While we've been watching London 2012...

[Tripitaka of AA]

India had a power cut that affected 600 MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Gore Vidal died.

Syrian city of Aleppo is still the scene of bitter fighting.

Snoop Dogg has changed his name to Snoop Lion, after he is "born again" on trip to Jamaica.

[Silent memory]

Another piece of news that will not appear in UK is the death of Sir Bernard Lovell. Creator of the Lovell telescope at Jodrell bank and head project of the H2S radar.

http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/news/2012/SirBernard/

[takadadojokeith]

And there's that little story about landing a rover on Mars, too.

[Silent memory]

If it wasn't for Lowell, Mars would not be available to roam around on and The Olympics would still be 5 hours behind in US viewing.

[Tripitaka of AA]

In contrast to the joy and celebration of the Olympics, the British public spent much of the last two weeks following this story as it unfolded. Tia Sharp is a 12-year-old girl that was reported missing from her Grandmother's house. Thought at first to have gone missing on a shopping trip to a nearby town centre, her body was later discovered in the loft of the Grandmother's house and the Grandmother's boyfriend has now been charged with her murder. A desperately sad story that had twists and turns, candle-lit vigils, press conferences by concerned relatives wearing T-shirts bearingth her photgraph, hundreds of calls to hotlines, scores of possible sightings, then suspicions cast upon the relatives at the centre of the story and finally a discovery made after previous searches had missed the body.

As a sobering and very depressing counterpoint to the Olympic events it took up whatever space the newspapers had left over. There realy wasn't much room left for anything else during the last two weeks.

So what else happened out there?