British PM makes own bread
Manchester: British Prime Minister David Cameron admitted today he doesn’t know the price of a loaf of bread — because he bakes his own.
British politicians are occasionally asked the price of basic household staples by the media to see how “in touch” they are with the rest of society, usually in a bid to trip them up. Cameron, 46, who was educated at the elite Eton College and Oxford University, said he did not buy the cheapest sliced supermarket loaf as he used an electric breadmaker and flour made in his wealthy constituency in southern England.
“You get some of that, beautifully milled in the Cotswolds, you pop that in your breadmaker. You set the timer overnight so when you wake up there is this wonderful smell wafting through your kitchen,” he told London’s LBC radio. “It takes 30 seconds to put in the ingredients.” He said his three children “like my home-made bread”.
The presenter told him that the cost of a loaf of value supermarket bread is around 47 pence (76 cents, 56 euro cents). Cameron, whose wife Samantha is the daughter of a baronet, is at his Conservative Party’s annual conference in Manchester, northwest England, where he was due to make his keynote speech Wednesday.
His admission came after London mayor Boris Johnson — who Cameron followed through Eton and Oxford — admitted on BBC television he didn’t know the cost of a pint of milk. Told it was around half what he had guessed, the Conservative mayor conceded: “Well there you go, I don’t know how much a pint of milk costs. So what?” (AFP)
Chinese zoo allows visitors to play tug-of-war with tiger!
Beijing: A Chinese zoo is launching a bizarre new game where visitors can play tug-of-war with a tiger by shelling out USD 7. Several human-tiger tug-of-war games were held in Changsha Ecological Zoo, in Hunan, last week as a trial of the activity, which will be officially launched next week.
Players need to grab a rope that passes through a tiny hole into the giant cat’s enclosure. To get the tiger to participate, a live chicken is placed in a sack tied to a rope. In one such game, seven tourists reportedly lost to a four-year-old Amur tiger. Yi Ting, who works at the zoo, said that the tug-of-war game aims to train the wild Siberian tigers and stimulate them, avoiding sickness that could be caused by their long-term captivity in the zoo.
Tourists who buy a ticket for USD 7.36 can participate in the game, Sina English news service reported. According to a regulation released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China in July, all kinds of animal shows are banned in zoos.
However, Yi said, such games should not be included in animal performances such as those held by circuses. Animal rights activist Guo Geng, a Beijing local political adviser, said human-tiger games are surely included in the animal performances, which also seem an insult to animals. The move has also drawn ire from netizens who believe the games between human beings and tigers are inappropriate. One netizen worried that a tooth of the tigers might be pulled out. (PTI)
Mystery 13th century eruption traced to Indonesian volcano!
London: Scientists have pinned down a volcano in Indonesia as the one responsible for a massive eruption that occurred in the 13th Century.
The Samalas Volcano on Lombok Island, Indonesia, may be behind the mystery event in 1257 which was so large that its chemical signature is recorded in the ice of both the Arctic and the Antarctic, researchers believe.
“The evidence is very strong and compelling,” Professor Clive Oppenheimer, from Cambridge University, UK, told the BBC. “We conducted something similar to a criminal investigation.
We didn’t know the culprit at first, but we had the time of the murder and the fingerprints in the form of the geochemistry in the ice cores, and that allowed us to track down the volcano responsible,” added co-worker Professor Franck Lavigne, from the Pantheon-Sorbonne University, France.
The 1257 eruption has been linked with volcanoes in Mexico, Ecuador and New Zealand. But these candidates fail on their dating or geochemistry. Only Samalas can “tick all the boxes”, researchers said.
The team’s studies on Lombok indicate that as much 40 cubic kilometres of rock and ash could have been hurled from the volcano, and that the finest material in the eruption plume would likely have climbed 40 km or more into the sky.
It would have had to be this big in order for material to be carried across the entire globe in the quantities seen in the Greenland and Antarctic ice layers. Medieval texts describe atrocious weather the following summer in 1258. (PTI)
Ancient city dating 3,300 yrs back unearthed in Iraq
Washington: Archaeologists have unearthed an ancient city called Idu, hidden beneath a mound in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.
Cuneiform inscriptions and works of art reveal the palaces that flourished in the city throughout its history thousands of years ago, Fox News reported.
Located in a valley on the northern bank of the lower Zab River, the city’s remains are now part of a mound created by human occupation called a tell, which rises about 32 feet above the surrounding plain.
The earliest remains date back to Neolithic times, when farming first appeared in the Middle East, and a modern-day village called Satu Qala now lies on top of the tell.
The city thrived between 3,300 and 2,900 years ago, Cinzia Pappi, an archaeologist at the Universitt Leipzig in Germany, said.
The researchers were able to determine the site’s ancient name when, during a survey of the area in 2008, a villager brought them an inscription with the city’s ancient name engraved on it.
Excavations were conducted in 2010 and 2011.
The findings are published in the journal Anatolica. (ANI)
Picture of Titanic victims’ burial at sea up for auction
London: A rare never-before-seen black and white photograph showing victims of the 1912 Titanic disaster being buried at sea has now been made public and is expected to fetch 5,000 pounds at an auction in the UK.
The picture was taken on board the Mackay Bennett – one of the body recovery ships – during a mass funeral service of dozens of the dead.
The image, which shows body bags stacked on the windswept deck while two crewman tip up a stretcher to drop a victim over the side, is going under the hammer, on October 19, at Henry Aldridge and Sons in Devizes.
It was taken days after the doomed liner Titanic hit an iceberg on April 15, 1912, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, and sank in the icy waters of Atlantic Ocean killing more than 1,500 passengers and crew. The photo shows the ship’s priest, the Reverend Hind, conducting the service, a websire reported.
“This picture blows away the myth the burials were dignified,” Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said. Records show 166 out of 306 bodies from the Titanic retrieved by the Mackay Bennett were buried at sea. (PTI)