Kosovo man braves wildfires on motorbike to deliver water to firefighters

Kosovo man braves wildfires on motorbike to deliver water to firefighters
A motocross volunteer waits to load water bags to help firefighters extinguish the fire as a wildfire burns in Prevalle, Kosovo on Aug. 14, 2024. (Reuters)
Short Url
Updated 15 August 2024
Follow

Kosovo man braves wildfires on motorbike to deliver water to firefighters

Kosovo man braves wildfires on motorbike to deliver water to firefighters
  • Allmedin Smaili, 26, a dentist from the nearby town of Prizren, has been helping firefighters for seven days
  • Most of the time he carries two backpacks with water totalling 50 liters, food and bottles of drinking water

PREVALLE, Kosovo: As firefighters in southern Kosovo prayed for rain in their battle against wildfires in the Sharr Mountains National Park, a young man on a motor-bike approached them and said: “I am here to help.”

Allmedin Smaili, 26, a dentist from the nearby town of Prizren, has been helping firefighters for seven days to stop a fire in the park where he and his friends usually go with their motorbikes to enjoy the thrill of riding over the harsh terrain.

Two men at the fire department base fill backpack waterbags of 25 liters each and Smaili transports them to other firefighters to use to douse the flames as huge areas of pine trees burn.

Most of the time he carries two backpacks with water totalling 50 liters, food and bottles of drinking water.

“When I saw what firefighters are going through and how committed they are I told myself I have to do something,” Samili said as he prepared to transport more water.

On Wednesday, Smaili called three other friends to transport more water as breeze stopped the flames and a US helicopter from the NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo started to drop water. The challenge is to stop slow burning trees which can ignite again with a more destructive fire.

“To reach the highest point with water on our back we need three hours and the boy (Smaili) was doing it in less than ten minutes,” said Flamur Hoti, the firefighters’ commander.

“We never imagined he could be so helpful.”

Video from his GoPro camera shows Smaili handing water to his new colleagues as his motorbike sped along trails made by brown bears and wild goats.

Steep slopes can be seen from his left and right side through traces of old burned areas which are still visible.

Fire trucks can not reach the terrain some 1,900 meters above the sea level.

“Cross motor-bike is a hobby for me but this week in turned into a real job,” he said, smiling. “When I see the impact, it gives me pleasure and I never got tired during these days.”


Man pulled into MRI machine after he walked into an exam room wearing a chain necklace

Man pulled into MRI machine after he walked into an exam room wearing a chain necklace
Updated 18 July 2025
Follow

Man pulled into MRI machine after he walked into an exam room wearing a chain necklace

Man pulled into MRI machine after he walked into an exam room wearing a chain necklace
  • The man, 61, had entered an MRI room while a scan was underway
  • Police said the incident “resulted in a medical episode”

NEW YORK: A man was hospitalized in New York after he was pulled into an MRI machine because he walked into the exam room wearing a large chain necklace, police said.

The man, 61, had entered an MRI room while a scan was underway Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI. The machine’s strong magnetic force drew him in by his metallic necklace, according to the Nassau County Police Department.

Police said the incident “resulted in a medical episode” that left the man hospitalized in critical condition. Authorities did not release his name and did not have an update on the man’s condition on Friday.

A person who answered the phone at Nassau Open MRI on Long Island declined to comment Friday.

MRI machines “employ a strong magnetic field” that “exerts very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels, and other magnetizable objects,” according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which says the units are “strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room.”


Coldplay’s Chris Martin calls out camera-shy cozy couple at Massachusetts concert

Coldplay’s Chris Martin calls out camera-shy cozy couple at Massachusetts concert
Updated 18 July 2025
Follow

Coldplay’s Chris Martin calls out camera-shy cozy couple at Massachusetts concert

Coldplay’s Chris Martin calls out camera-shy cozy couple at Massachusetts concert

MASSACHUSETTS: A “kiss cam” moment at a Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts this week has gone viral on social media after the band’s frontman suggested the camera-shy pair were either “having an affair” or just really shy.

The group was performing “The Jumbotron Song,” when the camera showed a man and woman cuddling as they watched the stage. 

