Braving storms and Dutch judges...

Two young yachtsmen hit the world's headlines at the weekend - after battling 50ft waves and savage storms, 17-year-old Mike Perham sailed into  Portsmouth and into the record books as the youngest person to circumnavigate the world single-handed; and in Holland another teenage sailor, 13-year-old Laura Bekker was made a temporary ward of court...to prevent the girl from emulating Mike's adventure.

Hundreds of well-wishers - among them his mother Heather and girlfriend Beckie - cheered Mike as he stepped ashore from his racing yacht Totallymoney.com in Portsmouth where his 30,000-mile voyage started last November.

Dutch girl Laura was born in a boat and has sailed for seven years - including a solo crossing of the North Sea. But last week a court decided that the 13-year-old's plans to sail around the world single-handedly must be put on hold...at least for the time being and although her parents had given their blessiung to what was to be a two-year trip.

Laura, the daughter of two round-the-world yachtsmen, had hoped to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe solo. She believed that she was experienced enough and her father had applied for leave of absence from school on her behalf.

Then the Dutch social services intervened. Laura, they countered, was too young and the voyage too arduous. The isolation, they said, would be damaging at an important stage in a girl's development.

In a 20-minute verdict, Judge M. Oostendorp agreed. "She would be confronted with difficult situations that will challenge her mentally and physically," she said. The Utrecht court ordered Dutch authorities to take temporary guardianship of Laura until psychologists could determine whether she is able to undertake such a difficult voyage.

She will remain living with Dick Dekker, her father, but under the responsibility of social services pending a further ruling in two months.

Mr Dekker squeezed past television cameras and journalists to hear the court's decision - an experience that he described as more gruelling "than a heavy storm in the Atlantic". Laura was not present. According to her lawyer, she was out sailing.

Anonymous Italian villager was luckier than our Peter

It's probably hard for some readers - and for any member of the Government - to imagine that anything or anyone could be bigger...or better ...or wiser ...or luckier than our illustrious Chief Minister. Remember last Christmas when he won a half share in the bumper  National Lottery? Well, there can't be many leaders of a country big or small who can boast that sort of luck (with the exceptionof places like Russia or China, where the perks go automatically to the man at the top).

However, ‘somewhere' in Italy an incredibly fortunate ‘someone' has supposedly won  Europe's biggest ever lottery...And the whopping 147 million euro jackpot dwarfs Peter Caruana's win by more than a thousandfold. But while Caruana's lucky break was known across Gibraltar within hours of the local lottery draw, a veil of mystery surrounds the Italian winner of the ‘Big One'.

The Italian media believe they have traced the winning ticket to the small Tuscan village of  Bagnone and to Vanni Simonetti, the owner of  its central watering-the supposed win has attracted.

"It was a moment of euphoria. People say silly things," he muttered last week while stocking the fridge of what, since the news broke,  has become the busiest bar in Italy. "But we are not the winners."

The bar owner is suspect ‘numero uno' in a national guessing game after he claimed to know the identity of the mystery man who bought a 2 euro  ticket from his bar and walked out a multimillionaire.

Bar Biffi became centre stage for the celebrations - but the corks have stopped popping. As the residents of the Tuscan hilltop village are beginning to realise, winning the biggest lottery jackpot in European history can bring its own problems.

Rumours are circulating that the Mafia is now demanding its share - a report in the newspaper Corriere della Sera claimed that the Calabrian mob, the 'Ndrangheta, was seeking 30 per cent of the winnings.

Villagers who were celebrating on behalf of their unidentified neighbour and teasing reporters with clues, now flatly deny any knowledge of his identity. The biggest volte-face comes from Vanni - who had told reporters that the £128 million jackpot winner was a 47-year-old single local man...an apt description of his own age and status.

"Here's another one," his partner, Anna Maria Ciampini, shouted across the bar earlier this week, waving yet another begging letter that had arrived in the morning post. "Hundreds arrive every day, asking for money," Vanni told a British newspaper. "The telephone has not stopped ringing, with calls from widows in financial straits, mothers of ill children and lawyers offering their services. What can I say? I've had enough."

Ugo Verni, 49, the forestry worker who emerged as an early favourite, has also backtracked, saying that he was only joking when he declared that he had the winning ticket. Andrea Barbieri, 47, another local named as a potential winner, insists that he did not even play.

The Superenalotto game went 86 draws without a winner and for weeks it offered the biggest jackpot in the world. Six months of rollovers finally came to an end on Saturday a week ago. A spokesman for Superenalotto confirmed that the winning numbers were played at Bar Biffi, and that no one had yet come forward to claim the prize. If the jackpot is not claimed within 60 days, the money will go back to the State.

The irony is that Bagnone, a mediaeval jumble of green-shuttered villas surrounded by orchards and vineyards, appears to offer just the kind of dolce vita most people dream of after winning the lottery.

