H FRES
Waiting Room News Australia
World CRUEL END: A man trying to dribble a soccer ball 16,000km for charity from the US to Brazil in time for the 2014 World Cup was killed by a car two weeks after setting off, the Mirror reported. Richard Swanson, 42, had been laid off recently and was looking for an adventure. DRUNK PREZ: The Czech President denied being drunk in a video of a state event which showed him the worse for wear. Footage showed Milo Zeman propping himself up against a wall, struggling to negotiate a step and being helped by a cardinal at a display of the crown jewels.
Fun Fact IF you type @[4:0] in a Facebook comment window and hit enter, the name of founder Mark Zuckerberg will appear. Source: CNN
TOLL CLIMBS: At least 82,000 had been killed and 12,500 were missing after two years of civil war in Syria, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. It said 35,000 civilians, including almost 5000 children, were among the dead, ABC News reported.
CHILD THROWN: An investigation was launched into a school fete accident in which a five-year-old was thrown from his seat on a ride in southern Queensland on Sunday. The child was in a critical condition with severe head injuries after falling 10m from a pendulum ride known as the Frisbee at a Highfields' school fete, north of Toowoomba.
BE KIND! Please put me back neatly for the next person to enjoy. THANK YOU! CLAIMS FAIL: More than three-quarters of arbitrated unfair dismissal claims fail, TheGuardian.com.au reported. Fifty one per cent of payouts were less than $4000 and 80% were less than $8000, according to figures for the six months to January from the Fair Work Commission. The data showed 76% of cases (representing 283 people) were dismissed. GOODNESS NOSE: More than 120 people had volunteered for a record-breaking nose-piercing session in Wollongong on June 16. Body piercing specialist Brendan Sawczuk would need to pierce a new nose every 30 seconds to break the record for most body piercings in an hour without the use of mechanical aid, TheGuardian.com.au reported.
Volume 11 May 20
Entertainment JOLIE SURGERY: Angelina Jolie revealed she had undergone a double mastectomy to cut her risk of breast cancer. The actor had a defective gene, BRCA1, which doctors told her had raised her risk of breast cancer to 87%, and her risk of ovarian cancer to 50%. SWIFT ACTION: A Taylor Swift fan swam more than 1.5km at night to her Rhode Island beach home to meet the star, News Ltd reported. The 22-year-old Chicago man was picked up around 2.30am by police and charged with trespassing.
Fun Fact AT just 2.05m, Ebenezer Place in Wick, Caithness, Scottland is the world’s shortest street. The longest road is Australia’s Highway One at 14,523km. Source: Guinness World Records 2013
KIDMAN GONG: Nicole Kidman, Rachel Griffiths and Carla Zampatti were honoured at the InStyle Awards in Sydney. Kidman’s mum Janelle accepted her Women of Style Award in Sydney, while Nicole took her place on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
H FRES
Waiting Room News
World ‘SPY’ EXPELLED: Russian authorities expelled an American they accused of being a spy operating under diplomatic cover, The Wall Street Journal reported. They said Ryan C. Fogle tried to recruit a Russian intelligence services officer with promises of $1 million a year plus bonus. KIDNAP ROW: Japan PM Shinzo Abe (pictured) said he might meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un if it could help resolve the issue of Pyongyang’s kidnapping of Japanese citizens, News Ltd reported. North Korea kidnapped Japanese in the ’70s and ’80s to help train their spies.
Odd Spot APPLE gave a $10,000 App Store gift card to an Ohio man who downloaded the 50 billionth app from its App Store. It was a free word game called Say the Same Thing.
Australia BOAT TACTIC: Parliament excised the Australian mainland from the migration zone to deter the arrival of asylum seekers. To now, asylum seekers who reached the mainland by boat could not be sent to Nauru or PNG’s Manus Island for processing. The change wipes any legal advantage for asylum seekers who reach the mainland, ABC News reported.
BE KIND! Please put me back neatly for the next person to enjoy. THANK YOU! KOGAN BAN: Wealthy online retailer Ruslan Kogan, 30, was banned from driving for six months after a high-speed spin on Melbourne's Grand Prix circuit, TheGuardian.com.au reported. Kogan’s BMW was impounded after police caught up to him. Melbourne Magistrates Court heard his speed was detected at 85km/h in a 50 zone on October 30, 2011.
