Workers find grenade near Gatwick Airport

by Sean McLachlan on

Workers digging near Gatwick Airport yesterday uncovered a grenade.

This wasn’t terrorism, though. The grenade is believed to date from the Second World War. Workers uncovered the grenade near the airport’s railway station. Bomb disposal experts carried out a controlled explosion to get rid of it.

While it didn’t pose any great risk except to the poor hardhat who dug it up, rail and flight services were briefly halted until the grenade was destroyed.

This odd event isn’t so rare. Europe is littered with unexploded ordnance from both world wars and other conflicts. In the Balkans, experts are still trying to remove the millions of landmines planted during the Yugoslav Civil War. Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, has 14,000 known minefields. In France, bomb disposal experts have to deal with huge amounts of unexploded ordnance, some even dating back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

[Photo courtesy J-L Dubois]

London considering “floating hotels” to accommodate visitors to 2012 Olympics

by Melanie Renzulli on

Although London is expecting close to 5.5 million visitors for the 2012 Olympics, the city only has around 120,000 hotel rooms. Given these numbers, Olympics organizers are considering setting up floating hotels – “flotels” or “floatels” – on the River Thames for the duration of the three-week event.

Organizers are considering inviting up to three cruise ships to dock about three miles from the Olympic Park in Stratford in order to cope with the high demand for hotel rooms. London also plans to lease docking berths to yacht owners for £150,000. Of course, this is a fantastic way for the city to make money during the games, but does not solve the problem for average spectators who wish to find a room at a reasonable rate. The Daily Mail estimates that visitors to London during the Olympics can expect a tenfold increase in the regular accommodations rates. No word yet on rates for a floating hotel room, but you can probably expect your bank account to be stripped of a substantial amount of gold, silver, and bronze.

[Photo credit: Flickr user robmcm]

London is burning: A dispatch from inside the riots, looting and arson

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Improbably, London is burning.

I returned from a long celebratory weekend in Antwerp on Monday afternoon. It was a grand weekend, full of very good meals, great conversation, and retail discoveries. While away, I’d read about rioting in Tottenham on Saturday night in response to the shooting death of a man named Mark Duggan at the hands of a policeman on August 4. I’d sensed from some news reports and Twitter that things had escalated, though to be completely frank I hadn’t paid much attention.

Transferring from the Eurostar to the Tube at St. Pancras this afternoon, I encountered a sign that things were off-kilter in the form of an announcement that there were no trains to Brixton. Hmmm. Then, transferring from the Tube to a bus at Old Street, it became clear that the city had temporarily morphed into a different place. The air was charged. Pedestrians crossed streets carelessly. Sirens were ongoing. I overheard snippets of conversation about Tube closures and bus detours. Three police vans screeched past our bus towards Hackney. My phone started to pulse.

I received eight text messages in a row from my partner. There was rioting on Mare Street, just ten minutes from our flat, and he asked if I would quickly do some grocery shopping before the shops in the area boarded up. He biked home from work early.

The Turkish proprietors at the grocery store downstairs seemed shell-shocked. They’d pulled their metal gate part-way down so that they’d be able to shut quickly if needs demanded. Three helicopters hovered overhead. Two middle-aged women came into the store. “Peckham,” one said, looking fatigued. “It’s really bad in Peckham.” My sister and I snapped up groceries and sat inside, keeping one eye on the street. Sirens waxed and waned. The news channels proved to be a chaotic and depressing distraction, so we turned the television off and refreshed various news sites online at an obsessive pitch.

So to Twitter, where the breadth of the rioting–mostly, it appeared, looting, with liberal lashings of arson and violent clashes with police–became evident. The looting is widespread. Buildings and cars have been set on fire. The stories of carjackings and bicyclejackings came fast and furious. Thankfully, in the midst of this frenzy, nobody has been killed.Since Saturday night, there have been rioting or looting incidents in Hackney Central, Bethnal Green, Enfield, East Dulwich, Ponder’s End, Deptford, Brixton, Croydon, Peckham, Woolwich, Balham, Elephant & Castle, and Clapham Junction, among other places. Most upsetting of all was the news that rioting spread tonight to other cities in the UK, including Birmingham, Leeds, and Liverpool.

And as Monday night wore on there were reports of riots in ever more unlikely London neighborhoods: Chalk Farm, Angel, and Notting Hill–yes, the cuter-than-cute Notting Hill of the 1999 Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant movie. The Telegraph put together a frequently updated and very handy interactive map of the London riots thus far.

