The Sunday Telegraph received information that there are plans make the 704 member House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers for ceremonial purposes, by an Act of Parliament, defunct.

The second (upper) house would not only be reduced, but replaced with 300 wholly-elected members, replaced by one third, at the same time as the general elections. Elected members would be able to serve three terms, which is up to 15 years and will be paid less than a back-bench Member of Parliament.

Read what this means to the aristocracy for whom the House of Lords provided an automatic seat in Parliament…

Vanuatu claimed the Guinness World Record, on November 19th for ‘How Many People Can Write a Story in 24 Hours’. The attempt was hosted by YouMe Support Foundation, a Vanuatu based charity.

838 participants took part, mainly school students from around Port Vila. The record was previously held by Novum Verlag Gmbh in Neckenmarktt, Austria, with 797 participants, in 2007.

Read more to find out why this tiny tropical island archipelago made the attempt….

Juan Alberto Poch, 57, has been arrested by the Spanish police. Poch is an Argentinian pilot accused of having taken part in ‘death flights’, in which hundreds of opponents of his country’s military junta where thrown live out of planes into the ocean, during the ‘dirty war’.

Poch, who also has Dutch nationality, was arrested while at the controls of a budget airline Dutch holiday jet. He was about to fly from Valencia to Amsterdam. Poch is wanted by the courts in Argentia to answer allegations that he flew navy aircraft on death flights between 1976 and 1983.

Across the ocean, it has been revealed that there is a hidden army of ex-servicemen in Britain.

Read more…

Hilary Rodham Clinton, looking every bit her 61 years of age, is the first politician to hold the office of Secretary of State, in 60 years. All other candidates have filled the position from fields of foreign policy, or the military.

According to Glenn Kessler, of the Washington Post, “Clinton is the consummate team player and often the best-briefed, most prepared person in the room. President Obama’s aides say he values her advice and appreciates her dedication.”

Read more

Italian government is facing claims that the Calabrian mafia deliberately sunk a ‘poison’ ship full of toxic waste, in order to bypass environmental laws, only 32 kilometres off the south west coast of Italy.

Francesco Fonti, from the Calabria-based ‘ndrangheta crime syndicate, has broken his silence and claims the mob muscled in on the lucrative business of radioactive waste disposal and illegally sank "hundreds" of barrels of toxic waste.

Robot guided submarines are searching the area.

Read more

As 17 year old Mike Perham touched land again, after completing his round the world solo cruise, the word was already out that a 13 year old, Laura Dekker, was out to challenge his newly acquired record.

The attempt by Dekker to beat Mike Perham to circumnavigate the world alone, in her 26 foot yacht, has raised a storm of controversy in the Dutch parliament. Opinion in Holland is strongly divided.

To read more….

Andrew Warhola, better known as Andy Warhol, was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art.  Warhol was famous for his portraits of famous people, such as Liz Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, as well as his painting of 100 cans of Campbell’s Soup.

At the time of his death in 1987, the artist had so many possessions it took Sotheby’s nine days to auction his estate, raising $20 million.Warhol was a compulsive collector.

Now archivists have been hired by the Andy Warhol  Foundation, for a fee of $600,000, to comb through 610 cardboard boxes, filing cabinets and a shipping container of ‘junk’ collected by Andy Warhol.

Over the next six years, every item will be meticulously photographed and catalogued, from taxi cab receipts, to fan mail, to scrappy notes. Where possible the bizarre items will be researched.

The director of the Andy Warhol Museum will host wives of 19 head of states  and representatives of the European Union, in September. “I would like to give them a Warhol experience,” says Thomas Sokolowki. He would like to see them dressed in white smocks and gloves, just the same as the archivists wear and give them a box to sift through.

The White House has not yet decided it if will go along with the idea.

One of the early finds by the archivists, has been a signed skinny-dipping poster of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie O., was a frequent visitor to Warhol’s Montauk, N.Y., beachfront estate. Onassis got a paparazzi to shoot a photo of Jacky skinny-dipping. It ended up in the hands of Larry Flynt, who turned it into a poster for his porn magazine. Jacky sent a copy, as a joke, to Andy Warhol, signing it ‘For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk’.

Warhol hated to throw anything away. When he died his four-storey Manhattan townhouse was jammed packed with stuff, including a drawer of gems worth $1million. Warhol collected things and placed them  in cardboard boxes, dating and taping them shut as ‘time capsules’.

It is 18 months since the archivists began the project in earnest, having opened 177 boxes , each with between  400 -1200 items inside.

In September an ‘Object of the Week’ blog will be aired on the Internet by the archivists.
While In Byron Bay, Australia, Warhol painted the outside of a toilet wall. The next morning the municipality ruled that ‘graffiti’ was not becoming on a public building and had workmen immediately paint it over.

In September an ‘Object of the Week’ blog will be aired on the Internet by the archivists.

While In Byron Bay, Australia, Warhol painted the outside of a toilet wall. The next morning the municipality ruled that ‘grafitti’ was not becoming on a public building and had workmen immediately paint it over.

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and a plane falls out of the sky in New York, who is sneezing where, to make multi-storey buildings collapse?

First there was the notorious 13-floor Lotus Riverside apartment building in Minhang, Shanghai, China, that fell over, fortunately before it was occupied. The foundation of the building was being excavated to make way for a garage.

The business of the developers of the building have been closed down, while the government investigates the mater. Prospective home owners are now demonstrating against the unfair payout they have received.

Now the No. 9 building complex of Zhongxiang Longbowan residential area in Minhang, has been slowly sinking for the past month. The back of the building has risen around 2.5 cm while the rest of the building has sunk downwards almost 10 cm, an increase of 6 cm in just one month.

