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India gives “king of sweets” a geographical tag to end bitter rivalry

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India has awarded a “geographical indications” tag to rosogolla, the king of Indian sweets, after a years-long battle between two neighbouring states over the ownership rights.

Luscious rosogolla, or sweet cheese balls dripping with sugar syrup, have long been a favourite dessert across the Indian subcontinent and among the diaspora.

But two eastern states, West Bengal and Odisha, have been arguing over the origins of rosogolla, which means a ball of sweet. They consulted historians and produced old documents to support their claims.

On Tuesday, the federal commerce and industry ministry ruled that the sweet originated from West Bengal, giving it the coveted “geographical indications” tag.

The World Trade Organisation says “geographical indications” defines a good as originating in a particular territory of a member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is available.

West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee welcomed the decision saying in a Twitter post it was “sweet news for us all”.

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“No cash, Carney?” Bank of England Governor unable to find wallet

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Bank of England Governor Mark Carney appeared unable to find his wallet while attending a central bank event to promote public understanding of economics.

When everyone in the room was asked to take out a purse or wallet, as an example of something that represented the economy, Carney hunted in several pockets before drawing a blank.

“No cash, Carney?” television host and conference moderator Ranvir Singh said jokingly to the central bank governor.

Earlier, the Canadian-born Carney said he first visited the Liverpool area three decades ago, when local rock group the Lightning Seeds – later well-known for an England soccer anthem – became his favourite band. He also supports local soccer team Everton.

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Finnish police rap deputy minister for hiding in car boot in govt crisis

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Finnish police reprimanded a man for travelling in a car boot to hide his meeting with Prime Minister Juha Sipila during a government crisis last summer, saying this was breach of the traffic code.

A police statement did not name the man in the boot, but in effect indicated the traveller was State Secretary Samuli Virtanen, who is also the deputy to Foreign Minister Timo Soini.

The meeting took place in June, a day after Virtanen’s co-ruling Finns party had elected anti-immigration hardliners as its new leaders.

The government was close to collapse until a group of politicians, including Virtanen and Soini, in the following week walked out of the Finns party and announced they would form a new group.

The Finns party was thrown out of the government and the new “Blue Reform” group kept its cabinet seat.

Virtanen has not commented on the case, but lawmaker Tiina Elovaara from Blue Reform said in a blog that Virtanen climbed into the boot to keep the meeting secret at a critical moment.

“He avoided media attention when the situation was most serious, and the risk of leakage about the parliamentarians’ transition was too big,” Elovaara said.

Police said that the man had travelled a few tens of metres in the back of the car, failing to use a safety belt. He had admitted the act to the police.

The road from the Prime Minister’s residency has little traffic, and only the man was at risk of harm, the police said.

“The given notification is considered as a sufficient sanction,” Inspector Pekka Seppala said.

He added that the police had been asked to investigate the case based on information in media reports.

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U.S. Navy crew grounded after pilot draws penis in the sky

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A U.S. Navy air crew was grounded on Friday after using their advanced fighter jet to draw a giant image of a penis in the sky with the exhaust, officials said.

The incident took place in skies over Okanogan County in Washington state, when a Navy E/A-18 Growler warplane flew the unusual air pattern.

Images of a condensed air trail in the shape of a penis immediately went viral on social media. A local television station said one mother in Okanogan County was concerned she might have to explain them to her young children.

The Navy, which is trying to crack down on sexual assault in its ranks, issued a formal apology on Friday for what it called an “irresponsible and immature act.”

“Sophomoric and immature antics of a sexual nature have no place in Naval aviation today,” Vice Admiral Mike Shoemaker, the commander of Naval Air Forces, said in a statement.

“We will investigate this incident to get all the facts and act accordingly.”

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British embassy cat in Jordan appointed chief mouser

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At the British embassy in Jordan, a former rescue cat is settling into his new position as chief mouser.

“Lawrence of Abdoun” is a fluffy black-and-white tom who, according to his Twitter feed, reports directly to the Foreign Office’s Palmerston, a cat that delights his 57,000 followers with regular updates from the ministry in Whitehall via @DiploMog.

Lawrence, named after T.E. Lawrence, a British military officer who fought alongside Arabs against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, has already gained 2,500 followers since being adopted from an animal shelter last month.

