Fake US tweets of start of World War 3 –
The New York Post and United Press International (UPI) have had their Twitter accounts hacked and fake tweets on economic and military news posted. On UPI’s Twitter feed the Pope was quoted as saying that “World War III has begun” and the NY Post had a tweet that hostilities had broken out between the United States and China. The attacks follow the ones on US Central Command on 12th January 2015.

Stephen Fry gets married –
Comedian, actor and QI presenter Stephen Fry (57) marries his 27-year-old partner Elliot Spencer and announced it in a tweet:

His “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” comedy partner and star of House M.D. Hugh Laurie responded with his own tweet:

Plans for the wedding at Dereham Registration Office in Norfolk were revealed on January 6th 2015

New running on water record –
Shi Liliang, a monk from Quanzhou, southeast China’s Fujian province, has broken his own record for running on plywood sheets floating on water. He managed a distance of 120 meters in Changsha, capital of central China’s Hunan province breaking his previous best of 118 meters that he had kept.

Video of the Day –

A Guide to Cracks & Curbs: London from Stay Wild on Vimeo.

List of the day –

Quite Interesting: 50 amazing facts from the QI book (collated by the Daily Mirror)

1 When customers visited the UK’s first supermarkets they were afraid to pick up goods in case they were told off.

2 Women buy 80% of everything that is for sale.

3 Nelson Mandela was not removed from the US terror watch list until 2008.

4 The founder of match.com, Gary Kremen, lost his girlfriend to a man she met onmatch.com.

5 The proud owner of the first silicone breast implant was a dog called Esmeralda.

6 In 1915, the lock millionaire Cecil Chubb bought his wife Stonehenge. She didn’t like it, so in 1918 he gave it to the nation.

7 Thomas Edison’s last breath is held in a vial at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.

8 A pumping human heart can squirt blood 30ft.

9 In ancient Greek the word “idiot” meant anyone who wasn’t a politician.

10 Jimmy Carter once sent a jacket to the cleaner’s with the nuclear detonation codes still in the pocket.

11 The second man to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, Bobby Leach, survived the fall but later died as a result of slipping on a piece of orange peel.

12 Just like humans, British cows moo in regional accents.

13 Every year, 4 million cats are eaten in Asia.

14 Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don’t eat rice.

15 John Cleese’s father’s surname was Cheese. Cleese grew up 10miles from Cheddar and his best friend at school was called Barney Butter.

16 The last private resident of 10 Downing Street was a Mr Chicken.

17 The shortest war ever fought was between Britain and Zanzibar on August 27, 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

18 The sun’s core is so hot that a piece of it the size of a pinhead would give off enough heat to kill a person 160 kilometres away.

19 Liechtenstein, the world’s sixth smallest country, is the largest exporter of false teeth.

20 Michael J Fox’s middle name is Andrew.

21 In 1811, nearly a quarter of all the women in Britain were named Mary.

22 In 1881, there were only six men in Britain called Derek.

23 Only 4 Clives and 13 Trevors were born in the UK in 2011.

24 It’s unsafe for travellers to rely on St Christopher any more: he lost his sainthood in 1969.

25 Until 1913, children in America could legally be sent by parcel post.

26 China is the world’s largest supplier of Bibles: one factory in Nanjing prints a million a month.

27 Ants can survive in a microwave: they are small enough to dodge the rays.

28 Heroin was originally marketed as cough medicine.

29 The Nazis made it illegal on pain of death for apes to give the Heil Hitler salute.

30 When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the suspects was Picasso.

31 The Dyslexia Research Centre is in Reading.

32 The United States of America maintains a military presence in 148 of the 192 United Nations countries.

33 If you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take you exactly 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.

34 Beyonce Knowles is an 8th cousin, four times removed, of Gustav Mahler.

35 All but one of the ravens at the Tower of London died from stress during the Blitz.

36 George W Bush and Saddam Hussein had their shoes hand-made by the same Italian cobbler.

37 In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole school.

38 The Irish poet Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight.

39 In Afghanistan and Iraq it takes 250,000 bullets (three tons of ammunition) to kill each insurgent.

40 Baseball legend Babe Ruth always wore a cabbage leaf under his cap to keep his head cool. In South Korea, this is considered unsporting, unless the player has a doctor’s note.

41 Under extreme high pressure, diamonds can be made from peanut butter.

42 The citizens of Kuwait celebrated the end of the first Gulf War by firing weapons into the air. 20 Kuwaitis died as a result of bullets falling from the sky.

43 The Sami people of northern Finland use a measure called Poronkusema: the distance a reindeer can walk before needing to urinate.

44 In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford.

45 In 1999, Darlington FC acquired 50,000 worms to irrigate their waterlogged pitch. They all drowned.

46 Edmund Hillary, right, the first man to climb Everest, was a professional beekeeper. When filling in forms, he always gave his occupation as “apiarist”.

47 Tintin is called Tantan in Japanese because TinTinis pronounced ‘Chin chin’ and means penis.

48 The water in the mouth of ablue whale weighs more thanits body.

49 Saddam’s bunker was designed by the grandson of the woman who built Hitler’s bunker.

50 The first-ever edition of the Daily Mirror came with a free mirror.

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Other News Stories –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• Terrorism in Yemen
  • Gunmen abduct the chief of staff to Yemen‘s president in the center of the capital, Sana’a. It is uncertain if Shiite Houthi rebels or al-Qaeda militants kidnapped Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak. (AP)
• Violence surrounding various protests against Charlie Hebdo leaves five protesters dead as well as some churches set ablaze in Niger. (BBC), (AFP via The Telegraph)
• Islamist insurgency in Nigeria:
  • Following the January 16 Chad authorities decision to send troops to Nigeria and Cameroon to fight Boko Harammilitants, the Russian ambassador to the country pledges to supply Cameroon with more modern weapons to combat the Islamist insurgents. (AFP via The Economic Times)
• 2013–15 Ukrainian crisis:
  • Clashes between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia rebels over Donetsk International Airport intensifies. (Al Jazeera)
• Greek anti-terror police arrest four people in Athens, Greece in alleged relation to the January 15 failed terrorist plot to kill police officers in Belgium. (Sky News Australia)

Arts and culture

• 2015 Papal visit to Sri Lanka and the Philippines
  • Pope Francis celebrates mass at Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda)-hit city of Tacloban with an audience of half-a-million people. (BBC)
  • The Pope cuts his Tacloban trip short as an approaching typhoon threatened the city in the Philippines. This cyclone may also affect Francis’s scheduled closing Mass on Sunday in the capital, Manila. (CNN) (AP via U-T San Diego)

Disasters and accidents

• The rescue and recovery efforts at the wreckage of the January 15 capsized tugboat on China‘s Yangtze River near the city of Jingjiang finds that twenty-one people are dead while three are rescued. (Straits Times)
• An entourage plane accompanying the Pope and carrying government officials experiences high winds and blows off the runway minutes after the pontiff’s aircraft takes off safely in the Philippines. (The Independent)
• The Bridger Pipeline Company spills up to 50,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, near Glendive, Montana.(CBS)

Law and crime

• Pemberton Township, New Jersey police arrest a woman and charge her with the murder of her newborn baby girl which she set on fire. Officers extinguish the fire, but the child later dies. (AP via MSN)

Sports

• In football, the Africa Cup of Nations gets underway in Equatorial Guinea. The tournament was scheduled to be hosted by Morocco, but they refused to act as host because of the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa. (AAP via SBS)

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