World At A Glance

Bidis spell trouble in USWASHINGTON: Indian-made bidis, fruit-flavoured for the US market, are fast becoming popular as the fashionable a...

Bidis spell trouble in US

WASHINGTON: Indian-made bidis, fruit-flavoured for the US market, are fast becoming popular as the fashionable alternative to cigarettes among American youth. But bidi-making has also come under assault on grounds of health and sweated labour. The authoritative US government-run Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have warned that bidis are more harmful than regular cigarettes because they contain at least three times more tar and nicotine. The Wall Street Journal also assails bidis but on a different ground, saying bidi-making involves hard and inadequately paid labour.

Son boils father

MOSCOW: Police arrested a 16-year-old boy who killed his father, carved up the body, boiled it into a stew and fed it to his cats, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. The boy had become frustrated with his father8217;s drunken abuse and murdered him with a meat axe, said Moskovsky Komsomolets, a daily that gets information from policesources. 8220;In the kitchen, tens of cats of various breeds were chewing hungrily on boiled meat with buckwheat,8221; the newspaper said. It said the police had found pieces of human thigh in the cats8217; bowl, and in the refrigerator were plates with chunks of human flesh and a pot of broth.

Mrs Marcos reacts

MANILA: Imelda Marcos on Wednesday accused reporters of being 8220;racist and very prejudiced8221; for focusing only on her massive shoe collection and ignoring her accomplishments as former first lady of the Philippines. Marcos said she was hurt when the collection became the butt of jokes. 8220;They did not look at my face, they did not look at my hands, what I did for the country instead they looked down at my feet,8221; she said.

19 millionth Aussie

SYDNEY: The 19 millionth Australian is a girl, has a fair chance of seeing in the 22nd century and was born on Wednesday. The Australian Bureau of Statistics announced the country8217;s latest population milestone on Wednesday, using a mathematical modelbased on assumed numbers of births, deaths and migration flows. But they said the population growth rate was slowing and immigration was almost neck and neck with reproduction as the main source of population increase. The ABS said it had taken four years and five months for the population to increase to 19 mn from 18 mn.

UFO sighted

HONG KONG: People in the Chinese city of Wuhan witnessed three unidentified flying objects UFOs, accompanied by 8220;strange snow8221; falling to the ground, Hong Kong8217;s pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported on Wednesday. The report quoted citizens of Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei, as saying that at about 8.30 pm local time on Monday, shining objects appeared in the southeastern sky.