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Orange sheep, knitted graffiti and the story of the President and the pen. It’s the week’s weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat’s Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.
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A reel of film discovered in a cupboard at a Baptist church in Devon is said to prove the guilt of a suspected Nazi war criminal, Walter Gieseke, says historian.
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Thestudy challenges th idea that the “language centres” of our brains are the sole driver of language A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt.
A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families.
The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage.
The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development.
At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies.
Lead author Michael Dunn, an evolutionary linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, said the approach is akin to the study of pea plants by Gregor Mendel, which ultimately led to the idea of heritability of traits.
“By looking at variation amongst the descendant plants and knowing how they were related to each other, [Mendel] could work out the mechanisms that must govern that variation,” Dr Dunn explained to BBC News.
“He inferred the existence of some kind of information transfer just from knowing family trees and observing variation, and that’s exactly the same thing we’re doing.”
Modern phylogenetics studies look at variations in animals that are known to be related, and from those can work out when specific structures evolved.
For their studies, the team studied the characteristics of word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.
They considered whether what we call prepositions occur before or after a noun (“in the boat” versus “the boat in”) and how the word order of subject and object work out in either case (“I put the dog in the boat” versus “I the dog put the canoe in”).
The method starts by making use of well-established linguistic data on words and grammar within these language families, and building “family trees” of those languages.
“Once we have those trees we look at distribution of these different word order features over the descendant languages, and build evolutionary models for what’s most likely to produce the diversity that we observe in the world,” Dr Dunn said.
The methods use inference in a similar way to Mendel’s studies of pea plants The results showed that, although grammatical features were shared across the families, the way that the features arose depended strongly on the history of development of language features within the families.
In a parallel to convergent evolution in biology – in which analogous structures in unrelated animals can evolve independently – grammatical constructs follow their own independent evolutionary paths.
“We show that each of these language families evolves according to its own set of rules, not according to a universal set of rules,” Dr Dunn explained.
“That is inconsistent with the dominant ‘universality theories’ of grammar; it suggests rather that language is part of not a specialised module distinct from the rest of cognition, but more part of broad human cognitive skills.”
The paper asserts instead that “cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states”.
However, co-author and evolutionary biologist Russell Gray of the University of Auckland stressed that the team was not pitting biology against culture in a mutually exclusive way.
“We’re not saying that biology is irrelevant – of course it’s not,” Professor Gray told BBC News.
“But the clumsy argument about an innate structure of the human mind imposing these kind of ‘universals’ that we’ve seen in cognitive science for such a long time just isn’t tenable.”
Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, called the work “an important and welcome study”.
However, Professor Pinker told BBC News that the finer details of the method need bearing out in order to more fully support their hypothesis that cultural boundaries drive the development of language more than biological limitations do.
“The [authors] suggest that the human mind has a tendency to generalise orderings across phrases of different types, which would not occur if the mind generated every phrase type with a unique and isolated rule.
“The tendency may be partial, and it may be elaborated in different ways in differently language families, but it needs an explanation in terms of the working of the mind of language speakers.”
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Hispanics became the largest minority group in 191 metro areas in 2010 New figures by the US Census Bureau show Hispanics now outnumber African Americans for the first time in most metropolitan areas.
The figures, from the 2010 Census, illustrate the growing diversity of the 366 metro areas in the US, which are home to 83.7% of the US population.
Hispanics became the largest minority group in 191 of the areas last year.
The data could influence redistricting lines in many states, where political maps are drawn based on population.
The figures released on Thursday are important for the US political process because population determines the number of members a state has in the House of Representatives.
And states draw their own district lines, often taking ethnic voting into account.
That Hispanic populations have become the biggest minority groups in an increasing number of metropolitan areas – 191, up from 159 in the 2000 Census – is in part attributed to black populations moving south, leaving behind economically troubled cities in the northern part of the country.
“A greater Hispanic presence is now evident in all parts of the country”
William Frey Demographer at the Brookings Institution
New metropolitan areas where Hispanic populations rose include: Chicago, Illinois; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Atlantic City, New Jersey – all regions that will lose US House seats in the 2012 elections because of overall population changes.
Last month, the Census Bureau said the total Hispanic population in the US jumped 42% in the last 10 years to 50.5m, the equivalent of one in six Americans.
Black populations increased 11% to 37.7m, or about one in 10 Americans.
