Entire Spanish Village Win Lottery

Anica Bordei serves a drink to a customer at the village cafe she manages, in Sodeto, Spain.

JUST a few weeks ago, the 70 households in the tiny isolated farming village of Sodeto were struggling under the double whammy of Spain's economic downturn and the ravages of a severe drought.

Some were even thinking of passing up Spain's huge Christmas lottery, known as El Gordo - the fat one. But they bought tickets out of loyalty to the local homemakers' association, which makes a small percentage on the sales.
And then, their number came in and all but one household in Sodeto held at least a piece of a winning ticket in the lottery's huge first prize, $US950 million ($A894 million), the biggest ever.
Some of Sodeto's residents, mostly farmers and unemployed construction workers, won millions. The least fortunate came away with a minimum of $US130,000.
It is a rare piece of happy news in the relentlessly gloomy European economic crisis, in which Spain has been one of the hardest of the hard-luck cases. But it is not without cost: the village, until now a dot on the map three hours north-west of Barcelona, has been inundated with salesmen and fortune seekers - bankers offering high interest rates, car salesman talking up BMWs and furniture dealers going door to door.
Like many other local farmers, Jose Manuel Penella Cambra, who had recently invested in more efficient irrigation, worried about how he would meet his payments. But his wife bought two tickets, worth $US260,000, and his son found two more she had bought earlier and had forgotten, bringing the total to $US520,000. ''This money means that now we can breathe. And the best part is that it isn't just me. Everybody won,'' he said.
The Christmas lottery, first established in 1812, is a huge event in Spain. Many people take the morning off to watch the televised coverage of the numbers being drawn.
The Sodeto homemakers' association sells the tickets and usually nets about $US1300, which it uses to pay for food and decorations at local festivals. This year the tickets brought in more than $US150 million. So far, though, no one has splurged on anything much.
Some hope the money will help keep the next generation in the village. In the 1960s, Sodeto had 400 residents, but nowadays only 250 people live there.
The only resident who did not win was Costis Mitsotakis, a Greek filmmaker, who moved to the village for love of a woman. It did not work out. But he still lives here in a barn he is restoring outside the village. Somehow, the ticket sellers overlooked him as they made the rounds.
Mr Mitsotakis said it would have been nice to win. But he has benefited nonetheless. He had been trying to sell some land without much success. The day after the lottery a neighbour called to say he would buy it. The next day another neighbour called. But Mr Mitsotakis refused to get into a bidding war. ''This is a small village,'' he said. ''You don't want bad feelings.''

Graffiti Artist Scores $200m Windfall

The graffiti artist who took Facebook stock instead of cash for painting the walls of the social network's first headquarters made a smart move. The shares owned by the artist, David Choe, are expected to be worth more than $US200 million ($187 million) when Facebook stock trades publicly this year.
The social network company announced a $5 billion public offering this week, which is expected to value the company at up to $US100 billion.
The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 27, has 533.8 million shares, worth $US28.3 billion based on a company valuation of $US100 billion, or $US53 a share. He has undisputed control of the company - owning 28.4 per cent of the company outright and controlling 57 per cent of the voting rights.
Facebook's first outside investor, Peter Thiel, the billionaire contrarian, led a $US500,000 investment in Facebook in late 2004. He has 44.7 million shares that could be worth more than $US2 billion. Elevation Partners, the venture capital firm of Bono, the U2 frontman, paid $US120 million for a chunk of Facebook's shares in 2010.
Choe's payout could provide more money from his paintings than Sotheby's attracted for its record-breaking $US200.7 million auction in 2008 for work by the artist Damien Hirst.
In 2005, Choe was invited to paint murals on the walls of Facebook's first offices in Palo Alto, California, by Sean Parker, then Facebook's president. As pay, Mr Parker offered Choe a choice between cash in the ''thousands of dollars,'' according to several people who know Choe, or stock then worth about the same amount. Choe, who has said that at the time that he thought the idea of Facebook was ''ridiculous and pointless'', nevertheless chose the stock.
Many ''advisers'' to the company at that time, which is how Choe would have been classified, would have received about 0.1 per cent to 0.25 per cent of the company, a former Facebook employee said. That may sound like a paltry amount, but a stake that size is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, based on a market value of $US100 billion valuing Choe's payment at about $US200 million.

