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Amazing tricks on a BMX, rather large feet and a celebration of being blonde. It’s the week’s weird and wonderful video stories in Newsbeat’s Odd Box with Dominic Byrne.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Groupon has 83 million members around the world Daily discount website Groupon is seeking to raise up to $750m (£460m) in an initial public offering (IPO).
It is the latest move by an internet company seeking to cash in on investor appetite for social media firms.
Last month, business networking site LinkedIn saw its shares more than double in value on their first day of trading after the company went public.
IPOs are when companies list their shares on the stock market for the first time.
Groupon offers daily discounts to members on items ranging from meals out and beauty treatments to flying lessons.
The offers are typically available for a set period and for a limited number of buyers.
The company has 83 million members worldwide and employs more than 7,000 staff.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
In March, Eman al-Obeidi showed journalists her injuries before being dragged away Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who claimed to have been raped by supporters of Col Muammar Gaddafi, has been deported from Qatar to eastern Libya, UN officials say.
A spokesman for the Libyan rebels said she had arrived in the city of Benghazi and was “welcome to stay”.
Ms Obeidi had sought refuge in Qatar after arriving there from Tunisia.
The reason for her deportation is not clear. The UN says it runs contrary to international law.
“She is a recognised refugee and we don’t consider there is any good reason for her deportation,” Sybella Wilkes of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) told the Associated Press.
Human Right Watch (HRW) also protested against the move.
“Forcibly returning a refugee who survived gang rape not only violates international law, but is cruel and could trigger further trauma,” said HRW’s Bill Frelick.
“All eyes are now on the authorities in eastern Libya, who should allow al-Obeidi to leave the country.”
A witness quoted by HRW said Qatari officials had taken Ms Obeidi from her hotel room on Wednesday night and forced her and her visiting parents to board a flight on Thursday to Benghazi.
Benghazi is the stronghold of rebel forces who are trying to oust Col Gaddafi.
Rebel spokesman Jalal el-Gallal told AP: “She is welcome to stay, this is her country.”
US state department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington was “monitoring the situation”.
In March, Ms Obeidi rushed into Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel where foreign correspondents are based and shouted out her story of being stopped at a checkpoint, dragged away and gang raped by soldiers.
As reporters recorded her story, government minders grabbed her and dragged her away.
She vanished for several days before turning up in Tunisia.
Ms Obeidi said she had escaped with the help of defecting military officers.
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Adm Mullen said it would be dangerous to abandon Islamabad The top US military officer has acknowledged “very significant” cuts to US military numbers in Pakistan, saying US-Pakistan ties need time to heal.
Adm Mike Mullen, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said some of the US troops, mostly trainers, would remain.
Pakistan asked the US to reduce its troop presence after US special forces killed Osama Bin Laden last month.
The raid sparked deep anger in Pakistan, further damaging already strained ties with the US.
The US has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars of aid in recent years, much of it military assistance.
Washington sees its relations with Pakistan as vital in the fight against al-Qaeda and against Taliban militants in Afghanistan who use safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal regions on the border.
But with al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden now known to have been living undetected almost next door to a major Pakistani military academy, many in the US Congress have questioned the value of the US aid.
Before Bin Laden was killed on 2 May in a raid on his compound in northern Pakistan, the US had about 200 troops in Pakistan. Most of them were helping to train the Pakistani army.
“There clearly is an ongoing contraction of that support… and it is tied to the difficult time we are going through,” Adm Mullen told reporters in Washington after a visit to Pakistan.
There have been protests across Pakistan over the US raid to kill Osama Bin Laden Adm Mullen said the raid to kill Bin Laden had triggered “a great deal of introspection” in Pakistan.
“They’re going to have to finish that before we get back to a point where we are doing any kind of significant training with them,” he said.
For now, he said, that meant “a very significant cutback in trainers”.
“I think we need to give them a little time and space to do that [introspection],” he said. “And that makes all the sense in the world to me.”
But he said it would be dangerous to abandon Islamabad.
“I think the worst thing we could do would be cut them off,” he said. If that happened, he said, “10 years from now, 20 years from now, we go back and it’s much more intense and it’s much more dangerous”.
