Random News Stories

[Jon Dent]

This is why we can't have nice things....

[Leo Enticknap]

So much for pulling permits...

Vandals busted open Great Wall to make 'shortcut,' creating 'irreversible damage'
The suspects wanted to shorten travel time to their construction project

By Peter Aitken, Fox News
Published September 6, 2023 7:10am EDT

Engineers in China "irreparably" damaged the Great Wall of China while trying to find a "shortcut" for their business, according to local reports.

"Excavators were used to excavate the original gap of the ancient Great Wall into a large gap, so that the excavator could pass through the gap, which caused irreversible damage to the integrity of the Ming Great Wall and the safety of cultural relics," police said in a statement.

Police in Shanzi province in China arrested a 38-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman for allegedly digging through the 32nd section of the Great Wall to speed along their construction work. Officers responded to reports on Aug. 24 that a huge gap had appeared in the wall and quickly located the pair.

The police stressed that while they have detained the suspects, the investigation continues, The Independent reported. The suspects remain in custody pending the completion of the investigation.

Pictures show that the portion of the wall – one of the sections that have a lower height and do not share the same grand towers and wide walkways as more famous parts of the structure – is completely eradicated, and a dirt road now runs through the opening.

The Great Wall is registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site and receives historical and cultural protection at the provincial level, according to the BBC. The rest of the 32nd section has suffered significant natural wear and tear and a lack of proper upkeep over time.

A report from Chinese outlet CGTN claimed that only about 8% of the wall constructed during the Ming Dynasty (the last dynasty to contribute to the Great Wall) remains in good condition while the rest has fallen into disrepair, with a third of the structure having completely fallen apart.

The Ming sections, built between the 14th and 17th centuries, are the most famous and generally best-preserved sections of the wall.

However, the earliest parts of the wall, built in the second century B.C., amount to little more than rammed earth walls that have eroded into vague mounds that most would not recognize as part of the Great Wall.

Local farmers and builders have even taken bricks and stones to use in their projects. Chinese authorities have made a greater show of trying to preserve culturally important sites, which has led many to believe the culprits responsible for the damage to the Great Wall may suffer severe consequences if found guilty.

great-wall-hole-2.webp

Reminds me of when I lived in York, UK, and a co-worker pointed at York Minster (a c11 cathedral, and arguably one of the most historically important buildings in the country), and commented that "...that place would make a great IMAX 4-plex You'd have to clear all that religious crap out of it and cover up those stained glass windows, though!"

[Leo Enticknap]

Many thanks - will file info carefully in case there is any question of us ever using the stuff. Although, as with pretty much all households in SoCal, keeping ants and cockroaches out during the summer is a constant battle (the kitties help with the latter - free treats!), so far and knock on wood, we have not yet been hit by bedbugs.

[Randy Stankey]

One caveat: Pyrethrins are extremely toxic to cats.

Their livers don’t produce the enzymes to break it down and their kidneys can’t excrete it.

If you use pyrethrin-based insecticides to kill bugs around your house, keep your cats away until the stuff has dried and the smell is completely gone.

My landlord has our common yard sprayed every spring and I have to keep all windows closed for 24 hours, afterward.

Since cats are allowed, here, the landlord is always good enough to warn us in advance.

[Leo Enticknap]

According to this, it's a significantly less toxic (to humans) and environmentally problematic pesticide than widely used predecessors.

[Randy Stankey]

Pyrethrin kills bedbugs.

The place where I work has the locker area sprayed for bugs two or three times per year because somebody found a bedbug. The exterminator uses a pyrethrin-based insecticide.

If you're interested to know what the stuff is, I can look it up the next time I go to work. They have to post notices and make the MSDS available. I'm sure I could get you the exact name and EPA registration number of the substance they use.

I know it's pyrethrin because I read it from the MSDS. I only read down as far as the ingredients because, once I read that it was pyrethrin, I felt like I understood what I needed to know.

[Frank Cox]

It's my understanding that bedbugs are the problem that they are because the most effective pesticides to kill them have been outlawed.

So bedbugs that were pretty much under control ten or fifteen years ago are now getting back to being a mainstream problem.

