News you can use - Time names The Protester its Person of the Year

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Oh, Craig Thomson. It has not been a good year, has it? I mean, this isn't exactly using Health Union money on sex workers, but still, taking a $24 000 taxpayer funded trip and then submitting a report that was lifted from Wikipedia is still pretty funny. Especially because even then he submitted it four months late.

If you thought it had been a year since the last time the Commonwealth Bank's systems went down, then you'd be right. Last night, as it did exactly 12 months previous, the entire CBA system seemed to go apoplectic, eating cards, refusing to give out money and lopping hundreds of dollars from people's accounts. The outage only lasted four hours, so they certainly have that on NAB, but four hours is still a lot of time for a lot of people to whip up a lot of irrational anger.

Papua New Guinea is now in the envious situation of having two Prime Ministers, two Governor-Generals, two Cabinets and two police Comissioners. Gosh, just think of how much they're going to be able to get done! However, this state of affairs evidently angered the gods and the country was subsequently struck by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake. Quite the day.

God, there's always something. Now it seems as if retreating Arctic ice is releasing catastrophic amounts of previously trapped methane into the air. The greenhouse properties of which are ten times that of carbon dioxide. Which is a good thing, right?

Another day, another picturesque European location punctured by random acts of wanton violence. Following on from Belgium's rampage, the unendingly beautiful city of Florence saw a man kill two Senegalese men, wound a couple of others and then shoot himself in a racially motivated attack. The Christmas spirit is strong this year.

Time Magazine has declared the protester to be its Person of the Year. Feels about right for a year in which the global order seemed to shift more decisively than at any point since the collapse of the USSR, and countries quiescent for decades – from Libya to the US to Russia – suddenly started to feel the rumblings of revolution.

Features

Al Jazeera offers a penetrating insight into the Iran-Israel-US relationship and how, right now, the US is pretty much everyone's bitch.

Newt Gingrich: Republican Presidential candidate, two-time divorcee, egomaniac and alternative fiction writer. You can tell he's a threat because the New Yorker have had two separate profiles on him in the last couple of days. One from Hendrik Hertzberg trying to lay out the reality of a Gingrich Presidency, and the other from editor David Remnick attacking his mendacious recasting of the Israel-Palestine history. And if that doesn't whet your thirst, then this 1994 New York Times profile is interesting, especially the bit where he offers to a friend this justification for divorcing his wife in 1978: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer."

Oddities/Curiosities

The year's events rendered in LEGO? The Guardian has you covered.



Jorge Santini, mayor of San Juan in Puerto Rico, is reaching out to his voters in a very specific Christmas fashion. Because nothing says Christmas cheer like a card featuring a taxidermied leopard ripping the throat out of a taxidermied antelope. The caption reads "May this Christmas illuminate your dreams". Quite.



And while we're talking questionable taxidermy, this is what a lion looks like when it's been stuffed by someone who has never seen a lion before.



Video

I think I have a new hero: Paul Yarrow, an otherwise nondescript British man who seems to spend his existence photo-bombing live TV news broadcasts.

Here's a sequence of still shots to give you some idea of the extent of the man's activities.



And here he is, in action. What a pro.