World News
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Britain to contribute $2.9 billion to G7 loan for Ukraine’s defense and reconstructionBritain is set to provide Ukraine with a loan of £2.26 billion ($2.94 billion) as part of a broader G7 initiative, utilizing frozen Russian central bank assets to help Ukraine purchase militaryRead More...
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UK rules out slavery reparations at Commonwealth summit, but open to dialogueBritain has made it clear that it will not be addressing the issue of reparations for historical transatlantic slavery during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), whichRead More...
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Round-the-world adventurer swims across Caspian Sea in epic journeyFormer paratrooper Karl Bushby, who began his global trek in 1998, has completed an extraordinary swim across the Caspian Sea as part of his 36,000-mile adventure around the world.Read More...
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King Charles and Queen Camilla begin Australia tour with Church service and warm public receptionKing Charles and Queen Camilla were warmly welcomed by enthusiastic crowds in Sydney after attending a church service on Sunday, marking the first event of their Australia tour.Read More...
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Global Combat Air Programme updateDefence Secretary John Healey attended the G7 Defence Ministers summit in Naples to review the progress of the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP).Read More...
Culture
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Discover Ufford: Suffolk's charming village with an award-winning pub and scenic walksSuffolk is known for its charming towns and villages, but this week we’re highlighting Ufford, a village that offers more than just picturesque scenery. With an award-winning pub and plenty ofRead More...
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UK’s National Gallery implements liquid ban following activist attacks on artworksThe National Gallery in London has introduced a ban on liquids in response to a series of activist attacks on its artworks, including Vincent van Gogh's iconic Sunflowers.Read More...
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Little Portugal: three restaurants to experience in London's Portuguese communityThe Portuguese population in this area of South Lambeth boasts a variety of exceptional dining options.Read More...
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Guildhall Library celebrates 600th anniversary with exhibition honoring founder and London’s legendary figureSix centuries ago, the first library at Guildhall was established through a bequest from Richard Whittington, a former Lord Mayor of the City of London, who was renowned as a shrewdRead More...
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Honiara: London Fashion Week show Blo Iumi returns bigger and better in 2024The British High Commission in Honiara hosted its second edition of the popular London Fashion Week Show Blo Iumi on Tuesday, September 17, 2024, featuringRead More...
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Wiener Holocaust Library reopens after major renovations with exhibition on Jewish émigré sculptor Fred KormisThe world’s oldest Holocaust studies library and research center, the Wiener Holocaust Library, is set to reopen its doors on September 20th following extensiveRead More...
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Van Gogh's 'Les Canots Amarrés' expected to fetch $50 million at Hong Kong auctionA painting by Vincent van Gogh, titled "Les canots amarrés" (The Anchored Boats), is set to be auctioned at Christie's 20th and 21st Century Evening Auction inRead More...
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Silk Roads at the British Museum: a first glimpse at a route of vast historical importanceThe upcoming "Silk Roads" exhibition at the British Museum promises to be an expansive exploration of one of history's most significant trade networks.Read More...
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Library closures are a 'decimation,' says former Children's LaureateFormer Children's Laureate Michael Rosen has strongly condemned the closure of libraries across the UK, describing it as a "decimation." Rosen, who grew up in Harrow,Read More...
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Historic painting once owned by Britain's first Prime Minister faces export riskA temporary export bar has been placed on Le Rêve de L’Artiste, a painting by the influential 18th-century French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau, to allow time for a UK galleryRead More...
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National Gallery enlists social media influencers to attract Gen Z and shed 'stuffy' imageIn an effort to draw in Gen Z visitors and refresh its image, the National Gallery has teamed up with social media influencers to promote its art and engage with aRead More...
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Liverpool library rises from the ashes: community defies UK riotsAmid a wave of community support, a library in Liverpool is rebuilding after being set on fire during a series of racist riots that swept across England last week.Read More...
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Media
After numerous attempts unsuccessfully to establish contacts with the daughter who lives with her father in New York, the Brazilian who lives in Florida, USA, Adriana Paula de Oliveira, was able to speak, via telephone, with her ex-husband, Marcelo Luiz da Silva, who once again did not allow his daughter to talk with her mother.
In one of the attempts to talk to her daughter by phone, and Adrianawas used the call never be answered, Adriana was surprised on January 21th, at 4:00pm when the phone was answering, when her ex-husband answered the call and as soon as he realized that it was the mother of his daughter, Marcelo, who is also Brazilian, raised uphis voice and started to speaking English, accusing her of lying about the article that she had an interview with the press.
Baffled and by instinct, Adriana has managed to write an excerpt of the conversation with her ex-husband, and reported to the News Radar, as was the conversation between the two.