“A greater Hispanic presence is now evident in all parts of the country – in large and small metropolitan areas, in the Snowbelt [northern states] and in the Sunbelt [southern states],” William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, told the Associate Press news agency.
He added: “From now on, local, state and national politicians will need to pay attention to Hispanics rather than treating blacks as the major minority.”
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Several people have been in injured in a Nato air strike that damaged a university campus in Tripoli, which is said to be situated near a military site.
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Ali Isa al-Saqer is one of several detainees who died in police custody Anti-government protests in Bahrain have been squashed but resentment of the Sunni monarchy simmers among the tiny Gulf kingdom’s Shia majority, reports the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner in the capital, Manama.
Bahrain is now under what is officially called a state of national security – imposed last month when the government’s patience with protesters and their roadblocks snapped.
But it is martial law by any other name.
Police checkpoints are up all over the country, there are tanks stationed in the centre of the capital Manama, a curfew from midnight until early morning and more than 1,000 troops and police from neighbouring Arab Gulf states helping to guard vital installations.
That’s fine by us, say many Bahrainis from the ruling Sunni minority, as well as expatriates.
They feel reassured, not threatened, by the checkpoints that have replaced the protesters’ anarchic and intimidating roadblocks. But most Shia Muslims tell a different story.
In Manama’s suburb of North Sehla we went to a packed Shia funeral for one of several detainees to die in police custody.
Accused of trying to run over a policeman during a protest, Ali Isa al-Saqer had handed himself over to police after his family say they were threatened.
Six days later he died in their custody, they say he fought his jailers.
“Making an enemy of a whole section of the population who are now unemployed, angry and clever is not wise, it is sowing the seeds for future trouble”
Western diplomat in Bahrain
His family, seeing his battered body for the first time since his arrest, collapsed in howls of grief; his wounds were quite simply horrific.
Beaten black and blue, his lacerated back resembled a bloody zebra; he appeared to have been whipped with heavy cables, his ankles and wrists manacled.
I brought up his case with the health minister, Dr Fatima al-Beloushi, who is also minister for human rights.
At first she said that the opposition had altered the images to invent the lacerations. But when I replied that we had been to the funeral and seen them ourselves she immediately promised a full investigation.
Daniel Williams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, told me after seeing Mr al-Saqer’s body: “If he had been in a car wreck he might have been better off.”
Opposition activists have frequently been prone to exaggeration, claiming wrongly for example that they were being fired on by helicopters.
But they are certainly suffering now.
Bahrain’s security forces are now out in force after weeks of protests In the last few days the security apparatus appears to have stepped up its intimidation of anyone even suspected of opposition.
People are grabbed at two in the morning from their beds, beaten in front of their families then dragged away by heavily-armed masked men and taken off to unknown cells.
The family is rarely, if ever, told where.
More than 400 people have been detained this year. Four have reportedly died in custody.
Not surprisingly, this is inflaming large parts of the Shia community.
Coupled with this is an organised programme of humiliation of Shia by “baltajiya” – thugs who come at night and smash up community gathering places and spray pro-ruling family graffiti on the walls of Shia areas with antagonising phrases like “the al-Khalifa are a crown upon your head”.
Large numbers of people, mostly Shia, including doctors and other professionals, have recently lost their jobs, officially for absenting themselves from their jobs during the protests.
As one Western diplomat put it to me: “Making an enemy of a whole section of the population who are now unemployed, angry and clever is not wise, it is sowing the seeds for future trouble.”
On the island of Muharraq, just next to the capital, we found unease too among the Sunni community.
Roadblocks set up by anti-government protesters have been dismantled At Friday prayers at this Sunni mosque we met a community largely supportive of the government’s crackdown.
Worshippers told me they welcomed the Saudi troops that Iran and many Shia have branded as “invaders”.
They said the protesters had gone too far, paralysing the country’s economy with their vigilante roadblocks.
I asked Sheikh Abdullatif Al-Mahmoud, the spiritual leader of Bahrain’s sizable Sunni minority, what he thought would happen if protesters from the Shia majority ever deposed the Sunni ruling family.
Sheikh Abdullatif al-Mahmoud, the spiritual leader of Bahrain’s sizable Sunni minority, warned of terrible consequences if the Shia majority ever deposed the Sunni ruling family.
