SPIEGEL Surfs the Web New Year's Snapshots
The Magnum photo agency, founded by war photographer Robert Capa and Henry Cartier-Bresson after World War II, made itself a legend in the news business for providing artistic shots of world-shaping events. It also helped photography be regarded more as an art form. Last month, the American online magazine Slate began publishing a daily Magnum photo dossier. For Auld Lang Syne, the publication has posted a photographic homage to New Year's past from the Magnum archive.
An Unlikely Friendship Prospers One Year after Tsunami
One of the few feel-good stories after the Indian Ocean tsunami last year was the tale of a hippo calf, named Owen, that lost its mother on the coast of Kenya and was adopted a temperamental, century-old tortoise called Mzee. The tale is rated by the urban-legend clearinghouse website, Snopes.com, as "true," although technically Owen may have lost track of his mother before the giant wave. The story made the rounds of e-mail inboxes last January, and now Snopes offers a year-end update . Tortoise and hippo are apparently still friends, it seems, but Owen, now aged 2, is growing up. "Conservation workers are planning sometime in 2006 to introduce Owen to Cleo a 13-year-old female hippo who has gone without the companionship of her own species for over ten years," the Web site reports.
Best Web Cams of 2005
Perhaps it was the scene from "Revenge of the Nerds" that has always made Web cams feel synonymous with voyeurism. And yet, there are tens of thousands of them on the Internet these days, and most of them have little to do with licentiousness. Rather, they take you from your office chair, through cyberspace, to somewhere -- and presumably a more interesting somewhere -- far away. To facilitate such cyber-travel,
Earthcam.com has come up with the 25 most interesting Web cams of 2005. From
beaches to
pandas,
construction sites to
piranhas, the possibilities are ... if not endless, then at least endlessly mesmerizing.
