A suspected Islamic militant fled without his trousers from an unlocked toilet window at a Singapore detention centre, but is thought to be still in the city-state two months after his escape, the government said yesterday.
Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister, Wong Kan Seng, told Parliament Mas Selamat bin Kastari could strike the city-state if he managed to hook up with the Jemaah Islamiah network, blamed for the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali that killed 202 people.
Mr Kastari, the suspected leader of the Singapore cell of al Qaeda-linked JI, flipped his trousers above the toilet cubicle door before escaping through a window.
Hello Kitty gets makeover
She may be cute, but the latest top model to make her debut in Vogue is also podgy with short legs and whiskers. Hello Kitty, a popular cat character in Japan, is set for a designer makeover in the June issue of Japanese Vogue, which goes on sale on April 26.
The fashion spread will show Kitty modelling the latest autumn and winter designs by John Galliano for the Dior brand, posing with the designer and enjoying a shopping spree in Paris.
Putin wins a 'Nobel' Prize
Russian President Vladimir Putin has won a Nobel prize. Not the better-known Nobel Peace Prize handed out by the Oslo-based committee to luminaries such as last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Instead, Mr Putin has won the Ludvig Nobel Prize for services to Russia - an award organised by Russian businessmen and artists which, apart from shared historical roots, has no connection to today's Nobel Peace Prize.
"Under the previous President, (Boris) Yeltsin, there was chaos and lawlessness," Yevgeny Lukoshkov, who heads the Ludvig Nobel Prize's selection committee, said. "Somebody had to stand up and take responsibility and stop the robberies and murders. Putin took responsibility for eight years."
Ludvig Nobel, who lived mainly in St Petersburg and became a Russian citizen, was the older brother of Alfred Nobel - founder of the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine and literature in Stockholm and the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.
Three-horned dinosaur skeleton
A private US collector has paid more than half a million euros for the rare skeleton of a triceratops, a three-horned vegetarian dinosaur that roamed the Earth 65 million years ago, Christie's auction house said.
The unnamed collector paid €592,250 for the near-complete 7.5-metre-long skeleton in a deal announced after the fossil failed to find a buyer at an auction held last week in Paris.
Unearthed from the badlands of North Dakota in 2004 the triceratops skeleton is 70 per cent complete, a rarity in paleontology, with only the tip of its hornsmade from resin and a few reconstituted bones in its hind leg and a rib.
Hunter cleared of killing bear
A French hunter accused of unlawfully killing the last known female brown bear native to the Pyrenees was acquitted yesterday after telling a court he had acted in self-defence.
Rene Marqueze said he opened fire on the 15-year-old female bear when she charged him.
The bear was accompanied by a cub at the time of her death in 2004 and the shooting caused an outburst of fury amongst environmentalists who were seeking to reintroduce bears into the Pyrenean mountains in south west France.
They suggested at the time that it was killed deliberately but Marqueze said he was confronted by the bear while hunting for wild boar in the Aspe valley of the Pyrenees.
"She raced forward when I saw her, I took off to get out of her way but she didn't hesitate, she charged me from behind," he said, adding he shot the bear from a distance of five to six metres.
If he had been convicted, he would have faced up to nine months in prison and a €9,000 fine.