Nerja News

A woman in Georgia is claiming to be the oldest person in the world. Her documents show that she was born on July 8th 1880, making her 130 years old this summer.

Antisa Khvichava lives in a remote part of Georgia, enjoys playing backgammon and is partial to vodka. If her birth documents withstand scrutiny and prove to be genuine she will take over from the current record holder, a 114 year old woman in Japan.

For the third year running, the world has a new ‘richest man’, with Mexican Carlos Slim taking over from Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the top men for the past couple of years.

Carlos Slim Helu has made his money in telecom holdings, his personal fortune increasing by a staggering 18.5 billion dollars in the past twelve months.

Here is the current list of the top twenty richest people in the world: more »

Check your wallets, not just because Gordy is still in power and an election is coming up, but because £20 notes bearing the face of Edward Elgar will cease to become legal tender on July 1st.

This means that shops are no longer forced to accept the notes and it is up to banks whether they agree to swap notes after this date.

As from July 1st, only notes with the image of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist, will be legal tender. These notes came into circulation in March 2007. more »

The Oscar ceremonies threw up a couple of ‘firsts’ as Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the best directing award and Sandra Bullock became the first person to be awarded a ‘Razzie’ (Worst Actress Award) and an Oscar (Best Actress Award) in the same year.

Kathryn Bigelow took the best directing Oscar for her Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker with the film receiving a total of six prizes including best film. Only three technical awards from the much heralded ‘Avatar’, the most successful film of all time.

After picking up a ‘Razzie’ for her role in ‘All about Steve’, and actually attending the ceremony, Sandra Bullock received the Best Actress award for her role as real-life Southern matriarch Leigh Anne Tuohy in the film ‘The Blind Side.

The full list of winners: more »

A new world record has been set after 235 skiers and snowboarders took to the piste on CairnGorm Mountain, near Aviemore, Scotland.

What made the record significant was that all the participants were wearing kilts. They skied down in a line from the Ptarmigan Top Station on CairnGorm Mountain to claim the record. Money raised from the event will go to charity and a schools skiing programme.

The event was the first attempt to set a world record for kilted skiers and the participants were led across the finish line by two pipers and a drummer.

I’ve planned this visit for some time

says Mr Bean as he makes a visit to Afghanistan to promise more equipment to British troops just one day after appearing at the Iraq Inquiry and being accused of being ‘disingenuous’ by two former army chiefs on the question of earlier requests for more and better equipment.

Alternatives to disingenuous: artful, crooked, cunning, deceitful, designing, dishonest, duplicitous, false, feigned, foxy, guileful, indirect, insidious, mendacious, oblique, shifty, sly, tricky, two-faced, uncandid, underhanded, unfair, unfrank, wily.

A South Korean couple were so addicted to the internet that they let baby, only three months old, starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online.

The couple spent twelve hour periods in a local internet cafe raising and nurturing an online virtual baby but only fed their own premature baby just once a day.

The father, aged 41 years, and the mother, aged 25 years, were arrested in the town of Suweon some five months after they reported the death of their daughter. more »

The crisis in the Greek banking sector has provoked all sorts of responses throughout the European community, none of them being the offer of huge wads of cash to bail them out. In turn, the Greeks have not exactly helped their cause, particularly during efforts to solicit financial aid from Germany, by bringing up the small matter of the disturbances which occurred in Europe between 1939 and 1945.

Advice to the Greeks has included selling off art, historical assets and even some of their islands before asking for financial aid. The latest advice, in an open letter printed in the German newspaper Bild, includes ‘getting up earlier’.

The letter.

Nokia users will be able to make free Skype to Skype calls on their mobile phones, as well as make reduced-rate calls to landlines and other mobiles at home and abroad

The Skype application, which can can run on more than 200 million phones around the world, is available as a free download from Nokia’s Ovi store.

The system will also allow users to easily share pictures and video files without the need for a computer. The application runs on WiFi and 3G, although Skype calls using the 3G network will count towards a user’s monthly contracted data allowance.

It is not long since the tragic death of Dawn Brancheau, a trainer working will killer whales at Sea World in Orlando Florida, and now we have keepers playing ‘cat and mouse’ with Bengal and Siberian tigers.

Called ‘Tiger Splash’, the event at Out of Africa Wildlife Park, in Camp Verde, Arizona, U.S. is a big hit with visitors and for 30 minutes every day a pair of the zoo’s six Bengal and Siberian tigers take to the 50ft pool for fun and games.

It may look like a terrifying game of cat and mouse but, according to wildlife photographer Kathleen Reeder, no one gets hurt.

So far! It can only end in tears, as so many do. They are not called wild animals for nothing….Story…

A passenger on a Ryanair flight from Krakow, Poland, to East Midlands was a lucky scratchcard winner, his prize being €10,000.

However, a trifle upset that the prize had to be collected from the offices of the company organising the scratchcard lottery as it was such a large amount, the man then ATE his winning ticket.

In doing so, he rendered himself ineligible to ever collect the prize and it will now be donated to charity. Ryanair are holding an online vote of passengers to determine which luck charity will benefit.

US troops are to be allowed to use social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook following a review of internet use and security, with Defence department officials saying that the benefits of using social media now outweigh the risks to security.

Many sites, including YouTube, were blocked by the Pentagon in 2007 but under the new ruling will be unblocked.
Commanders will, however, still be able to temporarily block access to safeguard missions or save bandwidth.

Only last year, the US Marine Corps renewed a ban on accessing Twitter from its network and the army also maintained a list of banned social sites.

Incidentally, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has a Twitter account with 16,330 followers as of today (Saturday Feb 27th 2010). more »

Research conducted by the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool concludes that females that have multiple mates reduce the risk of producing a brood of offspring without males and this could prevent the species becoming extinct.

The study into the long term effects of polyandry (multiple mates, a common phenomenon in the animal kingdom) was carried out on the fruitfly, Drosophila pseudoobscura, and covering fifteen generations.

You can read all about this interesting theory here.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of seemingly perpetual military intervention in Afghanistan by the forces of foreign powers, a debate without end except for the unfortunate victims on all sides, there is currently an offensive taking place against the Taliban.

The Denver Post, everyone’s favourite read, has published a plog (photo blog) containing a collection of 48 amazingly stunning and awesome (didn’t want to buck the trend) photos from the offensive. No blood or gore, just poignant moments from the desolate landscape which is Afghanistan….Photos…

It’s probably everyone’s dream to find a lost masterpiece in the attic, but it doesn’t always work out as expected.

In 1993, a painting came to light during a house clearance and the owners took the canvas to Christie’s in London for a valuation. They were told that the painting was probably from the ’school of Titian’ but unlikely to actually be the work of the master himself.

Advised that cleaning the painting would be an unnecessary expense, the owners agreed the valuation and put the piece up for auction. It fetched the reserve price of £8,000. more »

Banks are in the news again in the UK as the taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland posted losses of £3.6 billion. This was  just hours after announcing it would hand out staff bonuses of £1.3 billion.

This has caused a few eyebrows to furrow or rise in consternation, but it does have a sound basis in logic. RBS were expected to announce losses of £5 billion, so the staff have obviously done a jolly good job!

The bonuses were duly approved by the UK Financial Investments (UKFI), the body set up to manage the Government’s stakes in banks. No surprise there. more »

The controversial body scanners are now in widespread use in the USA and limited use in the UK, although implementation in the two countries is vastly different, but the latest developments could throw up an interesting dilemma for the UK authorities. more »