On Thursday morning an uninvited guest showed up to a breakfast-meeting of Frankfurt mothers with young children. Despite the shock of seeing a wild boar burst through the glass door of a church, nobody was injured. Over the last several months, turmoil in the international economy has made Frankfurt on the Main, Europe's financial capital, a pretty scary place to live. Still, the city's Martinus Evangelical Church got a special shock on Thursday as a rampaging wild boar burst through a glass porch door and terrorized a group of 10 mothers eating breakfast with their young children.Wild boars can be dangerous and terrifying. Even city-dwellers are threatened. The mothers, who dine regularly in the church as part of a "mini-club," were seated with their offspring, ages one to three, at small, appropriately-sized children's tables. At about 11 a.m., police reports indicate that a feral beast leapt into the room through a glass door, shattering its pane into hundreds of pieces. The boar then dashed frantically around the room before exiting through the very same portal from which it had made its violent entrance. The mothers and children took cover by getting up on top of the tables and chairs, and although no one was hurt, all were visibly rattled when the police arrived later. According to the police report, the parish is providing "psychological support" for all those who need it.
On Thursday morning an uninvited guest showed up to a breakfast-meeting of Frankfurt mothers with young children. Despite the shock of seeing a wild boar burst through the glass door of a church, nobody was injured.
Over the last several months, turmoil in the international economy has made Frankfurt on the Main, Europe's financial capital, a pretty scary place to live. Still, the city's Martinus Evangelical Church got a special shock on Thursday as a rampaging wild boar burst through a glass porch door and terrorized a group of 10 mothers eating breakfast with their young children.
Wild boars can be dangerous and terrifying. Even city-dwellers are threatened. The mothers, who dine regularly in the church as part of a "mini-club," were seated with their offspring, ages one to three, at small, appropriately-sized children's tables. At about 11 a.m., police reports indicate that a feral beast leapt into the room through a glass door, shattering its pane into hundreds of pieces. The boar then dashed frantically around the room before exiting through the very same portal from which it had made its violent entrance.
The mothers and children took cover by getting up on top of the tables and chairs, and although no one was hurt, all were visibly rattled when the police arrived later. According to the police report, the parish is providing "psychological support" for all those who need it.
Wild boar will do anything to stay quiet and not be bothered. They are only dangerous if cornered (especially injured). Or panicking like this one.
I'd expect some other humans were at the beginning of this story.
Boars are cool.
The birds first came to Britain as pets but some escaped into the wild and are now a common site in suburban South East England, particularly west London and Kent, although they have been as far north as Scotland.While native woodland birds have suffered from climate change and loss of habitat, the tropical birds have thrived in warmer temperatures. In the latest estimate, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) said the population has now reached a record 20,000, the majority of which are living in the South East.Bedecked with emerald green feathers and a rose-red beak, the ring-neck parakeet was brought to the UK from India and was first reported in the wild in 1969.By 1996, there were 1,500 of the birds living in the wild, by 2002 there were 6,000.
The birds first came to Britain as pets but some escaped into the wild and are now a common site in suburban South East England, particularly west London and Kent, although they have been as far north as Scotland.
While native woodland birds have suffered from climate change and loss of habitat, the tropical birds have thrived in warmer temperatures.
In the latest estimate, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) said the population has now reached a record 20,000, the majority of which are living in the South East.
Bedecked with emerald green feathers and a rose-red beak, the ring-neck parakeet was brought to the UK from India and was first reported in the wild in 1969.
By 1996, there were 1,500 of the birds living in the wild, by 2002 there were 6,000.
President-Elect Barack Obama is to have a street named after him in a Spanish town as part of a nationwide move to abandon symbols of General Franco's dictatorship. The central avenue in Naquera, a town of 5000 people in the eastern region of Valencia, is currently named after Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the right-wing Falange movement and Franco's ideological mentor.But under the Law of Historical Memory brought in by the socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last year, all statues, plaques and symbols of the Franco regime must be removed.
The central avenue in Naquera, a town of 5000 people in the eastern region of Valencia, is currently named after Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the right-wing Falange movement and Franco's ideological mentor.
But under the Law of Historical Memory brought in by the socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last year, all statues, plaques and symbols of the Franco regime must be removed.
