The week: 1-7 December

Published on Saturday 8 December 2007 01:14

WENDY Alexander, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, resisted calls for her resignation on Sunday following an illegal donation to her leadership campaign fund. Early exit poles suggested that Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party took more than 60 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections. Nine Victoria Crosses were stolen from an army museum in New Zealand. The Spice Girls began their world tour in Vancouver, Canada.

More than 40 per cent of Scotland's main roads were rated as inadequate in a report from the European Road Assessment Programme, which was published on Monday. Mark Wallinger won the Turner Prize for his reconstruction of a one-man war protest. Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher who was jailed in Sudan for allowing her class to name a teddy bear Muhammad, was released after being pardoned by Omar Al-Bashir, the Sudanese president.

Miss Gibbons returned to the UK on Tuesday following her release. The Board of Inquiry published its report into the explosion of Nimrod XV230 over Afghanistan in 2006 which killed 14 servicemen: it concluded that ageing components and a lack of fire extinguishers were partly to blame for the plane's destruction. Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, apologised to relatives. The Scottish Government called in Donald Trump's planning application to build a golf resort in the North-east after an Aberdeenshire Council committee last week rejected the plans. Celtic were beaten 1-0 by AC Milan in the Champions League, but still made it through to the last 16 after Benfica beat Shakhtar Donetsk.

John Darwin, the canoeist who disappeared in 2002 and then walked into a London police station on Saturday, was arrested on Wednesday under suspicion of committing life insurance fraud. The SNP administration unveiled its plans to phase out prescription charges. A murder inquiry was launched in Edinburgh after a man's body was found in a stairwell in Calder Park. A gunman shot dead eight people in a shopping centre in Omaha, Nebraska, before killing himself. Meredydd Hughes, Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, was given a six-week ban and a 300 fine after he was caught driving at 90mph in a 60mph zone. Robin Gloag, who founded the Stagecoach group with his then-wife, Anne, died following a car crash on the outskirts of Perth. Kiefer Sutherland, star of TV series 24, was jailed for 48 days for drink-driving.

On Thursday, the Bank of England cut its base interest rate by 0.25 per cent, bringing the rate down to 5.5 per cent. Nat Fraser, who was convicted of murdering his wife, Arlene, was sent back to prison after judges decided to withdraw his bail while they consider his appeal. At Holyrood, Labour, the Conservatives and Lib Dems united to launch a constitution commission to look at devolution.

Jockey Kieren Fallon was yesterday acquitted of race-fixing charges after his trial collapsed. Sainsbury's and Asda admitted they fixed dairy prices with other firms, costing their customers an extra 270 million. A study of Scotland's population warned the economy could suffer due to falling birth rates.

THE WEEK IN BRIEF...

Nice little motor

FOR sale: Ford Lotus Cortina Mk I, (old) C-reg, 21.3 miles per gallon, some former speedy owners... or so the small ad could have run. A 42-year-old Cortina - which was driven by Scottish Formula 1 world champion Jim Clark - was sold at auction this week for 136,000, a far cry from the 1,100 and three shillings price-tag when the car was new. The model auctioned off by Bonhams in London, was one of the works saloons used by Lotus in the mid 1960s and was also driven by touring car champions Sir John Whitmore and Jack Sears.

Name lives on

AN ANTI-WHALING ship has been named after the late Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, as it sets off from Melbourne to intercept whalers in the Southern Ocean. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was permitted to use Irwin's name by his widow, Terri. She said whales had been one of his great passions. Irwin died last year after an accident with a stingray's barb.

Santa Claus is coming to town

BORAT could soon have a new neighbour, if Santa Claus follows the advice from logistics company SWECO. The firm calculated that the most time-efficient starting point for Father Christmas' journey around the world would be Kazakhstan, home to Sacha Baron Cohen's comedy creation.

Hamming it up

THIEVES who stole 16 tonnes of ham and bacon from a warehouse in Australia left behind a message taunting the business, just weeks before the holiday season.

"Thanks... Merry Christmas," the crooks daubed on a wall of the Zammit Hand and Bacon curers warehouse in suburban Sydney as they made off with their haul.

