Top Story –
Two Belgian bankrobbers are named the Darwin Award winners of the year after killing themselves while trying to crack open a cash machine. The pair used so much dynamite that they managed to destroy the entire bank building – and themselves with it. Wendy Northcutt, the founder of the annual awards, declared them the 2009 winners of the Darwin Awards, given to those doing the most to improve the human gene pool by removing themselves from it.

Top Video –
Red Rabbit

Red Rabbit from Egmont Mayer on Vimeo.

Top News –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• The Ugandan army announces it has killed Bok Abudema, a senior member of the Lord’s Resistance Army, in theCentral African Republic. (AFP) (BBC)
• Piracy in Somalia
  • Somali pirates seize an Indonesian chemical tanker with 24 crew in the Gulf of Aden and a British cargo ship with 26 cars 620 miles off the Horn of Africa. (Times of India) (RTT News) (BBC)
• The Israeli Air Force launches an attack against tunnels leading from Gaza into Israel in response to missile attacks and mortar fire. (Haaretz) (Al Jazeera)

Arts and culture

• 19-year-old Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is confirmed as the youngest-ever world number one in the official January 2010 FIDE rating list. (Reuters) (TIME) (AFP) (Chessbase)

Discoveries

• An Antarctic expedition finds remains of the first aeroplane brought to the continent, a single-propeller Vickers plane of explorer Douglas Mawson. (Reuters)

Law and crime

• Police in Denmark shoot a 28-year-old male Somali after he breaks into the Viby J home of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist at the centre of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005, and threatens his family with an axe. (BBC) (The Times) (Sky News)

Politics and elections

• A quarter of voters in Iceland sign a petition asking President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to veto a bill on repaying US$5 billion to foreign savers who lost their money when Icelandic banks collapsed. (ABC News) (Iceland Review)
• The Afghan Parliament rejects 17 out of 24 cabinet nominees proposed by President Hamid Karzai. (The Daily Telegraph) (Hürriyet) (Al Jazeera)

Religion

• Atheist Ireland purposefully publishes the words of Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Salman Rushdie, Mark Twain and Pope Benedict XVI on its website despite a new law banning them on grounds of blasphemy. (BBC) (CNN) (Irish Times)

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