The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage.
The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the software responsible was replaced Tuesday night, November 4. Early tests of the newly-installed program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by mid-January.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improve it in years to come.
Thank you for your patience and understanding,
The USA Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
Everybody needs to chill out. I know people are asses and elbows to write the book on the Obama presidency in the blogosphere, and I know leaders in other parts of the world -- especially (and understandably) Yurp -- can barely contain their relief at getting rid of the Worst Preznit EVAH and getting someone who is at least in the same ballpark as they are on issues like climate change and not randomly blowing up Mid-East countries.
But we still have a long way to go. Bush is still in office until January 20th, and, after Katrina and Iraq and the financial crisis and on and on and on, people are kidding themselves if they don't think he's got one more giant fuck-up in him. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
A gun disguised as a mobile phone has been discovered by police in Italy. The .22 calibre weapon was found during an early morning raid on a property near Naples. Officers also seized bullet proof vests, drugs, ammunition and thousands of pounds in cash.
A gun disguised as a mobile phone has been discovered by police in Italy.
The .22 calibre weapon was found during an early morning raid on a property near Naples.
Officers also seized bullet proof vests, drugs, ammunition and thousands of pounds in cash.
The halting pace of the building project at the center of Berlin will move ahead this week by two full steps: a Communist building will be gone and designs for a Prussian building will be unveiled. None of which means the arguments around the project will be coming to an end any time soon. It's fitting that on the day that the final remnant of the Palast der Republik, the former capital building of communist East Germany, was scheduled to be cleared, a hydrolic shovel broke down, thereby forcing the foreman to push back the demolition from Wednesday to Friday. It is not the first form of delay and postponement, second-guessing and backtracking encountered by this project. Ever since its 1989 reunification, the city of Berlin has been involved in one form or another with the clearing of the old East Berlin landmark -- most recently as a prelude to the reconstruction of the Prussian-era Berlin City Palace that once stood on the site and had been itself demolished to make way for the communist building.
The halting pace of the building project at the center of Berlin will move ahead this week by two full steps: a Communist building will be gone and designs for a Prussian building will be unveiled. None of which means the arguments around the project will be coming to an end any time soon.
It's fitting that on the day that the final remnant of the Palast der Republik, the former capital building of communist East Germany, was scheduled to be cleared, a hydrolic shovel broke down, thereby forcing the foreman to push back the demolition from Wednesday to Friday.
It is not the first form of delay and postponement, second-guessing and backtracking encountered by this project. Ever since its 1989 reunification, the city of Berlin has been involved in one form or another with the clearing of the old East Berlin landmark -- most recently as a prelude to the reconstruction of the Prussian-era Berlin City Palace that once stood on the site and had been itself demolished to make way for the communist building.
Pope Benedict XVI today launched a crusade against climate change in his own tiny country by holding his first "ecologically friendly" public gathering at a Vatican audience hall newly powered by solar panels. Solar panels are seen on the roof of the Paul VI Hall, at the Vatican, today. The panels became functional on Wednesday, illuminating and heating Pope Benedict XVI's weekly general audience, held inside the Paul VI hall. (Alessandra Tarantino/AP Photo) The 2,400 solar panels placed on more than an acre of undulating roof of the Vatican's hall were officially activated today, providing the energy required by the the hall itself and the adjacent large buildings. The audience hall is a striking modernist construction amid centuries-old historical buildings. Built in 1969 and designed by the renowned Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, it is used for concerts and indoor papal audiences that are held there when the weather is poor.
Pope Benedict XVI today launched a crusade against climate change in his own tiny country by holding his first "ecologically friendly" public gathering at a Vatican audience hall newly powered by solar panels. Solar panels are seen on the roof of the Paul VI Hall, at the Vatican, today. The panels became functional on Wednesday, illuminating and heating Pope Benedict XVI's weekly general audience, held inside the Paul VI hall. (Alessandra Tarantino/AP Photo)
The 2,400 solar panels placed on more than an acre of undulating roof of the Vatican's hall were officially activated today, providing the energy required by the the hall itself and the adjacent large buildings.
