Wednesday, March 7 in the news....
- A Russian reporter who died after falling out of a window was investigating sales of weapons by Russia to Syria and Iran, his newspaper Kommersant said Tuesday. There are now rumours that the next extreme sport to be embraced by youth worldwide is to try and expose President Putin's activities.
- Alan Greenspan risked stirring renewed controversy on Tuesday when he told the Bloomberg news agency that there was a 'one-third probability' of a US recession this year. The former Federal Reserve chairman's comments are starkly at odds with the relatively upbeat assessment made by Ben Bernanke, his successor, in testimony to Congress last week. In fact, Ben Bernanke went so far as to bet Greenspan he was wrong, printing up a billion dollars to raise the stakes and challenging Greenspan to print up his own.
- The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law will be retroactive and the French have already denied that there were any professional journalists at the World Cup final when Zinedine Zidane got sent off.
- Visitors to Queensland could soon be bombarded with surf safety messages on aircraft, at airports and on roads as part an initiative to reduce the number of drownings on the state's beaches. The state government hopes the message gets through, and that Queenslanders just stick to party drugs while at the beach.
- Nearly the entire collection of a long-closed archive of Nazi records will be ready for research within a year. The core documents - incarceration records, death catalogues, concentration camp registries and transportation lists - will be digitally scanned and ready for transfer. It is considered to be at the top of gift ideas for Neo-Nazi's this Christmas.
- China's stability could be threatened if the government tried to curb smoking, a senior official said on Wednesday at a discussion of the annual meeting of parliament. The threat had one official suggesting that maybe to keep chaos in check China should be divided into smoking and non-smoking sections, using the Great Wall.
- A moose, apparently annoyed by being shot with a tranquilliser dart, charged the rear rotor of a hovering helicopter in Alaska, colliding with it and eventually bringing it down to the ground. The US is blaming Canada for allowing moose to enter through its border, condemning them for secretly supporting their migration, but stopping short of planned retaliatory air strikes on moose habitats in British Columbia.
