NEW YORK - APPLE chief executive Steve Jobs announced on Monday that he was being treated for a 'hormone imbalance' but would remain head of the company.

Jobs, in a letter to the Apple Community, noted that his decision not to give the keynote address at the Macworld exhibition opening in San Francisco on Tuesday had set off a 'flurry of rumours about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed'.

GAZA CITY - THE armed wing of Hamas said on Monday that it has 'thousands' of fighters ready to battle Israel in Gaza, in a second defiant televised address by the Islamists in a day.

'We have prepared thousands of brave fighters who are waiting for you in each corner of the street and will welcome you with fire and iron,' Mr Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, said in a broadcast on Hamas's Al-Aqsa television channel.

TOP performing madrasah Al-Irsyad has moved into a new and permanent home in the newly-built Singapore Islamic Hub in Braddell Road.

Classes for more than 900 primary and secondary-level pupils and students started last Friday.

TOKYO - TWO sushi bar owners paid more than US$100,000 (S$145,000) for a Japanese bluefin tuna at a Tokyo fish auction on Monday, about ten times the average price and the highest in nearly a decade, market officials said.

The 128-kilogram premium tuna caught off the northern coast of Oma fetched 9.63 million yen (US$104,700), the highest since 2001, when another Japanese bluefin tuna brought an all-time record of 20 million yen, market official Takashi Yoshida said.