Singapore's bridal agencies are seeing slowing business as the financial crisis and a looming recession hit love in the country.
Matchmaking agencies in the Southeast Asian country said the financial meltdown has forced some men to think twice about spending thousands of dollars to get a wife.
"About 10 per cent of my customers say 'The economy is slowing down, I have no money,'" said Mark Lin, who runs the Vietnam Brides International Matchmaker in Singapore. "In the past, girls used to get married in one to two weeks. Now it takes one to two months," he said, in a tiny office along Singapore where five Vietnamese women chatted under walls covered with pictures of smiling newly weds.
Three to four customers pull out of their marriages each month now, forfeiting deposits paid to agencies, up from one to two clients before, Lin said.
Jailed for Olympic bomb hoax
A Chinese court has sentenced a Shanghai man to 18 months in prison for calling in a fake bomb threat during the Beijing Olympic Games in August, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Zeng Weigen called police three times on the evening of August 9, the day after the opening ceremony, saying there was a bomb in the Huating Hotel, which was accommodating Olympic football players at the time, Xinhua said in a report late on Wednesday.
Police searched the hotel until late that night and concluded it had been a hoax. Zeng, arrested the next day, said he had made the calls "for fun after drinking".
There were at least two other bomb scares during the Games, including a threat on an Air China flight that forced it to turn back to Japan and two suspicious packages in Hong Kong that turned out to be hoaxes.
Irish bookmaker favours Obama
Ireland's biggest bookmaker said yesterday it would pay out more than €1 million on bets that Barack Obama will be the next US president, three weeks before the election.
Dublin-based bookmaker Paddy Power said it made the "unprecedented decision" to pay on bets taken so far, following Wednesday's final campaign debate between Mr Obama and his Republican rival John McCain, which polls judged the Democrat to have won.
"We declare this race well and truly over and congratulate all those who backed Obama," Mr Power said in a statement.
"Although he seemed a little out of sorts in last night's final debate we believe he has done more than enough to get him across the line on November 4."
The bookmaker said the overall betting trend had shown "one-way traffic" for the Illinois senator since the start of the summer.
The odds on Mr McCain winning are 5-1.
Whisky galore as stocks sink
While investors flee traditional fin-ancial markets on growing recession fears, trade in rare bottles of whisky is flourishing.
Roughly 11 months after the launch of a Dutch online trade platform for exclusive single malt whiskies, the World Whisky Index has seen an average return of 26.2 per cent, compared to a more than 40 per cent decline in the MSCI World stock index.
"There's big demand for rare whiskies and people are willing to offer a lot of money for certain bottles", said a spokesman for The Whisky Talker, a firm that initiated the index website which aims to bring buyers and sellers together. Since its launch last November, the index has seen investment inflows of around €2 million. The top gainer on the index is a 30-year old Bowmore Scotch whisky which has gained about 137 per cent.
"While shares and obligations can become completely worthless, if bottles turn out to be not very valuable, you always still have the bottle to drink", the spokesman said.
Poles apart at EU summit
A long-standing conflict between Poland's government and President turned ugly at an EU summit on Wednesday when the head of state barged into the meeting - illegally.
The world may be facing its biggest economic crisis in 80 years, but for the past weeks Polish leaders have locked horns repeatedly over who should represent the largest ex-communist EU member at the two-day summit.
Pro-European centre-right Prime Minister Donald Tusk had denied Eurosceptic conservative President Lech Kaczynski a government flight to Brussels to try to keep him away from the summit but the head of state chartered a plane at the last minute and came anyway, raising eyebrows among EU diplomats.
The two leaders reluctantly sat next to each other at the summit table. Poland would have to pass new laws to clarify the leaders' competences, or change the constitution to prevent similar conflicts in the future, Mr Tusk said.