“If they manage to seize power, Sunnis in Bahrain will suffer and we’ll see bloodshed and killings in Bahrain,” he told me.
For now, the country is holding its breath.
One month into the three-month state of emergency there are attempts to pretend everything is “getting back to normal” despite the sand-coloured armoured vehicles at junctions and a row of tanks guarding what used to be Pearl Roundabout, the now-bulldozed centre of the protests in February and March.
After losing patience with the opposition and their changing demands, the regime’s hardliners have got their security clampdown, the reformers have been sidelined and negotiations on political reform have stalled.
It is as if a lid has been clamped back onto a boiling pot, while at the same time the fire beneath it is being stoked.
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Republicans led by House Speaker John Boehner earlier pressed for $61bn in cuts The US Congress is set to approve a budget that would cut $38.5bn (£23.6bn) from last year’s spending levels in the remainder of the fiscal year.
The deal was agreed on Friday, six months after the last budget expired.
With its passage, Republicans and Democrats in Congress will turn their attention to what is expected to be a bitter fight over next year’s budget.
Republicans have pushed for greater spending cuts than Democrats have been willing to concede.
The bill, which is expected to pass both houses of Congress on Thursday and be signed by Mr Obama immediately afterwards, was crafted after weeks of fraught negotiations between the White House and congressional Democrats and Republicans.
The ballooning US deficit is forecast to reach $1.5 trillion (£921bn) this year.
It is set to be a top issue in the 2012 election campaign, with Democrats and Republicans offering voters starkly contrasting visions about how to close it.
The bill expected to pass on Thursday, which covers the fiscal year up to 30 September, slashes some domestic spending but also relies on accounting changes that some economists say create the illusion of deeper spending cuts.
Though Republican negotiators led by Speaker John Boehner in the House of Representatives initially pressed for $61bn in budget cuts, many analysts in Washington have scored the budget bill as a victory for the Republicans.
The debate over the budget for the fiscal year 2012, which begins on 1 October, has already begun in earnest.
Last week, Republican House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan introduced a budget proposal that would slash $6.2 trillion in government spending over the next decade.
It would achieve those cuts in large part by requiring the elderly to pay more for their healthcare than they do currently and cutting healthcare and social programmes for the poor.
Meanwhile, it would lower taxes for the wealthy, a move conservatives say will boost US economic growth.
On Wednesday, US President Barack Obama laid out his own fiscal policy plan, proposing a mix of tax increases for the wealthy and changes to social programmes, while rejecting the fundamental revisions Republicans proposed.
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Thusha Kamaleswaran was shot in the chest Police have arrested a 21-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy over a shooting in a shop in which a girl and a man were wounded.
Five-year-old Thusha Kamaleswaran and 35-year-old Roshan Selvakumar were shot inside the Stockwell Food and Wine store in south London on 29 March.
The girl suffered a chest wound while Mr Selvakumar, 35, suffered a head wound.
Two men have already been charged with attempted murder of both victims.
Kazeem Kolawoli, 18, of Black Prince Road, Lambeth, and Anthony McCalla, 19, of Oakdale Road, Streatham, have both been charged and were remanded in custody to appear at the Old Bailey on 10 June.
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The suspected bomber is picked out with a white circle in a CCTV still Prosecutors in Belarus have released images said to show a person planting a bomb that killed 12 people and injured 200 on the metro in the capital, Minsk.
One image shows what appears to be a man carrying a hold-all in the central aisle of a metro station as people board a train beside him.
The time shown is nearly 1744 (1444 GMT) – 12 minutes before the blast.
Three more arrests have been made, bringing the total to five, while no motive has yet been forwarded.
Deputy Prosecutor General Andrei Shved said on Thursday that the five, including the suspected bomber himself, were Belarusians under the age of 30, and another official reportedly added that one of them was a woman.
“The perpetrator [of the attack] has been found,” Mr Shved told reporters in Minsk.
Another CCTV still appears to show the suspect leaving the station aisle seconds before the blast at 1756 “Some of his accomplices have been identified.”
Earlier, Belarus’s authoritarian President, Alexander Lukashenko, announced that two of the detainees had confessed to the attack.
Oleg Voronin, an official at the prosecutor general’s office, told Russia’s Ria-Novosti news agency that one of the detainees was a woman.
The exploding bomb showered rush hour commuters at the Oktyabrskaya metro station with nails and ball bearings.
