1. Police raided and shut down a weekly, $4-a-round mah jongg game in Tampa played by Lee Eelnick, Bernice Diamond, Helen Greenspan and Zelda King, all between the ages of 87 and 95, because the police said they were gambling.
2. A new study by a Pittsburgh bank revealed that all the gifts listed in the iconic “Twelve Days of Christmas” song would cost a would-be buyer $34,131 this year.
3. Sushi Zanmai, a Japanese restaurant chain, just paid $117,000 for a 441-pound blue-fin tuna. That’s $265 per pound.
4. The Playboy Mansion, a 5-acre property featuring 29 rooms, a game house, home theatre, wine cellar and a swimming pool with a cave-like grotto is up for sale for $200 million dollars. As a condition of the sale, magazine founder Hugh Hefner would continue to live there.
5. The 2016 Olympic Games will be held in Rio de Janeiro and will include rugby, last featured in the 1924 games and golf, last played in the St. Louis Games in 1904.
6. Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the pro-independence party, as its first female president.
7. For the first time in 7 decades, a new annotated copy of Mein Kampf, banned by the book’s copyright holder, will be back in German bookstores. Under German law, a copyright expires 70 years after an author’s death. Scholars at Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History have spent 6 years correcting the outright lies, half truths and distortions in the 1925 edition.
8. Whoops! Steve Harvey mistakenly crowned Ariadna Gutierrez of Columbia as Miss Universe. Moments after the announcement Harvey returned to the stage to say that Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach of the Phillippines was the winner and Miss Columbia was 1st runner-up.
9. 4 new elements have been added to the periodic table, completing its 7th row. The new elements, which have been temporarily named ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium have the atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118.
10. A new study found that the midlife crisis is not a true psychological phenomenon and that most people are happier in their 40’s than they were at 18.
