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.”

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