"He answered the phone, then I asked in Portuguese, Marcelo? Marcelo? Then he responded rudely and in English: myself, why? There's another Marcelo? AI I commented that I was surprised with him answering the phone, and asked to speak to my daughter, he said I couldn’t talk to her because I put all those lies in the paper, and that our daughter was 17 years and that she is ' free ' to talk with me when she wants to. Before the allegations and contradictions started questioning what lies he's talking about, "said Adriana.
Her ex-husband claims that the mother owes child support and the statements made by her mother in an interview for the News Radar, are liars.
Under the pending charges with American justice, Adriana” requested a certificate letter to the Queens Family Court of New York, in order to know if there really was or have any pending case. And is there was or is a pending, I have some debt to the USA Government I have complete interest in resolving," said Adriana.
The Family Court of Queens, New York reported that:You have no case in any family proceedings pending on behalf of Adriana until January 14, 2015, as follows below in official document:
“Mrs. Adriana De Oliveira
The records of Queens County Family Court, show NO upcoming court dates for any of your cases.
Record Room”
British tabloid The Sun published a photo of a winking topless model on Thursday, rebutting reports it had ended the controversial tradition that has featured in the newspaper since 1970.
Newspaper The Times, which like the Sun is part of billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch's News UK group, reported on Tuesday that the page three feature had been shelved and the news was welcomed by government ministers.
Nevertheless, The Sun featured a photo of a bare-breasted blonde woman in its Thursday edition under the words "clarifications and corrections".
"Further to recent reports in all other media outlets, we would like to clarify that this is Page 3 and this is a picture of Nicole, 22, from Bournemouth," the caption to the photograph read.
Precious scrolls blackened by the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in AD 79 may become readable again, thanks to 21st century technology, scientists said on Tuesday.
Hundreds of papyrus scrolls believed to have been authored by Greek philosophers were found in the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was hit in the same eruption that destroyed the town of Pompeii.
Whereas Pompeii was buried under a thick layer of ash, nearby Herculaneum met a somewhat different fate -- it was exposed to a roiling blast of volcanic gas.
The furnace-like heat burned its citizens alive and turned the writings into pitch-black, brittle rolls.
The carbonised manuscripts, part of the only library to have survived from the classical world, were found 260 years ago in the ruins of a huge villa believed to have been owned by a wealthy Roman statesman, Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.
Now stored at the National Library of Naples, they are so fragile that the slightest touch can cause them to crumble.
Adding to the problem is that the letters on the papyrus were written in ink made from soot. On the blackened background, they are nearly invisible to the naked eye.
So many papyri have been damaged or destroyed in attempts to pierce their secrets that archaeologists abandoned the quest in frustration.
But, in a study published in the journal Nature Communications, Italian researchers offer hope that the enigmatic texts may be revealed for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.
- 'Readable within a decade' -
"It's always hard to make a precise prediction, but with resources, the scrolls should be readable within the next decade," lead scientist Vito Mocella told AFP.
Mocella, who works at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (IMM) in Naples, led a team to probe the scrolls non-invasively using X-ray phase-contrast tomography -- a scanner also used in medicine to image soft tissue.
The technique exploits the fact that different materials absorb X-rays differently.
The researchers wrote a purpose-made algorithm to process the signals returned from the beams, seeking to tease out contrasts between the papyrus and the inked letters.
They tested their innovation on pieces of a scroll that had been unrolled in fragments in 1986.
Africa Cup of Nations hosts Equatorial Guinea will be pressed to get off to a winning start when they face Congo Brazzaville in the tournament's opening game in Group A on Saturday.
The curtain-raiser to the competition in the country's largest city Bata will be followed later in the day by a meeting of the group's other two sides, Burkina Faso and Gabon, who clash again after doing battle in qualifying.
Equatorial Guinea rescued this year's tournament by agreeing to act as hosts after the late withdrawal of Morocco due to Ebola fears, and their fans will now expect Nzalang Nacional to match the exploits of three years ago, when they beat all the odds to reach the last eight of the same competition on home soil.
Nevertheless, they were initially disqualified from the competition for fielding an ineligible player, and their build-up has been somewhat chaotic, with Argentine Esteban Becker only named as the country's new coach last week in place of Andoni Goikoetxea, whose contract expired recently and was not renewed.
Jihadist groups tied to the men who attacked France's Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Paris kosher supermarket are waging an increasingly sophisticated propaganda campaign targeting Western recruits, experts say.
Organisations ranging from the Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria to Al-Qaeda and even the Somali Al-Shebab group have sought to exploit the anonymity and reach of the Internet to attract Western members.