150 Missing, 200 Saved After Ferry Sinks

Waiting ... family members standby for news about the passengers on board.

Australian rescue crews saved more than 200 Papua New Guineans from drowning after the MV Rabaul Queen ferry they were travelling on sank in open waters. But as night fell efforts were called off and fears remained for the 150 still missing. Officials believe up to 350 people were on board the ferry when it went down about 8.30am yesterday. They had been travelling in the Solomon Sea to Papua New Guinea's north town of Lae from the West New Britain town of Kimbe.

The ship is owned by the brother of Papua New Guinea's National Maritime Safety Authority chairman.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority, working with NMSA, directed commercial ships and several aircraft to scour the area as part of a co-ordinated search and rescue mission.

Despite initial fears that most of the passengers would drown, late yesterday afternoon AMSA spokeswoman Carly Lusk said there were eight merchant vessels on the scene, five of which had recovered survivors.

''There are reported to be 238 survivors on these five vessels,'' she said.Three search helicopters were helping rescue passengers as well as AMSA's dedicated search and rescue Dornier aircraft from Cairns, an Australian Defence Force PC3 Orion aircraft and AMSA's Dornier from Darwin.

Three life rafts from the MV Rabaul Queen float above the sunken hull of the ferry.

 

Underwear Scam Rocks Luge World

Tonga's 'Bruno Banani' during a practice session at the FIL Luge World Championships in Cesana Pariol, Italy. 

When news surfaced in Germany of a promising young luger from Tonga who bore the same name as a racy German underwear firm, scepticism might have been warranted.

But the story was too delicious. Bruno Banani, 24, ostensibly the son of a coconut farmer, was aiming to be Tonga's first ever competitor at a winter Olympic games.
When Banani was unveiled to the German media, he was naturally sponsored by Bruno Banani, a purveyor of knickers from the east German city of Chemnitz. But now an investigation by Der Spiegel magazine has revealed that the plucky luger was in fact christened Bruno Banani by some opportunists at a marketing company in Leipzig. According to Spiegel, it seems that the young IT student who was picked for luge success was actually called Fuahea Semi, and marketing firm Makai somehow arranged for a passport to be issued for Semi in the name of Bruno Banani.

Cold Snap Freezes Europe: Many Dead

A homeless man warms up near an outside coal fire on a street in Warsaw as temperatures dropped.

A girl looks out from a bus window covered with frost in the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

 

Scores of people have died in a cold snap across Eastern Europe, authorities said on Tuesday, forcing some countries to call in the army to help secure food and medical supplies and set up emergency shelters for the homeless. The temperature in Ukraine sank to minus 33C, the coldest in six years, while eastern Bosnia experienced lows of minus 31C and Poland, Romania and Bulgaria minus 30C.

Forecasters said the cold spell would last until Friday with further heavy snow expected across the region on Wednesday.
January temperatures in Ukraine do not normally sink below minus 15C. The ministry said 1600 centres had been set up to provide shelter and hand out food for the homeless.Five people died in Bulgaria and 8 in Romania, where troops were called in last week to rescue hundreds of people stranded in cars by blizzards. The Black Sea was frozen around the Romanian resort of Mamaia, and across the border in Bulgaria a salt lake froze for the first time in 58 years.Five people were reported dead in Poland overnight, bringing to 15 the number to have died since temperatures dropped at the weekend. Several suffered carbon monoxide poisoning from old or faulty heaters, the Interior Affairs Ministry said.
At least three people have died in heavy snow in Serbia's mountain regions to the south and southeast. Authorities declared a state of emergency in 13 municipalities and deployed the army and firefighters to get supplies to remote villages."The situation is gradually being restored to normal," said Predrag Maric, head of the Interior Ministry's emergency situations department.
Dozens of villages were cut off by two metres of snow in eastern Bosnia, where the frozen body of a man was found at the weekend.

