■ China
Lonely mom gets 200 suitors
A lonely single mother in southeast China has been swamped with 200 suitors after putting up a 60m2 advert seeking a boyfriend, a news report said yesterday. The 34-year-old mother from Hefei, Anhui province, placed what is believed to be China's biggest lonely heart advert on a billboard in downtown Hefei. The advert caused such a stir that she even got a response from a Chinese-American man living in the US who read about her search for love on the Internet. The billboard shows a huge photograph of the woman along with love poems she has written, according to the Hong Kong edition of the China Daily newspaper.
■ Bangladesh
Storm kills hundreds
Bangladeshi authorities sent food and emergency supplies to the north on yesterday as the toll from a violent storm rose to 66 with bodies recovered from ponds, rice fields and ruined homes. Survivors buried the dead and tended injured, many lying in the open. In several villages, mass prayers were held for the victims. "Village after village is lying in ruins. People are still in trauma. Only the brave are trying to rebuild their lives," said Prasanta Kumar Das, a local official in Netrokona, a town in the north near areas that bore the brunt of the storm on Wednesday night.
■ Fiji
Flood forces evacuation
Fijian army troops evacuated thousands of people to high ground yesterday as the South Pacific island nation, its rivers already swollen by floods, braced for more torrential rains. Up to 10cm of rain an hour hit parts of the country during much of Thursday, triggering floods that inundated thousands of homes, wiped out crops, cut electricity and submerged roads linking many communities. Floodwaters forced at least 2,000 people to flee their homes Thursday and take shelter in more than 60 evacuation centers, the National Disaster Management Office said.
■ Indonesia
Jakarta wants tall tower
An Indonesian consortium has restarted construction of what it claims will be the world's tallest tower, despite worries that the site is sinking into the sea, media reports said yesterday. The tower is being built on an old airfield in the center of Jakarta and will reach 558m, The Jakarta Post said. The world's highest freestanding tower is the 550m CN Tower in Toronto, Canada.
■ United States
New baby survives crash
A woman gave birth in the back of a car on the way to
a hospital, but the vehicle
then left the road and struck
a utility pole, killing her husband. Both the newborn boy and the mother, 22-
year-old Atara Sasoon, were hospitalized late Thursday
in fair condition. The car crashed on Wednesday about 1.6km from the hospital in the New Jersey town of Brick. Binyhmin Sasoon, 22, was found slumped over
the steering wheel and
was pronounced dead at
the scene. His wife was apparently ejected from the car and was able to stop a passing motorist, who found the baby in the car under
a coat. The infant wasn't breathing, so the motorist, taking instructions from a 911 dispatcher, cleared the boy's mouth and nose.
■ United States
AIDS alert halts porn films
Adult movie producers agreed to shut down sets for weeks after two performers tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. At least 45 men and women were under voluntary quarantine after having sex with the HIV-positive performers or their sex partners, said Sharon Mitchell, spokeswoman
for the nonprofit Adult
Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, on Thursday.
A list of quarantined performers was placed
on the Web site of the foundation, which screens about 1,200 adult-movie performers a month for
HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
■ Russia
Heavy ballerina loses suit
A top Russian ballerina, sacked for being too heavy, lost a damages claim for US$1 million against the chief of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater on Thursday.
Prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova, fired last September for being too bulky for her partners to
lift, sought the damages
from Anatoly Iksanov for
harming her personal and professional reputation.
The case at a Moscow court centered on a newspaper interview with Iksanov headlined "No one wants to dance with Volochkova."
■ Italy
Artist ropable over media
British performance artist Mark McGowan dragged a TV roped to his ear through Milan on Wednesday to protest against what he called excessive political control over the media in Italy and other countries. His head bandaged to hold the rope, he said he was heading for the headquarters of Fininvest, the holding company of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. McGowan said he had covered 1km and had another 3km to go. McGowan's other exploits have included pushing a
nut with his nose through London to 10 Downing Street in protest at education costs.
■ Italy
Chef unveils handy pizza
In the innermost recesses of an exclusive school for top chefs, Italians have been plotting a devastating counterstrike against the hot dog and the hamburger. US supremacy on a battlefield stretching from stadium terraces to railway platforms has been assured by the unique portability of its fare. Unique, that is, until the arrival of the hand-held pizza. Thanks to Rossano Boscolo, whose cone-shaped creation was unveiled on Thursday at an exhibition in Milan, slobs the world over can walk, talk and eat pizza at the same time without having to worry about dribbling mozzarella or slithery slices of tomato all over themselves. The pizza takes three minutes to cook in a special oven, which was also designed at Boscolo's school.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
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