World Briefs

Bucharest's mayor Sorin Oprescu cuts a fruit and cream cake in Bucharest during a Guinness World Record event for the world's heaviest cake, Romania, yesterday.

The cake which weighs 281 kilos set a new world record and was covered with fruit and whipped cream.

It was decorated with the Romanian and European Union flags along with the words Happy New Year 2009 and was commissioned by the city for the annual winter festivities.

The heaviest cake in the world was then distributed to residents of Bucharest who had gathered around.

Lennon lives on in TV ad

Imagine if John Lennon were to make a TV comeback for charity. Through the use of digital technology, the former Beatle urges people across the United States to support a campaign by One Laptop per Child to deliver tough, solar-powered XO laptop computers to the world's poorest children.

"Imagine every child no matter where in the world they were could access a universe of knowledge. They would have a chance to learn, to dream, to achieve anything they want," a voice and video image of Lennon has been created to say.

"I tried to do it through my music, but now you can do it in a very different way. You can give a child a laptop and more than imagine, you can change the world," says the musician in a play on one his best known songs - 1971's Imagine.

Lennon was shot and killed as he and his wife, Yoko Ono, arrived at their Manhattan apartment building on December 8, 1980.

2008 gets extra second

Those eager to put 2008 behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year's Eve.

The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The US Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon's master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world's atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time.

UTC is the time scale kept by highly precise atomic clocks around the world, accurate to about a billionth of a second per day. For precision timing, it has replaced Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.

Blackout hits Obama vacation island

The resort and much of the island of Oahu where President-elect Barack Obama is vacationing was hit by a major blackout on Friday evening.

However, it was not immediately clear if his compound had a backup source of electricity.

John Cummings, a civil defence spokesman, said a good part of the island was affected and authorities were trying to discover the cause.

'Clash of civilizations' author dies

Political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book The Clash of Civilizations predicted conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has died aged 81, Harvard University has said.

Mr Huntington, who taught for 58 years at Harvard before retiring last year, died on Wednesday at a nursing facility in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the university said on its website.

In his 1996 The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which expanded on his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Mr Huntington divided the world into rival civilizations based mainly on religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism and said competition and conflict among them was inevitable.

His focus on religion rather than ideology as a source of conflict in the post-Cold War world triggered broad debate about relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, especially in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Despite criticism, his thesis was simplistic or in the words of Middle East scholar Edward Said promoted the idea of "West versus the rest," Mr Huntington told Islamica magazine in 2007, "My argument remains that cultural identities, antagonisms and affiliations will not only play a role, but play a major role in relations between states."