The two panicked and attempted to leave the frame in hopes to cover their faces.



“Whoa, look at these two,” the band’s lead singer Chris Martin said. “Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” he jokingly said.

The man and woman were identified as Astronomer CEO Andy Byron and HR Chief Kristin Cabot.

Several internet users noted that Byron’s wife had recently removed his last name from her social media profiles. 

There has been no official response from Byron or Cabot although fake ‘apologies’ have circulated the internet.

 


From Antarctica to Brussels, hunting climate clues in old ice

From Antarctica to Brussels, hunting climate clues in old ice
Updated 18 July 2025
Follow

From Antarctica to Brussels, hunting climate clues in old ice

From Antarctica to Brussels, hunting climate clues in old ice
  • In a small, refrigerated room at a Brussels university, parka-wearing scientists chop up Antarctic ice cores tens of thousands of years old in search of clues to our planet’s changing climate

BRUSSELS: In a small, refrigerated room at a Brussels university, parka-wearing scientists chop up Antarctic ice cores tens of thousands of years old in search of clues to our planet’s changing climate.

Trapped inside the cylindrical icicles are tiny air bubbles that can provide a snapshot of what the earth’s atmosphere looked like back then.

“We want to know a lot about the climates of the past because we can use it as an analogy for what can happen in the future,” said Harry Zekollari, a glaciologist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).

Zekollari was part of a team of four that headed to the white continent in November on a mission to find some of the world’s oldest ice — without breaking the bank.

Ice dating back millions of years can be found deep inside Antarctica, close to the South Pole, buried under kilometers of fresher ice and snow.

But that’s hard to reach and expeditions to drill it out are expensive.

A recent EU-funded mission that brought back some 1.2-million-year-old samples came with a total price tag of around 11 million euros (around $12.8 million).

To cut costs, the team from VUB and the nearby Universite Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) used satellite data and other clues to find areas where ancient ice might be more accessible.



Just like the water it is made of, ice flows toward the coast — albeit slowly, explained Maaike Izeboud, a remote sensing specialist at VUB.

And when the flow hits an obstacle, say a ridge or mountain, bottom layers can be pushed up closer to the surface.

In a few rare spots, weather conditions like heavy winds prevent the formation of snow cover — leaving thick layers of ice exposed.

Named after their coloration, which contrasts with the whiteness of the rest of the continent, these account for only about one percent of Antarctica territory.

“Blue ice areas are very special,” said Izeboud.

Her team zeroed in on a blue ice stretch lying about 2,300 meters (7,500 feet) above sea level, around 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Research Station.

Some old meteorites had been previously found there — a hint that the surrounding ice is also old, the researchers explained.

A container camp was set up and after a few weeks of measurements, drilling, and frozen meals, in January the team came back with 15 ice cores totalling about 60 meters in length.

These were then shipped from South Africa to Belgium, where they arrived in late June.

Inside a stocky cement ULB building in the Belgian capital, they are now being cut into smaller pieces to then be shipped to specialized labs in France and China for dating.

Zekollari said the team hopes some of the samples, which were taken at shallow depths of about 10 meters, will be confirmed to be about 100,000 years old.

This would allow them to go back and dig a few hundred meters deeper in the same spot for the big prize.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” Zekollari, 36, said, comparing their work to drawing a map for “Indiana Jones.”

“We’re trying to cross the good spot on the map... and in one and a half years, we’ll go back and we’ll drill there,” he said.

“We’re dreaming a bit, but we hope to get maybe three, four, five-million-year-old ice.”

Such ice could provide crucial input to climatologists studying the effects of global warming.

Climate projections and models are calibrated using existing data on past temperatures and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — but the puzzle has some missing pieces.

By the end of the century temperatures could reach levels similar to those the planet last experienced between 2.6 and 3.3 million years ago, said Etienne Legrain, 29, a paleo-climatologist at ULB.

But currently there is little data on what CO2 levels were back then — a key metric to understand how much further warming we could expect.

“We don’t know the link between CO2 concentration and temperature in a climate warmer than that of today,” Legrain said.