They urge recruits to come to the battlefield, but also encourage them to carry out violence at home.
Jihadist groups have targeted Western recruits for decades, but the Internet has revolutionised their approach, according to Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
"Thirty years ago it took a long time to get everyone to Afghanistan" where jihadists were fighting Soviet troops, he said.
"Now they propagate through social media, that's why it can happen so quickly, they can rapidly ramp up recruitment."
The three men involved in the France attack appear to be linked to different jihadist groups.
The two brothers who targeted Charlie Hebdo were linked to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is based in Yemen.
The third attacker appears to have pledged allegiance to IS.
Jihadists use a variety of media for their message.
Since 2010, AQAP has produced the English-language "Inspire" magazine, released periodically in PDF format with articles expounding on its ideology and instructing readers on how to carry out attacks.
In recent issues it singled out France as a target and put Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief Stephane Charbonnier, who was killed in last week's attack, on a "Most Wanted" list.
Al-Nusra Front, Al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, publishes slickly produced video, as well as photos and statements, through official accounts on Twitter and the video-sharing website YouTube.
And Somalia's Al-Shebab has frequently used Twitter to reach out to potential followers.
But perhaps no group has harnessed the power of the Internet as effectively as IS, which eschewed the password-protected forums preferred by Al-Qaeda in favour of popular social media sites.
It quickly established a presence on Facebook and Twitter and even allows its fighters to converse publicly with potential recruits on question-and-answer sites like Ask.fm.
"Islamic State has really honed its media strategy," said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremist think tank.
"It has a standardised format, which makes it easy to identify as official Islamic State propaganda. It is very productive, it has an output rate of four or five videos a week," he said.
The group also relies on "a wide, decentralised network of people who are almost obsessive in their need to share things" to distribute its material, Winter added.
IS and its backers also use high-profile methods, like this week's hacking of the Pentagon's Central Command Twitter feed, to gain notice.
Experts say foreign recruits play a key role in jihadist outreach.
Most prominent jihadist groups now advertise their operations in Western languages and often feature videos of Westerners describing life on the battlefield.
"They are a way to get through to a population that might otherwise be difficult to reach," Winter said.
European coast guards on Friday secured a cargo ship with 450 migrants on board, which was drifting off the coast of Italy in rough seas. The vessel was towed to Crotone port, FRANCE 24 has learned.
A dramatic, hours-long rescue mission in choppy waters ended Friday morning, when the Italian navy took control of the 73-metre-long (240-foot-long) Sierra Leone-registered Ezadeen, which had been abandoned by its crew off the southwestern coast of Italy.
Six coast guard officers were lowered from a helicopter onto the deck of the vessel, according to an Italian naval official.
FRANCE 24 has learned that the Ezadeen was towed to the Italian port of Crotone.
Earlier Friday, the AP reported that an Icelandic coast guard ship, part of a new European patrol force to aid migrants at sea, was responsible for towing the cargo vessel to Italy.
Crewless ship with children and pregnant women on board
Children and pregnant women were among the migrants, most of whom were believed to be Syrian, according to Italian Coast Guard Cmdr. Filippo Marini. The Sierra-Leone-flagged cargo ship apparently set sail from Turkey, he said.
A migrant on board the drifting vessel had called for help saying, “we're without crew, we're heading toward the Italian coast and we have no one to steer,'' Marini told reporters.
Prior to losing power, the almost 50-year-old ship had been moving at a brisk seven knots and had been spotted by a coast guard plane 80 miles offshore shortly after nightfall.
The Ezadeen is the second cargo ship full of migrants to be abandoned while still sailing this week. Days earlier, the Italian Coast Guard in a daring attempt, lowered officials onto another, Moldovan-flagged cargo vessel so they could take control of the ship, which was only a few miles from crashing into the Italian coast.
More than 170,000 migrants were intercepted or needed rescue by the Italian navy, coast guard and air force patrols last year. This apparently new technique by smugglers of abandoning a ship after setting it on a crash course complicates rescue efforts, Marini told Italian state radio, "but the important thing is there are lives to be saved.''
The migrant boat dramas have come as Italy grapples with the aftermath of the Norman Atlantic ferry disaster in which at least 13 people died following an onboard fire that erupted before dawn on Sunday in waters off Albania.
They also come after a record year for people fleeing conflict and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia attempting to reach Europe by sea.
The primary general immediate flight from the UK to China outside London takes off on Monday, as Cathay Pacific dispatches its Manchester-Hong Kong administration.