[Leo Enticknap]

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the theater...

Cinemagoers covered with bedbug bites after alleged infestation

Visitors to Parisian multiplexes believe the country’s insect problem, previously confined to hotels, has reached film theatres

By Vivian Song in Paris 3 September 2023 • 5:43pm

Blood-sucking monsters are usually confined to the screen in horror movies, but in Paris they have been breaking out for real, biting and stinging cinemagoers in their seats.

People have been posting photos online of their red and blotchy skin – the hallmark of bedbug bites – which they claim to have discovered after leaving the cinema.

It follows a mass outbreak in the country that has seen homes and hotels infested with the insects.

Nawal was one of the first people to go public over the infestation in the cinemas after a visit to a UGC multiplex in Paris.

She said that while she was in the theatre she could feel little stings but it didn’t occur to her that they might be bedbugs.

“The seat I had reserved was very damaged. I thought maybe it was just fleas,” she told Le Parisien.

It was only after she came out that she realised from the telltale linear bites that she had been feasted on by bedbugs.

After she complained to the cinema and received only a word of acknowledgement but no apology, she took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to post photos of the bite marks:

#Cinema Les salles impaires en bas, @UGCcinemas @ugcdistribution de #Bercy Village sont infestées de punaises de lit, ATTENTION ‼️‼️‼️#Paris12
En DM ici, on vous remercie de l’info, mais PAS un mot de regret, ni aucune excuse. RIEN.
La direction du ciné ne traite PAS les salles. pic.twitter.com/VwPkBNlwEF
— Nawal ⚡️ (@Nawal_) August 26, 2023

“The cinema management does NOT treat the rooms,” she said.

“[I received] NOT a word of regret, nor any apology,” she added.

Since then others have come forward with similar complaints from half a dozen cinemas in and around Paris.

One man shared photos of bite marks on his neck and back following a screening at the same UGC Bercy theatre, while another woman posted photos of angry red splotches on her shoulder after watching a film at MK2 Beaubourg.

It follows a government report that revealed 11 per cent of all French households had faced an outbreak of bed bugs between 2017-2022. The rise of international travel and hotels were identified as the primary sources of infestation.

Bedbugs are reddish-brown and wingless and often live in old bedding or furniture.

Cinema chain MK2 sought to reassure customers, saying that the rooms had been treated and “there is no more risk in our rooms than in any other public place in Paris.”

UGC has yet to respond to the claims and could not be reached by The Telegraph for comment.

I don't find the MK2 spokeshole's reassurance very reassuring. If the whole of Paris is crawling with the little gits, claiming that there is no more risk in your theater than anywhere else in the city translates as "You're gonna get munched, folks ... enjoy!"

[Leo Enticknap]

This reads like Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, but in the other direction!

Girl Power?: Woman Who Said ‘I Don’t Need No Man’ Calls Firemen When Trapped Under Couch

A woman in England who thought she was more capable than a man recently found herself in a predicament in which she needed help from the opposite sex.

When 30-year-old Sara Aziz of Colchester, Essex, decided to move a couch from her first floor down a flight of stairs, things did not go according to plan, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday.

An image shows Aziz with the couch in question:

I tried to move my sofa alone because I 'didn't need a man' to help me – but I got pinned underneath it and firefighters had to rescue me https://t.co/9t3cXMazau pic.twitter.com/4fsH3tCjEs

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) August 29, 2023

While trying to push it through a tight space, the couch became wedged between the banister and the wall. So Aziz crawled underneath it to try and free it.

Moments later, Aziz slipped, fell backward, hurt herself, and became trapped underneath the couch. She was stuck there for approximately 90 minutes with no way out unless someone came to her rescue.

She was getting rid of her old couch to replace it with another one. Before attempting to move it, she said, “‘I thought ‘You know what? I can do this, I’m an adult, I don’t need no man, girl power’ kind of thing.”

Desperate for help, she contacted family members on her cell phone, which was still tucked into her bra. However, no one could come to her aid at the moment, so she dialed 999, and dispatchers sent out fire crews to rescue the frustrated young woman.

