Alcatraz News

A father, a mother and 4 children. That's the Elliots, a sheep-rearing family in Queensland (Australia) with a passion for archaeology.
In the last ten years they've discovered the remains of 7 dinosaurs on their farm, and one of them (20 metres long and 4 metres tall) has been baptised Sauro Elliott in honour of the family.
"We're on the edge of what was once an enormous artesian basin. It's like being on the shores of a great sea and, in fact, we often find the teeth of prehistoric sharks and petrified fish'', says David, the father. "By now my children are used to it - he sighs - finding a dinosaur in the garden no longer has any affect on them".

15 minutes of laughter a day is good for your heart. The scientific proof comes from Dr. Michael Miller of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. Miller has noted that watching a comedy film relaxes the peripheral arteries and augments the blood flow for over 45 minutes, the equivalent of an aerobic exercise.

Mine clearance operations will soon be starting in the African Great Lakes region, in a UNO project that will last three years at a cost of about 10 million dollars. They'll be using mine detector-rats, specially trained in Tanzania. The technique has proved to be highly ingenious: the rats, weighing very little and with an excellent sense of smell, are able to detect and locate the mines without exploding them (the mines are detonated later on).
A team of rat-mine detectors can cover about a hundred square metres in less than half an hour.
Shouldn't we nominate these heroic beings for the 2006 Nobel Prize?

The governor of California, A. Schwarzenegger, would appear to have approved a law banning Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola in schools.
According to the Public Health Protection Agency, a Californian adolescent consumes on average 800 cans a year, double the recommended sugar intake.
It's one of the boldest laws ever made in California, and that's with a robot in power...

A brilliant scheme has been launched by the WFP (World Food Programme), UNICEF and others in Mozambique. In 30 village schools they've installed water pumps under playground roundabouts. As the children whiz round they pump water up into a tank that supplies the school and part of the village.

On the 28th of October the city of Caracas, Venezuela, will officially be declared an "Illiteracy-Free Territory", one of the best pieces of news of recent times.
Venezuela started its battle against adult illiteracy 2 years ago, with the help of Cuba, who made their "Yo, sí puedo" literacy programme available.
More than 1,400,000 Venezuelans over the age of 18 can now read and write; some are attempting to complete their sixth grade at school (equivalent to the second year in our high schools) and thousands more are studying for their high school certificate or going to university.
800 new schools have been built.

According to researchers at Washington University, tourists visiting penguin breeding grounds may be a source of stress to the chicks.
The research was published in the October issue of the highly respected "Conservation Biology" journal.
Stay at home and watch your penguins on TV.

Police in Sao Paolo, Brazil, arrested a gang of drug traffickers. The men (it's not specified how many) were caught in possession of a small quantity of cocaine, nothing special, but when the police looked at the traffickers' mobile phones they found photos of them with scores of kilograms of cocaine and marijuana.
"It was funny" said a police spokesperson.

The second Chinese space mission was a complete success. The astronauts, or rather taikonauts, orbited the Earth 76 times and confirmed that it was round.

The Grand Fugue
A musical score by Ludwig van Beethoven has been found in a theological seminary near Philadelphia: the original finale of string quartet no. 13 in B flat minor, the penultimate work of the great German composer, thought to be too modern at the time (around 1826). The score is entitled Grand Fugue and the finale is marked "allegro".
The manuscript will be auctioned at Sotheby's. It has a value of 1.7 - 2.6 million dollars.
Readers are reminded that Beethoven was so deaf he thought he was a painter.