Anthony Zammit promised to fulfil all his customers' festive orders and has hired extra staff.

Hippos in Ayia Napa

SCIENTISTS are trying to solve the riddle of a collapsed cave brimming with the fossilised remains of extinct dwarf hippos, which were descended from a group believed to have migrated there 250,000 years ago.

Palaeontologists have unearthed around 80 dwarf hippos at the site, just outside the Cypriot resort of Ayia Napa, more popular in modern times with ravers rather than hippos. Researchers hope the new fossil haul could offer vital clues to solving the quandary over when humans first set foot on the Mediterranean island.

Scientists are baffled as to how hippos arrived on an island that has never been physically linked to another land mass. Some believe the collapsed cave could have been an abattoir used by the early Cypriots: others say the hippos may have just been seeking sheltered when the roof caved in.

Beaten by a chimp

SCIENTISTS have confirmed what many university lecturers have been suspecting for years: chimps have better memories than students. Japanese researchers pitted young chimpanzees against students in two short-term memory tests - and the chimps won.

The researchers think that the chimps, right, may have "photographic memories" and are better at recalling numbers than adult humans. The ability was described as "extraordinary" in the journal Current Biology.

Researchers tested three pairs of mother chimps and their offspring alongside a group of university students. Both were briefly shown various numerals from one to nine on a touch-screen monitor. The numbers were then replaced with blank squares and the participants had to remember which numeral appeared in which location, and touch the squares in the right order.

The students tended to become more inaccurate as the numbers were presented for less time.

Part of the problem may have been the competing teams' preparations for the test: the chimpanzees counted each others' fleas, ate plenty of bananas and went to bed early the night before the challenge. The students, on the other hand were up late drinking cheap lager at the student union and their only revision was watching Carol Vorderman on Countdown.

Farce

PANTOMIME actors have been banned from throwing sweets into the audience because of health and safety concerns. Oh no they haven't! Oh yes they have: the Gorleston Pavilion Theatre, in Gorleston, Norfolk, has halted a long-standing tradition for fear of being sued by anyone injured by a stray piece of candy. At this year's Babes in the Woods and Robin Hood productions, the sweets will be dropped into the front row and distributed to the children by ushers.

Enigma variation

CAR maker Toyota has unveiled a robot that plays Pomp And Circumstance on the violin. The five foot-tall robot uses its fingers to push the strings and plays the bow with its other arm. Toyota has already shown robots that roll around to work as guides and have fingers dextrous enough to play the trumpet. The mechanical violinist is expected to win next year's X-Factor, as it has more charisma - and talent - than this year's entrants.

Creating a stink

UNSURE what to get your dad for Christmas? Why not try some rhino pooh? The International Rhino Foundation is auctioning pieces of white, black, Indian and Sumatran rhino dung on Ebay to raise funds. Each piece is dried, mounted in a trophy case and marked with the type of rhino that produced it. The Javan rhinos refused to give a sample, saying the auction was in bad taste.

Chelsea, Chelsea

IT'S good to see that being raised in the White House hasn't gone to Chelsea Clinton's head. The former First Daughter - whose mother, Hillary, is seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for next year's presidential race - couldn't find a seat in a New York Starbuck's this week but, unphased by such worries, she simply sat on the floor and got her laptop out. Chelsea, who graduated from Oxford University with a masters degree in international relations, is working for a hedge fund in NYC.

Here she comes again

DOLLY Parton has been working nine to five this week promoting literacy in t'north of England. The country and western chose Rotherham as the first place in the UK to benefit from her Imagination Library. The reading scheme, which was set-up in the US in 1996, involves posting children a book every month up to the age of five. It's not clear if Dolly met any children called Jolene at the Magna Science Adventure Centre, the former steel mill at which she launched the scheme, but soon she had the Tennessee Homesick Blues for her Tennessee Mountain Home. She told the gathered children "I will always love you" before boarding a plane so she could get back home in time for the next meeting of the Harper Valley PTA. When asked her view on Rotherham, she said it was like an island in the stream.