The audience hall is a striking modernist construction amid centuries-old historical buildings. Built in 1969 and designed by the renowned Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, it is used for concerts and indoor papal audiences that are held there when the weather is poor.
i want more -stomps ferragamos- i want him to get up on his bully pulpit and tell his obeisant cultists to get the alt energy going within a year or they're condemned to eternities of breathing benzene and mercury from coal plants, little devils will chew on their savings, and they can save their souls by saving the planet!
then he should direct huge chunks of vatcapital as venture financing for solar and wind and geothermal startup companies, subsidies for poor renters to insulate their homes etc etc.
it's a start though, unlikely as it seems. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
... She persuaded Queen Victoria to appoint a Royal Commission on the Army medical department, and she herself wrote an 830-page report. Her stories, she decided, weren't enough. She turned to William Farr, who had recently invented the field of medical statistics, to help her identify the reasons for the calamity and the necessary policy changes. He advised her, "We do not want impressions, we want facts."Under Farr's tutelage, Nightingale compiled vast tables of statistics about how many people had died, where and why. Many of her findings shocked her. For example, she discovered that in peacetime, soldiers in England died at twice the rate of civilians -- even though they were young men in their primes. The problem with the military health service, she realized, extended far beyond a few terrible hospitals during a war.Furthermore, the statistics changed Nightingale's understanding of the problems in Turkey. Lack of sanitation, she realized, had been the principal reason for most of the deaths, not inadequate food and supplies as she had previously thought. Deaths from disease began to fall only in March 1855, after a Sanitary Commission arrived in Turkey. They did what she could not do alone: They flushed the sewers, removed putrid animal carcasses that were blocking the water supply, replaced rotten floors and improved ventilation. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped from 52 percent to 20 percent.As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change. In doing so, she ignored the express advice of her mentor, Farr. "You complain that your report would be dry," he wrote to her. "The dryer [sic] the better. Statistics should be the dryest [sic] of all reading." CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW FOR AN ANIMATION Animation credit: Ian Short at understandinguncertainty.com.
... She persuaded Queen Victoria to appoint a Royal Commission on the Army medical department, and she herself wrote an 830-page report. Her stories, she decided, weren't enough. She turned to William Farr, who had recently invented the field of medical statistics, to help her identify the reasons for the calamity and the necessary policy changes. He advised her, "We do not want impressions, we want facts."
Under Farr's tutelage, Nightingale compiled vast tables of statistics about how many people had died, where and why. Many of her findings shocked her. For example, she discovered that in peacetime, soldiers in England died at twice the rate of civilians -- even though they were young men in their primes. The problem with the military health service, she realized, extended far beyond a few terrible hospitals during a war.
Furthermore, the statistics changed Nightingale's understanding of the problems in Turkey. Lack of sanitation, she realized, had been the principal reason for most of the deaths, not inadequate food and supplies as she had previously thought. Deaths from disease began to fall only in March 1855, after a Sanitary Commission arrived in Turkey. They did what she could not do alone: They flushed the sewers, removed putrid animal carcasses that were blocking the water supply, replaced rotten floors and improved ventilation. Almost immediately, the mortality rate dropped from 52 percent to 20 percent.
As impressive as her statistics were, Nightingale worried that Queen Victoria's eyes would glaze over as she scanned the tables. So Nightingale devised clever ways of presenting the information in charts. Statistics had been presented using graphics only a few times previously, and perhaps never to persuade people of the need for social change. In doing so, she ignored the express advice of her mentor, Farr. "You complain that your report would be dry," he wrote to her. "The dryer [sic] the better. Statistics should be the dryest [sic] of all reading."
CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW FOR AN ANIMATION Animation credit: Ian Short at understandinguncertainty.com.
I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, "I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it's silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers." I hoped that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea. Somehow that message failed to come across. Six months after Liar's Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They'd read my book as a how-to manual. In the two decades since then, I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents' world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces? At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system. More From Portfolio.com The New OrderThe crash did more than wipe out money. It also reordered the power on Wall Street. What a Swell PartyA pictorial timeline of some Wall Street highs and lows from 1985 to 2007.Worst of TimesMost economists predict a recovery late next year. Don't bet on it.Then came Meredith Whitney with news.
sorry if it's already been flagged... ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
