That's more like last year's news. Not that people have verified Perelman's work yet, but talk about started a while ago. In fact it seems like he can proven the even stronger 'geometrisation conjecture' which implies the famous Poincaré conjecture. I also like Yahoo's way of converting dollars to pounds. I hope they'll give me a similar rate.

Perelman put the initial piece of work on the web in late 2002 (link). I think there started being rumours in the following spring [...] People were rather positive all the way through. I even saw a printed book introducing Ricci flows (the technique Perelman uses) explicitly referring to the papers recently.

I also saw another report on the topic on a German news site today. I wonder why this is suddenly 'news' again. Who gets to decide that?