An Australian lawyer has set a world record by stringing up almost 1.2 million Christmas lights in the center of the nation’s capital.
Guinness World Records yesterday confirmed that the 120km of multicolored wire strung in the shape of three interconnected giant, wrapped Christmas gifts in a downtown Canberra shopping mall was the largest ever image made out of LED lights.
Lawyer David Richards assembled the Canberra light show with the help of an army of volunteers and powers it with electricity donated by a local power company.
Photo: EPA
He set a Guinness World Record a year ago for the most Christmas lights on a residential property by cocooning his Canberra home with 502,165 bulbs.
However, traffic snarls in his neighborhood created by 75,000 sightseers who visited the display over four weeks made it difficult for his family to get to and from their home.
“I couldn’t do it again to my neighbors or my family,” Richards said, explaining the move to the city center.
The latest light show opened to the public free of charge yesterday and is to run until New Year’s Eve.
Visitors to the light show last year donated A$138,000 (US$117,000) to a local Canberra Sudden Infant Death Syndrome counseling and support service.
Richards said he expects donations to the charity will be higher with the bigger and more spacious display.
The 1,194,380 twinkling bulbs arranged since Wednesday beat the previous record set in Shurtan in southern Uzbekistan by 181,540 lights.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS