COLUMN

NICOSIA: At 8am British time yesterday, the sound of babies wailing stopped abruptly as more than 50 infants latched onto their mothers’ breasts in Cyprus’ latest attempt to drum up popularity for breastfeeding. With pacifiers, baby bottles and milk formula left at the door, children from six days to 18-months suckled for one minute as part of a 19-country attempt to set a new synchronised breastfeeding record. Countries from Ireland to Australia are involved. The present record is 22,000 mums simultaneously breastfeeding in the Philippines last year. Cypriot mothers said the pressures of modern life and the work environment were not conducive to breastfeeding. “Nobody really supports breastfeeding, maternity leave is very short and it is difficult to do it if you are a working mother,” Iliana Kanara said as she breastfed her son, Ioannis.
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MOSCOW: A crocodile survived a fall from the 12th floor of a Russian apartment block after making an escape bid through a window, emergency services said yesterday. Diving out of the window has become a habit for the crocodile, called Khenar, with concerned neighbours saying it was the third time he had used that method to flee, Moskovsky Komsomolets daily reported. The crocodile lost one tooth in the latest fall but was otherwise unscathed, said a spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry in the Nizhny Novgorod region of central Russia. “It seems the owner was not at home when the crocodile came out of the window,” she said. Emergency services put the crocodile in a local aquarium to recover from his fall. Within a few hours, his concerned owner came to pick him up and the crocodile was last seen lying on the back seat of his owner’s car.
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BERLIN: A German farmer angry with police for trying to confiscate his tractor wrecked three patrol cars and evaded capture for seven hours before an elite unit arrested him, a police spokesman said yesterday. The farmer, 53, was pulled over by police for driving his tractor without a licence, despite several previous warnings. The officers called in three patrol cars for help before asking the farmer to get out of his vehicle. He refused, and proceeded to ram the cars with his tractor, making full use of its attached muck spreader and hydraulic fork. Officers were only just able to scramble out of harm’s way. The farmer then drove into a forest, where he eluded a manhunt involving two helicopters and an armoured car for seven hours before finally being found in a barn on his farm in Lauterbach, in central Germany. – Reuters

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