Sara Aziz ficou embaixo de sofá por uma hora e meia e precisou da ajuda dos bombeiros para sair da situação. https://t.co/0LvyuQTgpl

— Metro Jornal (@MetroJornal) August 28, 2023

“The firemen were very handsome but I was lying there looking like a slug so I don’t think I looked as good,” she recalled of the first responders who freed her after a few minutes of trying.

Aziz, who suffered a bruise on her chest during the ordeal, admitted she was relieved when the rescuers arrived at her home, adding, “It was the most embarrassing situation of my life. The fire brigade were at my house to lift a sofa off me when they should be putting out fires.”

Social media users had a lot to say about the young woman’s predicament, one person writing, “So you did need a man.”

“God works in mysterious ways,” another replied.

In 2018, cultural commentator Camille Paglia said that while second-wave feminism was trying to destroy men, it was also destroying women and culture, Breitbart News reported:

The feminist icon – who prefers the original brand of feminism that won women the right to vote and raised up heroines such as Katharine Hepburn, Amelia Earhart, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh – said the more recent second wave of feminism is “an absolute poison that has spread worldwide.”

“Paglia said the original feminists ‘admired what men had done – there was no male-bashing – as became systemic to second-wave feminism,'” the outlet stated.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's been an excellent week for Telegraph obituaries:

Jani Allan, South African-born journalist who lost ‘the libel case of the century’

She sued over claims that she had been sexually involved with the white supremacist Eugène Terreblanche

Jani Allan, who has died of cancer aged 70, was a star columnist of the liberal-leaning and influential Sunday Times of South Africa who in 1992 failed in her sensational attempt to sue Channel 4 for libel; she claimed that the documentary, The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), falsely alleged that she had been sexually involved with the Right-wing supremacist Eugène Terreblanche.

The proceedings attracted intense interest in both Britain and South Africa, with several character witnesses flown in from South Africa for what Private Eye called the “libel case of the century”. Jani Allan, who had engaged the libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck, was represented by Charles Gray QC, and Channel 4 by George Carman QC.

The story had its origins in 1987 when Jani Allan, a glamorous blonde social butterfly with glossy red lips and large brown eyes, was sent to interview Terreblanche, the charismatic leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). “Look, the man’s no mimsy. To be honest, he’s a hunk,” she wrote in her copy. “Right now I’ve got to remind myself to breathe. I’m impaled on the blue flames of his blowtorch eyes.”

Jani Allan regarded the assignment as a triumph. “Everything he said would make for great copy,” she recalled. “I had succeeded in penetrating the enemy camp.” A follow-up piece about an AWB training facility drew ugly threats, but Jani Allan was unrepentant, insisting it was her job to interview all players in the apartheid-ridden country.

When she was seen dining in a Pretoria steakhouse with Terreblanche, a married man, however, tongues began wagging. She was also with him when he was accused of ramming his car through the gate of an Afrikaner monument in the conservative town of Krugersdorp, near Johannesburg.

Shortly afterwards a wheel on her car was loosened and fell off while she was driving. Then her apartment was bombed. She was advised to leave the country and work from Britain. Soon afterwards her South African newspaper column was cancelled and she instead found occasional work on the Sunday Times in London.

Before long parts of the British press were repeating the insinuations about a relationship with Terreblanche. Options magazine and the Evening Standard settled her libel actions quickly but Channel 4 denied that its programme was libellous and chose to fight, setting the stage for a sordid but gripping libel trial presided over by Sir Humphry Potts.

The High Court heard that Jani Allan’s flatmate, Linda Shaw, had peeped through a keyhole and witnessed her having sex with Terreblanche. Responding to Carman’s cross-examination, Linda Shaw described seeing Jani Allan “flattened beneath a large white bottom … going up and down between her raised knees”. Jani Allan refuted the claim, saying she had thought Terreblanche “looked rather like a pig in a safari suit”.