Abdoun is the neighbourhood of Amaan where the embassy is located.

“Apart from his mousing duties, he reaches out to followers on Twitter. What’s quite interesting is the British public are seeing the U.K embassy in Jordan in a different light,” said Deputy Ambassador Laura Dauban.

“Through Lawrence’s Twitter account we’re trying to show a different side to Jordan, what it is really like, a peaceful, prosperous country that British tourists should come and visit.”

Tweeting under the name @LawrenceDipCat, Lawrence has discovered the perils of social media and has even been fat-shamed by trolls.

“He’s been a bit upset because some people have said he looked a bit fat in the last tweet he did, so he’ll be doing some exercises and posting to sort of rectify that situation,” Dauban said.

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Finland baker launches bread made from crushed crickets

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Finnish bakery and food service company Fazer launched recently what it said was the world’s first insect-based bread to be offered to consumers in stores.

The bread, made from flour ground from dried crickets as well as wheat flour and seeds, contains more protein than normal wheat bread. Each loaf contains about 70 crickets and costs 3.99 euros ($4.72), compared with 2 to 3 euros for a regular wheat loaf.

“It offers consumers with a good protein source and also gives them an easy way to familiarise themselves with insect-based food,” said Juhani Sibakov, head of innovation at Fazer Bakeries.

The demand to find more food sources and a desire to treat animals more humanely have raised interest in using insects as a protein source in several Western countries.

In November, Finland joined five other European countries – Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Denmark – in allowing insects to be raised and marketed for food use.

Sibakov said Fazer had developed the bread since last summer. It had to wait for legislation to be passed in Finland for the launch.

“I don’t taste the difference … It tastes like bread,” said Sara Koivisto, a student from Helsinki after trying the new product.

Due to a limited supply of crickets, the insect-bread will initially only be sold in 11 Fazer bakery stores located in Helsinki region hypermarkets, but the company plans to offer it in all 47 of its stores by next year.

The company buys its cricket flour from the Netherlands, but said it was also looking for local suppliers.

Fazer, a family business with sales of about 1.6 billion euros last year, did not give a sales target for the product.

Insect-eating, or entomophagy, is common in much of the world. The United Nations estimated last year that at least 2 billion people eat insects and more than 1,900 species have been used for food.

In Western countries, edible bugs are gaining traction in niche markets, particularly among those seeking a gluten-free diet or wanting to protect the environment because farming insects uses less land, water and feed than animal husbandry.

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Flipping lids! Chinese barber offers eyelid shaves

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Chinese street barber Xiong Gaowu deftly scrapes a straight razor along the inside of his customer’s eyelid.

“You should be gentle, very, very gentle,” said Xiong, who performs traditional eyelid shaves at his roadside location in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan.

Customers swear by the practice of “blade wash eyes”, as it is known in Mandarin, saying they trust Xiong’s skill with the blade.

“No, it’s not dangerous,” said 68-year-old Zhang Tian. “My eyes feel refreshed after shaving and I feel comfortable.”

Xiong, 62, said he learned the technique in the 1980s and serves up to eight customers a week, charging 80 yuan ($12) per shave.

“It was difficult at the beginning, but it became a piece of cake afterwards,” he said.

The technique appears to unblock moisturizing sebaceous glands along the rim of the eyelid, said Qu Chao, an opthalmologist who works at a nearby hospital in Chengdu.

“Patients will feel their eyes are dry and uncomfortable when the glands are blocked,” she said. “When he is shaving, it is most likely that he is shaving the openings of these glands.”

She said there was a risk of infection if the equipment was not sterilised.

“If he can properly sterilize the tools that he uses, I can still see there is a space for this technique to survive,” Qu said.

While customers insisted their eyes felt better after a shave, onlookers cringed at the sight of Xiong wielding his razor.

“I am afraid to do it,” said He Yiting, 27, who winced as she watched.

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Abominable news: Purported yeti evidence came from bears, dog

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For fans of the yeti, newly published genetic research on purported specimens of the legendary apelike beast said to dwell in the Himalayan region may be too much to bear – literally.

Scientists said on Tuesday that genetic analysis of nine bone, tooth, skin, hair and fecal samples from museum and private collections attributed to the yeti, also called the Abominable Snowman, found that eight came from Asian black bears, Himalayan brown bears or Tibetan brown bears and one came from a dog.