At least 30 people, most of them homeless, have died in Ukraine in the past five days, the Emergencies Ministry said. Another 500 people were treated in hospital for frostbite and other cold-related ailments.

 

Assange's In Court Today In Last Stand Against Extradition

For more than a year the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has remained closeted at secret locations in the English countryside, surrounded by friends and admirers but shackled on the right ankle with an electronic monitor to ensure he remains within reach, until the law this week hears a case that will decide his future.Assange will appear in London today before seven of the 12 judges of Britain's Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, for his appeal against his extradition to Sweden, where is accused of rape, sexual molestation and coercion involving two women.The legal action against the Australian-born Assange, 40, has generated considerable public and legal interest worldwide, since he was taken into custody in England in December 2010 under a controversial European Arrest Warrant (EAW). A Swedish public prosecutor issued the warrant on allegations that Assange had sexually assaulted two women during a visit to Stockholm, Sweden, in August that year. Assange is alleged to have had unprotected sex with one woman when she allegedly had insisted he use a condom, and also to have had sex with another women when she was asleep. He denies strenuously the claims and says any sex was consensual.

US Returns Stolen French Artwork

The United States has returned a long-missing work of art to France, the third such handover in little more than a year.
The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned over to the French ambassador what the embassy described as a rare, historic and precious work by Impressionist Camille Pissarro titled The Fish Market. It had been taken in 1981 from the Faure Museum in Aix-les-Bains.
In returning The Fish Market, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, said his agency's cultural property, art and antiquities unit was set up to identify, investigate and return cultural treasures such as the stolen painting to their rightful owners and countries of origin.

Lego Man Launch A Success

Two Canadian high school students have launched a Lego man almost 25 kilometres above sea level - high enough to capture video of the plastic toy hovering above the curvature of the Earth.
Now the results of their experiment have gone viral, racking up more than 600,000 views on YouTube in just two days and inspiring a Facebook page.
The Toronto Star reports that the two teens, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed spent 4½ months working on the project.They told the Star the hardest part was hand sewing the parachute.
They also constructed a lightweight Styrofoam box to carry three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera and a mobile phone with a downloadable GPS app.
They purchased a professional weather balloon for $85 online while the helium that would lift it up came from a party supply store.
For launch, they put two mitten warmers in the Styrofoam box to keep the cameras working at altitude.
The project cost about $400.
The two waited until weather conditions would ensure the Lego man would land in Canada and not somewhere in the US because they didn't want to take their chances with US Homeland Security, the Star reported.

Bill Gates Gives away $750M In AIDS Fight

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $US750 million ($707 million) to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to help ensure the organisation can keep supplying AIDS drugs while it tries to adjust to the economic downturn.
The Global Fund, which has paid $US15.1 billion to low-income countries in the past decade, said in November it would not award any new grants until 2014. Most of the fund's money comes from governments in the industrialised world, but many are now unwilling to increase their donations and a few to fulfil earlier pledges.
There are fears some AIDS programs in Africa might run out of money, forcing patients to stop taking the life-saving antiretroviral drugs.
''These are tough economic times, but that is no excuse for cutting aid to the world's poorest,'' Mr Gates said in announcing the contribution at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His foundation had previously contributed $US650 million to the fund in a decade.
A fund spokesman, Andrew Hurst, said the Gates donation would pay for 164,000 people to continue receiving AIDS drugs; buy 11.4 million mosquito nets and treat 427,000 cases of tuberculosis if their costs remain at the level they have averaged since the fund's inception.
As well as antiretroviral drugs, The Global Fund has underwritten 8.6 million tuberculosis treatments and provided 230 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets for the prevention of malaria. During its existence, the fund has paid for 1042 programs in about 150 countries.
Also in Davos, former Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan said Japan would contribute $US340 million to the fund this year. Two years ago, it contributed $US200 million, but last year because of the March earthquake and tsunami it contributed only $US110 million. This would be a 'catch-up' contribution.