The exchanges in court were frequently salacious. As The Daily Telegraph reported at length on Page 3, Andrew Broulidakis, a record producer who had known Jani Allan since childhood, told of meeting Linda Shaw for lunch to learn what information she was giving Channel 4: “Bearing in mind considerable quantities of alcohol had been consumed, there was a flirtatious aspect… If you want the exact words, she said to me, ‘I never trust a man until I’ve f----- him.’ With that in mind, we returned to her apartment.” Broulidakis added that they had sex three times in five hours.

Although Terreblanche submitted a sworn statement denying any relationship, Marlene Burger, Jani Allan’s former news editor, testified that the columnist had confided in her that the pair had been having an affair.

On the second day of the hearing Carman mysteriously produced Jani Allan’s 1984 diary. It contained her sexual fantasies about a married Italian airline pilot, casting doubt on her professed lack of sexual experience and her sworn testimony that she would never commit adultery.

Her own mother weighed in, saying of her daughter’s claim only ever to have slept with her former husband: “That’s precious little sex to have had at the age of 41. If it’s so, then she’s missed a lot in life. Some women have two partners a night.”

Carter-Ruck and Gray urged Jani Allan to drop the case, but she persisted. Meanwhile her medical records, stolen from a South African hospital, turned up in court showing that she used a contraceptive device.

So traumatised was Jani Allan by her cross-examination that she told Carman: “Whatever award is given for libel, being cross-examined by you would not make it enough money.” After the case she described him in The Spectator as “a small bewigged ferret”.

There was also drama outside the court. Anthony Travers, a former British representative of the AWB who had been attending the hearing, was stabbed in the street, possibly mistaken for Carter-Ruck. Meanwhile, Jani Allan’s London flat was burgled and she received a telephone death threat in the court ushers’ office.

On August 5 the jury decided, after four-and-a-half hours’ deliberation, that Channel 4 had not libelled Jani Allan, leaving her with costs in excess of £300,000 and her reputation destroyed. “I have always equated sex with punishment,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “And now this has been proved conclusively.”

She was born on September 11 1952, the product of an unwanted pregnancy. She was adopted at a month old by John Allan, a Scot who became chief sub-editor of The Star in South Africa, and his wife Janet (née Henning). They named her Isobel Janet Allan, though she did not learn of her adoption until she was 18.

Her father died when she was 18 months old and her mother went to work at De Beers, leaving her with a Zulu male nanny named Dennis. Her mother remarried an English widower called Walter Fry and fostered three more children, one of whom sexually abused her.

Music was ever present and young Isobel, known to her mother as Juliette, took to the piano, performing with the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. She read Chaucer at night and had lessons in ballet, art, elocution and Scottish dancing.

By 13 she had a pony called Prince, but when she fell off her mother made her get straight back on, saying: “Cease this detestable boo-hooing.” Her mother’s other advice included the rule that if she must sit on a man’s knee, “put a telephone directory on his lap.”

She was educated at Greenside High School, studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, worked as a photographer’s model, wrote film and classical music reviews for newspapers, and taught English and art at Bryanston High School.

On the basis of her reviews she was offered a column on the Sunday Times called “Just Jani” because “Janet” would not fit on the page; thereafter she was known as Jani. Within weeks she had been dispatched to Corfu to interview Roger Moore on the set of For Your Eyes Only.

In 1987 a Gallup poll commissioned by the paper named Jani Allan “the most admired person in South Africa”. She was certainly among the best known. “I could delay the take-off of an aeroplane. I remember I was a bit late for a flight to, I think, Durban. I went like this to the pilot,” she told the South African Mail & Guardian, waving flirtatiously, “and they held it”.

Then came her fateful meeting with Terreblanche.

After the court case Jani Allan wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers including The Daily Telegraph. Trouble seemed to follow her and for a time she found herself being inadvertently used to spy on the African National Congress’s enemies in Britain.

Returning to South Africa, Jani Allan became a born-again Christian and a speechwriter for Chief Buthelezi, the former leader of the KwaZulu government. She also had a late-night radio show, Jani’s World, but that was cancelled after she interviewed another rightwing extremist. Meanwhile, Terreblanche was murdered by a black farm worker in 2010.