“This strongly suggests that the yeti legend has a root in biological facts and that is has to do with bears that are living in the region today,” said biologist Charlotte Lindqvist of the University at Buffalo in New York and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, who led the study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Lindqvist called the study the most rigorous analysis to date of purported yeti specimens. The researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA, genetic material in structures within cells that was passed down from mothers, of purported yeti samples from Tibet, India and Nepal as well as from black, brown and polar bear populations.

File photo: Actors dressed as a ‘Yeti’ ride aboard a tour bus during a promotional event in Manhattan New York

The yeti is a creature of folklore in the Himalayan region that has become a part of Western popular culture. It is separate from North America’s Sasquatch and Big Foot folklore.

“I initially became involved in this study when I was contacted about a previous study that found two purported yeti samples to match genetically with an ancient, 120,000-year-old polar bear that I was doing research on,” Lindqvist said.

“But the data was very limited, and it made me suspicious about the speculation that the yeti legend represented some strange, hybrid bear roaming the Himalaya mountains. So, I agreed to follow up on this study with a more rigorous approach based on more genetic data from more purported yeti samples,” Lindqvist added.

Lindqvist said purported yeti samples came from places including the Messner Mountain Museum in Italy and were gathered by British independent television production company Icon Films.

While no actual yeti was identified, the DNA research shed light on bear populations in the region.

The brown bears roaming the high altitudes of the Tibetan Plateau and those in the western Himalayan mountains appear to belong to two separate bear populations separated from each other for thousands of years, despite their relative geographic proximity, Lindqvist said.

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Weird news grabs headlines in 2017

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President Donald Trump’s Oval Office style dominated U.S. headlines in 2017, but readers were particularly perplexed by his use of the word “covfefe,” in what turned out to be one of the oddest news stories of the year.

A tweet by Trump in May read simply: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

White House officials batted away questions about what the word meant and even the dictionary company Merriam-Webster drew a blank. Trump left it up to the reader to divine his meaning, with a follow-up: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!”

But he was not alone in leaving readers scratching their heads. Even outside Washington, the year produced a spate of weird news, including odd pranks and poorly considered crimes.

Los Angeles residents awoke on New Year’s Day to find the four-story white letters of the world-famous “Hollywood” sign had been altered to read: “Hollyweed.” The prank came just two months after California voters approved the recreational use of marijuana despite a federal ban.

Austin, Texas, police were tipped off to an illegal brothel when hundreds of condoms clogged a city sewer pipe in March. The blockage at Jade Massage Therapy was the smoking gun that led to the arrest of two people for prostitution and money laundering.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents were spared a spine-chilling surprise when a California man was arrested in July for trying to smuggle three highly poisonous king cobra snakes hidden in potato chip canisters.

Crooks had planned the latest haul of snakes in a can after all 20 king cobras in a previous shipment died in transit, authorities said.

Back in the political arena, an octogenarian ex-con New Jersey politician revived her burlesque act at a May fundraiser – although she kept her clothes on.

Former Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, who is in her early 80s and danced as “Hope Diamond,” performed in a gown and feather boa to raise cash for a non-profit dance company, three years after being released from prison following a bribery conviction.

Animal stories also captured the public’s attention.

Millions watched via webcam as April, a giraffe, gave birth to a 6-foot-tall (1.83-meter) male calf. From around the globe, her fans watched her endure the conclusion of a 16-month pregnancy at Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York – in April, of course.

Months earlier, a small moth with a yellowish-white coif of scales was named for then-President-elect Trump, who wears a similar hairstyle, researchers told the scientific journal ZooKeys.

The new species of insect, Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, is native to Southern California and Mexico’s Baja California, and is likely capable of flying over the proposed border wall with Mexico that was a central promise of Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Does Pentagon still have a UFO program? The answer is a bit mysterious

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The Pentagon acknowledged on Saturday that its long-secret UFO investigation program ended in 2012, when U.S. defense officials shifted attention and funding to other priorities.

