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Belgians reacted with widespread alarm to news that their country had been split in two - before finding out they had been spoofed.

The Belgian public television station RTBF ran a bogus report saying the Dutch-speaking half of the nation had declared independence.

Later it said Wednesday night’s programme was meant to stir up debate.

It appears to have succeeded. Thousands of people made panicked calls to the station and politicians complained.

"It’s very bad Orson Welles, in very poor taste," said a spokesman for Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, referring to the famous director’s 1938 radio adaptation of War of the Worlds. That spoof fooled many Americans into believing Martians had invaded.

"In the current context, it’s irresponsible for a public television channel to announce the end of Belgium as a reality presented by genuine journalists," he added.

The French-language TV channel interrupted regular programming with an apparent news report, announcing that Dutch-speaking Flanders had unilaterally declared independence and that Belgium as a nation had ceased to exist.

It showed "live" pictures of cheering crowds holding the Flemish flag, huge traffic jams leading to Brussels airport, and trams stuck at the new "border".

The broadcast came amid an apparent growth of separatist sentiment in Flanders.

Recent regional elections have shown strong support for the far-right, nationalist Vlaams Belang party, which advocates Flemish independence.

The station’s website crashed briefly as alarmed viewers sought more information, and 2,600 calls were made to a telephone number given out during the spoof.

"Our intention was to show Belgian viewers the intensity of the issue of the future of Belgium and the real possibility of Belgium no longer being a country in a few months," Yves Thiran, head of news at RTBF, told the BBC.

He said it introduced people to the debate who would otherwise have ignored it, but he admitted some may have taken it the wrong way.

"We obviously scared many people - maybe more than we expected," he said.

Some politicians were in on the joke, contributing interviews to the programme with their reactions to the "news". But others were not amused.

The minister for audiovisual affairs for the French-speaking community, Fadila Laanan, said the words "this is fiction" appeared on screen half an hour into the broadcast - at her insistence.

"I find it questionable to use such a tactic, which frightened people unbelievably," she said, adding that a number of people had called her in panic when the "news" broke.

The AFP news agency reported that even some foreign ambassadors in Brussels were taken in, and sent urgent messages back to their respective capitals.

via BBC.

The world’s tallest man has saved two dolphins by using his long arms to reach into their stomachs and pull out dangerous plastic shards.

Mongolian herdsman Bao Xishun was called in after the dolphins swallowed plastic used around their pool at an aquarium in Fushun, north-east China.

Attempts to use instruments failed as the dolphins contracted their stomachs.

Guinness World Records list Mr Bao, 54, as the world’s tallest living man at 2.36m (7ft 8.95in).

Veterinarians turned to Mr Bao after attempts to extract the plastic shards at the aquarium in Fushun, Liaoning Province, had failed.

The mammals had lost their appetite and were suffering depression, aquarium officials said.

The heads of the dolphins were held back and towels wrapped around their teeth so Mr Bao could not be bitten.

He then extended his 1.06m-long arm into the mammals’ stomachs.

Chen Lujun, manager of Royal Jidi Ocean World, said Mr Bao was successful and the dolphins were "in very good condition now".

Local doctor Zhu Xiaoling told the state media agency Xinhua: "Some very small plastic pieces are still left in the dolphins’ stomachs.

"However the dolphins will be able to digest these and are expected to recover soon."

Mr Bao was confirmed as the world’s tallest living man by Guinness World Records last year.

He overtook the previous holder, Radhouane Charbib of Tunisia, by just 2mm.

Guinness World Records say Mr Bao was of normal height until 16 but then put on a spurt that doctors were unable to explain, reaching his full height in seven years.

via BBC.

LONDON (AFP) - Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal and Russian businessman Roman Abramovich come first and second in a newspaper’s list of the richest people living in Britain.

Mittal is worth 13.2 billion pounds (19.5 billion euros, 25.9 billion dollars), while Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, has 10.8 billion pounds, up from 7.5 billion last year, the Sunday Times Rich List showed Wednesday.

The list shows that the combined wealth of those on the list has shot up in the last year — it is now 406 billion pounds, up over 18 percent from 343 billion pounds last year.

The benchmark for entering the top 5,000 is five and a half million pounds.

Other notable figures on the list include footballer David and Victoria Beckham, with a combined wealth of 87 million pounds, while Beatles legend Sir
Paul McCartney is worth 825 million pounds.

But list compilers warn he could fall out of the top 100 for the first time if he loses up to 200 million pounds in a divorce battle with estranged wife Heather Mills McCartney, as some pundits have predicted.

A Norwegian businessman is looking to earn money on the fat of the land, and create fuel in the USA.

Lauri Venøy wants to use the product created from liposuction to develop bio-diesel.

Bio-diesel can be produced from plant oils and/or animal fat, and the Norwegian sees the scheme as a renewable energy source, newspaper Dagens Nærinsgliv reports.

More than sixty percent of Americans are overweight and the Norwegian’s firm in Miami, Florida is in the process of signing an agreement with US hospital giant Jackson Memorial. This deal would give Venøy & Co. around 11,500 liters of human fat a week from liposuction operations, which is enough to produce about 10,000 liters of bio-diesel.

"Maybe we should urge people to eat more so we can create more raw material for fuel," Venøy said.

In Norway bio-diesel is primarily produced from fish oils and used fryer fat.

via aftenposten.

In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.

A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.

Mr. Kramnik fell behind in the match when he lost Game 2 by walking into a checkmate in one move with hardly any pieces remaining on the board, a mistake that ranks as one of the biggest in championship-level chess history. Needing a win today to tie the match, Mr. Kramnik took some chances, eventually lost a pawn, and was then outmaneuvered by the computer.

The match, which began Nov. 25, was played in the National Art Gallery in Bonn, Germany, and was sponsored by the RAG Group, a German industrial conglomerate based in Essen. According to RAG, Mr. Kramnik would have been paid $1 million if he had won; reports in the chess press said that he would receive half that amount as an appearance fee if he lost.

The match was the second that a world chess champion has lost to a computer. In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost a six-game match to Deep Blue, a dedicated chess computer created by I.B.M.

Since then, Mr. Kasparov drew a match in 2003 against Deep Junior, a program developed in Israel, and Mr. Kramnik drew a match in 2002 against an earlier version of Deep Fritz.

Today’s outcome may end the interest in future chess matches between human champions and computers, according to Monty Newborn, a professor of computer science at McGill University in Montreal. Professor Newborn, who helped organize the match between Mr. Kasparov and Deep Blue, said of future matches: “I don’t know what one could get out of it at this point. The science is done.”

Mr. Newborn said that the development of chess computers had been useful.

“If you look back 50 years, that was one thing we thought they couldn’t do,” he said. “It is one little step, that’s all, in the most exciting problem of what can’t computers do that we can do.”

Speculating about where research might go next, Mr. Newborn said, “If you are interested in programming computers so that they compete in games, the two interesting ones are poker and go. That is where the action is.”

via NYTIMES.