Meanwhile, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson and UK Prime Minister David Cameron, both on summer holidays, were missing in action during the most dramatic hours of the day; as the pitch of the day got more and more fevered, however, both men announced that they would be returning to London ahead of schedule. (Early this evening a spokesperson for the Prime Minister made it clear that he would be monitoring events from his holiday perch in Tuscany, but just after 9 pm he reversed course and announced that he would return to London on Tuesday morning; the Mayor made it clear several hours earlier that he would be cutting his Canadian vacation short.)

Why have these riots exploded now, and with such copycat force? Honestly, I have no idea. Everyone I’ve talked to today has been surprised by the events of the last 72 hours. Nina Power suggested in the Guardian today that heavy cuts in public spending, high levels of unemployment, and deep inequality have all played a hand. I have no doubt that she is right. But the force and the speed of the riots can’t be completely explained by Power’s argument.

Londoners have been taken aback. We’ll wake up on Tuesday with shot nerves, hoping for calm.

[Image: Flickr | StuartBannocks]

Polar bear kills tourist in Norway

by Kraig Becker on

A British youth group traveling in a remote region of Norway was attacked by a polar bear yesterday, leaving one dead and four others severely injured. The animal entered their camp while the group slept, and attacked the travelers inside their tents, before it was shot to death by one of the group’s leaders.

17-year old Horatio Chapple was one of 13 members of a BSES Expedition traveling along a glacier on the island of Spitsbergen, located in the Svalbard archipelago. He was sharing a tent with two other boys when the bear attacked, fatally wounding him. The animal then turned on other campers, before it was killed as well. Chapple was already dead by the time a rescue team could reach them, but the other four victims were air lifted to a hospital.

The BSES is an organization that works with young people in the U.K. in an effort to introduce them to the outdoors and encourage an active lifestyle. The group helps the youth to build confidence, while also educating them about the impact of climate change on our planet. This particular BSES expedition was part of a larger group of 80 that were spending five weeks on the island.

As the ice in the Arctic Ocean retreats, polar bears have been forced into smaller habitats, which has brought them increasingly in contact with humans. This team came to Spitsbergen not only armed with guns, but also a safety system designed to give them an early warning if a bear should approach. At this time, it’s not known if that system went off, but no one noticed, or if it failed altogether.

Two of the survivors of the attack are said to be in serious condition in a university hospital in Tromso, Norway.

Brochs: the prehistoric castles of Scotland

by Sean McLachlan on


In Scotland, the past is still very much present. In rural areas you can hear people speaking Scots Gaelic or Lowland Scots like their forefathers did. There are castles and stone circles all over the region. The most enigmatic remains from the past are the brochs.

Brochs are mysterious drystone towers dating to around two thousand years ago. Built without mortar or nails, they’re architectural wonders, yet nobody is sure what they were for.

The best example surviving today is the broch of Mousa, pictured above in this photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Built around 100 B.C., it still stands to its original height of 13 meters (43 ft). A stairway cleverly constructed inside the thick wall spirals up to the top, where a walkway offers a beautiful view of the surrounding countryside.

Archaeologists used to think brochs were fortresses, a sort of prehistoric castle. This idea has given way to theories that they were homes of the elite or even simple farmhouses. This former archaeologist thinks the original theory is more likely. To me they feel like forts, and are far more imposing than the standard homes of the day. Plus in Lowland Scots the word brough means fort. In Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, borg also means fort. The Vikings reused some brochs as fortified bases from which the ransack the countryside. Many brochs have earthen ramparts around them, or are located on easily defensible spots such as beside a cliff or on an island in a loch.

%Gallery-130017%It’s hard to say how many brochs there are in Scotland because archaeologists argue over which sites are brochs and which aren’t. Estimates vary from barely a hundred to almost six hundred. Most are clustered in the far north, especially on the windswept Shetland and Orkney islands. Researchers can’t agree on when they were built either. Most agree it was from about 500 BC to 200 AD, but they can’t get more precise than that. This was the Iron Age, when competing tribes fought over land and crafted elaborate weapons and jewelry.

Perhaps the oldest known broch is being excavated right now. A broch at Nybster in Caithness may date back to 500 or even 700 BC, although it’s unclear if these early walls constituted a broch or if the broch was built on top of it. Prince Charles visited the excavation this week. Charles studied archaeology at university and has even gotten the royal hands dirty on several excavations.

All this academic debate just adds to the mystery. Located in the rugged far north of Scotland, often in remote areas, they can’t fail to impress. The sheer effort and skill required to build them in such a hostile environment commands respect.

They have more mysteries to offer up too. Inside there’s often evidence for rooms, floors, or other structures, but none have survived in good enough shape to show what they were used for.

To learn more about brochs and ancient Scotland, check out the BBC’s Mysterious Ancestors website.