Cape Wrath from the sea in 2007 Image: Colin Wheatley.
A Scottish woman who set out before Christmas to purchase a turkey finally made it home on Monday, after being cut off by snow for a month. Kay Ure left the Lighthouse Keeper’s cottage on Cape Wrath, at the very northwest tip of Great Britain, in December. She was heading to Inverness on a shopping trip.
However on her return journey heavy snow and ice prevented her husband, John, from travelling the last 11 miles to pick her up. She was forced to wait a month in a friend’s caravan, before the weather improved and the couple could finally be reunited.
They were separated not just for Christmas and New Year, but also for Mr Ure’s 58th birthday. With no fresh supplies, he was reduced to celebrating with a tin of baked beans. He also ran out of coal, and had to feed the couple’s six springer spaniels on emergency army rations.
“It’s the first time we’ve been separated”, said Mr Ure in December. “We’ve been snowed in here for three weeks before, so we are well used to it and it’s quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet.”
Weisz, photographed in 2007, is not a fan of Botox.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
English actress Rachel Weisz thinks that Botox injections should be banned for all actors.
The 39-year-old actress, best known for her roles in the Mummy movie franchise and for her Academy Award-winning portrayal in The Constant Gardener, feels facial Botox injections leave actors less able to convey emotion and that it harms the acting industry as much as steroids harm athletes.
In an interview with UK’s Harper’s Bazaar, coming out next month, Weisz says, “It should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen,” she claims. “Acting is all about expression; why would you want to iron out a frown?”
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Currently living in New York, she also mentions that English women are much less worried about their physical appearance than in the United States. “I love the way girls in London dress,” she claimed. “It’s so different to the American ‘blow-dry and immaculate grooming’ thing.”
Eight American troops and one contractor were shot and killed by an Afghan National Army Air Force pilot Wednesday. Five Afghan soldiers were also wounded in the attack, for which the Taliban has claimed responsibility.
The incident, which began around 10 a.m. Afghan time (0530 UTC), occurred in the operations room of the Afghan Air Force in Kabul International Airport. The shooter, Ahmad Gul Sahebi, was killed by NATO forces.
“Suddenly, in the middle of the meeting, shooting started,” said Afghan Air Corps spokesman Colonel Bahader. “After the shooting started, we saw a number of Afghan army officers and soldiers running out of the building. Some were even throwing themselves out of the windows to get away.”
The shooter’s brother, Hassan Sahebi, said, “My brother was a little depressed recently, but he had served with Afghanistan’s national army for 20 years. He loved his country and his people. He was a good man.” He also said that his brother was facing financial troubles, but was not connected with the Taliban. A spokesman for the militia group, however, described Ahmad Gul Sahebi as an informant and sleeper agent who began planning the shooting five months ago.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai quickly condemned the attack and offered condolence to the victims and their families. He also said that the police and military would investigate the matter. Wednesday’s incident is the seventh this year in which NATO or Afghan forces have been killed by rogue Afghan troops or insurgents dressed as troops.
Eight people are dead and two more are missing and presumed dead after an explosion and fire on a cargo ship undergoing repairs at a naval dockyard in Kaliningrad, Russia.
The container ship MV Yenisey was the scene of an explosion while in drydock at about 3:00 p.m. Moscow time (11:00 GMT). Ten people were missing after the explosion. It was confirmed today that the eighth body has been recovered, and the remaining two are thought to be dead as well. Three more were injured.
Captain 1st Rank Igor Dygalo, acting as a navy spokesperson, said “Each family of the victims of the fire on the Yenisey civilian vessel will be paid more than a million rubles.” This makes their compensation roughly equivalent to US$43,000.
Dygolo said that the dockyard, in the closed military town of Baltiysk, near Kaliningrad, had been leased to the Yenisey’s St Petersburg owner, a private company, who were conducting the work themselves. He said an investigation has been launched by the navy led by top admiral Vladimir Vysotsky.
Vysotski himself has indicated that serious safety legislation breaches concerning welding regulations by both the vessel’s owner and the naval dockyard’s bosses. He did not go into details, but RIA Novosti claimed that a source at the dockyard said a gas burner applied to the roof of a fuel tank to heat and therefore loosen its bolts had triggered the disaster.
Today is an official day of mourning for Kaliningrad Region to mark the deaths.
Dogs are normally resistant to most flu strains. Since about 2000, a new strain of dog flu has been spreading in America, and there’s no vaccine to prevent it.
To limit exposure to the flu, some dog owners are avoiding public places like dog shows and parks. Since the flu can spread where groups of dogs are housed, some dog owners are nervous about the practice of putting their pets in kennels. According to Edward Dubovil, director of the animal virology lab at Cornell University, 100% of dogs appear to be susceptible to infection by this new flu strain. It is estimated that 1-5% of infected dogs are dying from this flu strain. The symptoms of dog flu are akin to those of kennel cough, a more common and less serious illness.