Fleeing to America, Jani Allan wound up as an anonymous waitress in the small town of Lambertville, New Jersey, going by her former nickname Juliette. In 2013 she started a blog, demonstrating that she had not lost her readable style and wit. “There is also a chance of collateral windfall,” she wrote of her new life. “An arguing couple once stormed out of the restaurant forgetting a bottle of Dom Pérignon.”

Jani Allan married Gordon Schachat, a South African businessman, in 1982. When the marriage was dissolved in 1984 she blamed her own lack of interest in sex. In 2002 she married Peter Kulish, an American advocate of the controversial biomagnetic therapy; that too was dissolved.

Jani Allan, born September 11 1952, died July 25 2023

One wonders how she could have come up with that description if she hadn't seen him without the safari suit on?!

Arthur Boyt, roadkill enthusiast who waxed lyrical about polecat, badger ham – and dog

His motto was ‘just because it doesn’t have a label, doesn’t mean it’s not edible’ and putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment

Arthur Boyt, the roadkill enthusiast who has died aged 83, became an accidental fixture in British newspapers, with journalists ringing him up each year to quiz him on his eccentric Christmas lunch.

Sometimes it was badger ham, or a polecat (which he claimed could serve four); more sensationally, there was beached sperm whale casserole with brussel sprouts, and his Christmas 2015 dish of dolphin, which he sautéed live on air on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show. The dolphin caused a minor scandal as it was technically property of the Crown; Boyt retorted that he was simply disposing of the dead body, which was within the law, and nobody had stipulated that the disposal should not be via his mouth.

But if he was mischievous and unrepentant about his eating habits, it was because he believed passionately that they were ethical. He would never kill an animal, and was revolted by factory farming.

For Boyt roads were a deli counter, and of all the meats he scraped off the tarmac, his favourite was dog. “DELICIOUS… tender as veal with the consistency of lamb,” he recorded, having first tried it in January 1978. Dog was only ever an occasional treat, however, because if the collar had a name on it, Boyt would do his utmost to reunite the deceased with its owner.

Unclaimed, a large dog could furnish 15 meals and plenty of sandwiches. “I once had four sandwiches for lunch, three of which were dog and one was hare,” Boyt wrote in his memoir. “I ate the hare first to give it time to get away before I sent the dog down after it.”

Cat he found bland, but much improved by redcurrant jelly. Once, he served cat fat from his dripping bowl to his unsuspecting sister, a fact he revealed to her only much later, in a speech at her son’s wedding; in front of all the guests, the infuriated sister tried to beat him up.

Swan was muddy, bat was odd, and fox repeated on him – “it tastes like it smells: a mixture of diesel and onions” – but most other species, from otters to squirrels to stoats, he praised with an eloquence worthy of Elizabeth David. He even published his own recipes, for dishes such as hedgehog carbonara.

“What a race of spoilt fusspots we have become!” Boyt said, demanding to know why Britons were so revolted by a rabbit, garnered from a roadside, that had “grown up eating grass and wildflowers, the epitome of an organic existence” and yet were perfectly happy to consume beef that had been “standing all winter in its own excrement, fed on heavily fertilised fodder, supplemented with growth hormones and injected with antibiotics”.

His motto was “just because it doesn’t have a label doesn’t mean it’s not edible.”

Putrefaction was no barrier to enjoyment, either. “I’ve eaten stuff that is dark green and stinks,” he said, claiming that roadkill – because he cooked it for long enough – never made him ill, whereas “buffet food like sandwiches and scotch eggs” had given him stomach bugs.

The only bit of the animal he was too squeamish to eat was the eye’s gelatinous lens, which turned into a hard white ball when cooked.

Obsessively parsimonious, Boyt did not just dine from the roads, he dressed from them, too, washing encrusted vomit off fleeces he found discarded on the A39. A pioneer “freegan”, he was so notorious for supplementing his lunch from the skip outside his workplace that he nearly ate a white bap filled with spit and sand, left for him by some builders as a prank.

As a romantic gesture, he gave up eating dog in 1996, when he married his second wife, Sue, a vegetarian, but their marriage was still tested by the prank callers who rang up at 2am, pretending to be the ghosts of animals Boyt had eaten, and by the badger heads he always had bubbling on the stove.