Perhaps Peter Caruana was luckier than he thought ...

Old Scottish music found

The oldest written instrumental music composed in Scotland has been found etched into the side of a 16th-century carving from Stirling Castle's royal palace. The border of one of the oak roundels known as the Stirling Heads - world-famous masterpieces of Scottish Renaissance art that once adorned the ceilings of the Royal Palace at Stirling Castle - has been found to bear a sequence of cryptic code that experts think must be a 16th century composition for the harp.

The music could have been played in the castle's minstrels' gallery on instruments such as harps, viols, fiddles and lutes - and evidence found in Wales from later in the same century suggests the ancient tune discovered on the Stirling Head is part of the Celtic harp tradition.

The musical markings are not an exact score, but would have given guidance to players who then improvised - in much the same way as modern jazz and blues musicians. They were discovered by a woodcarver, John Donaldson, who was commissioned by Historic Scotland to create a series of replicas of the heads. Historic Scotland, the guardians of the castle, said Mr Donaldson noticed what seemed to be a deliberate sequence of 0s, Is and IIs round the edge of head number 20, which has the face of a woman as its central image.

Donaldson contacted a lecturer at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama who specialises in early Scottish music. He recognised the similarity of the sequence to rare Welsh notations from a few decades later, previously thought to be the earliest of their kind in the British Isles.

Bill Taylor, a world authority on medieval harp music, played the music of the Stirling Head in the castle's Chapel Royal last weekend, but as there were no music critic present, Atlas cannot report on the quality of the music.

Britain no longer loves Big Brother

Britain's Channel 4 television has announced it was cancelling future episodes of Big Brother - the show that sparked a national obsession with reality TV. Next year's 11th season will be the last.

Big Brother made its British debut in 2000 and quickly became a national talking point. The show confines a group of people to a house under the constant gaze of cameras and lets viewers vote to evict them one by one. Several contestants became celebrities, including Jade Goody, the troubled star who died of cancer in March at 27.

Celebrity Big Brother, a version of the show featuring second rate actors and tabloid personalities, also made for successful television. The show's 2006 series featured renegade politician George Galloway performing an interpretive dance dressed in a red leotard and lapping imaginary milk while pretending to be a cat.

In 2007, the show made a brief and chaotic foray into the international arena when Indians protested what they said was racist treatment of Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. Shetty herself said she was shocked but not surprised by news of the show's demise.

Viewers made 20 million calls to the program's eviction line during its debut. At its peak, it was estimated to be generating a profit of £68 million a year. But the show has suffered falling ratings the last few years. Channel 4 director of television Kevin Lygo said it had reached a "natural end."

Helping Cyberspace addicts quit...

A treatment centre for computer-related addiction has opened in the USA and offers a 45-day treatment plan for "Internet, gaming, texting and video game excessive use".  Its promoters claim that hundreds of people have lost money or disrupted their family life through too much Web-related activity.

The treatment is specifically oriented "towards launching tech dependent youth and adults back into the real world," while current research suggests that as many as one in ten of the online population is "dependent on one or more aspects of cyber technology and the Internet".

...but China takes a tougher line

Both China and South Korea have designated Internet addiction as their number one public health danger, and China has responded by developing tough treatment programmes.

At China's first internet ‘boot camp'teenagers spend a minimum of three months being weaned off their obsession with cyberspace. The Juvenile Psychological Growth Base can treat about 100 children at a time - barely scratching the surface in a country where 10 million children from among the 340 million internet population are deemed to be addicts.

China's treatment of internet addiction has been mired in controversy; about 400 improperly licensed boot camps have sprung up, many inflicting brutal violence on their young charges. The reported deaths of two teenage boys over the summer at such institutions has shocked the country, while a third youngster is in hospital with kidney failure from severe beatings.

Tao Ran, the director of the clinic just outside Beijing, says that the violence comes as little surprise: "Almost all these children have real psychological problems. They can have behavioural difficulties and the teachers are not trained to handle them. They regard these children as disobedient and do not understand that they are not well."

The need for regulation of the schools is urgent, Dr Tao says. "The Ministry of Health must recognise this type of addiction and there must be more co-operation with the Ministry of Education so that these schools can be stopped."

Mayor arrested for nicking knickers

Ian Stafford, the 58-year-old  Mayor of Preesall in Lancashire, had to hand over his chain of office to a fellow councillor last week...after he was arrested when  women in the area called police to report knickers repeatedly disappearing from their homes.

One woman was so peturbed she installed a hidden camera in her bedroom, which recorded a semi-naked man rifling through her drawers and putting on her underwear before performing a sex act. Investigations later revealed a collection of knickers, allegedly matching those reported stolen, at the home of the mayor. He was arrested on suspicion of burglary and later released on bail.