It is an iconic issue. In gathered southeast England, moves to stretch limit are in halt. The UK's enormous commonplace airplane terminals, in the mean time, are caught up with boosting long-separation flights, opening up immediate courses to the billions-solid fare markets of Asia.
Stanley Chan, of Chi Yip, a gathering that runs and supplies Chinese shops and restaurants over the UK, said the Manchester flight — which takes 12 hours and will run four times each week — will help grow the business. "Some time recently, holders needed to stay overnight in Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam. Time is cash.
"In the event that we can discover items the Chinese need, we will fare and offer there. They have had a considerable measure of sustenance outrages and it is a boundless business sector."
The initiative group of sports journalists launched a campaign "Knock terrorism out - save Ukraine!" in support of the volunteer battalions and the Ukrainian army, who are bravely fighting to the East of this country with externally supported the illegal armed groups and the occupation by Russian warriors.
The promotion is available to all comers, which are able to hit a punching bag. One of the sports projectile not - come any substitute, from wood to a sparring partner. Fists, feet, head - improvisation is encouraged. And, of course, no sexual discrimination among participants, the organizers also expect girls!
The project was already joined by former world and European champion in Boxing Alina Shaternikova. The first athlete of the representatives of the Ukrainian Boxing supported the campaign by writing a short video, thereby completing the mandatory part of it. Alina, who is also Vice-President of the National League of professional Boxing Ukraine, worked the combination on the bag - it, by design, a symbol of terror and war, which are now taking place in the East. Your participation in the promotion Shaternikova without the slightest hesitation showed citizenship and expressed towards those who unleashed the armed conflict in Ukraine, and on the conscience of anyone responsible for hundreds of thousands of victims in this confrontation.
Supported the initiative and world champion 2011 in the amateurs, bronze medalist of the Olympic games in London, and now a promising boxer-professional Taras Shelestyuk. The athlete, as Shaternikova, sent financial help to the needs of the Ukrainian soldiers, and passed the baton to his colleagues from the already legendary national team of Ukraine in Boxing - Alexander Usik, Alexander Cloves, Eugene Hitrovo, Vasyl Lomachenko, Denis Berenice and Paul-Ogneslaw Ishchenko.
As the morning sun rises over the golden dunes of Erg Chebbi in the Sahara, men and women dig holes for tourists who want to bury themselves in the sand.
Decades ago, tribal nomads settled here, living a traditional desert existence that has now had to adapt to changing circumstance.
The dunes of Merzouga tower over the small community in southeastern Morocco, where the Berber Ait Atta tribe now makes a brisk living from tourism.
The formerly nomadic tribesmen have for years been running hotels and restaurants in Merzouga, a key stop on the Moroccan tourist trail on the edge of a sea of sand dunes.
Now they're even turning to the sands themselves to attract visitors.
For around 10 minutes visitors are buried neck-deep in the hot sand for therapy said to cure those who suffer from rheumatism, lumbago, polyarthritis and some skin disorders.
The therapy has the same effect as a sauna session, helping purge the body of poisonous toxins, according to those tribesmen such as Abdessalam Sadoq who now work in wellness tourism.
"We offer every type of tourism here, but especially for health," he said.
Making a living was not always easy for the descendants of the Ait Atta nomads, and over the decades the sons and daughters of those who roamed the desert on camels have had to attune themselves to more modern ways.
The Ait Atta once accumulated riches from trans-Saharan commerce, but now all that remains of this past is a road sign pointing towards Timbuktu, a mere 52 days away by camel.
Their way of life ended after Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912, with the development of mining in the region, the emergence of urban centres and demarcation of the nearby border with Algeria.
Once-nomadic tribes had to find a new livelihood, and turned to cultivating date palms and tourism in the second half of the past century.
Visitors in search of a cure do not come only from abroad: many Moroccans also firmly believe in the power of the desert.
They're not just for sharing any more: Facebook and Twitter are now looking to play a bigger role in shopping.
Both major social networks have unveiled plans to start using "buy" buttons on their sites, which could start having an impact on "social shopping" in the coming holiday season.
The idea of using social networks such as Facebook to promote e-commerce has been around for some time, but so far has failed to deliver much. Facebook had some short-lived programs for "digital gifts" and another program selling virtual goods via Facebook games.
"Social commerce," stemming from reviews or referrals from social networks, is expected to hit $15 billion by 2015, according to the research firm Invesp.
Some analysts see a natural connection between social networks and shopping, since users often discuss products and brands in the messages.
"Sharing is a fairly reliable indicator of what people are going to buy," says Andy Stevens, head of strategy and research for Share This, a company which produces a sharing button for websites and analyzes social media trends.