To reduce the smell, he started to casserole them instead of pressure-cooking them, but his preference for a “greenish” carcass drove Sue to have dinner in her bedroom, to avoid a row. “I have to be discreet because I don’t want her to rush off and leave me,” Boyt told a journalist. “I’d sooner have her than the badgers.”

Arthur Boyt and his twin brother Dennis were born at Watford on September 3 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, to William Boyt, a solicitor, and Bessie, née Legg. There were two older siblings, John and Naomi.

The family were Exclusive Brethren, a sect of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren; there was no television, no Christmas festivities and no black pudding (the consumption of blood is forbidden in Acts). Their mother, a keen botanist, encouraged the twins’ fascination with foraging outdoors; soon, they had a Wunderkammer of bleached skulls, glass bottles and Roman tesserae from nearby Verulamium.

The twins’ father died of a heart attack two days after their 10th birthday. They attended Brodick School, then Watford Grammar, where Arthur saw Whiskey Galore! Not having seen a film before, he believed everything in it was real.

He got his taste for roadkill aged 13, when the twins, on one of their 100-mile cycle trips, came across a dead pheasant in Windsor Great Park. They liked the idea of dining at the monarch’s expense, so asked their mother to roast it.

In 1957 she died of a stroke. The now-orphaned Arthur read biology at university, then worked for seven years as an entomologist for Cooper, McDougal and Robertson, before joining the Fire Research Station as a librarian and researcher, making money on the side as a coach driver for Haberdashers’ Aske’s school.

He married another of the Exclusive Brethren, Patricia, but in 1977 he was excommunicated for dissent; his wife left him and his twin brother cut him off.

Indefatigable, he cycled across the United States, across Canada, and from Cairo to Khartoum, and twice ran the London Marathon in under three hours. But his passion was orienteering, for which he represented England well into old age, freely sharing his badger sandwiches with those he met on the way; for although he was pathologically averse to spending money, he had a Christian generosity to waifs and strays.

Nature absorbed him. He took up bird-song recording, then ringing birds’ legs. Snares drove him wild – he once found an emaciated badger that had been left, illegally, ensnared for two weeks – and he campaigned to have them consigned to the dustbin of history.

His run-ins with “legal” hunts trying to hide fox carcasses were legion (and often came to blows); and he harangued the RSPB, for which he worked as a surveyor, for tolerating the shooting of snipe, woodcock and golden plover.

He achieved his mild celebrity only in retirement, entertaining film crews from around the world in his house at Davidstow, Cornwall. In 2022 he published his memoir-cum-cookbook Roadkill, which aimed to fill the carnivorous gap left between Wild Food by Ray Mears and Richard Mabey’s Food for Free. Roadkill offered such startling tips as not to be alarmed, when you defrost weasels in the microwave, to hear them whistle: this is just the steam escaping from their mouths.

The last two years of his life were spent at Exmouth. His wife Sue survives him.

Arthur Boyt, born September 3 1939, died July 4 2023

Talk about opposites attracting!

[Frank Cox]

https://canoe.com/news/weird/b-c-rea...d-4309951d96b9

VANCOUVER — A British Columbia real estate agent has been fined $20,000 after being caught on camera drinking milk straight out of the jug at a home he was showing.

A consent order released by the BC Financial Services Authority last week says Mike Rose was alone in the home in Kamloops, B.C., in July last year as he waited for his clients, who were interested in buying the property.

Rose went to the refrigerator to find water, but instead swigged some milk straight from the container, which he then put back in the refrigerator.

The consent order, agreed by both the superintendent of real estate and Rose, says the owners of the home saw him drinking the milk when they reviewed footage from a surveillance camera, then confronted him about it two days later.

Rose, who apologized for his actions, was told he wasn’t welcome in the home and his clients replaced him in their purchase of the property.

He says in the order that his behaviour was out of character, and he was “unusually dehydrated” at the time because of a new medication, as well as being under “considerable stress.”

Rose, who is now working at a different brokerage, agreed to pay a disciplinary penalty of $20,000 to the authority for conduct unbecoming, and $2,500 in enforcement expenses.