His team hopes to find it trapped inside some very old ice. “The air bubbles are the atmosphere of the past,” he said. “It’s really like magic when you feel it.”


UK ‘princes in the tower’ murder probe clears Richard III

UK ‘princes in the tower’ murder probe clears Richard III
Updated 18 July 2025
Follow

UK ‘princes in the tower’ murder probe clears Richard III

UK ‘princes in the tower’ murder probe clears Richard III
  • Nearly 200 years after they disappeared, two small skeletons were found in a wooden box at the historic tower and reburied at Westminster Abbey

LONDON: It is one of history’s most intriguing “murders” — the mysterious disappearance over five centuries ago of two young princes from the Tower of London.

Nearly 200 years after they disappeared, two small skeletons were found in a wooden box at the historic tower and reburied at Westminster Abbey.

The remains were believed, but never proved, to be those of the two brothers — heir to the throne Edward, 12, and Richard, nine, the sons of King Edward IV of England, who were reputedly murdered at the behest of their uncle, Richard Duke of Gloucester.

William Shakespeare later immortalized him in Richard III as a scheming hunchback who did away with his royal nephews so he could take the crown himself, sealing his reputation as a child killer.

Now British author Philippa Langley, who helped unearth Richard’s body from a central England carpark in 2012, has claimed that the princes — far from being killed — actually survived.

The elder prince, Edward, was heir to the throne at the time of his disappearance and would have ruled as King Edward V of England.

Langley decided to delve into the mystery after coming to believe that the conventional narrative in which Richard had the young princes killed smacked of “history being written by the victors.”

She was finally spurred into action after reading an article about Richard’s reburial at Leicester Cathedral in 2015 which questioned whether the nation should honor a “child killer.”

“I think I’d always realized that the story sort of developed during the reign of the Tudors,” she said, adding that it was then “repeated and repeated over time” until it became “truth and fact.”

The last English king to die in battle, Richard ruled from 1483 until his brutal death at the Battle of Bosworth near Leicester in 1485, aged 32.

Bosworth was the last major conflict in the Wars of the Roses and changed the course of English history because the Tudor dynasty of Henry VII captured the crown from Richard’s Plantagenets.

Langley attributes the accepted story that Richard had the boys murdered to King Henry VII, a “very, very intelligent individual, but suspicious and highly paranoid.”

“He had a massive spy network working for him. And he was able to completely control the narrative,” she said, adding that Richard ended up “covered in Tudor mud.”

Taking a cold case review approach to the historical “whodunnit,” Langley says she assembled a group of investigative specialists, including police and lawyers, to advise her.

“They said: ‘Look, if you haven’t got any confirmed, identified bodies, then it has to be a missing persons investigation and you have to follow that methodology’.

“They said: ‘You have to actively look for evidence’. That’s when it really started to get interesting.”

Langley put out an appeal for volunteers to scour archives, only to be inundated with offers of help from people ranging from ordinary citizens to medieval historians.

The result was the decade-long Missing Princes Project which she says unearthed a significant amount of information pointing to the survival of both young princes.

Langley now believes that it is up to Richard’s detractors to disprove the survival thesis, which she outlines in the new book “The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case.”

“The onus is now on them to find the evidence that the boys died.

“They cannot say Richard III murdered the princes in the tower any more because we found numerous proofs of life everywhere,” she said.

Key to Langley’s conviction that both boys survived are documents discovered supporting a rebellion by “Edward IV’s son.”

During the rebellion in 1487, Lambert Simnel, a pretender to the throne who came forward after Richard’s death, was crowned in Dublin.

According to fresh references found by the project, the boy was “called” or said to be “a son of King Edward,” which she believes points to Simnel being the elder prince, son of Edward IV.

The reaction to Langley’s research has been mixed.

Michael Dobson, director and a professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute, expressed skepticism.

“Given the ways of dynastic monarchy, I think Richard would have been taking a very big risk in leaving those princes alive,” he said.

“The chances of their having accidentally gone missing while incarcerated on his orders in the Tower of London seem pretty remote.”