Terrorist attacks are almost unheard-of in Belarus, where the authorities have been widely accused of seeking to stifle political opposition to Mr Lukashenko, in power since 1994.
Mr Lukashenko said the suspects arrested earlier were linked to two previous bombings – one in Minsk in 2008 and one in the western city of Vitebsk in 2005 – in which some 50 people were injured.
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A number of homes have been damaged – some of them severely – after a suspected explosion at a building site in Kilsyth, North Lanarkshire.
The incident is believed to be linked to a site, operated by Dawn Homes, near a quarry off Kilsyth’s Stirling Road.
Emergency services were called to the scene at about 1420 BST. There are no reports of any injuries.
One local resident said it was “a miracle” no-one had been hurt.
Yvonne Ross, who lives in nearby Ladeside Drive, saw the damage to houses on her estate after she arrived home with her children.
She told BBC Scotland: “The police and fire brigade were here when I got back. The street was cordoned off and they were checking everyone’s house.
“Rocks from the explosion went through the roofs of houses. In one case a boulder went right through into the lounge.
“One of bricks has broken our front step but the damage is quite minor. It must have travelled quite a distance to reach my door.”
Mrs Ross said debris from the explosion went right through a brick wall in one garden and “right through a conservatory and bathroom wall” in another home.
She added: “No-one has been injured which is quite surprising really. It’s a total miracle.”
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A group of student singers from St Andrews University has paid tribute to Prince William and Kate Middleton with a reworking of a Lady Gaga song, which has proved a YouTube hit.
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Camp life as painted by Arnold Daghani An historian is claiming that a can of film found in a Devon church could help finally prove the guilt of a suspected Nazi war criminal.
The film, which was rescued from the rubbish during a clean-out at Cullompton Baptist Church back in 2006, turned out to be a home movie featuring senior SS officers.
The 11 minutes of grainy black-and-white footage shows images of high-ranking Nazis off-duty, drinking tea, and chatting with women working in their office.
One man is seen to dominate the proceedings. He is pictured inspecting a camp, ordering other officers about, and taking delivery of a column of slave labourers.
“They were worked to the point of exhaustion, forced to dig pits by the side of the road, and then they were machine gunned to death ”
Dr Harry Bennett Plymouth University
Now Dr Harry Bennett, associate professor of modern history at Plymouth University, says he has identified the main figure in the film.
After extensive research, Dr Bennett is convinced that the man is SS officer Walter Gieseke, a Nazi in charge of building a 1,000-mile road across Ukraine that cost tens of thousands of slave labourers their lives.
Dr Bennett says that the film was made in 1943 and shows the building of a road which was officially called the DG IV, but which became known as The Street of the SS.
The road was one of the largest building projects ever undertaken by the Nazis, and it was intended to take millions of Germans to a new breeding ground for the master race in the East.
Fifty-thousand Russian prisoners of war, 50,000 Ukrainians and 25,000 Jews were forced to work on the road. But, as Dr Bennett explains, this was not simply a building project.
“Death rates were high amongst the Russian and Ukrainian workers, but almost all of the Jews were murdered. They were worked to the point of exhaustion, forced to dig pits by the side of the road, and then they were machine-gunned to death. This was an extermination programme.”
Walter Gieseke died in 1974, having always denied involvement in the road building One man who was forced to work on the road was a Jewish artist named Arnold Daghani. He managed to escape, carrying with him sketches and paintings he had made, which he hoped would serve as testimony to the atrocities he had witnessed.
When the war ended Mr Daghani campaigned for 20 years to get those responsible for the road brought to justice.
Thanks largely to Mr Daghani’s work, Mr Gieseke, and many other former Nazis, were eventually questioned by war crime investigators.
Mr Gieseke flatly denied having any direct involvement with the building of the road, and he was never brought to trial.
“Gieseke always maintained that he was simply a pen-pusher, with no knowledge of conditions on the road,” says Dr Bennett, “but this footage from Cullompton blows that alibi out of the water. We can see him at the scene, hands on, very much the man in charge, he is responsible, he is powerful.”
Mr Daghani spent the rest of his life painting images from the slave labour camps, and compiling lists of the dead, and of those he held responsible.
He died in 1985 a frustrated man, and his work is now held in a special collection at the University of Sussex.
