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Sunday, January 8, 2006 — Original Reporting

A woman in Australia has been killed in a shark attack. The attack occurred at 5pm (Local Time) just off Amity Point, North Stradbroke Island, south-east of Brisbane.

The woman, described as 21, had lost both arms up to the elbow and sustained severe wounds to her torso and legs. She was carried to shore by friends and was then flown by rescue helicopter to the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Surgeons were unable to save her.

The woman was holidaying from Brisbane with a church camp and attempts to contact her family have been made.

Emergency Services Rescue Helicopter crew officer Rod Morgan said the woman had suffered massive blood loss.

“She was very pale” he said, “We were diverted right away and were able to be on the scene within minutes and were able to have the patient at hospital within an hour of the attack.”

“She had life threatening injuries she had lost significant amounts of blood and the patient had what we would call an altered level of consciousness where it wasn’t able to communicate directly with the patient” said Queensland Ambulance paramedic Lachlan Parker.

There were many witnesses at the scene and they are now being interviewed by Police at Amity Point. They are described as being distraught.

One witness, who asks to not be identified, described that the victim was swimming in the sea with her Border Collie. When the attack happened, the dog ran home to raise the alarm.

“I was across the road from where she was staying and I saw the dog come flying up the road all wet and shivering and whimpering,” she said, “Then a little boy came running up and said the girl had lost her leg and her arm and everyone ran out of the house towards the beach. It was just a little black-and-white dog but he was crazy so I locked him under the house.”

Other reports claim that the woman had been scuba diving in murky shallow water approximately 15 metres from the shore.

The woman is believed to be from McDowall in Brisbane, but her name has not yet been released.

A resident of Amity Point for 20 years, Brad Ross, said tourists visiting the area have been warned of potential attacks; “The shore just falls away into 30m of water and there are plenty of bull sharks out there. People know when they enter the water there they’re stepping into a shark habitat.”

Other beaches on the island are protected by drum lines.

Queensland state police inspector Peter Harding believes from the severity of the woman’s injuries that she was attacked by a group of bull sharks, a species known for aggressive behavior this time of year. Water police will search for the sharks today and as a result, beaches on the east and west of Amity Point have been closed.

This is the first attack in the area since August 1972.

Local wisdom cautions against allowing dogs in the water at swimming beaches, because of a fear that they attract sharks, perhaps because of residue accumulated from fleas which live on the dog’s blood.

Friday, May 26, 2006

In February of 2006, the Savarino Services Construction Corp. proposed the construction of a seven million dollar hotel on Elmwood and Forest Avenues in Buffalo, New York. In order for the hotel to be built, at least five properties containing businesses and residents would have to be destroyed. It was not certain whether the properties were owned by Savarino or by the landlord Hans Mobius. The hotel was designed by Karl Frizlen of the Frizlen Group, and is planned to be a franchise of the Wyndham Hotels group.

Elmwood Avenue is known by the community as a popular shopping center, and Nancy Pollina of Don Apparel (who is “utterly against” the construction) claims it’s the only reason why students from Buffalo State College leave campus. Additionally, Michael Faust of Mondo Video said he did not want to “get kicked out of here [his video store property].”

In 1995, a Walgreens was proposed to be built on the same land, but Walgreens later withdrew its request for a variance because of pressure from the community. More recently, Pano Georgiadis tried to get the rights to demolish the Atwater House next to his restaurant on Elmwood Avenue, but was denied a permit due to the property’s historical value. He has since been an opponent to the hotel construction.

In the process of debating the hotel, it was thought that a hotel had previously existed on the proposed site, however; research done at the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society had shown that no hotel had previously existed on the site.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

A scientist for NASA has said that the recent magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile, which killed at least seven hundred people, may have moved the Earth’s axis, and caused the day to shorten.

Richard Gross, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, computed how the globe’s rotation should have been altered by the earthquake; he and fellow scientists determined that the day had been shortened by approximately 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

Gross commented about his findings to the Bloomberg news agency in an email, saying: “[t]he length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds. The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (equal to approximately eight centimeters or three inches).”

Gross compared the Chile earthquake with the 9.1 magnitude Sumatra earthquake in 2004 which generated a tsunami. According to him, that temblor shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and moved the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds.

The scientist noted that the Chilean earthquake moved the Earth’s axis more than the Sumatran one, despite not being as strong for two reasons. The first, he said, is because it was located in the mid-latitudes of the globe, which made it more effective in altering the axis. The other reason was that the Chilean earthquake fault was steeper than that in Sumatra, which results in more vertical motion and thus more change in the figure axis.

In an interview with Bloomberg Radio, David Kerridge, the head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, described how the earthquake may have caused such a change in the axis. “It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” Kerridge explained. He then described how when an ice skater executes a spin, if the skater pulls in his or her arms, the skater’s rate of spin will increase. “It’s the same idea with the Earth going around. If you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.”

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Cambridge, Massachusetts —Catherine Ndereba won her fourth Boston marathon yesterday, making her the first woman to do so. The Kenyan trailed for the first 20 miles of the race, before passing Elfenesh Alemu at the top of Heartbreak Hill in Newton. Though the 26.2 mile race takes place in Boston, Massachusetts, it has been dominated by Kenyan and Ethiopian runners for approximately the last ten years. Emily Levan of Wiscasset, Maine, was the first American woman to finish, placing twelfth in 2:43:14. Levan was also 12th in the 2003 Boston Marathon.

Ethiopian Hailu Negussie won the men’s race in 2:11:45. American Alan Culpepper placed fourth, the highest an American has placed in the Boston marathon since 1987, when Dave Gordon did the same.

Ernst Van Dyk won the men’s wheelchair race for the fifth year in a row. The women’s wheelchair race was won by Cheri Blauwet, who also won the event in 2004.