Volume 11 May 20
Entertainment BECKHAM QUITS: Soccer superstar David Beckham, husband of Spice Girl Victoria, announced his retirement. The 38-year-old former England captain, who this month helped Paris St Germain to the French league title, would play his last match on May 26. MONEY FIGHT: Ashton Kutcher, 35, and Demi Moore, 50, who split in 2011, were battling over $10 million, the London Evening Standard reported. The actress was asking for an eight-figure sum due to Kutcher’s slice of a venture capital tech fund worth $100 million.
Fun Fact EARTH’S beaches contain roughly 5000 billion billion (5 sextillion) grains of sand. And there is 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometres of water on the planet. Sources: The Math Dude; US Geological Survey
TAX SCANDAL: The head of the US tax agency quit after it emerged his staff singled out conservative groups for extra scrutiny, BBC News reported. The agency used words such as “patriot” to subject applications by conservatives seeking taxexempt status to closer attention.
GST LAMENT: Former PM John Howard once again lamented losing the battle to have food included in the GST package. Speaking to 2100 Queensland business leaders in a postbudget breakfast, Mr Howard said a GST on essential foods would have put the states in a much better position to ride out the economic slowdown, Brisbane Times reported online.
$37m PAINTING: A 1968 painting by German Gerhard Richter, Domplatz, Mailand, set a record in New York for the highest auction price achieved by a work by a living artist. It sold for $US37.1 million, BBC News reported. Richter, 81, also held the old record.
Odd Spot
Fun Fact
Did You Know?
BRITISH women spent 59 days of their lives shaving their legs, a study found. And 35% of women polled said it was their least favourite beauty chore. The second most detested was hairstyling, with eyebrow plucking third.
JIMMY Carter, while US president, once sent a jacket to the cleaner with the nuclear detonation codes still in the pocket.
THE beef-producing McDonald family controls more than 34,000sq km of property in Queensland, which makes them the largest private landowners in Australia, with an estate larger than Rwanda or Belgium.
Q: Which sea captain commanded the First Fleet to Australia?
Q: Is jujitsu a Japanese martial art or paper-folding craft? A: Martial art
A: Arthur Phillip
Q: Cut, clarity. colour, and carat set the value of which gemstone?
Source: QI television show
A: Diamond
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Waiting Room News Technology
Health BRAIN REPAIRS: The brain formed new circuits after damage to compensate for lost function, US and Australian scientists found. In research on rats, they showed that although damage to the hippocampus erased a rodent’s memories, with training it could relearn tasks. BUG BOOST: Gut bacteria had been used to reverse obesity and Type-2 diabetes in animals. Research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed a broth containing the bacteria could alter the health of obese mice. It is thought to change the way
Odd Spot ANXIETY, or excessive worrying, is the most common psychological problem in Australia and affects 14% of the population, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
GOOGLE UPGRADES: Google introduced 41 new Google+ features, including a fresh design, mobile chat and more tools for editing photos. With about 360 million active users, Google+ has surpassed Twitter to become the world's second-most popular social network, after Facebook, CNN reported. Google held its annual developers’ conference last week.
BE KIND! Please put me back neatly for the next person to enjoy. THANK YOU! FLIGHT FIRST: A Jetstream aircraft became the first to fly unmanned across a UK airspace shared with passenger carriers. An on-board pilot handled the take-off but a pilot on the ground managed the rest of the 800km journey. Known as “the Flying Testbed”, it has on-board sensors and robotics to identify and avoid hazards, BBC News reported.
Volume 11 May 20
Business WEALTH GAP: The gap between rich and poor widened more in the three years to 2010 than in the previous 12 years, the OECD group of industrialised nations said. The richest 10% in the 33 OECD countries received 9.5 times the income of the poorest, up from nine times in 2007. BANKS TO COOL: Bank stocks had avoided bubble territory, said Bank of Queensland boss Stuart Grimshaw, but he predicted shareprice gains would cool, The Courier-Mail reported. The Big Four earned half-year profits of $13.4 billion and had jumped at least 35% in 12 months.
Did You Know? AT some point, genes from at least eight retroviruses became incorporated into human DNA. They now perform important functions in reproduction, yet are entirely alien to our genetic ancestry.
BABY SAVED: Doctors carried out lifesaving surgery on an Indian baby with hydrocephalus, a rare disorder that caused her head to swell to nearly double its size. The doctors used a surgical drill to pierce her skull before draining fluid from her head, News Ltd reported.
