Gay Singaporean loses bid to adopt surrogate son

SINGAPORE: A gay Singaporean man has failed in a bid to formally adopt his biological son fathered via a surrogate in the United States at a cost of $200,000.

The man, a doctor in a long-term relationship, initially approached authorities about adopting in the city-state but was told a homosexual couple were unlikely to get permission, according to court documents.

The couple travelled to the US where the doctor underwent procedures for in-vitro fertilisation and found a surrogate who agreed to carry his child for $200,000.

A son was born and as the biological father, the doctor – who has not been identified – was allowed to bring him back to Singapore to live with him. The boy is now four.

The doctor applied to formally adopt the boy in Singapore to "legitimise" their relationship and hopefully secure him Singapore citizenship but a court rejected his bid, according to a judgement released earlier this week.

District Judge Shobha Nair said that the doctor and his partner were aware that procedures to help couples have children were available to only married couples in Singapore and there were no surrogacy services in the city-state.

Gay marriage is not permitted in Singapore. Surrogacy is not explicitly banned although official guidelines prohibit the practice in assisted reproduction centres, according to the Straits Times newspaper.

"The applicant, a medical doctor himself, was acutely aware that the medical procedures undertaken to have a child of his own would not have been possible in Singapore," said the judge.

"He cannot then come to the courts of the very same jurisdiction to have the acts condoned." MANILA: The Philippine central bank said on Thursday it accidentally released defective 100-peso bills with the face of a former president left out.

Officials at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) made the admission after a woman's Facebook post showing the defective 100-peso ( 1.99) bills she received from an ATM went viral. Chief among the mistakes on the notes is a blank space where the portrait of former president Manuel Roxas should have been. Two words from the country's official name were also missing.

BSP managing director Carlyn Pangilinan said the errors were caused by a "glitch" in a printing machine.

"Our quality control was manual before. Now, it is all machines so there are things that slip through," she told reporters. Only 33 100-peso bills with the errors have been discovered so far, she added.

Authorities asked people to return the defective bills but conceded that some may want to keep them as potential collector's items. ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's antigraft body has given the nod for launching a corruption case against ousted premier Nawaz Sharif and his younger brother Shahbaz Sharif.

National Accountability Bureau (NAB) chairman Javed Iqbal on Wednesday approved registration of the corruption case during an executive board meeting. NAB officials said the case was related to alleged loss of over Rs 120 million to the national exchequer over the construction of a two-way road in 2000 from Raiwind to the Sharif family home in Jati Umra in the suburbs of Lahore.

The Sharif brothers have so far not reacted to the new allegations of corruption.

Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam, son-in-law Muhammad Safdar, and sons Hassan and Hussain, are already facing three NAB cases filed in September on the basis of the Supreme Court's decision of July 28 in the Panama Papers case that led to Sharif 's ouster as premier.

However, the new case also includes Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif who has been tipped as a future prime minister if Nawaz's PML-N party wins the election next year.

Officials said the NAB in the same meeting also approved filing of six corruption references, complete four pending inquiries, and 11 investigations against different politicians and officers.

The meeting also decided to probe former prime minister Raja Pervaiz Ashraf who as minister for water and power from 2008-2011 caused a loss of Rs 113 billion to the national exchequer by delaying a key energy project. NAB will also launch investigations into alleged corruption by another former premier Yousaf Raza Gilani who was disqualified by the apex court in 2012 and replaced by Ashraf. KUTA (Indonesia): Bali's palm-fringed Kuta beach has long been a favourite with tourists seeking sun and surf, but nowadays its golden shoreline is disappearing under a mountain of garbage.

Plastic straws and food packaging are strewn between sunbathers, while surfers bobbing behind the waves dodge waste flushed out from rivers or brought in by swirling currents.

"When I want to swim, it is not really nice. I see a lot of garbage here every day, every time," Austrian traveler Vanessa Moonshine explains.

"It's always coming from the ocean. It's really horrible," she adds. Often dubbed a paradise on earth, the Indonesian holiday island has become an embarrassing poster child for the country's trash problem.

The archipelago of more than 17,000 islands is the world's second biggest contributor to marine debris after China, and a colossal 1.29 million metric tons is estimated to be produced annually by Indonesia.

The waves of plastic flood- ing into rivers and oceans have been causing problems for years, clogging waterways in cities, increasing the risk of floods, and injuring or killing marine animals who ingest or become trapped by plastic packaging.

The problem has grown so bad that officials in Bali last month declared a "garbage emergency" across a sixkilometre stretch of coast that included popular beaches Jimbaran, Kuta and Seminyak.

Officials deployed 700 cleaners and 35 trucks to remove roughly 100 tons of debris each day to a nearby landfill.

"People with green uniform were collecting the garbage to move it away but the next day I saw the same situation," said German Claus Dignas, who claimed he saw more garbage with each visit to the island.

"No one wants to sit on nice beach chairs and facing all this rubbish," he added.

Bali's rubbish problem is at its worst during the annual monsoon season, when strong winds push marine flotsam onto the beach and swollen rivers wash rubbish from riverbanks to the coast, according to Putu Eka Merthawan from the local environment agency.