What better incentive than money to drop a few pounds? Gianluca Buonanno, the mayor of Varallo, a town of 7,500 in northern Italy, thinks it might work. The town is offering cash rewards to overweight residents who slim down and more money if they keep the weight off.

"We wanted to encourage people to lose weight, and we thought that both the money and the idea of joining a group could be stimulating," Buonanno said in a telephone interview Thursday.

The town’s offer is the latest effort by public officials and employers to encourage people to exercise and trim their weight. Earlier this summer, a Baltimore company sponsored a weight-loss contest to motivate its employees.

Participants in the week-old Varallo initiative will be given $67 when they reach their ideal weight. If they don’t gain any weight back after five months, they will receive $268.

If they maintain their ideal weight for a year, they will get $670 more.

So far, 30 of the townsfolk have signed up, Buonanno said.

To enroll, participants must present a medical certificate proving they are overweight. They can choose to be assisted by a dietitian, who helps determine their ideal weight, and a personal trainer.

Buonanno’s inspiration? His own need for a diet.

"If you have a health problem, you can get sick, stop going to work and are less exuberant," he said. "We just want a better society."

The mayor said the town has set aside about $13,000 for the project. It is looking for sponsors to expand the program.

The prevalence of obesity in Europe has tripled in the past two decades. Half of all adults and 20 percent of all children are estimated to be overweight, the World Health Organization says. Two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese.

Dave Rankhorn, a tourist visiting Rome from Chicago, knows he’s overweight. As he took pictures of the Spanish Steps on Thursday, he considered Buonanno’s proposal.

"Money is always great as an incentive. I have always wanted to lose weight, but never had the motivation," he said.
If someone told him he’d get paid to lose weight, "I would be there, I would do that," he said. (AP)

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A watermelon breeder, Che Yonggao, known as the Watermelon King in his native village near Fuzhou in east China’s Jiangxi Province, holds a 10 kilo conjoined watermelon, which he has inadvertently bred, on Monday, August 13, 2007.

A watermelon breeder, Che Yonggao, known as the Watermelon King in his native village, near Fuzhou in east China’s Jiangxi Province, accidentally picked-up a conjoined watermelon, which weighs more than 10 kilos, in his field on Monday.

This is a first for the prolific watermelon breeder, who has grown melons for more than 10 years. Usually, one pistil could only bear one melon, reports jxnews.com.cn.

Che has decided to send the watermelon to his local agricultural departments for research, though some melon sellers have offered him several hundred yuan to buy it. (CRIEnglish)

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An elite kindergarten in China says it will take only ’round-headed’ students as they make the cleverest pupils.

Li Junjie Educational Kindergarten, in Zhengzhou city, checks the shape of would-be pupils’ heads as part of admission tests.

Owner Li Junjie insisted: "A round head indicates cleverness; a student with a flat head can never be outstanding no matter how hard he works."

The school charges tuition fees of nearly £7,000 a year, possibly the highest in China, and guarantees that pupils will prosper, reports China News Network.

Li Junjie added: "Every student in my school will become talented. They will be able to read at age three, and enter middle school at seven and university at 15.

"We now have 21 students with 13 teachers. We make sure they have the best resources." (Ananova)

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A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him’," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.

While the "@" simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out — which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers.

Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people’s increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.

Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like "King Osrina."

Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (http://www.gov.cn/).

One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare "rong" character that gave newspaper editors headaches. (Reuters)

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Yone Minagawa (皆川瑤子)

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