There is an old saying, “university education won’t ruin an idiot”, and those girls are the living proofs of it: 23-year-olds Shanti Andrews and Rebecca Turner, both law graduates from the UK, tried to pull off an insurance fraud in Brazil, and, naturally, got caught.
The law graduates, who spent almost a week in jail after being arrested, were formally charged with attempted insurance fraud, the Daily Mail reports. Their lawyer Renato Tonini said they’re going …

Twitter is back up and running again after hours of downtime after a co-ordinated denial of service attack against the site.
Twitter status blog said they were defending themselves against a denial of service attack. Denial of service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
Now the site is back up again and seems to be working, however, some sources say they cannot log …

Twitter has been down for hours already, now the BBC says that according to the company, it was a co-ordinated attack that brought down the micro-blogging site.
The popular site has been subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the company’s status blog.
Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.
It also appears that Facebook is having trouble – I have never got …

The Bank of England have surprised markets by extending their radical plan to print money by £50bn, in a sign the Bank believe a robust recovery is far from assured, the Daily Telegraph reports.
The decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to increase the scale of the unprecedented programme from £125bn to £175bn will require permission from Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Bank’s MPC said that while there were signs that the …

Arab terrorist organisation Fatah unanimously adopted a proposal calling for the establishment of a committee which would investigate the death of former “Palestinian” leader Yasser Arafat while abiding by the following guidelines: that Israel bears full responsibility for his death, that the issue continues to remain open, and that the investigation enlists international support.
The proposal was raised by Bassam Abu Sharif, Arafat’s former political advisor, and was motivated both by demands from a number of …

In an interview with the BBC’s “Newsnight” program, Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams labelled London the “top Twitter-using city”, and said that “the UK is second only to the US in terms of number of Twitter users”, pocket-lint.com reports.
He also responded to criticism from archbishop Vincent Nichols, who recently labeled the service “dehumanising”.
“I think it’s kind of silly, I would say that anyone who says that isn’t really familiar with the service, because it’s about …

German carrier Lufthansa have announced that they will pay passengers 20 euros for every rainy day if their holiday is a washout, the maximum payout for a trip will be 200 euros, the Daily Mail reports.
A rainy day is defined by the airline as a day during which at least five millimetres of rain per square metre falls.
The offer applies to 36 European and worldwide destinations, including Barcelona, Istanbul, Madrid, Rome, Dubai, Cairo, New York, …

The Conservatives have extended their lead over Labour to 14 points, according to a “poll of polls”, ePolitix reports.
A weighted average of five polls taken last month showed the Tories have reached the critical 40 per cent mark, seen as necessary to secure a general election victory. This would be enough to give David Cameron a Commons majority of 68-seats.
The poll puts Labour up two points on 26 per cent, while the Liberal Democrats remain unchanged …

Company bosses fear that measures designed to reduce the impact of swine flu on the workplace could end up creating a “skivers’ charter”, Press Association reports.
More than 1,000 firms have contacted one employment law service to seek advice about staff who use the pandemic to extend their summer holidays.
Employment Law Advisory Services (ELAS) say they have been inundated with inquiries from managers who claim colleagues without any signs of illness are using a self-diagnosis website …

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are set to start charging online customers for news content across all their websites, the BBC reports.
The company lost $3.4bn (£2bn) in the year to the end of June, which chief executive Rupert Murdoch said had been “the most difficult in recent history”.
News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK, as well the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.
“We intend to charge for all our …

Access to Israel’s Kadima party website was temporarily inaccessible late Wednesday night, after hackers posted violent photos and anti-Israel slogans on the site, and made apparent threats on the life of party head and opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the Jerusalem Post reports.
Even after the violent images and threats were removed from the website, a sentence in Arabic and the hackers’ signature “Gaza Hacker” still appeared on-line.
The hackers, possibly Arabs, posted a horrific photograph of a …

Cancer-stricken actor Patrick Swayze was seen recently visiting a smoking paraphernalia shop with his brother Donny, and he looked healthier than he has in months.
When Swayze’s cancer first became public knowledge, it was thought he only had months to live, but the star has battled on, the Daily Mail reports.
He even appeared to have gained a little weight and had grown some of his hair back, including a new goatee. Tubes thought to be catheters for …

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe is man’s earliest map, dating from almost 14,000 years ago, the Daily Telegraph reports.
A stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain is believed to contain the earliest known representation of a landscape.
Engravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good …

Over 25,000 postal workers will stage a series of strikes on Friday, Saturday and Monday over pay and jobs, the BBC reports.
Communication Workers Union said that services across the UK, including in London, Scotland, the West Country, East Anglia and the Midlands will be affected.
London and Scotland have already witnessed stoppages in recent weeks. Last time the postal workers refused to do their jobs was only two weeks ago, when they didn’t work for three …

The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was exposed as a fraud 30 years ago by British diplomats who were investigating his qualifications, The Times reports.
The science-fiction writer, who invented a religion now followed by celebrities such as Tom Cruise, awarded himself a PhD from a sham “diploma mill” college that he had acquired, the diplomats found.
Such was the climate of fear and paranoia surrounding Scientology that the US believed the sect had sent bogus …

If I counted, how many times some organisation has said that worst of the recession is over, I would go insane. And now here’s another one – the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR) are saying that “the period of sharp recession is over”.
“Output is stabilising and, in the absence of further shocks, the period of sharp recession is over,” the institute said according to The Daily Telegraph.
NIESR’s optimism was echoed by the …