I woke up early this morning and for the past 3-4 hours I've been listening and watching to the stream from the bbc on the bombs in london. There are some first hand photos on flickr at bomb, London,and adders,Jim Christian,moggan,drebben and a pretty scary one at qwghlm who got the photo from Alfie
Recently in News Category
It is interesting to see that the news site are only able to send audio streams of the results of the Michael Jackson trial that was due to be announced 10 minutes ago as cameras are not allowed in the courtroom. The BBC have an "audio only" stream but at the moment its actually streaming video reportage from reporters at the court room. The msn's website is not sending anything at all and looks broken.
I'm not going to comment on the actual case itself as I've not been privy to the evidence submitted during the trial - I just think its crazy that the trial has gone on for so long and am amazed how much of a media circus this has turned into.
(and when interviewing someone on the news, you really want to pick someone who doesn't answer your questions with "that's right" as it leads to a rather boring interview.)
In case you didn't know, you can donate to the Red Cross via amazon and its very easy if you already have an amazon account. Also for british tax payers by ticking the box you immediately boost your donation by 28% via tax relief. So far amazon have had 6081 donations totally just under $300,000 and its increased by 6 donations whilst i've written this.
As the title says, people in Nigeria are going on strike due to fuel price hikes. Sounds remarkably familiar to what happened in the uk about 4 years ago when petrol rose to a price that is actually cheaper than it is today. Still, with all these millions floating around that the 419'ers have got, why don't they just share this wealth amongst themselves so they can afford the fuel? (I got a new 419 the other day - this time from a pastor of a church who wanted me to spread the good news via 4million dollars!)
The BBC reports that a suffolk school issues a skirt ban because the skirts were getting too short and too immodest. Now the girls all have to wear trousers. It will be interesting to see how long it takes before someone challenges this in court. Why they didn't just say the skirts have to be at least X cm's long or knee length or something.....When I was at school there were about 2 girls who wore trousers at school and they were always getting picked on or laughed at. Interesting how times change.
ironically enough, some time ago there was a girl launching legal action to wear trousers and also a boy fighting to wear a skirt
A cool piece of programming, newsmap shows all the headlines as they appear around the world, with the most talked about stories appearing bigger on the screen and the most recent ones in a brighter colour than older news. I did find some of the links to pages were broken but it is a good way of getting new news sources and keeping up to date.
In a story on Reuters which I had to check to make sure wasn't published on the 1st April, Jewellery in your eyeball now seems to be the new "subtle" body piercing (which seems painful enough already!). Thanks Richard
A stupid woman got arrested at the airport for joking about having a bomb in her luggage. Has she been asleep for the past week? The news about the british woman arrested in Miami (I think) for doing the same thing has been in the news all this week so you would have thought someone wouldn't have done the same thing less than a week later.
Apparently the police are threatening to release CCTV footage of people in the area of where someone was murdered. Apparently people should be ashamed if they've not come forward as witnesses...I'm not a lawyer but this does seem to be an invasion of privacy and I'm guessing it breaks the Data Protection rules (although theres probably a police get-out clause) as they are publishing details on people NOT related to the crime but just happened to be in the area.
Sounds rude :-)
Apparently an elephant escaped "with simplicity - it just walked through something". (nice quote from that inspector!). Also in weird news, apparently the guy who worked two weeks solid, wasn't working but was dead. If they thought he was working, I guess Taxmen don't do much.....
The US airforce drop a practice bomb, but its' ok - it was inert........still caused an 18" crater though!
Its ironic that the register is reporting that there are 13 million kids online in the same week that Microsoft and others announce they are closing chatrooms due to threat of kids being groomed. So what are the kids going to do now if they can't chat? ;-)
From the Stella Awards is a newspaper story of the police who are suing the makers of Tazer as the cop was too stupid to tell the difference between a tazer and a gun and shot someone she was meant to be tazering. The cops are suing Tazer as they didn't train the cops well enough to tell the difference!
The nutter made it - flying over the english channel without an engine - although he did use one to get started. Pictures, video and commentary are available from the BBC news website
A nutter (my description) plans to fly across the english channel unaided by engine power or anything. By jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet and a 6foot wing strapped to his back he aims to glide across the channel and land in france 7 minutes later.
Congratulations to Cameron who has won this years BigBrother.
I do think its quite amazing that he has won considering that last year when they showed the failed entrants, they had another Christian on and they made it quite clear that they didn't want a "bible basher" on big brother - where they used the term Bible Basher for someone who was a Christian. So, despite what some might say vote-twisting questions from BigBrother on Cameron's views on homosexuality, he still managed to win.
Good on yer mate!
For those Harry Potter fans *cough*Kelly*cough*, the Harry Potter House is for sale for an estimated quarter of a million pounds. It would be interesting to see how much the house next door is worth.
Amzing news is that the Tom Watson, a Labour MP who uses Moveable type for his blog has also signed up for the Blogathon 2003
Thanks to Amanita for the information
There's an interesting set of letters at the HSF - International Space Station website, which as Jerry Kindall points out is almost a blog!
Environmental officers in Yorkshire are now fining people 50 pounds who drop fag ends in the street. Some people are saying this is excessive but I think its a good idea, it should hopefully clean the streets up. They are also doing the same thing with chewing gum. I must admit I was suprised when Kristen's parents came over, they stubbed their cigarettes out and then picked up the fagend afterwards!
The BBC has a correspondent following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Burton in Brazil, and blogging his journey. It makes an interesting read and the pictures are really neat too. The first couple are of a waterfall with and without water, as the falls are switched on and off by the local electricity company!
Forget the segway, residents in Paris now have a walkway that runs at speeds up to 11kph - its basically an advanced flat escalator. The BBC website has a neat flash animation that shows how it works, which is a good example of how flash SHOULD be used on a website. The downside for londoners is that they reckon it would never work on the underground as it needs a straight flat site to work. personally, they should forget the underground and install it above ground - it would beat the congestion charge and get people to where they want to be :-)
It was announced today that driving whilst talking on a handheld phone is now illegal (at the moment you can only be done for a different offence of driving without due care and attention). Personally I think its about time too as I've seen loads of near misses as people are yakking on the phone with one hand (and i've had to endure a scary ride as a passenger with someone talking on the phone AND changing gear at the same time - so guess the number of hands holding the steering wheel). What does annoy me is the cops say eating food (and chatting on the phone) is really dangerous, but they don't do anything about people smoking whilst driving and thats just as dangerous as people fiddle around trying to light their fags. It will be interesting to see if they will get away with making handsfree kits illegal as that will affect so many people who have bought the kits to avoid this recent legislation, all the techie and sales people who spend hours driving around the country, and of course all the manufacturers of phones as not as many people will buy phones if they can't use them in the car.
We went to Middlewich canal festival yesterday as it was a nice day and we wanted to do something relaxing. The festival itself was pretty cheesy, but it was still a nice day. I think it should really have been renamed Middlewich Morris Dancer Convention as there were at least 5 or 6 groups dancing at the various locations. I took some pictures of a couple of groups and I've uploaded to the Middlewich Canal Festival Gallery. We also saw three cygnets in the canal and Kristen got a few shots of them too.
I meant to comment on this a couple of days ago but I was not near a net connection. It made me laugh that the two guys escaping from the securicor van were actually in the securicor van as they were being charged for attempting to rob a securicor van! Does this sound crazy logic to you? I guess that the jury are unlikely to find them not guilty now that they've successfully done it this time!
Apparently only now is London Council chasing the people who didn't pay the congestion charge on the first day. With the rate of interest the banks charged, they could have almost made the £80 fine in interest charges. Eighty quid seems an awful lot of money considering the initial payment is only a fiver!
The gun shootout near Heathrow yesterday happened right by the hotel that I was staying at last Thursday night - and I thought it was a quiet neighbourhood!
Congrat's Queeny! 50 years ago today we had a new queen!