People are still living in the building. Even though it has been reported to the authorities, no one appears to be doing anything to deal with the problem.

Now a five storied building has toppled into the raging flooded river in Taitung country. This is in the wake of the deadly Typhoon Morakot, which hit Taiwan, causing a mudslide that buried an entire village, while the inhabitants slept. There are around 4 - 600 people still missing.  “A part of the mountain above us just fell on the village,” said one shocked survivor.

Taiwan is experiencing the worst flooding in half a century, after Typhoon Morakot dumped up to 80 inches of rain over the weekend. The waves reached heights of 26 feet and more than 2,000 houses have collapsed.

Typhoon Morakot swept on into China, causing the evacuation of nearly 1 million people. Five apartment buildings have collapsed in China.

Typhoon Morakot killed 22 people in the Philippines.

Further north Japan was slammed with Tyhpoon Etau, killing 12 people, with 10 still missing.

The next time you go to your hairdressers, you might  like to consider the value of what is left lying on the floor.

In the ‘Roaring Twenties’ the world was first introduced to the cultured pearl, which threw the pearl industry into spasms. Now the same revolution is taking place in the sparkling  world of diamonds, with the introduction of cultured diamonds.

These have the same quality as colourless diamonds, making it impossible for professional gemologists to tell the difference, either chemically, optically, or physically. Both stones have the same hardness, specific gravity, refraction index and dispersion factor.  Both are polished using the exact same techniques and equipment. The only difference is the point of origin.

The New Age Diamond company in Russia offers to create a cultured diamond from your hair, using the same conditions as when diamonds are formed  through extreme volcanic forces beneath the earth’s surface.

With approximately 1 gram’s weight of your hair, the company adds approximately 1 gram’s weight of carbon and runs it through their HPHT (high pressure, high temperature) machine. The ‘seed’ is heated up to 5,400 degrees. Slowly the diamond begins to form, atom by atom.  A diamond is crystalized over a 6-9 month period, created from your DNA.

The company however,  offers only cultivated diamonds that are yellow, green and red in colour, costing on average, one third the price of a natural diamond. Fancy colour diamonds represent the fasted growing trend in the diamond industry, worldwide.

The company also says it can create diamonds from a new-born baby’s hair, or hair from a pet dog, cat, horse or rabbit, or even from cremated ashes. Hair may even be collected from two or three different sources.

Now a United States company, VadenBiesen says it is going to create approximately 10 diamonds from a lock of Michael Jackson’s hair.  The company also claims it created three diamonds from locks of Beethoven’s hair in 2007 and sold one of them for around $200,000.

The first diamond was made from hair several years ago, from 40 grams of beard trimmings. It took quite a while to collect the amount of beard trimmings needed. Carbon was extracted from the trimmings and a .85 carat, 58 faceted diamond was produced.

The largest diamond made from hair to date, is 2.00 carat. That required around 100 grams of clean hair. Phoenix Diamonds has also created a diamond from an umbilical cord.

Perhaps institutions, like the armed forces, or prisons, that specialize in a certain type of hair style, could put all the ‘leftovers’ to better value, than just throwing the hair clippings into the rubbish. Hairdressers to the stars may find themselves with a valuable by-product to their business.

Several people have been asking just who am I and what are my credentials, so I have decided to give you a quick run-down.

I have always enjoyed writing. My first extended study course was written in the early 1990’s, which I also taught. I published a 500 page book on the same subject, The Tabernacle of Moses, besides writing three fiction novels.

Over the past two and a half years I have turned to writing for the Internet. I have published over 350 articles and press releases on a wide variety of subjects. I enjoy anything unusual or interesting that captures the imagination. My blog’s byline is ‘What Others Won’t Tell You’.

I enjoy discussing items that take ordinary everyday things and grab your attention:

• from observations on the activities of politicians,
• rights of women,
• education,
• extreme sport,
• some ‘how to’ advice articles,
• unusual destinations or sports,
• entertainment personalities,
• society in general in articles such as the growing centenarian club (those over 100 years old). I have discussed
• the facts behind child brides stolen by China,
• the use of blood diamonds in Africa,
• the Soamli pirates,
• why Madoff was permitted a consultant to choose his jail and whether Ruth Madoff was involved,
• the makeover of Susan Boyle,
• the military coup in Fiji,
• an overview of Nelson Mandela and his thoughts on education,
• to clownless circuses in England.

I receive many requests for my articles to be reproduced in magazines, or projects, or for use in text books.

I currently research and write up to 10-14 items every week, on an average of 450 words per item. All are published first on my websites Winaresort Blog Blog, or  Tropic Post then they are sent out to many different sites on the Web.

I earned a Bachelor in Theology, Master in Missiology and Doctrate of Divinity over 20 years ago. I have taught in many countries around the world in Christian circles, as well as teaching English in a school in the New Territories, Hong Kong. I am supposedly retired now in Vanuatu (ha). I don’t know the meaning of the word retirement.

My husband and I co-founded YouMe Support Foundation and are currently raising funds to provide high school education for children in Vanuatu, where there is no free education.

• Primary school attendance       -  55.8%
• Never attended or pre-school  – 18.3%
• Junior secondary                        – 16.8%
• Senior secondary/vocational    –  7.8%
• Tertiary                                        –  1.3%

As the United Nations Rights of A Child declares, every child has the right to an education. We are doing our part in our small corner of the world.

You will find more information on Wikipedia about YouMe Support Foundation.

Or you can meet Maimona, on video. She is the first student to receive an education grant from YouMe Support Foundation.