CAR HACK FEARS: Rising hacking risks as cars were increasingly powered by and connected to computers had prompted the US vehicle safety regulator to set up an office focusing on the threat, Fairfax reported. Regulators were preparing for the possibility cars could be accessed remotely. A typical luxury car had more than 100 million lines of computer code.
ON TRACK: CBA was on track for another record full-year profit after reporting quarterly cash earnings of $1.9 billion. The result for the three months to March 31 brought profit to $5.7 billion this financial year - on track to beat last year’s full-year cash profit of $7.1 billion.
Odd Spot
Fun Fact
Did You Know?
Source: QI television show
Q: Is Eimeo a seaside suburb of Mackay, Cairns or Bundaberg? A: Mackay
Q: Which singer had a hit with the 1988 dance track The Only Way is Up?
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 160km away.
THE antioxidant concentration in hot cocoa was almost twice as strong as red wine, two to three times stronger than green tea and four to five times stronger than black tea, a study at Cornell University determined.
Q: In grammar, ‘the slimy snake slithered slowly’ is an example of what? A: Alliteration
A WEALTHY Chinese Maserati owner hired four sledgehammer-wielding men to smash up his $420,000 Quattroporte supercar outside an auto show in protest at poor customer service, The Indian Express reported online.
A: Yazz
H FRES
Waiting Room News
Health HEART HOPE: Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital was testing a procedure it said could save heart attack victims who had been dead for up to an hour. It was using CPR and heart-lung machines to continue chest compressions, while cooling the patient to prevent brain damage.
Science MOON BLAST: A 40kg space rock had slammed into the Moon at about 90,000km/h, exploding with a force of five tonnes of TNT, NASA said. An automated telescope captured the images of the March 17 explosion, the biggest seen since NASA began watching the Moon for meteoroid impacts about eight years ago, ABC News reported.
AGE IMMUNITY: Women lived longer than men partly because their immune systems aged slower, a Japanese study suggested. As the body’s defences weakened over time, men’s increased susceptibility to disease shortened their lives, BBC News reported.
Fun Fact THERE are 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and a German supercomputer calculated there were 500 billion galaxies in the universe. Source: BBC Schools online
Volume 11 May 20
Business OIL SURGE: Over the next five years, the US would account for a third of new oil supplies, the International Energy Agency said. The US would go from the leading oil importer to a net exporter. Demand from Mid-East producers was set to slow as a result, BBC News reported. BHP SLASHES: BHP boss Andrew Mackenzie had slashed capital spending by 18%, reinforcing concerns the mining investment boom had peaked. The miner would cut capital and exploration expenditure to $US18 billion next financial year, from $US22 billion.
GRUBS UP: Eating insects would ease world hunger and boost health by reducing malnutrition, a UN report said. The document released by the Food and Agriculture Organisation said grasshoppers, ants and other insects offered “high-quality protein and nutrients when compared with meat and fish, particularly for undernourished children”.
Did You Know? AT the Santa Rita do Sapucaí jail in Brazil, inmates can pedal to generate electricity in return for a cut in their sentences - a day off for every 16 hours of effort on bikes hooked up to batteries.
DODGY MEALS: The number of people affected by Canberra’s worst food poisoning outbreak had reached 140, ABC News reported. They became ill with salmonella poisoning after eating at a Dickson restaurant. Investigators had found salmonella in the mayonnaise.
CARBON CLIMBS: For the first time in human history, the concentration of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had passed the milestone level of 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time so much greenhouse gas was in the air was several million years ago, when the Arctic was ice-free, The Guardian reported online.
FRANCE SHRINKS: France entered its second recession in four years when the economy shrank 0.2% in the first quarter. France had record joblessness and low business and consumer confidence. Separate figures showed the recession in the eurozone had hit a sixth quarter.
Odd Spot
Fun Fact
Did You Know?
PEOPLE’S closest friendships were formed with their colleagues – particularly if their workplace environment was stressful, research conducted by the Lancaster University in the UK concluded.
IF you drilled a tunnel straight through the Earth and jumped in, it would take 42 minutes and 12 seconds to get to the other side.
Q: Who starred in movies The Hustler, Hud, Harper, and Harry and Son?
Q: Who wrote the novels Rage, Monsoon, Warlock, and Men of Men?
Q: Which is the only state in the US to begin with the letter ‘P’?
A: Wilbur Smith
A: Pennsylvania
Source: QI television show
DROUGHTS cause more deaths and displacement than floods or earthquakes, making them the world's most destructive natural hazard, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
A: Paul Newman