusion over his whereabouts and friends. Eddie Fisher was a chart-topping teen idol in the early 1950s with songs like Thinking of You and Oh! My Pa-Pa, before rock ‘n’ roll and scandal ruined his career. He left Reynolds, Carrie’s mother and the first of his five wives, after four years of marriage to marry family friend Taylor in 1959. His marriage to Taylor lasted five years. Carrie Fisher, 53, who played the feisty rebel leader Princess Leia in the original Star Wars movies, detailed her entangled family history as well as her own personal battles in her recent one-woman Broadway show Wishful Drinking.
■ UNITED STATES
Woman executed in Virginia
The first woman executed in the country in five years was put to death in Virginia on Thursday for arranging the killings of her husband and a stepson over a US$250,000 insurance payment. Teresa Lewis, 41, died by injection at 9:13pm on Thursday, authorities said. She became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century. Supporters and relatives of the victims watched her execution at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
■UNITED STATES
TV show cancels Katy Perry
Producers of the hit children’s TV show Sesame Street on Thursday canceled an appearance by cleavage-baring pop singer Katy Perry following feedback from parents. Perry, who rose to stardom in 2008 with the No. 1 single, I Kissed A Girl, was set to appear on the premiere of the program’s 41st season on Sept. 27, performing her song Hot N Cold alongside the lovable puppet Elmo. However, after the segment appeared online on Monday showing Perry in bright yellow bustier, Sesame Street decided not to air it. The song, originally about an elusive lover, was rewritten for the segment in which Elmo is unsure about playing a game of dress up with Perry.
■PARAGUAY
President cleared in case
A third and final lab test has cleared President Fernando Lugo in a paternity case, a year after the former Catholic bishop acknowledged fathering a boy with a different woman, officials said on Thursday. After the results were announced by Judge Ana Ovelar, Lugo’s lawyer Marcos Farina asked for the case to be dismissed. The latest suit was brought by Damiana Hortensia Moran, who had alleged that Lugo was the father of her two-year-old son.
■ PERU
Mayor’s foes steal skull
Foes of a small-town mayor say they have dug up the skull of his late father and won’t give it back unless he drops out of next month’s election. Police in San Cristobal say unknown thieves unearthed the remains of Juan Vizcarra Quispe, who died in 1978. His bones were found strewn about the cemetery, but his skull is missing. San Cristobal Mayor Rogelio Vizcarra says he received a text message offering to return the skull if he withdraws his bid for re-election Oct. 3, but he still plans to run.
A beauty queen who pulled out of the Miss South Africa competition when her nationality was questioned has said she wants to relocate to Nigeria, after coming second in the Miss Universe pageant while representing the West African country. Chidimma Adetshina, whose father is Nigerian, was crowned Miss Universe Africa and Oceania and was runner-up to Denmark’s Victoria Kjar Theilvig in Mexico on Saturday night. The 23-year-old law student withdrew from the Miss South Africa competition in August, saying that she needed to protect herself and her family after the government alleged that her mother had stolen the identity of a South
BELT-TIGHTENING: Chinese investments in Cambodia are projected to drop to US$35 million in 2026 from more than US$420 million in 2021 At a ceremony in August, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet knelt to receive blessings from saffron-robed monks as fireworks and balloons heralded the breaking of ground for a canal he hoped would transform his country’s economic fortunes. Addressing hundreds of people waving the Cambodian flag, Hun Manet said China would contribute 49 percent to the funding of the Funan Techo Canal that would link the Mekong River to the Gulf of Thailand and reduce Cambodia’s shipping reliance on Vietnam. Cambodia’s government estimates the strategic, if contentious, infrastructure project would cost US$1.7 billion, nearly 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP. However, months later,
Texas’ education board on Friday voted to allow Bible-infused teachings in elementary schools, joining other Republican-led US states that pushed this year to give religion a larger presence in public classrooms. The curriculum adopted by the Texas State Board of Education, which is controlled by elected Republicans, is optional for schools to adopt, but they would receive additional funding if they do so. The materials could appear in classrooms as early as next school year. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott has voiced support for the lesson plans, which were provided by the state’s education agency that oversees the more than
Ireland, the UK and France faced travel chaos on Saturday and one person died as a winter storm battered northwest Europe with strong winds, heavy rain, snow and ice. Hampshire Police in southern England said a man died after a tree fell onto a car on a major road near Winchester early in the day. Police in West Yorkshire said they were probing whether a second death from a traffic incident was linked to the storm. It is understood the road was not icy at the time of the incident. Storm Bert left at least 60,000 properties in Ireland without power, and closed
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