But as to whether the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program has continued to investigate UFO sightings since its funding ended five years ago could rank as an unexplained phenomenon.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that the hush-hush program, tasked with investigating sightings of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, ran from 2007 to 2012 with $22 million in annual funding secretly tucked away in U.S. Defense Department budgets worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Its initial funding came largely at the request of former Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat long known for his enthusiasm for space phenomena, the newspaper said.

Yet according to its backers, the program remains in existence and officials continue to investigate UFO episodes brought to their attention by service members, the newspaper said.

The Pentagon openly acknowledged the fate of the program in response to a Reuters query.

“The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program ended in the 2012 timeframe,” Pentagon spokeswoman Laura Ochoa said in an email.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” she said.

But the Pentagon was less clear about whether the UFO program continues to hover somewhere in the vast universe of the U.S. defense establishment.

“The DoD takes seriously all threats and potential threats to our people, our assets, and our mission and takes action whenever credible information is developed,” Ochoa said.

What is less in doubt is former senator Reid’s enthusiasm for UFOs and his likely role in launching the Pentagon initiative to identify advanced aviation threats.

“If you’ve talked to Harry Reid for > 60 seconds then it’s the least surprising thing ever that he loves UFOs and got an earmark to study them,” former Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman said in a message on Twitter.

Or as Reid himself said in a tweet that linked to the Times’ story: “The truth is out there. Seriously.”

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Got sex questions? Google before you ask Siri

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If you need to know how to have sex, use contraception or avoid sexually transmitted infections, you may want to do a Google search before you ask Siri for help, a new study suggests.

When researchers posed similar sexual health questions to smartphone digital assistants like Siri and to Google’s online search engine, the web-based results were often more likely to provide accurate information.

“If people want to get internet-based sex advice or other health advice online, they should first probably do a laptop Google search according to our results, and then try Google Assistant – but not rule out other digital assistants such as Alexa and Bixby,” said lead study author Nick Wilson, a researcher at the University of Otago in Wellington, New Zealand.

“But if you want amusing wrong results – Siri is probably best,” Wilson said by email.

Two in five teens and adults go online looking for answers about sex, Wilson and colleagues note in The BMJ.

To see how well computers and smartphones may respond to these queries, researchers typed some common sexual health questions into Google’s online search engine and also spoke out loud to two smartphone tools, Siri and Google Assistant.

For each question, researchers checked answers for relevance and reliability. They gave higher marks to questions answered with links to credible public health sources like the UK National Health Service, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Planned Parenthood, or hospitals and universities.

Answers that sent people to less reliable sources of information like Wikipedia or product advertisements got lower marks.

Google online searches provided the best, or among the best, responses 72 percent of the time, compared with 50 percent of the time for Google Assistant and 32 percent of the time for Siri, the study found.

When researchers asked “how to have sex,” for example, Google searchers and Google Assistant sent people to instructional videos on how to use condoms or a YouTube video using a wooden penis that has over six million views, the study found.

But Google wasn’t perfect. In response to one question, Google offered a video clip entitled: “The 5 stupidest ways people die having sex.”

Siri didn’t find any videos of people having sex on the internet, the study found.

Even when researchers asked for pictures of people having sex, Siri offered some strange responses like pictures with aliens, what looked like men wrestling, and photos of people kissing.

When people asked for information about sexually transmitted infections, though, Siri came out on top. Siri offered nearby places to buy condoms or obtain emergency contraception.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how different online searches or digital assistants might be able to give people the best advice about sexual health.

Another limitation is that the performance of these tools can vary by device and change with software updates.

Still, the findings add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that online and digital technology can have some limitations when it comes to giving people accurate information about their health, said Dr. Karandeep Singh, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who wasn’t involved in the study.

When it comes to sex, however, it’s possible people might not always want to ask their smartphones for help, Singh said by email.

“The fact that questions need to be spoken aloud is a large enough barrier to privacy that people are more likely to direct sensitive questions to online searches as opposed to smartphone assistants,” Singh said.

“Besides digital assistants, technology savvy users have access to many other tools to ask for help or advice: online medical forums, patient communities like PatientsLikeMe, general question-answer apps like Quora, and tools to contact doctors online like HealthTap,” Singh added.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.

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London cafe unveils the “selfieccino”

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A cafe in London is taking barista art to a new level by giving customers the chance to sip on their own self-portraits.

