■ 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.
BACKLASH: The National Party quit its decades-long partnership with the Liberal Party after their election loss to center-left Labor, which won a historic third term Australia’s National Party has split from its conservative coalition partner of more than 60 years, the Liberal Party, citing policy differences over renewable energy and after a resounding loss at a national election this month. “Its time to have a break,” Nationals leader David Littleproud told reporters yesterday. The split shows the pressure on Australia’s conservative parties after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor party won a historic second term in the May 3 election, powered by a voter backlash against US President Donald Trump’s policies. Under the long-standing partnership in state and federal politics, the Liberal and National coalition had shared power
A Croatian town has come up with a novel solution to solve the issue of working parents when there are no public childcare spaces available: pay grandparents to do it. Samobor, near the capital, Zagreb, has become the first in the country to run a “Grandmother-Grandfather Service,” which pays 360 euros (US$400) a month per child. The scheme allows grandparents to top up their pension, but the authorities also hope it will boost family ties and tackle social isolation as the population ages. “The benefits are multiple,” Samobor Mayor Petra Skrobot told reporters. “Pensions are rather low and for parents it is sometimes
CONTROVERSY: During the performance of Israel’s entrant Yuval Raphael’s song ‘New Day Will Rise,’ loud whistles were heard and two people tried to get on stage Austria’s JJ yesterday won the Eurovision Song Contest, with his operatic song Wasted Love triumphing at the world’s biggest live music television event. After votes from national juries around Europe and viewers from across the continent and beyond, JJ gave Austria its first victory since bearded drag performer Conchita Wurst’s 2014 triumph. After the nail-biting drama as the votes were revealed running into yesterday morning, Austria finished with 436 points, ahead of Israel — whose participation drew protests — on 357 and Estonia on 356. “Thank you to you, Europe, for making my dreams come true,” 24-year-old countertenor JJ, whose
Two people died and 19 others were injured after a Mexican Navy training ship hit the Brooklyn Bridge, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said yesterday. The ship snapped all three of its masts as it collided with the New York City landmark late on Saturday, while onlookers enjoying the balmy spring evening watched in horror. “At this time, of the 277 on board, 19 sustained injuries, 2 of which remain in critical condition, and 2 more have sadly passed away from their injuries,” Adams posted on X. Footage shared online showed the Mexican Navy ship Cuauhtemoc, its sails furled
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