BREAKING NEWS ODDS AND ENDS - 2

Perfect hostesses outclass sexy cheerleaders at Games

BEIJING—Forget the skimpily clad cheerleaders. The immaculate hostesses handing out medals at the Olympics have won the spectator vote for glamour.
Wearing Chinese silk dresses with their hair pulled back tightly into neat buns, the hostesses are beautiful and elegant. Their eyes are three-tenths the length of their faces, as required by the Chinese selection committee.

“They are so pretty and precise. They smile continuously,” said Debra Sinex, a tourist from Atlanta, Georgia, who was in Beijing for the Olympics.
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The hostesses underwent thorough training at a kind of charm boot camp, learning to stand for hours in high-heels and honing the perfect smile exposing eight teeth by spending hours before a mirror with a chopstick between their teeth.

“In the standing sessions, we have to stand still and smile for half an hour or more. We also run about a 1,000 meters every day for physical conditioning,” one of the hostesses, Ma Sha, 20, told Reuters ahead of the Games.

It is no wonder China leads in the manufacturing industry.
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PM: Baby-short Singapore to double spending on incentives

SINGAPORE -- Singapore will double its spending on incentives to address a severe shortage of babies threatening the country's future, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a television broadcast Monday.

He unveiled a series of measures, including extended maternity leave, which he said add up to more than 700 million dollars ($US 496 million), "about double what we are spending today on child incentives."

"This package will make a difference to many couples, but I can't guarantee that it will solve our problem, because it is a deep problem," he said in his key annual policy speech.

Government figures say Singapore had a fertility rate of 1.29 babies born per woman in 2007, well below the 2.1, or at least two children per woman, needed for the population to replace itself naturally.
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But those incentives failed to adequately address the baby shortage.

Lee touched on the problem earlier this month in another speech on the eve of Singapore's national day, when he said the city-state needed enough babies "to secure our long-term future."
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Lee got it backwards. Learn from the Philippines. Make the population dirt-poor, and they will multiply like rabbits.
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Australian town mayor recruiting ugly women

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—Life can get a little lonely for bachelors in the Australian Outback mining town of Mount Isa. So the mayor has offered up a solution: Recruit ugly women.

Mayor John Molony found himself under attack on Monday over comments he made to a local newspaper that read: “May I suggest if there are five blokes to every girl, we should find out where there are beauty-disadvantaged women and ask them to proceed to Mount Isa.”

The mayor added that many women who lived in the remote Queensland state town seemed quite happy. “Quite often you will see walking down the street a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face,” he continued.
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And several local women said there weren’t a lot of gems to be found among Mount Isa’s men, either.
“We’ve got a saying up here that the odds are good, but the goods are odd,” 27-year-old Anna Warrick told The Brisbane Times.
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Nuff said.