UbuneBlog

A 110-YEAR-OLD Malaysian man who has been looking for a wife said he was ready to marry again after an 82-year-old woman responded to his wish, a report said on Sunday. Ahmad Mohamad Isa, who has 20 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren, told Malay-language newspaper Utusan Malaysia earlier this week that he wanted company and a […]

DILMA Rousseff took over as Brazil’s first female president on Saturday with pledges to ‘govern for all’ and build on the policies of her hugely popular predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The 63-year-old divorced grandmother, who was Mr Lula’s former cabinet chief, assumed the presidency in a carefully staged ceremony under at times rainy […]

ROMANIA has changed its labour laws to officially recognise witchcraft as a profession, prompting one self-described witch to threaten retaliation. The move, which went into effect on Saturday, is part of the government’s drive to crack down on widespread tax evasion in a country that is in recession. In addition to witches, astrologists, embalmers, valets […]

Nearly a million revelers crowded New York’s Time Square to witness the traditional dazzling ball drop, fireworks lit up Australia’s Sydney Harbor and communist Vietnam held a rare Western-style countdown to the new year as the world ushered in 2011. In Europe, Greeks, Irish and Spaniards partied through the night to help put a year […]

NORTH Korea called for better relations with South Korea on Saturday, amid heightened tensions on the divided peninsula after the North’s deadly bombardment of a border island. ‘Confrontation between North and South should be defused as early as possible,’ joint New Year editorials of three leading North Korean state newspapers said. Relations plunged after the […]

CONVICTING food safety whistleblowers in China has a ‘chilling effect’ on other activists, a UN envoy said on Thursday, after the November jailing of a man who campaigned for victims of a tainted milk scandal. Olivier De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, said he had raised the case of Zhao […]

MILITANTS in Iraq have attacked at least four Christian homes with a combination of grenades and bombs, killing two people and sending fear into the country’s already terrified tiny Christian community. Thursday night’s attack was the first since al-Qaeda-linked militants last week threatened a wave of violence against Christians in Iraq. The community went so […]

LARGE amounts of rice noodles made with rotten grain and potentially carcinogenic additives are being sold in south China, state press said on Friday, in the country’s latest food safety scare. Up to 50 factories in south China’s Dongguan city near Hong Kong are producing about 500,000kg of tainted rice noodles a day using stale […]

SWEET dreams are made of this for Annie Lennox, honoured by the Queen her New Year list of awards. The statuesque Scottish singer, who came to fame in 1980s duo Eurythmics, was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, for her work with charities fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa. […]

The Bank of Japan said Thursday that 82.31 trillion yen worth of banknotes were being kept in household or corporate coffers without being deposited at financial institutions by the end of this year, up 1.7% from a year earlier to a record high. People are tending to keep their money under the mattress given the […]