Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and his five-year-old son donned military fatigues for a training session yesteray in an unusual attempt to promote the armed forces.
Local television showed pictures of Mr Saakashvili going for a morning run with troops at a military base in the ex-Soviet state, watched by his equally camouflage-clad son Nikoloz.
They then went for lunch in the soldiers’ canteen, where Mr Saakashvili gave a televised interview as the five-year-old ate his food.
“It’s a great honour to serve with you guys because we are all soldiers for our motherland,” Mr Saakashvili said.
“This is not for television publicity. It is because the army needs discipline and a special spirit.” (AFP)
LA bike plan
Los Angeles has approved a plan that aims to get the notoriously car-loving city out of its cars and onto bicycles. It hopes to link its sprawling communities with an extensive network of cycle paths and trails.
The bicycle master plan unanimously approved by the city council sets a long-term goal of some 1,680 miles of interconnected cycle paths and calls for a new 200 miles to be added every five years. The city currently has fewer than 400 miles in a patchwork of segments. “We’ve always given the automobile the priority, and the bicycles were secondary,” councillor Ed Reyes said. (PA)
Cookie ban crumbles
The city manager of Savannah, Georgia, has granted Girl Scouts an exemption to sell cookies outside the historic mansion of the woman who founded the organisation nearly a century ago.
A complaint, which many thought took the biscuit, halted the long-time practice of selling cookies outside the home of Juliette Gordon Low, who founded the Girl Scouts in Savannah in 1912 – near a busy junction. Savannah bans peddling on public footways but Rochelle Small-Toney used her civic power to make exemptions to the regulations to allow the Scouts to continue their sales. (PA)
Elvis honoured
Budapest will name one of its squares after US rock icon Elvis Presley and make him an honorary citizen for his support after Hungarians’ 1956 anti-communist uprising.
“The reasons for honouring Elvis are not sentimental but political,” mayor Istvan Tarlos said yesterday.
On January 6, 1957, the legendary singer and actor appeared on US television variety programme The Ed Sullivan Show where he sang the gospel song “Peace in the Valley” as a tribute to the short-lived Hungarian revolt, which was crushed two months earlier by Soviet tanks. (AFP)
‘Gender apartheid’
A Serbian bus company met with outrage over “gender apartheid” after it introduced different coloured tickets for men and women to prevent abuse, radio B92 reported yesterday.
Autoprevoz transport in central Cacak, owned by Israeli company Kavim Public Transportation Ltd since 2007, has introduced the same-priced daily bus tickets in different colours: Red and purple for women and blue and yellow for men, the radio reported. The move was an attempt to prevent widespread “abuse of all-day tickets” among the passengers, it added.
“Everyone will now have a ticket in accordance with the gender and it will not be possible for a wife to use the ticket in the morning and give it to her husband in the afternoon,” Aleksandar Petronijevic of the company said. But women rights activists were up in arms about the move. (AFP)
On the house
Australian police have said they had charged two men with dishonestly obtaining money, a day after a computer glitch left bank machines giving customers more money than they had in their accounts. The men, aged 18 and 20, were allegedly seen passing money between themselves outside a bank in western Sydney.
“It will be alleged that both men dishonestly obtained the cash by using a faulty ATM (automatic teller machine),” police said in a statement. Police did not link the arrest to Tuesday’s fault which affected cash machines in Sydney, but have reminded the public it is an offence to fraudulently obtain money via an ATM. Reports said that customers raced to Commonwealth Bank cash points after news of the technical problem spread via social networking sites, with queues forming at branches around Sydney. (AFP)