‘Shop local’: Bad Bunny brings tourism surge to Puerto Rico

‘Shop local’: Bad Bunny brings tourism surge to Puerto Rico
Updated 17 July 2025
Follow

‘Shop local’: Bad Bunny brings tourism surge to Puerto Rico

‘Shop local’: Bad Bunny brings tourism surge to Puerto Rico
  • The day before Bad Bunny kicked off his blockbuster residency that’s expected to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to Puerto Rico while showcasing its rich culture

SAN JUAN: The day before Bad Bunny kicked off his blockbuster residency that’s expected to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to Puerto Rico while showcasing its rich culture, he posted a simple message: Shop Local.

The ethos is core to his 30-show concert series in San Juan which, after nine performaces exclusive to residents, will open up to fans from elsewhere — what many Boricuas, as Puerto Ricans are known, are hoping will serve as an exercise in responsible tourism.

“It’s an incredible moment for the island,” said Davelyn Tardi of the promotional agency Discover Puerto Rico.

The organization conservatively estimates the residency will bring in some $200 million to Puerto Rico over the approximately three-month run, which falls during the typically less-trafficked summer months.

Azael Ayala works at a bar in one of San Juan’s popular nightlife zones, telling AFP that business was already booming even though the residency was only in its first weekend.

It’s “completely changed,” the 29-year-old said, as crowds buzzed about La Placita where some bars were slinging Bad Bunny-themed cocktails.

“We’re thrilled,” Ayala said. “The tips are through the roof.”

The fact that people are coming from across the globe to see Bad Bunny “is a source of pride for Puerto Rico, too,” he added.

Arely Ortiz, a 23-year-old student from Los Angeles, couldn’t score a ticket to a show — but said Bad Bunny was still the draw that prompted her to book her first trip to Puerto Rico.

“I really love how outspoken he is about his community,” she said. “Just seeing him, that he can get so far, and he’s Latino, it encourages more Latinos to be able to go for what they want.”

“He has for sure empowered Latinos, like 100 percent.”

But while tourism has long been an economic engine for the Caribbean island that remains a territory of the United States, the relationship is complicated.

Concerns around gentrification, displacement and cultural dilution have magnified on the archipelago beloved for stunning beaches with turquoise waters — especially as it’s become a hotspot for luxury development, short-term rentals and so-called “digital nomads” who work their laptop jobs remotely while traveling the world.

Visiting foreigners sample the island’s beauty but are shielded from the struggle, say many locals who are coping with a chronic economic crisis exacerbated by natural disasters, as rents soar and massive blackouts are routine.

Bad Bunny — who was born and raised Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio — himself has pointed to such issues and more in his metaphor and reference-laden lyrics.

“In my life, you were a tourist,” reads one translation of his track “Turista.”

“You only saw the best of me and not how I was suffering.”

Historian Jorell Melendez Badillo told AFP that Puerto Rico by design has long catered to foreign investment: “A lot of people see tourism as sort of like this colonial undertone,” he said.

But when it comes to Bad Bunny and his residency at the affectionately nicknamed venue El Choli, “we cannot negate the fact that it’s going to bring millions of dollars” to the island, he added.

“We can celebrate what Benito is doing while also looking at it critically, and having a conversation around what type of tourism will be incentivized by this residency.”

Ana Rodado traveled to Puerto Rico from Spain after a friend native to the island gifted her a ticket.

She booked a five-day trip with another friend that included a visit to beachside Vega Baja, the municipality where Bad Bunny grew up and worked bagging groceries before gaining fame.

After posing for a photo in the town square, Rodado told AFP that she’d been trying to take the artist’s “shop local” plea to heart.

“Tourism is a global problem,” she said. “To the extent possible, we have to be responsible with our consumer choices, and above all with the impact our trip has on each place.”

“We try to be respectful, and so far people have been really nice to us.”

Ultimately, Bad Bunny’s residency is a love letter to his people — a show about and for Puerto Ricans whose narrative centers on heritage, pride and joy.

“We’re here, damn it!” he shouted to ecstatic screams during his sweeping first show, which at times felt like a giant block party. “I’d come back for the next 100 years — if God lets me, I’ll be here.”