A sparrow shot dead after flying into the middle of a Dutch world record attempt, knocking over 23,000 dominoes with a little flap of its wing is to be given pride of place at Rotterdam’s Natural History Museum. The bird, whose killing last month in the northern Dutch city of Leeuwarden enraged animal rights activists, will be placed on top of a box of dominoes at an exhibition. The sparrow was shot with an air rifle during a televised world record dominoes attempt. Thousands of messages of condolence were sent after its death to the website dodemus – set up to record the storm of protest from people across the Netherlands. The sparrow’s exterminator was fined €170 (£115) on Friday for shooting a protected species. The common house sparrow was added to the Dutch list of endangered species last year. Participants in the record attempt went on to knock down about 4 million dominoes to claim a new record, yet to be verified by Guinness World Records.

The sparrow will be on display at the museum this year with another dead bird, famous for different reasons – a male duck, obtained posthumously, said to be the victim of the first scientifically documented case of “homosexual mallard necrophilia”.

A belated entry to the e-newsletter; this was passed to me by Padmassana whilst the Beetle was working away in SE Asia.

Padmassana heard on the radio that a Thomsonfly a stewardess said she needed “eight fat people” to sit nearer the front because the captain of a half-full London-bound Thomsonfly flight was unhappy about the weight distribution and therefore the handling of his plane. Passenger Peter Harrison, who weighs 24-stone, said the request for people to move was made as the plane taxied to take off from Tenerife to Gatwick last Saturday. Mr Harrison added: The stewardess said there were too many passengers on the back of the plane and she needed eight fat people sat in rows 31 to 42 to sit near the front. Mr Harrison, a postman, was not in those rows but felt awkward. He said: “In the end eight people got up and shuffled forward before we took off.

Speak Chinese and travelling to Africa? You may get a chance to try it out. Zimbabwe’s government hopes to see Mandarin Chinese taught in universities as the school year starts in February. This is part of mad crazed dictator Robert Mugabe’s “Look East” policy of building closer economic links with China amid worsening relations with the West.

If you were thinking of going to work in Saudi, be aware of a “Saudi-isation” program that is edging foreign workers out of the country in favour of local people.

According to press reports late last year, the Saudi Labour Ministry has banned the renewal of work licenses of expatriate workers who reached 60 years of age and also banned the recruitment of foreigners aged over 60 years.

After a series of quarrels with his wife, an Indian man left his home to live in a tree and has been there for the past 15 years. Kapila Pradhan, 45, a resident of Nagajhara village in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, now lives in a tree-house 7. 6m (25 feet) above the ground. “Sometimes the villagers feed him during festive occasions,” says a local resident Sukanta Dakua. Cyclones, rain and wild elephants and monkeys forced him to move to a tree closer to the edge of the forest, near a village.

According to the Transportation Security Administration Air travellers in the United States will soon be allowed to carry small scissors and tools on planes, but will face more random security searches that focus more on detecting explosives at airports as part of an effort to thwart potential terrorists.

The new focus on random searches will include more additional screenings of passengers and their bags at security checkpoints. While in the past passengers have been selected for extra or “secondary” screening when they check in for their flight, that will be expanded to checkpoints as well. The secondary checks will be based on behaviour patterns and a random pattern selected by the screeners.

TSA screeners will also use a different pat-down procedure, to improve their ability to detect nonmetal weapons and explosive devices that may be carried on the body. Pat-down searches will now include the arms and legs. But oh, none of this is supposed to cause any major delays.

Kew Palace in south-west London once a royal palace that was once home to “mad” King George III is to open to the public after being shut for 10 years. The king used Kew as a place to convalesce during his bouts of mental illness, which are believed to have been caused by the hereditary disease porphyria.

From May 2006, visitors will be able to tour the palace, which is in the grounds of Kew’s famous Royal Botanic Gardens. The palace was a royal residence from 1728 to 1818, and in the early 19th Century was the home of King George III and Queen Charlotte.

The newly opened palace will show an exhibition of Georgian life, including literature, music, horticulture, architecture and astronomy. The second floor of the palace has never been seen before by the public, and has been hardly altered since it was decorated for the Georgian princesses in the early 19th Century.

The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office advise against all but essential travel to Eritrea. We advise against all travel to the border areas with Ethiopia and Sudan. In recent weeks, restrictions placed on the UN Monitoring force by the Government of Eritrea have further heightened tensions along the Ethiopia/Eritrea border. This advice includes Tesseney, near the Sudan border. We also advise against travel in the area north of Afabet in the Sahel region and along one road in the west of the country (see Local Travel Section below for details).

In November 2005, UN agencies in Eritrea withdrew families of their personnel in response to increased tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea over their disputed border. On 6 December 2005, the Government of Eritrea told UN Mission to Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) staff from USA, Canada, Europe and the Russian Federation to leave the Mission within 10 days. The relocation of these personnel to Ethiopia is now complete.

You should be aware that there is a continuing threat to Western, including British, targets from terrorism in Eritrea as there is in other countries in East Africa and the Horn.

You should be aware that travel restrictions may limit our ability to offer immediate consular assistance outside Asmara, Keren, Dekemhare, Mendeferra and Massawa.

Travel options to and from Asmara are limited following the cancellation of scheduled flights between Asmara and Nairobi.

The Beetle read a touching account from the BBC News on-line about women in Afghanistan having freedoms but not being free to enjoy these. This is what it said: Girls can go to school, at least in the big cities like Herat and Kabul, and a fragile peace now exists in a war-torn country that has known only brutality and chaos since 1979. But some things, it seems, have not really changed at all.

Mamozai’s Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Driving School was one of the first driving schools in Afghanistan to allow women to enrol. The Taleban thought the idea of teaching women how to drive was “satanic”, but Mr Mamozai’s school now has more than 200 female graduates.

Even so, the women are often told to “sit up like a man” by their male instructors as they navigate the precarious back-roads of Kabul, and to “stop driving like a woman. ”

But then that is hardly surprising. Most of the instructors are ex-Taleban and they do not really think women should drive at all. They certainly would not allow their own wives to drive

A member of Globetrotters Club? Interested in a £1,000 travel award?

Know someone who is? We have £1,000 to award each year for five years for the best submitted independent travel plan. Interested?

Then see our legacy page on our Website, where you can apply with your plans for a totally independent travel trip and we’ll take a look at it. Get those plans in!!