The Tea Terrace, based in House of Fraser’s Oxford Street branch, has become Europe’s first location to deliver the “Selfieccino,” which features an image of customers’ faces on the frothy topping of their drinks.

Patrons send their headshots via an online messaging app to the barista and are given the choice of either a cappuccino or hot chocolate as their canvas.

The image is uploaded to the “Cino” machine while the drink is placed in position. The picture is then scanned and reproduced onto the froth using a flavourless food colouring.

The process takes around four minutes before an image is presented on the froth, ready to be photographed and sent to all points via social media before drinking, and costs around 5.75 pounds. ($7.5)

“Due to social media, the dining experience has completely shifted,” Ehab Salem Shouly, owner of The Tea Terrace told Reuters. “It’s not enough any more to just deliver great food and great service – it’s got to be Instagram worthy.”

Over 400 of the personalised drinks have been sold since they launched on Saturday, with the hash tag “Selfieccino” going viral across various social media platforms.

The Tea Terrace hopes to trademark the term as they expand the service across their other two locations in London Victoria and Guildford, Surrey.

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Coffee-fuelled buses to disco soups: five quirky uses of waste in 2017

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From London buses rumbling along on the power of coffee beans to a football legend championing the transformation of plastic bottles into building blocks, 2017 has been a year full of innovative uses for the things we usually throw away.

Here are five of the quirkiest uses of waste worldwide:

London buses
The red London bus may be an age-old symbol of the British capital – yet in recent months it is also becoming the focus of an innovative scheme to cut the city’s carbon emissions.

Waste coffee grounds will now be used to help fuel some of London’s buses, Royal Dutch Shell (RDSa.L) and clean technology company bio-bean announced in November. The new biofuel, which contains part coffee oil, can be used without the need for engine modification, the companies said in a statement.

With the average Londoner drinking 2.3 cups of coffee a day according to bio-bean, wasted grounds are collected from high street coffee chains and factories, and then dried and processed to extract the coffee oil.

Poo Power
“Flying toilets” – usually a plastic bag filled with poo and often flung overhead in a random direction – has long been a pesky problem in some of Kenya’s most fetid slums.

But developers have found a new way of not only collecting toilet waste hygienically but also turning it into fuel.

Social enterprise Sanivation installs “blue box” plastic toilet containers in customers’ homes for free, then charges a monthly fee of 700 Kenya shillings ($6.78) to collect the waste.

The excrement is then heated to kill dangerous bacteria and turned it into (odour-less) charcoal balls, sold in supermarkets under the brand Eco Flame.

This means less trees are felled to cook food for Kenya’s 44 million people, who are rapidly depleting its forests by illegal settlements, logging and charcoal production.

Plastic bottle building blocks
In Cameroon, football legend Roger Milla – whose hip-shaking dance moves propelled him to international fame at the 1990 World Cup – has turning to recycling plastic bottles in order to make building blocks.

His organisation Coeur d’Afrique (Heart of Africa) pays around 300 unemployed young people in the country’s capital, Yaounde, to collect the plastic which blocks drains and exacerbates flooding during the rainy seasons.

Slabs made from the recovered plastic have already been used in construction projects in the city, including a national sporting facility for handball.

Waste for plastic
Meanwhile in Tanzania, by February 2017 one entrepreneur had transformed nearly 1 million kg of waste into “plastic lumber” that can be used for fences, house beams, signposts and more.

The initiative by EcoAct Tanzania won the $10,000 Africa Finance and Investment Forum Entrepreneurship Award in Nairobi earlier this year. The company says it is reducing waste in the East African nation’s cluttered commercial capital, while creating jobs for young people and saving trees.

Raving for rubbish
In April 2017, night-revelers across five continents took to the dance floor in an unusual effort – a mass rave to tackle food waste.

The world’s first ever World Disco Soup day, an event promoted by the Slow Food movement to encourage young people to think about the mountains of food thrown out every day, was powered with food that would otherwise have been thrown away.

Organisers collected ingredients from farmers, restaurants, retailers and markets and cooked them with the help of professional chefs and disco-crazy movers and shakers alike.

About a third of food produced every year, equal to approximately 1.3 billion tonnes, is never eaten because it is spoiled after harvest and duri transportation, or thrown away by shops and consumers.

