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Where: Cerrejon, Colombia February 4, 2009 : ‘Nature’ journal reports that the snake, named ‘Titanoboa cerrejonensis’ by the scientists who found the remains, would have had a 13-metre-long body and weighed 1,140 kilograms, making it the largest snake on record. A mathematical ratio between the size of vertebrae and the length of the body in living snakes was used by the team to estimate the size. The world’s heaviest snakes, green anacondas, weigh only 250 kilograms, and the longest, reticulated pythons, measure 10 metres at the most....
Where: Washington, DC, U.S.A. January 20, 2009 : Barack Obama became the first African-American President of the U.S.A. in a year which is also the 200th birth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln, the President who abolished slavery in that country. African-Americans first went to America as slaves, and they did not have the same rights as white people even as recently as the middle years of the twentieth century. Despite freezing weather conditions and high security, a record number of people (over a million) gathered outside Washington D....
Where: Brussels, Belgium January 10, 2009 : Tintin made his first appearance in a Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle (The 20th Century) on January 10, 1929. This comic strip eventually became ‘Tintin in the Land of the Soviets’. There are 24 Tintin comic books in all, translated into more than 60 languages, including English – the originals are all in French! Over 200 million Tintin comic books have been sold worldwide. In an age before there were cartoons on television, these books were simply devoured by generations of readers, who loved to ‘travel’ with their hero....
Where: Melbourne, Australia February 9, 2009 : Australia’s worst disaster in over a century, the bushfires could claim up to 230 victims. Bush* fires are common occurrences in the hot and dry Australian summer. This summer, the country has seen a severe drought and recorded temperatures as high as 47 degrees centigrade, as well as winds at speeds of over 90 km per hour. The fires have already destroyed more than 750 homes and an area of nearly 3,500 square kilometres....
Where: Athens, Greece December 11, 2008 : The shooting took place after a verbal disagreement between two police officers and a small group of people in the Exarcheia district of Athens. Eyewitnesses said the police officer fired directly at the boy. In the riots that followed, protesters expressed their rage against the government. They set hundreds of buildings on fire, and hurled petrol bombs at police. Even the giant Christmas tree on Athens’ central Syntagma Square was torched....
Where: Hyderabad, India January 09, 2009 : Satyam, India’s fourth-largest software company, is at the centre of the country’s biggest corporate scandal. The group’s Chairman, Ramalinga Raju revealed on 7 January, 2009, that around US $1.04 billion (Rs. 5000 crore or 94% of the company’s cash assets, was non-existent, and that figures and account books had been ‘cooked’, or modified, to show profits. Raju resigned from the Board of Directors, and his location is at present unknown....
Where: London, United Kingdom January 10, 2009 : An interesting story by BBC News tells how a team of London doctors, including five anesthetists, two general practitioners and a vascular surgeon climbed Mt. Everest. They then treated themselves as guinea pigs to measure oxygen levels present in their blood at the summit. The readings confirmed that high-altitude climbers have extremely low levels of oxygen in their blood. At sea-level these would only be seen in patients who were close to death....
Where: Samarinda, Indonesia January 26, 2009 : The annular eclipse of the sun on Monday, 26 January was a celestial spectacle, seen in several parts of Indonesia, and on the Cocos, a South Pacific island group. These areas fell directly in line with the alignment of the moon and sun. People cheered and banged on drums as the moon moved slowly over the sun’s surface, until only a thin, blazing rim of fire could be seen....
Where: Vavuniya, Sri Lanka January 30, 2009 : The Sri Lankan army has been engaged in fierce fighting with the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) forces. In the first weeks of 2009, the army took control of the main rebel bases of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. The LTTE is a militant group that formed in 1976, and their campaign to carve out an independent state for the minority Tamil population in the country’s northern region led to a raging civil war....
Where: Bangalore, India January 29, 2009 : The possibility of water-ice existing on the polar regions of the moon is one of the questions that scientists aim to discuss at a meeting to mark the first hundred days of Chandrayaan-I. The scientists include representatives from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Chandrayaan-I has so far captured the first-ever images of the dark side of the moon, detected the presence of iron and received X-ray signals from its cratered surface....
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