Month: January 2011

Since 1950, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is mandated with the coordination of aid and assistance for refugees worldwide. According to its self-description, its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees.

Over 6,000 people in more than 110 countries work for the UNHCR. Founded in 1951 as a means to assist the more than one million people who were still uprooted after World War II, the agency’s mandate covered about 10 million refugees in 2009. This visualization attempts to give a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of flight and expulsion, an ongoing issue of global scale and extreme complexity.

The Mexican distiller’s 1.3 litre bottle is coated in a layer of platinum and studded with more than 4,000 diamonds.

Hacienda La Capilla already holds the Guinness world record for most expensive bottle of tequila, but their previous offering fetched a mere £142,000, a fraction of what the latest bottle is expected to go for.

Is this art? The flying steamroller was exhibited at the South London Gallery last year.

at Jeopardy… So, in February IBM’s Watson will be in an official Jeopardy tournament-style competition with titans of trivia Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. That competition will be taped starting tomorrow, but hopefully we’ll get to know if a computer really can take down the greatest Jeopardy players of all time in “real time” as the show airs. It will be a historic event on par with Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov, and we’ll absolutely be glued to our seats.

Today IBM and Jeopardy offered a quick teaser of that match, with the three contestants knocking out three categories at lightning speed. Not a single question was answered wrongly, and at the end of the match Watson, who answers questions with a cold computer voice, telegraphing his certainty with simple color changes on his “avatar,” was ahead with $4,400, Ken had $3,400, and Brad had $1,200.

With quitting smoking on top of many a list of new year’s resolutions, the broker has considered what a decline in smoking means for the tobacco industry.

The habit has been on the wane since the 1960s, when just over half of adults in Britain smoked. With people becoming more conscious of the health risks associated with smoking and the introduction of the smoking ban in 2007, that figure had dropped to a fifth by 2008.

The world’s fattest man has told how the break up of a relationship with an older woman spurred him to binge eat his way to 70 stone. But it is the British taxpayer who should be the one feeling heartbroken.

Paul Mason, from Ipswich, was given life-saving bypass surgery last year and now weighs a comparatively slim 37 stone. But his care bill costs taxpayers an estimated £100,000 a year and is believed to have topped £1million over the last 15 years.

The 50-year-old former postman, who now travels by motorised wheelchair after being bedridden for years, claims his gargantuan size was not down to greed but the heartbreak he went through in his youth.