Saving 25 percent of it would be enough to feed the more than 800 million people that go to bed hungry every night, according to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

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Swedish roofs can handle Santa’s sleigh – if he’s careful

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Sweden’s houses should be able to cope when Santa and his sleigh land on their snowy roofs this Christmas – as long as he doesn’t try to deliver too many presents in one go.

The portly Father Christmas probably weighs about 150 kg (330 lb) and his reindeer and sleigh a tonne, the Swedish construction company NCC calculated, allowing another 50 kg for gifts.

Swedish building requirements would easily handle that weight, plus 50 percent extra pressure from the force of the landing on the roof, and half a meter of snow, construction designer Thomas Lecher said.

However, presents for all the world’s 2 billion children, as well as a sack big enough to hold them, would weigh at least 200,000 tonnes if delivered on a single run.

“Under that sort of pressure, a Swedish house would be about as strong as paper,” Lecher said. “But it is clear as day that he has access to some sort of Christmas magic.”

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Estonian police send ‘black’ Christmas cards to driving offenders

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Estonian police have sent 700 Christmas cards to the Baltic country’s worst drivers, hoping that pictures of car crashes and road accident statistics will get repeat offenders to change their ways.

The cards are sent to drivers with five or more driving offences recorded during the year, mostly for speeding or driving under the influence.

“There have been so far more than 40 road deaths this year,” reads the card, which does not carry a personal greeting.

It blames the deaths, and injuries to more than 1,300 people, on drivers ignoring traffic rules and urges recipients to do all they can to keep the roads safe. “Believe us, your family and friends wish the same,” it adds.

The “black” Christmas cards, which police have sent since 2011, are among measures that have helped Estonia, with a population of 1.3 million, slash the number of road deaths from around 200 a year a decade ago. Drink-driving offences have also fallen, to 6,100 so far this year from 17,920 in 2007.

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Israel’s overweight hedgehogs go on diet

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Ten overweight hedgehogs have had to go on strict diets and exercise regimes after they ate so much on the streets of Israel they struggled to curl up into a ball to fend off predators.

Animal lovers found them waddling around and brought them into the hospital Ramat Gan zoo.

Staff there said the hedgehogs had probably been snacking on food left out for pets.

“A lot of people put cat food on the streets for the stray cats, which is very nice but … the problem is that there’s other wildlife that eats it,” zookeeper Becka Rifkin told Reuters.

One adult male named Sherman was 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) when he arrived at the facility two months ago, almost double the average weight for a hedgehog his age.

He has since lost 120 grams after staff monitored his diet and left him to run around an enclosure. They hope they will be able to release him by the summer.

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Dog guards body of dead owner for weeks over Christmas

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A dog has been rescued by animal protection services in Hungary after being found lying alongside the body of her mistress who died weeks before.

The 9-year-old Havanese, called Zsazsa, was in a severely dehydrated state when she was found in a Budapest apartment on Wednesday but was now recovering, Gabor Pataki, head of the animal rescue group Allatmento Liga, said on Friday.

The dog had some dry feed to eat, but doctors said she would have died within a couple of days if she had not been found, Pataki said, adding that the owner must have died weeks before.

Police opened up the flat after neighbours reported that the elderly owner had not been seen for some time.

“The dog was lying next to the dead body, and was so weak that she could not stand up. We had to drag her away,” Pataki said. He said many dogs would have died after such a trauma.

“But yesterday she was on her feet again and even wagged her tail.”

Police said the 66-year old woman appeared to have died of natural causes.

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Japanese astronaut apologises for ‘fake news’ of height increase

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Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai, on a mission to the International Space Station, apologised on Wednesday for saying he had grown 9 cm (3.5 inches) while in space and expressing concern about whether he’d be safe on his return to Earth.

Most astronauts “grow” during protracted space missions because their spines extend in the absence of gravity, but the gains are usually limited to a couple of centimeters (inches) maximum and disappear once they are back on the ground.

The 41-year-old Kanai, who went to space last month for a nearly six-month mission, posted on Twitter on Monday that he had “a big announcement.”

“My height’s been measured here in space and somehow, somehow, I’ve grown 9 cm! In only three weeks I’ve really shot up, something I haven’t seen since high school,” he tweeted.