[Leo Enticknap]

Meow!

Berliners warned to stay indoors as ‘lioness’ prowls the suburbs

Police issued an alert about an ‘escaped wild animal’ on Thursday morning as vets and hunters joined the search

By Our Foreign Staff
20 July 2023 • 9:20am

German authorities warned people in Berlin’s southern suburbs to watch out for a potentially dangerous animal, suspected to be a lioness, that was on the loose.

Police in Brandenburg state, which surrounds the capital, issued a warning in the early hours of Thursday of an “escaped wild animal” and asked people in and around Kleinmachnow, Teltow and Stahnsdorf - just outside Berlin’s city limits - not to leave their houses and to bring their pets indoors.

The warning was later extended to southern areas of Berlin and an alert was sent on an official warning app that the animal was suspected to be a lioness. Vets and hunters were participating in a search for the creature. Police had no immediate information on who owned it.

Two men reported seeing a big cat running after a wild boar, the latter common in and around Berlin, police spokesman Daniel Kiep told local public broadcaster rbb.

“The two gentlemen recorded a smartphone video and even experienced police officers had to confirm that it is probably a lioness,” he said, adding that there were various reported sightings.

Neither of Berlin’s two zoos nor any circuses were missing a lioness, he added.

Not that they admitted to, at any rate. I suspect that someone who decided to illegally import her as an exotic "pet" (as in the movie Alligator and an example of life imitating art that followed it) is to blame, and that when she outgrew that role, both in size and behavior, she was abandoned. This happens surprisingly frequently with tigers in these parts, so much so that cases rarely make it beyond the local news media.

[Frank Cox]

Apparently the price of the grain increased between the "signing" of the contract and the delivery date.

I suspect (without any proof, of course) that the farmer wanted his thumbs-up to be ambiguous so if the contract price was higher than the spot price he would deliver on the contract, otherwise he could sell on the spot market and say "what contract?"

[Leo Enticknap]

I guess the key to this is how reasonable it was for the vendor to assume that the emoji indicated acceptance of the contract. If they had swapped similar texts in the past and the business took place without any dispute, I'd say very reasonable. If the two parties were doing business for the first time, I would argue that this was the wrong decision.

Telegraph:

John Goodenough, Nobel laureate who helped to develop the lithium-ion rechargeable battery – obituary

He was the oldest Nobel Prize-winner for his work in doubling the lithium battery’s energy potential and making it less volatile

By Telegraph Obituaries 6 July 2023 • 7:00pm

John Goodenough, who has died aged 100, was a materials scientist who became the oldest winner of a Nobel Prize at 97, when he won a third of the £740,000 2019 Prize in Chemistry for his contribution to the development of the lithium-ion battery.

The rechargeable battery has helped to fuel the global revolution in portable electronics, transforming technology with power for devices ranging from cellphones, computers and pacemakers to electric cars – and its development, much of which took place at Oxford University, should have been a British success story.

Instead, like computers, the internet and civil nuclear power, it became an example of the country’s failure to commercialise its scientific innovations. British companies remain bit players in a global lithium battery industry dominated by Japan, South Korea and China.

It was Goodenough’s co-laureate, the Nottingham-born Stanley Whittingham who, in the early 1970s, managed to build the first rechargeable lithium battery. Much of Whittingham’s original research had been carried out at Oxford before he was lured to the US to take up a fellowship at Stanford University, and was later hired by Exxon Research.

Whittingham’s battery, however, suffered from safety issues. In 1980, working at Oxford, where he was head of inorganic chemistry, Goodenough doubled the lithium battery’s potential and made it less volatile by using lithium cobalt oxide as a cathode, creating the right conditions for a vastly more powerful and useful battery.

Subsequently, the third laureate, Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan, succeeded in eliminating pure lithium from the battery, instead basing it wholly on lithium ions, which are safer. This made the battery workable in practice.

A plaque at Oxford University records the year Goodenough and two colleagues “identified the cathode material that enabled the development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery ... This breakthrough ushered in the age of portable electronic devices.”