Starting in 2004 there have been many outbreaks of flu at dog race tracks. Since early in 2004, researchers have been working to characterize the type of flu that is infecting dogs. In September of 2005 it was reported that this dog flu strain had crossed over from horses to dogs. This type of flu virus has been infecting horses for at least 40 years. It is expected that existing flu vaccines for horses can soon be adapted for use in dogs.
The spread of a horse flu virus to dogs is an example of what could happen with bird flu. Currently the bird flu is transmitted from birds to humans but does not spread easily from person to person. The new strain of dog flu shows signs of having been genetically modified from the original horse-preferring virus strain making it easy to transmit from dog to dog. Future genetic modifications of bird flu could better adapt it to humans and allow it to spread from person to person. The chance of such viral evolution can be reduced by limiting exposure of humans to bird flu.
At this time, the new dog flu virus strain does not seem to be a danger for humans. However, humans will be monitored for signs of infection by new genetic variants of the dog flu. Due to the close physical association between pet dogs and humans, a flu strain that could jump from dogs to humans would be of great concern. Recently evolved virus strains that jump from one species to another are often particularly lethal because the newly infected species may have little or no immunity to the new virus strain.
The announcement on Tuesday the 16th of October 2007 includes Dell selling VoIP, data and wireless networking products from Nortel and the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and other unified communications products.
The partnership with both manufacturers should allow Dell to provide a pre-integrated solution.
In March 2007, competitors IBM and Cisco announced they would join in the competition for developing unified communications applications and the development of open technologies around the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) client platform an application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime.
“We want to make it simple for our customers to deploy unified communications so their end users can get access to all their messages in one place – whether its e-mail, phone or mobile device. This will pave the way for more business-ready productivity tools,” said vice president of solutions, Dell Product Group, Rick Becker.
Customers have four options:
Core Office Communication Server 2007 – provides instant messaging and on-premise Microsoft Live Meeting.
Office Communication Server: Telephony – enables call routing tracking and management, VoIP gateway and public branch exchange (PBX) integration.
Audio and Video Conferencing – allows point-to-point conference, video conference and VoIP audio conference.
Exchange Unified Messaging – provides voicemail, e-mail and fax in Microsoft Outlook, and anywhere access of Microsoft Outlook Inbox and Calendar.
Police at the scene of one of the raids, on Forest Road, Walthamstow, London.
The Metropolitan Police’s anti-terrorist branch and security service in London have claimed that a terrorist plot to detonate bombs on nine planes travelling mid-air from the United Kingdom to the United States has been thwarted.
Police in the West Midlands in England today said nearly 200 kilograms worth of drugs with value possibly as great as £30 million (about US$49 million or €36 million) has been seized from a unit in the town of Brownhills. In what an officer described as “one of the largest [seizures] in the force’s 39 year history”, West Midlands Police reported recovering six big cellophane-wrapped cardboard boxes containing cannabis, cocaine, and MDMA (“ecstasy”) in a police raid operation on the Maybrook Industrial Estate in the town on Wednesday.
The impact this seizure will have on drug dealing in the region and the UK as a whole cannot be underestimated
The seized boxes, which had been loaded onto five freight pallets, contained 120 one-kilogram bags of cannabis, 50 one-kilogram bags of MDMA, and five one-kilogram bricks of cocaine. In a press release, West Midlands Police described what happened after officers found the drugs as they were being unloaded in the operation. “When officers opened the boxes they discovered a deep layer of protective foam chips beneath which the drugs were carefully layered”, the force said. “All the drugs were wrapped in thick plastic bags taped closed with the cannabis vacuum packed to prevent its distinctive pungent aroma from drawing unwanted attention.” Police moved the drugs via forklift truck to a flatbed lorry to remove them.
Detective Sergeant Carl Russell of West Midlands Police’s Force CID said the seizure was the largest he had ever made in the 24 years he has been in West Midlands Police and one of the biggest seizures the force has made since its formation in 1974. “The impact this seizure will have on drug dealing in the region and the UK as a whole cannot be underestimated”, he said. “The drugs had almost certainly been packed to order ready for shipping within Britain but possibly even further afield. Our operation will have a national effect and we are working closely with a range of law enforcement agencies to identify those involved in this crime at whatever level.”
Expert testing on the drugs is ongoing. Estimates described as “conservative” suggest the value of the drugs amounts to £10 million (about US$16.4 million or €12 million), although they could be worth as much as £30 million, subject to purity tests, police said.
Police arrested three men at the unit on suspicion of supplying a controlled drug. The men, a 50-year-old from Brownhills, a 51-year-old from the Norton area of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, and one aged 53 from Brownhills, have been released on bail as police investigations to “hunt those responsible” continue. West Midlands Police told Wikinews no person has yet been charged in connection with the seizure. Supplying a controlled drug is an imprisonable offence in England, although length of jail sentences vary according to the class and quantity of drugs and the significance of offenders’ roles in committing the crime.
