Aussie tenor Skelton wins top opera award 

AUSTRALIAN heroic tenor Stuart Skelton has been named male singer of the year at the second International Opera Awards in London.

The 45-year-old singer from Sydney gave a surprise performance at the awards ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel.
Skelton was given the top gong for his performance in Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the English National Opera (ENO).

Importance of child sleep stressed 

SLEEP plays a vital role in the early learning and development of babies and young children, a study has found.

Infants who nap are better able to apply lessons learned to new skills, while sleeping appears to help pre-school toddlers retain learned knowledge.
US researchers looked at the ability of young children to recognise something similar but not identical to what they have learned and apply it to a new situation.
Known as "generalisation", language examples include recognising the letter "A" in different fonts, understanding a word regardless of who speaks it, or spotting a grammatical pattern in a sentence never heard before.

PM faces off with North Korea in DMZ tour 

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has visited the "tensest border on earth", stepping into North Korean territory and facing off with soldiers from the rogue state.

Mr Abbott on Wednesday took his tough talk on Pyongyang to the next level, inspecting first-hand the demilitarised zone dividing the two Koreas.
The zone feels far from demilitarised, with claymore mines, armed sentry towers and razor-wire fences dotting the no-man's land between the enemy neighbours.
Standing in T2 - a blue building straddling the border of both countries - Mr Abbott had a close encounter with the soldiers defending the isolated regime ruled by Kim Jong-un.

US Marine guard shot to death by colleague 

A US Marine posted at the main gate of a North Carolina base has shot and killed a colleague inside a guard shack, a military spokesman says.

Camp Lejeune spokesman Nat Fahy said the shooting occurred at around 5.30pm local time on Tuesday.
Law enforcement and emergency personnel attempted to revive the shooting victim at the scene, but Fahy said the person was later pronounced dead at a base hospital.
Fahy said the Marine who fired the shot from his M4 rifle was in custody and awaiting questioning by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

More than 150,000 killed in Syria 

MORE than 150,000 people have been killed in Syria's three-year conflict, as fighting continues to rage across the country, including an attack in the north that killed at least 31 people.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that it has documented 150,344 deaths in the conflict that started in March 2011.
The figure includes civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military.
It also includes militiamen, fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces and foreign fighters battling for Assad's ouster on the rebels' side.
The Observatory bases its tally on the information the group receives from a network of informants on the ground inside Syria.
In January, the UN said it had stopped updating its own tally of the Syrian dead because it could no longer verify the sources of information that led to its last count of at least 100,000 in July.
Of the 150,344 people who died in the conflict, about a third, 51,212, were civilians, including 7,985 children and 5,266 women, The Observatory said.
The number also includes 26,561 rebel fighters and 35,601 Syrian soldiers as well as 22,879 Assad-loyal fighters and 11,220 foreign fighters battling on the opposition side. The number also includes unidentified casualties totalling 2,871.
Tuesday's attack in the northern town of Maaret al-Artiq came in the form of a barrel bombing - bombardment with containers stuffed with explosives rolled out of military helicopters, the Observatory said.
Syria's uprising began with largely peaceful protests against Assad's rule. It has evolved into a civil war with sectarian overtones, pitting predominantly Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad's government that is dominated by Alawites, a sect in Shiite Islam.
On Tuesday, The Observatory said fighting between Assad's loyalist and the rebels was concentrated in several opposition-held suburbs of the capital, Damascus, and the northern province of Aleppo, where rebels have managed to hold on to large swaths of territory and whole districts of the city of Aleppo, Syria's largest urban centre and its commercial hub.
The rebels captured them from government forces in a 2012 offensive.

source- www.news.com