Moai statue might be better left in British Museum: Mayor
SANTIAGO: The mayor of the Chile’s Easter Island territory conceded on Monday that the British Museum might be a better home for a massive native Polynesian statue taken by British seamen 150 years ago. Pedro Edmunds Paoa said Easter Island had a “thousand” of its iconic statues, known as the Moai, “both buried, ignored and discarded” and lacked the means to maintain them. “Those thousand are falling apart because they are made of a volcanic stone, because of the wind and the rain are. We need global technology for their conservation,” he said. He said one statue returned to the island from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires “four or five years ago” was now housed in a square where stray dogs urinated on it. His comments will add weight to the argument of the British Museum to keep artefacts that originate from other nations in London where they are carefully curated and popular exhibits with visitors from around the world. (Reuters)
World’s 1st floating N-plant operational in Russia
Murmansk: Akademik Lomonosov, the world’s first “floating” nuclear power plant (FNPP) for installation in remote areas, has been started and brought to 10 per cent of its capacity, Russian state-run atomic energy corporation Rosatom announced on Tuesday. In a statement, Rosatom said that it had started up the first reactor unit of Lomonosov which would be towed to its final destination by next autumn, as scheduled. “We successfully conducted tests in accordance with the schedule. There is no doubt that by next autumn we will tow Akademik Lomonosov to Pevek, as planned. We consider this project as a new product which is of interest, not only for the grid-isolated Russian Arctic regions, but also for a number of other countries,” Rosatom CEO Alexey Likhachev said in a statement. The power start-up is a series of functionality and safety tests conducted on Lomonosov’s reactor required to be completed before connection to the grid, the statement said. (IANS)
Man jailed for calling fiancée ‘idiot’ on WhatsApp
Abu Dhabi: A man has been jailed here for 60 days and fined 20,000 dirhams (around Rs 4 lakh) for calling his fiancée an “idiot” in a WhatsApp message. The man claimed to have used the word in a joking manner but his fiancée took it as an insult and filed a court case against him, the Khaleej Times reported on Tuesday. This case, the daily said, was one of the several court cases filed on the premise of a person sending something on WhatsApp as a “joke”, which the other person took “seriously”. The report said that as per the law, sending anything of an offensive nature on social media is considered a cybercrime. Legal consultant Hasan Al Reyami said that any content sent on social media or messaging services will lead to prosecution under the cybercrimes law. (IANS)
Facebook building in California evacuated over bomb threat
San Francisco: A building on Facebook’s main campus in California was evacuated due to a bomb threat, police said. After an inspection of the building on Tuesday by anti-explosives units and sniffer dogs, the Menlo Park police said they could not find any suspicious packages, reports Efe news. The building is located in the 200 block of Jefferson Drive in Menlo Park, a town south of San Francisco where Facebook is headquartered. Facebook also evacuated the adjacent buildings as a preventive measure. The Menlo Park authorities were alerted to the bomb threat by the New York Police Department. (IANS)