Goodenough continued to carry out important research at Oxford, but when he won the Nobel Prize he expressed his frustration that the university had forced him to retire in 1986 aged 65, after which he had moved to the University of Texas at Austin. “I fled,” he said. “I didn’t want to retire. They don’t make you retire at a certain age in Texas. It’s foolish... I’ve had 33 good years since I was forced to retire in England. That’s why I left. I’m working every day.”

John Bannister Goodenough was born on July 25 1922 in Jena, in the eastern part of Germany, the second of four children of American parents Erwin Goodenough, a postgraduate student at Oxford, and Helen, née Lewis. The family returned to the US when John was an infant and settled in Woodbridge, Connecticut, his father later becoming a professor of the history of religion at Yale University.

As he recalled in a memoir, Witness to Grace (2008), John had an unhappy childhood. His parents were emotionally distant and as a boy he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia and was dismissed as backward at primary school.

Sent to the Groton School, a private boarding school, aged 12, he rarely heard from his parents, and when he went on to Yale to read mathematics, his father gave him just $35 even though his tuition fees were about $900. “I said I will never take another penny from home. I never did. I worked 21 hours a week for 21 meals during my undergraduate days,” he recalled. “I had a scholarship for my tuition. And I worked. My old headmaster had arranged for me to have jobs tutoring sons in wealthy homes in the summer.”

Through hard work and determination, supported by rigorous educational standards at Groton and Yale, Goodenough overcame his dyslexia. He left Groton top of his class and graduated from Yale after wartime service as an army meteorologist in Newfoundland and the Azores.

He then went on a government scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied physics under Clarence Zener, Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, and took a master’s degree followed by a doctorate. After working briefly for Westinghouse, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he and fellow scientists helped to lay the groundwork for random access memory (RAM) in computers.

In 1976 he moved to Oxford, where he began his research on batteries. At first there was little interest in his lithium-ion battery. Oxford declined to patent it and, as Goodenough recalled, he and his fellow scientists regarded it as “just something to do ... I really didn’t anticipate cellphones, camcorders and everything else.”

Goodenough received no royalties for his work on the battery. “You become well known when somebody makes money out of what you do, when somebody else becomes a billionaire,” he reflected ruefully in 2019. “Whatever I’ve done, the lawyers have managed to siphon it off. Keep your hands away from lawyers.”

But in any case he cared little about money, donating whatever came with his awards to fund research and scholarships.

In 1986, after retiring from Oxford, Goodenough was appointed Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained active well into his 90s, latterly working to find the “Holy Grail” of renewable energy – a battery that he hoped might one day store wind, solar and nuclear energy.

Goodenough’s honours included the US National Medal of Science, presented to him by President Barack Obama in 2011. On the day his Nobel Prize was announced he was in London to receive the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, the world’s oldest scientific award.

In 1951, John Goodenough married Irene Wiseman, who died in 2016. There were no children.

John Goodenough, born July 25 1922, died June 25 2023

Well he as a high achiever, to put it mildly! I'm guessing he must have realized that there is a hard limit to which li-ion can be scaled up (even in its variants, such as li-poly) before the barriers of cost, safety, end energy density become an insurmountable problem, given that after retiring, he worked on ways of high capacity energy storage: presumably, though the article doesn't say, based on fundamentally different chemistries.

[Frank Cox]

https://canoe.com/news/national/farm...3-97ed5f1e26d1

SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — A Saskatchewan judge says an emoji can amount to a contractual agreement and ordered a farmer pay more than $82,000 for not delivering product to a grain buyer after responding to a text message with a thumbs-up image.

The Court of King’s Bench decision, released in June, found a thumbs-up emoji indicated Chris Achter agreed to a contract to deliver flax to South West Terminal in November 2021.

The company’s grain buyer had sent an image of a contract to Achter through a text message earlier in the year and the Swift Current farmer responded with an emoji.

The farmer argued that the emoji indicated only that he’d received the contract, not that he accepted its terms.

His lawyers argued that allowing an emoji to act as a signature for contracts would open the floodgates for cases interpreting the meaning of the images.

Justice Timothy Keene says in his decision that emojis are the new reality in Canadian society and courts must meet the new challenges that the images will bring.