“This makes me a little worried that I might not be able to fit in the Soyuz seats for our return.”

But a bit over a day later – and in the wake of a flurry of news stories – he apologised, saying that he’d measured himself after his captain raised questions about the apparent growth and he had stretched only 2 cm from his Earth-bound height.

“This mis-measurement appears to have become a big deal, so I must apologise for this terrible fake news,” he tweeted, without explaining how the original miscalculation had occurred.

“It appears I can fit on the Soyuz, so I’m relieved.”

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Prize camels keep tradition alive, but please no Botox!

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The dromedaries paraded down a dusty racetrack as judges rated the size of their lips, cheeks, heads and knees. Crowds of men watched from the bleachers, hooting when the beasts representing their own tribe loped down the track.

A dozen beasts have been disqualified from this year’s Saudi “camel beauty contest” because their handlers used Botox to make them more handsome.

“The camel,” explained the chief judge of the show, Fawzan al-Madi, “is a symbol of Saudi Arabia. We used to preserve it out of necessity, now we preserve it as a pastime.”

Much is changing in Saudi Arabia: the country is getting its first movie theatres. Soon women will be permitted to drive. The authorities eventually hope to diversify the economy away from the oil that has been its lifeblood for decades.

But as they seek to transform the conservative kingdom, the Saudi authorities are trying to smooth the path for reform by emphasising traditional aspects of their culture. And for the Bedouin of Arabia, nothing is more essential than the camel, used for centuries for food, transport, as a war machine and companion.

So, the authorities have ramped up the country’s annual month-long camel festival, which was relocated last year from the remote desert to the outskirts of the capital. On a rocky desert plateau, the government has erected a permanent venue to host the headline events: races and show competitions with combined purses of 213 million riyals. ($57 million)

The pavilion features an auction where top camels can fetch millions of riyals.

There are food stalls and souvenir shops, a petting zoo featuring the world’s tallest and shortest camels, a museum with life-size sand sculptures of camels, tents for tasting camel’s milk and viewing camel-hair textiles, and a planetarium showing how Arabs rode camels through the desert guided by the stars.

Organisers say this “heritage village” will expand in coming years as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – who is heir to the throne, defence minister and head of oil and economic policy – takes the reins through a newly-created official Camel Club established by royal decree last year.

Halfway through this year’s festival, attendance is up about a third from last year, with about 300,000 people making the 1-1/2 hour trip from Riyadh so far, said Fahd al-Semmari, a Camel Club board member.

“The vision is for the (festival) to become a global, pioneering forum for all classes of people to come for entertainment, knowledge and competition.”

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Museum offered 18-karat toilet to Trump

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New York’s Guggenheim Museum offered to lend an 18-karat gold toilet to President Donald Trump after the White House asked to borrow a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The museum’s chief curator offered to loan the toilet, which had been used by tens of thousands of visitors, in a Sept. 15 email to a Trump administration official, the newspaper reported.

A Guggenheim spokeswoman declined immediate comment on the Washington Post report and White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It was not clear how the White House responded to the Guggenheim curator’s offer.

The piece, by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s, is an 18-karat gold, fully functioning toilet. It is called “America.”

It was put on display in 2016 in a single-stall bathroom at the Guggenheim, where it was used in private luxury by more than 100,000 people, according to a Guggenheim blog post. The museum said the object, which was on display for a year, “skewers social complacencies” and the extravagances of the wealthy.

Trump, a real estate developer turned reality television star, campaigned for president as a savvy businessman with the commercial sense to succeed in the White House. His exact personal wealth is unknown.

The offer came in response to a White House request to borrow the painting “Landscape with Snow” by 19th century Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, for installation at the president and first lady’s private living quarters, the Washington Post reported. The request for the painting was declined.

Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector had previously written about the toilet in a 2017 blog post, in which she took swipes at the president. She wrote that the “Trump reference” inherent in the gold toilet resonated with people “during the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim.”

“When the sculpture came off view on Sept. 15, Trump had been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril,” Spector wrote.

Trump is known to have a taste for gold and gilded objects. On Christmas Eve, he took calls from children while seated on a gold chair in a tapestried room at his Florida vacation home.

The post Museum offered 18-karat toilet to Trump appeared first on Cyprus Mail.

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