Protesting pensioners brought traffic to a standstill in Australia’s second-largest city on Friday when some stripped to demand more money from the government. The scantily clad seniors braved the autumn weather in a 150-strong protest against this week’s federal budget, which offered them little despite a Aus$21,7-billion surplus.
A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said on Tuesday. The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces.
The people of Mizoram, a tiny, remote state of north-east India, have known for the past 48 years that they would face famine in 2008. Confirmation came last November when the local species of bamboo that dominates the state’s landscape began to burst into flower. A plague of rats rapidly followed.
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/ 15 January 2008
India on Tuesday confirmed a bird-flu outbreak among poultry following the deaths of thousands of chickens in the past week in the state of West Bengal. It is the country’s third outbreak since 2006 and the first since India, home to 1,1-billion people, declared itself free of the disease last November.
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/ 24 October 2007
Fierce wildfires raged across Southern California on Tuesday, threatening more than 60 000 homes as night fell and forcing half a million people to flee in the state’s largest evacuation. California’s worst fires in four years tormented the San Diego area in the south and threatened mountain communities further north.