An amorous Italian who claimed to set a new world record for non-stop kissing had to receive oxygen after his 31-hour 18-minute St Valentine's marathon.
The couple, who staged the breathtaking smooch, were not the only ones to kiss their way into the record books.
In the Philippines 5,122 couples lined up to kiss for at least 10 seconds to celebrate the day of love. Thousands of onlookers cheered as the couples, stretched out along Manila Bay, locked lips on the stroke of midnight on Friday.
"Some wouldn't let go," Manila city spokesman Armand Sebastian said.
The kissathon beat the previous world record of 4,445 couples set last month in Santiago in Chile, he said.
Organizers of the Italian event in northern Vicenza said the loved-up couple had beaten the previous non-stop kissing record by 18 minutes and 33 seconds.
But when they detached on Friday night, doctors had to give the 31-year-old man oxygen. The 30-year-old woman was said to be in fairly good shape.
Italy, the land that gave the world St Valentine, saw more passion in the capital Rome when 1,700 couples, most of them gay, kissed each other in the historic Piazza Farnese.
The kiss-in was held during a demonstration to demand the same rights for gays as married heterosexual couples.
In San Francisco gay couples rushed to get married over the Valentine's Day weekend after a judge refused to stop the ceremonies in defiance of California state law.
Valentine's Day had an altogether different flavor in Texas, where one Dallas church celebrated by asking people to trade guns for roses. The First Presbyterian Church said anyone handing in a gun would get US$50, which it suggested could be spent on candy or flowers.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS