In the National Football League, the New Orleans Saints defeated the Indianapolis Colts, 31-17, to win Super Bowl XLIV.
Class of 2010 Hall of Famer Emmitt Smith did the coin toss. The Saints won toss and elected to receive. It was the thirteenth straight time that the NFC won the Super Bowl coin toss. The Saints got the ball first inside the 25, and went three and out. The Colts' first play was a first down pass to Dallas Clark. The first penalty comes with 8:36 left in first quarter, a false start on the Colts. Their third 3rd down of the drive failed, and kicker Matt Stover's 38 yard field goal was good, giving the Colts the first score of the game, 3-0.
Clare Short, the United Kingdom's then-Secretary of State for International Development, appeared before the Iraq Inquiry yesterday, and told the panel that the Cabinet was "misled" about the Iraq War's legality prior to the 2003 invasion. The three-hour session was held in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London's City of Westminster.
Clare Short speaking at a rally in Birmingham.
Image: Faizan Bhat.
A court in Poland has issued a European Union arrest warrant for 34-year-old Anders Högström, the alleged mastermind involved in the theft of the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign from Auschwitz. The sign, later recovered cut into three pieces, was stolen from the entrance of the death camp in December last year. Five Poles have been arrested for the arrest of the sign, that translates to "work sets you free". The wrought-iron sign weighs 40kg and is five metres long, and was unscrewed and ripped from above the gate of the infamous site in the heart of Poland. The theft caused outrage around the world, in particular in Poland and Israel.
Al-Qaeda's notional leader Osama Bin Laden has released a new audio tape in which he delivers a message he describes as from "Osama to Obama". Bin Laden tells the US President that Americans can expect further attacks.
In the tape, aired by al-Jazeera, Bin Laden describes Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a US airliner on Christmas day, as "a hero" who was reaffirming the message of the September 11 attacks. He commented that "If it was possible to carry our messages to you by words we wouldn't have carried them to you by planes."
The United Nations has announced that the government of Haiti has put an end to its efforts to rescue survivors of the earthquake that hit the region eleven days ago. The announcement comes just a day after two people were found alive.
Downtown Port-au-Prince after the earthquake.
Image: UNDP Global.
|
The UK's Home Secretary said today that Britain has raised its terrorism alert level to "severe", the second-highest level, which indicates that an attack is "highly likely". The highest level, "critical", means that an attack is believed to be "imminent".
A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which claimed that the glaciers in the Himalayas were likely to melt within thirty years, was at least in part not based on scientific data.
Teodoro García Simental, alleged to be a major kingpin in Mexico, has been arrested by Federal Police in southern Baja California.
"No shots were fired. It was a very fast operation. The investigation has been going on for a long time," an unnamed police officer told Reuters. Simental was handcuffed and swiftly flown to Mexico City.
Teodoro García Simental (DEA)
An international court in Strasbourg has issued a ruling yesterday that powers allowing UK police to stop and search anyone without reason is in breach of European law. The European Court of Human Rights deemed powers contained in the Terrorism Act 2000 denied the human right of privacy.
Chinese officials have said that their country's exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world's biggest exporter.
The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany's forecast $1.17 trillion.
|
A public bus has crashed into a shop in Cardiff, Wales. No one is believed to have been injured.
The bus was nearly empty when it crashed into a closed, shuttered shop.
This Tuesday, at a wholesale auction at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, a 512-pound bluefin tuna was sold for over sixteen-million yen ($177,000 USD). The great fish was bought and then shared by the owners of a local sushi restaurant and a Hong Kong-based dining establishment. This tuna is the most expensive fish sold on record since 2001, when a 440-pound tuna was sold for over twenty-million ($220,000) at the very same market.
Blue fin tuna in their natural environment.
A team of researchers from the Thomas Jefferson University's Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories (BFL) in the United States have managed to increase the amount of oil produced by tobacco leaves. Tobacco oil can be very efficiently converted to biofuel, but most oil is located in the seeds, which the plant does not produce many of.
A team of expeditioners from Australia has found the remains of the first airplane ever taken to the Antarctic. The find was made at Camp Denison.
The expedition is in Antarctica to help conserve huts used by the Australian explorer Douglas Mawson in the early twentieth century. The team unsuccessfully searched for the aircraft for three summers. The plane, which was a single-engine Vickers built in 1911, has been lost in the Antarctic ices since 1975. It was the first aircraft produced by the Vickers plant in France.
The Chinese economy is likely to overtop the Japanese economy and become the second largest in the world.
David Li Daokui received his PhD degree in Economics from Harvard University
|