Temple For Athiests Sparks Controversy

Plans to build a £1 million ($1.47 million) ''temple for atheists'' among the international banks and medieval church spires of London have sparked a clash between two of Britain's most prominent non-believers.
The philosopher and writer Alain de Botton is proposing to build a 46-metre tower to celebrate a ''new atheism'' as an antidote to what he describes as Richard Dawkins's ''aggressive'' and ''destructive'' approach to non-belief.
Rather than attack religion, Mr de Botton said he wants to borrow the idea of awe-inspiring buildings that give people a better sense of perspective on life.
''Normally a temple is to Jesus, Mary or Buddha but you can build a temple to anything that's positive and good,'' he said. ''That could mean a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective … Because of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, atheism has become known as a destructive force.''
Professor Dawkins criticised the project, indicating the money was being misspent and that a temple of atheism was a contradiction in terms.
''Atheists don't need temples,'' the author of The God Delusion said. ''I think there are better things to spend this kind of money on. If you are going to spend money on atheism you could improve secular education and build non-religious schools which teach rational, sceptical critical thinking.''
The spat came as Mr de Botton revealed details of the temple. Each centimetre of the tapering tower's interior has been designed to represent 1 million of the 300 million years of life on Earth and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet. The exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.

Fried Food Not To Blame For Heart Attacks, Study Shows

Regularly eating fried food does not cause heart attacks, provided that olive oil or sunflower oil is used in the cooking, researchers say.

A study published in the British Medical Journal says there is mounting research that it is the type of oil - and whether it has been used before - that really matters.

It found no association between the frequency of eating fried food in Spain - where olive and sunflower oils are prevalent - and the incidence of serious heart disease.

Spanish researchers studied more than 40,000 people from the mid-1990s to 2004 to see if regularly eating fried foods increased the likelihood of suffering coronary heart disease that led to a heart attack or angina requiring surgery.
Dividing participants into four groups, from lowest fried food intake to highest, they found no significant difference in heart disease.
The authors concluded: ''In a Mediterranean country where olive and sunflower oils are the most commonly used fats for frying, and where large amounts of fried foods are consumed both at and away from home, no association was observed between fried food consumption and the risk of coronary heart disease or death.''
Fried foods from US-style takeaways were different because they tended to have been cooked in re-used oils higher in transfats.

Dozens Killed In Papua New Guinea Landslide

Destruction ... villagers search the site of the disaster, which is reported to have killed at least 40 people, with more missing..

As many as 60 people are feared dead after a massive landslide wiped out an entire village in a scene of ''utter devastation'' in Papua New Guinea, according to reports and aid workers.
The disaster struck near a huge ExxonMobil liquefied natural gas project in the country's rugged southern highlands on Tuesday as people slept, leaving a trail of destruction. An aerial shot showed mud and other debris extending for at least one kilometre across a forested area.
Papua New Guinea's media said 40 bodies had been recovered and another 20 people were still missing. The director of the country's National Disaster Centre, Martin Mose, said it appeared lives had been lost but he could not verify how many.
''It was a big landslide and it covered a big area where there used to be small hamlets, so we are expecting a number of deaths,'' he said.
The area's MP, Francis Potape, said the landslide completely covered two villages while people slept. ''There are people buried underneath and a number of them are, from what I have heard, children,'' he reportedly told the The National. The Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill, was reportedly rushing to the scene, near Tari.
Nanduka Yandi, an aid worker for the US non-government organisation Population Services International, was at the scene of the landslide soon after it happened. He said many people were killed and few had escaped.
''It covered 42 houses and only three or four people managed to escape. Everyone else died,'' he said by telephone. ''It is quite remote and yesterday there was hardly anyone here to dig out the bodies or help people. People lost their entire families. They are in shock.''