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Wednesday, May 21, 2008

At least 170 firefighters in Berlin, Germany battled a fire on Tuesday at the Berliner Philharmonie, the building that is home to the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra.

The fire broke out around 2:00 p.m. local time, while the orchestra was rehearsing, but all the members of the audience and orchestra made it out of the building without injury. Much of the instruments were also saved before the fire grew out of control.

Firefighters had to take off large portions of the metal roof in order to battle the blaze which took almost five hours to bring under control and burned for almost 12. It is believed that welding on the roof may have caused the fire to start, but an investigation is ongoing.

Officials have yet to determine the total extent of the damage, but do say that nearly 17,000 square feet of the roof is burned.

The building, designed by Hans Scharoun, was built in 1963 to replace the previous concert hall which was destroyed in 1944 during World War II. The orchestra was first formed by 54 individuals in 1882.

All future concerts that have been scheduled to take place at the Philharmonie are canceled until further notice.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

At least 54 people died today when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a gas station near a mosque in Musayyib, about 60 km south of the Iraqi capital. Some 80 people are reported to have been injured.

Witnesses said a fuel tanker was slowly approaching the pumps at the station when the attacker ran towards it and detonated explosives strapped to his body. Police said the resulting huge blast destroyed a nearby apartment complex and damaged the mosque and some small businesses.

The gas station was located near the city-center. Iraqi gas stations normally include a number of small businesses selling tea, soft drinks and snacks where crowds of people often gather.

Mussayib, a religiously mixed town, lies in an area named the “triangle of death”, due to the large number of kidnappings and killings of Shiite Muslims traveling between Baghdad and the Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Saturday, July 9, 2005

After a press conference in London from the Metropolitan Police and Transport for London, more details are emerging about the attacks in London on Thursday.

Data from the Underground system’s power and control systems have revealed that all three bombs went off within 50 seconds of each other, at 8.50am, with the managing director of Transport for London, Tim O’Toole saying the bombs went “bang bang bang, very close together”.

The first bomb to detonate was on the Liverpool Street train soon after it left for Aldgate on the Circle line, seconds before the others. The blast tripped out the power system, visible in the control room. The first call the police received that morning reported “a bang” at Aldgate East, coming within a minute of the blast.

The Edgware Road train, leaving for Paddington and also on the Circle, exploded opposite a train coming from the other direction, making people think at first that it was a derailment. The first call to the Police spoke not of an explosion, but of a person falling under the wheels of the train. The confirmation of a bomb did not come until 9.17am, but by that time the emergency services were already on scene.

Transport for London’s new TrackerNet software is fully opertational on the Circle line, which allows for precise tracking of trains, but is not yet fully installed on the Piccadilly line. The first indication of the Piccadilly line bomb was when the tunnel telephone system wires were cut by the blast, an event logged by other software. The cutting of the lines then tripped out the track current. The tunnel itself suffered only slight damage and is safe, but the train – which was packed with commuters heading for Russell Square – is very badly damaged.

London Underground declared a ‘code Amber’ within minutes, moving trains to platforms and opening all doors. A ‘code Red’ – full evacuation – was set at around 9.15am. O’Toole described the decision to evacuate as being “very grave, not taken lightly”. When questioned as to whether everything possible had been done on the day to save lives, the managing director of Transport for London was “very proud” of the choices made that morning.

As investigations continue, all bodies have been removed from the sub-surface Circle line trains, but the carriages themselves are still in situ while a painstaking forensic investigation takes place.

Currently, work is on-going to retrieve bodies and forensic evidence from the carriage of the train in the deep tunnel of the Piccadilly line near King’s Cross. Teams of rescue workers looking for human remains are working alongside forensics experts in a “meticulous” search to find evidence.

Conditions are described as being very difficult, with high temperatures and lots of dust. Work was halted over Friday night when conditions became too bad, and resumed this morning. Efforts have been made to improve the ventilation.

Work will continue throughout tonight and possibly into Sunday. The exact number of bodies still in the wrecked carriage is unknown.

Access from King’s Cross is impossible, so workers are taking the longer route from Russell Square station to get to the front of the train.

Police have revealed that the bombs were ‘high explosives’ – not homemade. However they are declining to be specific about their composition as the information could be useful when they interrogate suspects.

Police will not confirm or deny if any parts of a timer have been found, but have said that “any device will now be in a million pieces”. Police believe the use of timers more likely than suicide bombings as the blasts were so closely timed, but are not ruling out anything.

Friday, October 5, 2007

The winners of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize have been announced. The awards, given out every early October since 1991 by the Annals of Improbable Research, are a parody of the Nobel Prize, which are awards given out in several fields. The awards are given to achievements that, “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They were presented at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.

Ten awards have been presented, each given to a different field. The winners are:

• Medicine: Brian Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer, who studied the health consequences of sword swallowing.

• Physics: A team from the USA and Chile, who made a study about how cloth sheets become wrinkled.

• Biology: Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands, for carrying out a census of creatures that live in people’s beds.

• Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for creating a method of extracting vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

• Linguistics: A team from the University of Barcelona, who discovered that rats cannot tell the difference between Japanese and Dutch when spoken backwards.

• Literature: Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study on how the word “The” confuses people when they try to put things in alphabetical order.

• Peace: The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for trying to develop a “Gay bomb” that would turn enemy soldiers homosexual.

• Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University for his investigation into the limits of the human appetite, by using a self-refilling “bottomless” bowl of soup.

• Economics: Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan, for patenting a machine that catches bank robbers by dropping a net on top of them.

• Aviation: A team from the National University of Quilmes, Argentina, for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters recover from jet lag.