SPIEGEL Surfs the Web Sizing Up New Year's
Picking where to go and what to do on New Year's Eve can be a real hassle. Will I go to the right party? Will I be stuck somewhere horribly dull while the rest of the planet is having a blast? Well, now you can see if your party measured up. A Danish Web site has posted panorama shots of the revelry had in 14 cities around the world. Featured are well-known New Year's locations such as New York's Times Square and Sydney's famous harbour. But if you're wondering why Minneapolis, of all places, got double panorama treatment, maybe you should just check out the New Year's resolutions of the blog world at Technorati.
Years Gone By
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.
