Camp X-Ray trial
1 Guantanamo Bay Osama Bin Laden’s former driver was convicted at the
first military trial at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday. Salim Hamdan was found
guilty of helping Bin Laden evade capture but acquitted of conspiring in
acts of terrorism. Described as a “lowly employee”, Hamdan sat with his head
in his hands as the verdict was read out. He spent four years as Bin Laden’s
driver and was paid $200 a month while Al-Qaeda attacked embassies and
plotted the 9/11 attack on America.
Human rights lawyers have criticised the tribunals for allowing information
obtained under duress to be admitted as evidence. Hamdan, who was kept in
isolation and deprived of sleep, was sentenced to 5½ years in prison by a
judge and jury made up of naval officers. He is expected to appeal.
Swinging Italy
2 Italy Wife-swapping is all the rage in Italy, according to the
strait-laced daily La Stampa, which reports that as many as 500,000 Italian
couples regularly engage in sex swaps at clubs across the country. The
Rome-based swingers’ organisation Federsex claimed the real figures could be
closer to 2m, a quarter of the 8m sexually active couples in Italy. In this
staunchly Catholic country, the internet was blamed for stripping away
taboos.
Polar bear suit
3 Alaska Are polar bears an endangered species? The state of Alaska has
filed a lawsuit against the US government in an effort to overturn the
animal’s “at risk” status, says The New York Times. Sarah Palin, Alaska’s
Republican governor, claims that giving polar bears protection under the
Endangered Species Act will delay offshore oil and gas exploration. “The
decision to list the polar bear was not based on the best scientific data
available,” said Palin. The US interior department listed polar bears as a
threatened species in May.
Dead dog reborn
4 South Korea A woman who had her pet dog cloned by South Korean
scientists was unmasked last week as a former beauty queen who, 30 years
ago, stood accused of a kidnapping known as the “Mormon sex-slave case”. As
photos of Bernann McKinney, posing in Seoul with her cloned dog, flashed
around the world, it emerged that she was actually Joyce McKinney, pictured
below, who jumped bail in Epsom, Surrey, after kidnapping a 17-stone male
Mormon missionary, manacling him to a bed and forcing him to have sex with
her.
McKinney, who fled Britain in 1979 on a false passport for Canada, once said
she loved Anderson so much that she would “ski naked down Mount Everest with
a carnation up my nose if he asked me”.
Despite flatly denying the growing suspicion about her true identity, last
week McKinney did admit loving her dog Booger enough to part with £25,000 to
create five clones in the first transaction of its kind. She pronounced
herself delighted with her new Boogers.
French accused
5 Rwanda French politicians and soldiers have been accused of
involvement in the genocide 14 years ago in which about 1m of Rwanda’s
minority Tutsi tribe, and moderates from the majority Hutu tribe, were
killed in ethnic cleansing. Thirty-three French politicians, including the
late François Mitterrand, were named in a damning report published this
week, the result of a two-year investigation by Rwanda’s president, Paul
Kagame. It alleges that the French knew the genocide was being planned as
early as 1990 and sent arms to the regime after the killing started, and
that French soldiers took part in raping and killing Tutsis. Rosemary
Museminali, the Rwandan foreign minister, said: “It is important that this
comes out and that people are tried.” France has admitted making mistakes in
Rwanda but denies complicity with the genocide.
Gay Barça
6 Spain Barcelona is increasingly being touted as the “gay capital of
the Mediterranean”, El Pais reported last week. The city has recently hosted
a “gay circus”, an international meeting for homosexual policemen against
discrimination and various gay art exhibitions. It also staged the latest
edition of the Eurogames, or what some called the “gay Olympics”.
Freeman ditched
7 Mississippi The Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman was discharged
from hospital on Thursday after a car he was driving on Sunday came off the
road in Mississippi, landing in a ditch. Freeman, who needed surgery to his
left arm and hand, was at the wheel of a Nissan with a female friend in the
passenger seat. On Monday it emerged that Freeman is ending his 24-year
marriage. Clay McFerrin, editor of the Charleston Sun-Sentinel, who was one
of the first on the scene, said: “When a spectator tried to take a photo,
the actor joked, ‘No freebies, no freebies’.”
Comedian tried
8 Burma One of Burma’s most popular comedians has been charged with
public order offences after he helped victims of Cyclone Nargis, which
killed tens of thousands in May this year. Zarganar, whose name translates
as Tweezers, helped deliver aid to homeless families in defiance of a
government edict that only the military should be involved. A fierce critic
of the generals who govern Burma, Zarganar appeared at a special court on
Wednesday. There have been many reports that aid supplies are being siphoned
off by soldiers.
Cosmic discovery
9 Holland A Dutch schoolteacher has discovered a new kind of cosmic
object while taking part in an astronomy project that allows users to
classify space matter online. Hanny Van Arkel, 25, came across the green,
gaseous blob while she was using the Galaxy Zoo website. Unable to match it
to any of the galaxy types described in the project’s tutorial, Van Arkel
contacted the website’s administrators.
Astronomers from Oxford University concluded that the apparently unique
formation, since dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (Object), is an echo of light from
a quasar, powered by a black hole that has since gone dim.
Festival spirit
10 Lebanon After a two-year break in which Lebanon teetered on the
brink of war and political chaos, music is once again drifting through the
columns of a Roman temple in the Bekaa valley outside Beirut. The Baalbek
International Festival, the Middle East’s most celebrated cultural event,
which has in the past featured stars such as Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis
and Sting, has made a comeback. Joseph Chemali, the vice-president of the
festival, said: “Once the festival goes ahead it means the country’s in good
shape again.”
