Pop star Kylie Minogue wowed fans yesterday at her first performance in the Chinese capital Beijing with an electric show.
A beaming Minogue, who recently overcame breast cancer, belted out a series of her biggest hits, including Can't Get You Out of My Head, Better the devil you know and I Should Be So Lucky.
"It's my first time ever here in Beijing and you've made me feel so welcome," she told the crowd of some 6,000 who had gathered to see her at the Beijing Workers' Gymnasium.
"Kaili Minuo" as she is known in Chinese barely rested during the two-hour show, dressed to the nines in a dazzling and constantly changing Jean Paul Gaultier wardrobe. Ms Minogue packed in the crowds with the most expensive ticket going for 2,580 yuan (€298), well out of the price range of the average Chinese.
Visits by Western singers and bands to China are still fairly rare as artistes are forbidden to perform content that would harm "national unity" or "stir up resentment" and promoters are asked to submit set-lists and lyric sheets for approval.
Warning: African 'booby trap'
Uganda's police warned male bar-goers to keep their noses clean after a probe found a gang of robbers had been using women with chloroform smeared on their chests to knock their victims unconscious.
"They apply this chemical to their chest. We have found victims in an unconscious state," Criminal Investigations Directorate (CID) spokesman Fred Enanga said.
"You find the person stripped totally naked and everything is taken from him," he said. "And the victim doesn't remember anything. He just remembers being in the act of romancing."
"We don't know exactly how they get these materials," Mr Enanga added. "That is something that our investigations must crack."He called on men, particularly travelling businessmen who tend to carry a lot of cash, to take caution. "It's a serious situation and people have to be aware."
Security intrudes on Livni interview
A suspected break-in at Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's home yesterday intruded on her electioneering as she gave a live radio interview. Mrs Livni, a former Mossad spy who hopes to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert next February, laughed as an unidentified man's voice was repeatedly heard summoning police to her house in Ramat Hahayal, a Tel Aviv suburb.
"Everything's okay, I'm here," she told Army Radio by phone, speaking from her office while the messages "Intruder alert" and "Foreign Minister's house at Ramat Hahayal" sounded in the background.
"You see - all this security, and now everyone knows where I live," Mrs Livni quipped. The radio later explained that an alarm button had been accidentally pressed at her home.
It will be lonely this Christmas
More single Japanese men than women are looking for love this Christmas to beat the holiday blues, according to a survey released yesterday.
Seventy per cent of single Japanese males - but only 55 per cent of females - want to find a partner in time for Christmas, according to a survey of 150 men and 150 women in their 20s to 40s.
"Single men always feel lonely and Christmas increases their loneliness," said an official at the Nozze marriage information centre which published the survey results. It said that 34 per cent of respondents have taken, or plan to take, action to meet a partner for Christmas, particularly at parties.
In Japan, which is mostly Buddhist, people usually celebrate Christmas by spending time with their sweethearts and exchanging gifts.
17 killed in horse race shoot-out
A shoot-out between inebriated rival drug traffickers who disagreed over the winner of a horse race in Guatemala left at least 17 dead, police said yesterday.
The shooting took place on Sunday in Santa Ana Huista, some 19 kilometres from the Mexican border, and some 100 soldiers were deployed to the area to restore calm.
"They had been drinking at a local rodeo, and they were drunk, when they started insulting each other during a horse race and the shooting started," police spokesman Donald Gonzalez said.
Eleven of the dead had been identified and included both Guatemalans and Mexicans, some with previous convictions for drug trafficking.