Sun-loving Australians reacted angrily yesterday to a mid-summer bid by a conservative Christian lawmaker to ban topless sunbathing on beaches in the country's most populous state.
Christian lawmaker and veteran morals campaigner Reverend Fred Nile won backing from key politicians in New South Wales state, counting Sydney and its famed ocean beaches, to tighten existing laws covering nude sunbathing.
"The law should be clear. It must say exposure of women's breasts on beaches will be prohibited," Rev. Nile said.
Centre-left state government lawmaker Paul Gibson told the Daily Telegraph newspaper that families at the beach during the summer holidays did not want topless women. But scores of callers to radio talkback stations complained about the plan and Leanne Peters from the ACT Nudist Club in the capital Canberra said Australia would look like a "haven for prudes" in the unlikely event that laws passed Parliament.
Australians love their suntans and topless sunbathing has been common on most beaches since the 1960s.
Cost of living tops UK worry index
Britain is becoming a nation of worriers, according to a new survey, with the financial crisis giving people ever more reason to fret about their lives.
The average Briton now spends two and a quarter hours of every day worrying - six and half years of the average life span - a figure up 30 minutes a day from last year, according to the worry index compiled by www.reallyworried.com, a support group.
Young adults - those aged between 16 and 24 - worry the most, and women worry substantially more than men, according to the survey of 1,400 people nationwide.
The top five concerns in 2008 were: the cost of living, energy prices, personal health, outgoings and income, and personal debt.
Job security, which last year didn't figure in the top 25 worries, shot up to number seven in the rankings, one notch below recession and a bigger concern than crime.
Australia tourist numbers to fall
Foreign visitor numbers to Australia will hit their lowest point for two decades as a new tourist campaign based around actress Nicole Kidman fails to deflect global recession fallout, the Australian newspaper said.
The number of tourists travelling to Australia would decline from 5.56 million in 2008 to 5.33 million, cutting four per cent or A$500 million (€244.68 million) from the A$90 billion industry.
"There is no doubt that tourism operators who are heavily reliant on international tourism are in for a tough time in 2009," Tourism Australia's Forecasting Committee chairman Bernard Salt told the newspaper yesterday.
Ahead of an official report on the 2009 outlook for the industry, Tourism Australia said the biggest falls would be in visitors from Japan, expected to plummet almost 30 per cent from 573,000 in 2007 to an anticipated 407,000 in 2009.
Record breaking 392-metre sausage
Bucharest has achieved a new world record with a 392-metre smoked sausage that took two weeks to prepare and weighs a hefty 150 kilogrammes.
About 20 people worked on the giant sausage, commissioned by the city of Bucharest and presented over the weekend during local holiday festivities. Two hundred metres longer than the previous record holder from Poland, according to local media, the sausage was later grilled and served to residents.
A representative of the Guinness Book of World Records was on hand to witness the record attempt.
On Sunday, the Romanian capital claimed the world's biggest-ever Christmas give-away, when 3,939 people dressed as Father Christmas handed out gifts to children in the streets of Bucharest.
Tourist spends three months in airport
A distinguished-looking Japanese tourist lingered more than three months at Mexico City's airport, sleeping on the ground and eating in pricey restaurants, until he left with a woman in a taxi, witnesses said.
Nobody knows why the tall, bearded Hiroshi Nohara decided to stay at Benito Juarez airport after missing his connecting flight to Brazil - he apparently has a return ticket to Tokyo, but for 117 days he became a tourist attraction in his own right.
"They say he's got love problems," Cinnamon Rolls cafeteria employee Ana Elena Ruiz said yesterday. She confessed to growing "fond" of the polite, often smiling man that reminded her of Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg's The Terminal (2004).
"He slept over there, used the rest rooms" to clean himself and "spent every day in the restaurant area," said maintenance worker Alejandro Garzon.
The stranger left on Sunday, as mysteriously as he appeared in early September, boarding a taxi with a woman, witnesses said.
"A woman came for him this morning and took him away, but I think he'll be coming back because he didn't say good-bye to any of us," said Ms Ruiz. "I think the woman took him out for a spin around the city for a few days."