(submitted by gekkogecko)

Reuters to My Yahoo!

ASHGABAT (Reuters) - Turkmenistan's authoritarian
president, whose recent decrees have included banning
gold teeth, has told television presenters to stop
wearing make-up because he had difficulty telling the
men from the women.

"You put too much make-up on female TV presenters
whose faces would be paler without it. Her own,
natural color is better," President Saparmurat Niyazov
said.

"Sometimes you even put make-up on the lads. Then I
really cannot tell the two apart," he said at a
meeting with cultural and television representatives
shown on state TV on Thursday.

Since post-Soviet independence, Niyazov has cut the
gas-rich Central Asian state's ties to the outside
world, stamped out dissent, and built up a bizarre
personality cult around himself with golden statues
and idiosyncratic decrees.

In the footage of Wednesday's meeting Niyazov also
expressed a dislike for spitting in public and
confiscated three months of wages from a minister whom
he blamed for a short-lived hike in sales taxes last
week.

Other recent decrees by the president, who calls
himself Turkmenbashi the Great (Father of all
Turkmen), include the ban on gold teeth, making his
book on morality part of the driving test, and opening
a leisure center for horses.

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