New Year's News 2011/12

Samoa and Tokelau -- usually the last countries to celebrate the new year were the first to party in 2012, after skipping west across the international dateline, missing out on December 30th entirely in the process!

Twitter Crashed as their servers were overloaded with over 16,000 tweets per second.

Russian police detained 60 opposition activists to prevent them from protesting on a central Moscow square against the stifling of democratic freedom.

A 90 year-old man walked to church.

Fifteen people died in the southern Andhra Pradesh state in India after consuming bootleg liquor.

New York-based Code Academy launched Code Year. A project to teach programming.

Denmark started its presidency of the EU Council. 

In a poll the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace was voted the favourite television moment of 2011.

Some dogs sang Auld Lang Syne:-

In 2011 we said goodbye to:

Pete Postlethwaite, actor
Dick King-Smith, author
Helene Palmer, actress (best known as Ida Clough in ITV's Coronation Street)
Brian Jacques, fantasy writer (He wrote the Redwall series)
Edward Stobart, haulage contractor and entrepreneur (made famous on TV)
Dame Elizabeth Taylor, American actress
Michael Gough, actor
Lee Bradley Brown, A British tourist, beaten to death in police custody.
Brian Haw, peace activist,
Lucian Freud, German-born British painter.
Sir Jimmy Savile, disc jockey and TV presenter (I met him once)
George Baker, actor
Ronald Searle, cartoonist who invented the St Trinian's schoolgirls
James Rizzi, pop artist

 

 

British New Year