Five children die in two fires
Five children died in two house fires over the weekend in Greater Manchester and South London.
In Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in the early hours of Saturday, Alan Wild, 9, his niece Courtney Wild, 11 months, and Cole, a three-year-old family friend, died.
A fire in Wallington, South London, killed two children, aged 3 and 7. They are yet to be named by police, but neighbours said that they were Tiffany, 7, and her brother, Tristan, 3. Ria, 24, their mother, escaped from the blazing flat at 3am yesterday. A neighbour said that the children’s father was away at the Glastonbury festival.
Neither fire is thought to be suspicious.
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Tyres and roads are death risk
Drivers’ lives are being put at risk by “a lethal combination” of worn-out roads and tyres inflated to the wrong pressure.
As many as 17 per cent of main roads fail skid resistance tests, and 10 per cent of cars are running on illegal tyres, according to a study by the AA Motoring Trust and the County Surveyors’ Society. About nine in ten tyres are incorrectly inflated and up to a half of garage air pumps are inaccurate.
Fatal plunge
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A 13-year-old boy died when he fell through a roof after playing with two other youths. Police were alerted by a man who saw the boys playing on top of a building in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Officers found two boys at the scene and discovered the body. A post-mortem examination is due to be carried out.
Canal victim
A human torso was found in a shopping bag floating in the Regent’s Canal in North London. The black and tartan bag containing male remains was spotted by a member of the public. Police said the remains had been in the water for seven to ten days, and that the man had died as a result of stab wounds.
Live 8 tickets
An additional 55,000 Live 8 concert tickets are to be made available, allowing music fans to view the event on giant screens. Space for the screens has been made available in Hyde Park, in London. Details of how the new tickets will be distributed are expected to be announced today by the Live 8 co-ordinator, Bob Geldof.
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Prize catch
Anglers have a second chance to catch one of the most famous fish when Herman the giant carp comes up for auction next month. Herman weighed a British record for the common carp at 50lb 8oz when he was caught in 1996. Now the stuffed trophy is to be sold by Dukes of Dorchester.
£1.8m Freud
A nude portrait by Lucian Freud of his daughter Bella, the fashion designer, fetched £1.8 million at Christie’s in London. The sale came four months after another Freud nude — of Kate Moss, the supermodel, when she was pregnant — fetched just over £3.9 million. He painted his daughter in the 1980s.
Frog leapt
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Crazy Frog was knocked off the top of the Official UK Singles Chart when 2Pac’s Ghetto Gospel reached the No 1 spot. The single, which features Elton John, went straight to the top. Axel F, based on the Crazy Frog ringtone, had been at No 1 for four weeks. It moved down to No 2.
Rescue failings
Understaffing at rescue centres and unreliable technical equipment could put lives in danger this summer, the BBC TV programme Real Story claims tonight. It says that a Maritime and Coastguard Agency report raises questions about staff competence in operations rooms.
Toddler drowns
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A British toddler, thought to be a two-year-old boy from Kent, died after falling into a hotel swimming pool on Menorca during the night.
He is thought to have slipped out of his family’s accommodation at Arenal d’en Castell without them realising.
Deadly gas alert
The Health Protection Agency is to write to another 10,000 Scottish homeowners to offer detectors which can alert them to the presence of radon. The radioactive gas causes 2,500 cases of lung cancer in Scotland each year, with the east coast known to contain “hot spots”.
The £1.3m car . . .
A 1933 Bugatti racing car that has had one careful owner for 56 years was sold for £1.32million by Bonhams in an auction at the Goodwood Festival of Speed near Chichester, West Sussex. The light blue Type 59 Grand Prix two-seater had been kept in pristine condition.
Nelsonian tribe is gathering
Ships from around the world, including the Russian tall ship Mir, are congregating at Portsmouth in readiness for the bicentenary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, to be marked by a “red” team fighting a “blue” team. Anna Tribe, 75, the great great great granddaughter of Nelson and Emma Hamilton, told descendants of survivors of the battle: “The idea is silly. The French and Spanish are adult enough to appreciate we did win that battle.”
Scots are most violent tourists
A Foreign and Commonwealth Office study shows that Scottish tourists often swap sun, sex and sand for booze, violence and a spell behind bars.
A holiday for a young Scot frequently revolves around drinking vast amounts of alcohol, going to nightclubs and picking fights with fellow holidaymakers. One in ten has been arrested while abroad on holiday, which is almost twice the British average.
While 11 per cent of 16 to 30-year-olds said that they had been involved in a fight, this rose to 20 per cent among Scots. The findings are contained in a £50,000 study, called Project Holiday, which is aimed at understanding the young Brit abroad.
The Spanish island of Ibiza, Faliraki in Greece and Ayia Napa in Cyprus are the resorts where the British are most likely to cause trouble. Thirteen per cent of Scots admitted to having unprotected sex and taking drugs while while on holiday, compared with the British average of 8 per cent.
Appeal to stop the noble Briton
The search is on to find one of Britain’s most endangered insects — the iridescent green Noble Chafer beetle. Volunteers are being sought by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, which wants the public to scour their surroundings particularly near orchards during the summer. The beetle has been found recently in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire, but historically has been found in Cumbria, Kent, Devon, Essex, Hampshire and Oxfordshire.
Film executives turn to the Bible
They have tried fancy boxes, celebrity interviews and behind-the-scenes documentaries, but film distributors’ latest ruse to sell DVDs involves the Bible.
Ben-Hur, the 1959 epic set in the Roman Empire during the first century, will be sold with a Bible study guide to cash in on religious audiences in Britain and America.
Warner Home Video has commissioned Grace Hill Media, a Hollywood publicity firm that targets the religious community, to produce a 12-page guide to sell the Charlton Heston blockbuster to Christians.
Executives believe that they can replicate the success of The Passion of the Christ, which became the biggest foreign language film ever shown in Britain after Mel Gibson’s company Icon ran a marketing campaign aimed at religious groups. The film made £2 million on its opening weekend.
The new Ben-Hur DVD set, which includes ten hours of features, will be released in Britain in February after its American release in September.
Stepping on the gas
A hydrogen-fuelled vehicle built by ETH Zuerich set a new fuel-consumption record at a French test track by travelling the equivalent of 5,385 kilometres per litre. At this level of consumption eight litres would be enough to drive the car around the world. The vehicle, which has been dubbed PAC-Car II, set the record at Ladoux, near Clermont Ferrand.