Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
time to get married
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promoted family values on his way to winning office in November, but now the mother of his health minister is pleading with him to give her daughter time off to get married.
"I just need to tell you Nicola will need two weeks off some time this year if she is ever going to get married," Roxon's mother Lesley told Rudd at a ministerial swearing-in, local newspapers said on Thursday.
On winning office for Labor, after a decade of conservative rule, Rudd ordered his team back to work the next day.
Health Minister Nicola Roxon, a rising star for centre-left Labor, wants to marry her longtime partner, with whom she has a two-year-old daughter.
But reform of Australia's health system is a major priority for the new Rudd government and Roxon is caught in negotiations on a A$50 billion ($43 billion) health agreement with Australia's six states, due for completion mid-year.
Rudd reportedly told Roxon's mother that his minister "should be able to get a weekend off" to tie the knot.
bails a hay london..
LONDON (Reuters) - A farmer built an entire mock castle behind a screen of hay bales and lived there concealed for four years to evade planning regulations, officials said on Friday -- but it may be torn down anyway.
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Robert Fidler hopes to take advantage of a provision of planning law that allows buildings without planning permission to be declared legal if no objections have been made after four years
But Reigate and Banstead Borough Council in Surrey is not impressed.
"It does not count because the property was hidden behind hay bales," said a spokeswoman. "No one knew it was there."
The council wants the building near Redhill some 30 km south of London to be demolished, along with an associated conservatory, marquee structure, wooden bridge, patio, decking and tarmac racecourse.
"It looks like a mock-Tudor house from the front and it's got two turrets at the back," the spokeswoman said. "I understand there is also a cannon."
The couple would have been unlikely to get planning permission as the farm was in "green belt" land where building was restricted, she said. A hearing takes place in February.
Fidler's wife Linda told the Daily Mail newspaper the children grew up looking at straw out of the windows of the house and that they kept their son away from playschool on the day his class were due to do paintings of their houses.
"We couldn't have him drawing a big blue haystack," she said. "People might ask questions."
Planning inspectors had been called to the site by concerned neighbours shortly before Fidler took the hay bales down in summer 2006 but had not seen the house.
"When the inspectors went there, all they saw was hay bales and hay bales on agricultural land are not that unusual," the spokeswoman said.
"I think the neighbours thought there might be something going on but it is difficult to tell, isn't it?"
(Editing by Steve Addison)
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Odd News Video
Shanghai trouble
BEIJING - Shanghai's subway operator has fired an employee who uploaded security camera video of a couple kissing on one of its trains to the Internet, Chinese media said Friday.
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The company has also offered compensation and an apology to the pair, who could be identified from the video, and were reportedly shamed and harassed over its appearance on sites such as YouTube.
The video reportedly showed the couple kissing and embracing.
"We have wrapped up an internal investigation and found the videotape was uploaded by people who had worked for Shanghai Metro," the company said in a statement quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency.
"We made formal apologies and are negotiating with the couple over compensation," the statement said.
Xinhua said the company's probe found three employees had been involved in the incident, two of whom quit last September for reasons it did not explain.
Xinhua identified the dismissed employee as a woman. Her name was not given.