Mr Gieseke died in 1974, taking many secrets with him to his grave, but he left behind a reel of film which could now, at last, show his true face to the world.
Quite how the film came to be in a Devon church remains unclear, but it was found among other film cans that had belonged to Reg Whitton, a member of the congregation.
Mr Whitton was known to be a film enthusiast, and he ran a haulage firm that carried out work across Europe at the end of World War II, but no-one knows exactly how he came by the film or why he kept it hidden for all those years.
Arnold Daghani plotted the camps along the strategic military road in Ukraine This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Moussa Koussa arrived in the UK at the end of March Libyan defector Moussa Koussa has been removed from the EU sanctions list, the Treasury has announced.
In a notice issued on Thursday, the former head of Libyan intelligence was deleted from the list of people and companies who have their assets frozen by the EU.
Mr Koussa fled Libya and Col Muammar Gaddafi on 30 March for the UK.
He has been accused of involvement in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing during his time with Libya’s intelligence service.
He is the most high-profile minister to flee Libya as rebels opposing Col Gaddafi continue their campaign, and Nato leads an international operation to enforce a no-fly zone.
The EU sanctions froze the assets of Col Gaddafi and members of his family, and banned the supply of arms, ammunition and any equipment that could be used for “internal repression”.
In March, the list was extended to include the country’s sovereign wealth fund and central bank.
A Foreign Office spokesman said the decision to remove Mr Koussa from the list was taken at the EU Council in Luxembourg on Tuesday.
He said sanctions were introduced to target members of Col Gaddafi’s regime and encourage “behavioural change”.
As Mr Koussa has chosen to leave the regime, the sanctions have been removed.
Foreign Secretary William Hague told Parliament on 4 April that he would be seeking to have him removed from the list.
Mr Hague said at the time: “In the case of anyone currently sanctioned by the EU and UN who breaks definitively with the regime, we will discuss with our partners the merits of removing the restrictions that currently apply to them while being clear that this does not constitute any form of immunity whatsoever.
“Sanctions are designed to change behaviour and it is therefore right that they are adjusted when new circumstances arise”.
This week Mr Koussa left the UK for Qatar, where it was understood he would meet the Qatari government and a range of other Libyan representatives in the capital city Doha, the Foreign Office said.
The former foreign minister had been staying at an undisclosed location in the UK after travelling from Tunisia.
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One person has died and six have been injured in a road crash involving five vehicles.
The collision happened on the A4119 near Tonyrefail in Rhondda Cynon Taf on Thursday.
The Welsh Ambulance Service said the injured were taken to hospital in Cardiff and Llantrisant with a range of conditions, including leg fractures and neck pain.
The road was reported to have been closed in both directions.
South Wales Fire and Rescue Service said crews from Tonypandy, Pontypridd and Bridgend attended the incident, after being alerted by police at around 1720 BST.
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Google has seen a rise in the number of people looking at paid-for adverts Internet giant Google has reported a sharp rise in first-quarter earnings, the first figures with co-founder Larry Page back at the helm as boss.
The world’s leading search engine reported $6.54bn (£4bn) in net revenue in the first quarter, up 29% from $5.06bn the same time a year ago.
Google has about a 65% share of the US search engine market and about 90% in Europe.
The firm said it would continue “to invest for the long term”.
Announcing the results, Patrick Pichette, Google chief finance officer, said: “These results demonstrate the value of search and search ads to our users and customers, as well as the extraordinary potential of areas like display and mobile.”
During the quarter, paid clicks – which measures the number of times people click on Google ads that are sponsored by the advertisers – rose by 18%.
Meanwhile, average cost-per-click for its search advertisements increased by about 8% on the same quarter 12 months earlier, and decreased about 1% from the fourth quarter of 2010.
However, on some measures Google came in below analysts’ expectations.
Revenues from the UK were $969m, representing 11% of income in the first quarter of 2011, against 13% in the first quarter of 2010.
The firm has been engaged on a staff hiring spree, looking to employ more than 6,000 workers this year, but that has been driving up its costs.
“Clearly the company is still in growth mode and for Google that means spending too,” said Jordan Rohan, analyst at financial services firm Stifel Nicolaus.
He said Google was spending on sales and marketing, and “they’ve hired 1,900 more people this quarter, which might be a new high”.
In trading of its shares after the New York Stock Market closed, Google stock fell by 4% to $553.09.
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