British Open runner-up Ian Poulter has pulled out of the Singapore Open after being unable to replace the driver he had stolen at the HSBC Champions Tournament in Shanghai.
"I am really gutted," he told reporters yesterday. "I have been thinking about it for four hours and I have decided to withdraw because my new driver will not arrive on time.
"It is disappointing because I did not come all this way not to play. But with so many world ranking points at stake, if I played badly (by using a different driver) I may have lost ground."
The tournament starts today but world number 25 Mr Poulter would have been unable to secure a replacement driver until tomorrow.
India's Anirban Lahiri will take the Englishman's place in the field for the €4 million event at Sentosa Golf Club, the richest national open on the Asian Tour.
Canadian author with aboriginal roots wins Giller
Novelist Joseph Boyden became the first author with aboriginal roots to win Canada's Scotiabank Giller prize, the country's most prestigious and lucrative literary award.
Mr Boyden won the C$50,000 prize late on Tuesday with his book Through Black Spruce, a suspenseful and humorous novel published by Viking Canada about an aboriginal woman from Canada's north going missing in New York City.
"I'm so deeply humbled to be counted among the writers here," the Toronto-raised Boyden said after the award was announced at a black-tie gala attended by much of Canada's literary community.
Anthony De Sa's collection of short stories Barnacle Love was short-listed along with Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault, Rawi Hage's Cockroach and Mary Swan's The Boys in the Trees.
Raul Castro says Cuba losses almost £8 billion in storm
Cuba has suffered almost €8 billion in damages from the three hurricanes that struck the island this year, according to President Raul Castro in a report aired on state-run television. He made his comments during a visit to Camaguey province, where officials said 8,000 homes were damaged when Hurricane Paloma struck over the weekend, the report said.
"We're almost getting to €8 billion in losses in the last three months, that's how the economy is," Mr Castro said. Paloma followed hurricanes Gustav and Ike, which struck 10 days apart in late August and early September and caused destruction across much of the island.
Galapagos bachelor turtle struggles to be a dad
After stunning conservationists by mating for the first time in decades, a giant tortoise from the Galapagos islands called Lonesome George, who is the last of his kind, still may not become a dad.
George, a 90-year-old conservation marvel and one of the world's rarest creatures, mated this year with two females, but 80 per cent of the eggs they laid appear infertile.
The females belong to a different subspecies of giant tortoise.
A Pinta Island tortoise, George had showed little interest in sex during 36 years in captivity. His new-found libido has raised hopes he could save his subspecies from extinction
Ecuadorean scientists are studying the eggs and have not ruled out that George could be sterile.
"We are puzzled. We will leave the eggs in the incubators and try to find answers," said Washington Tapia, a park official in change of George's reproduction programme. "It's too early to say if George is infertile, only genetic research could tell us that."
Three planes stranded at shuttered Berlin airport
Three propeller aeroplanes have been left stranded at Tempelhof airport in the heart of Berlin two weeks after the Nazi-built landmark was closed down and may now have to be dismantled, city officials said.
One of the world's oldest commercial airports dating to 1923, Tempelhof was shut down despite protests on October 31 as part of plans to consolidate all air traffic at a new Berlin Brandenburg International airport due to open in 2011.