World briefs

A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands yesterday. The 15-metre-long ship, named after the Norse god Thor, is made from 15 million recycled ice-cream sticks glued together by US-born stuntman Robert McDonald, his son and more than 5,000 children.

"If you can dream it you can do it... I want to teach children that anything is possible," Mr McDonald said.

Badly injured as a child in a gas explosion that killed the rest of his family, he has loaded his ship with cuddly toys and plans to reach London and visit children in hospitals. He and his crew hope to cross the Atlantic later on the ancient Viking route to North America via Iceland and Greenland.

Berlusconi's sexism chafes

Silvio Berlusconi, who has been biting his tongue for most of the April 13-14 election campaign, yesterday said his opponents on the left had no taste in women. "The left has no taste, not even when it comes to women," he said. "As for our (women candidates) being more beautiful, I say that because in Parliament they have no competition."

The favourite to win the parliamentary election also promised women would occupy a third of Cabinet posts if he won, but his sexist comments provoked an angry response. "Running for Parliament is not the same as competing in the Miss Italy beauty contest," said parliamentarian Paola Balducci from the red/green Rainbow Alliance.

Mr Berlusconi, the conservative People of Freedom party leader, cultivates a jocular image and told a TV interviewer his background as a salesman had taught him that "you have to make a joke every 10-15 minutes. It's a way of keeping up morale".

Robots do work of 3.5 million

Robots could fill the jobs of 3.5 million people in greying Japan by 2025, a think tank says, helping to avert worker shortages as the country's population shrinks. Japan faces a 16 per cent slide in the size of its workforce by 2030 while the number of elderly will mushroom, the government estimates, raising worries about who will do the work in a country unused to, and unwilling to contemplate, large-scale immigration.

The think tank, the Machine Industry Memorial Foundation, says robots could help fill the gaps, ranging from micro-sized capsules that detect lesions to high-tech vacuum cleaners.

Rather than each robot replacing one person, the foundation said in a report that robots could make time for people to focus on more important things.

Condoms to stem Amazon losses

The Brazilian government began producing condoms this week using rubber from trees in the Amazon, a move it said would help preserve the world's largest rainforest and cut dependence on imported contraceptives given away to fight AIDS. Brazil's first government-run condom factory, located in northwestern Acre state, will produce 100 million condoms a year, the health ministry said in a statement.

The latex comes from the Chico Mendes reserve, named after a conservationist and rubber tapper killed in 1988 by ranchers. The government says the condoms would be the only ones made of latex harvested from a tropical forest.

Environmentalists say tapping native rubber trees helps generate income for Amazon residents and reduces pressure to fell trees. More than 550 families will earn a total of 2.2 million reais (€997,000) annually producing condoms, the ministry said.

Sport's once-golden couple

The public fallout following the split of Singapore sport's once-golden couple is threatening to scupper the city-state's Olympic medal chances.

The Republic's table tennis captain Li Jiawei says she has been stung by a front-page story in The Sunday Times broadsheet in which former fiancé and national badminton player Ronald Susilo said he was mulling legal action to recover money he claimed he had put into their car and apartment.

"Does he want to affect my chances of winning a medal or my moods?" Ms Li said in today's Straits Times broadsheet. "What is his motive and why now? I am a girl after all and he knows these things will upset me," the 24-year-old added.

Ms Li and Mr Susilo ended their five-and-a-half year relationship in January and were thought to have parted as friends. Ms Li, who has been tipped to lead the women's team to a medal in the Beijing August 8-24 Olympics, said she was "very troubled" by the claims she owed the 28-year-old badminton player money.

English Wikipedia OK in China

Chinese authorities appeared to have lifted a block on the English-language version of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, but politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square are still off limits.

Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai have confirmed that they could access the English-language version of one of the world's most popular websites, but the Chinese language version was still restricted.

While searches of random topics such as "Johann Sebastian Bach" and "dim sum" brought up English-language articles, sensitive words such as Tibet were met with a message that the browser was unable to connect to the internet. The move comes after International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors told Beijing organisers that the internet must be open for the duration of the 2008 Olympics and that blocking it "would reflect very poorly" on the host country.