Adm Mullen steps down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later this year.
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Scientists have identified a highly toxic new variant of E. coli which has already claimed 18 lives, most of them in Germany where the outbreak started and where 1500 people have been infected.
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A man has been given a life sentence for the murder of a father as he walked home from his daughter’s 18th birthday.
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Police examine whether a man who carried out two double murders in Pembrokeshire in the 1980s has any connection to a similar crime near Bridgend in 1993.
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The lawyer has previously raised doubts about Gen Mladic’s health Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic was treated for cancer two years ago while on the run as a war crimes suspect, his lawyer has said.
Milos Saljic provided documents apparently showing Gen Mladic had lymphoma, and was treated at a Belgrade hospital in 2009.
Gen Mladic, who is awaiting trial in The Hague, is due to make his initial appearance in the court on Friday.
He is accused of atrocities committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
He will be asked to plead on 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including charges relating to the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica.
Mr Saljic showed the Associated Press news agency a document purportedly showing Gen Mladic was treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from 20 April to 18 July 2009 at a Belgrade hospital.
The document said Gen Mladic was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma He said his client underwent surgery and chemotherapy.
The names of the hospital and the doctors who treated him appear to have been blacked out.
However, the authenticity of the document cannot be checked.
Nerma Jelacic, spokeswoman for the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, declined to comment on the claim that Gen Mladic had had cancer.
Mr Saljic, who represented Gen Mladic in Belgrade before his extradition, had previously been quoted as saying by Serbian media that his client had suffered three strokes and two heart attacks, was too ill to be sent to The Hague and would not live to the end of a trial.
Serbian doctors who examined him last week said he was fit enough to be extradited.
Correspondents say tribunal officials will be anxious for Gen Mladic to avoid the fate of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack four years after the start of his own war crimes trial in 2006.
Mr Saljic told AP he had only been sent the hospital document on Monday, a day before Gen Mladic was flown out to the Netherlands.
“A man called me on the phone, asking if I was interested in a document that could prevent Ratko Mladic’s extradition to The Hague,” he said.
When Gen Mladic appears in court at 0800 GMT on Friday, he will be asked to confirm formally his identity and enter a plea to each of the charges against him.
He may decide to delay entering a plea by 30 days, but if he has not done so at the end of this period the court will automatically enter a not guilty plea on his behalf.
He has been appointed a Serbian lawyer, Aleksandar Aleksic, as an interim counsel for Friday’s hearing.
He may then choose a permanent counsel for the trial, or opt to conduct his own defence.
The prosecution has charged Gen Mladic with genocide, persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts and cruel treatment for his alleged part in a plot to achieve the “elimination or permanent removal” of Muslims from large parts of Bosnia in pursuit of a “Greater Serbia”.
He is accused of masterminding the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 7,500 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.
He is also charged over the 44-month siege of the capital Sarajevo from May 1992 in which 10,000 people died.
Gen Mladic’s arrest is considered crucial to Serbia’s bid to join the European Union.
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Three British nationals in the UK have been infected with E. coli linked to the outbreak in Germany, according to the Health Protection Agency.
It brings the total number of cases in the UK to seven, the other four are from Germany.
It is believed that all patients caught the infection in Germany and brought it back to the UK.
Three of them have developed the potentially deadly complication of haemolytic uraemic syndrome.
Across Europe the number of infections has passed 1,500 cases, 17 people have died – 16 in Germany and one in Sweden.
All the UK cases either went to A&E, walk in centers or had visited their GP.
The HPA continues to advise people travelling to Germany that they should not eat raw cucumber, lettuce or tomatoes and that they should seek medical advice if they have bloody diarrhoea.
Source: UK Health Protection Agency
Haemolytic uraemic syndrome is a very severe kidney complication which destroys red blood cells and can also affect the central nervous system.
Dr Dilys Morgan, from the Health Protection Agency, said: “It’s very unusual for adults to have HUS anyway.
“It mainly affects young children and older adults, but what we’ve seen is predominantly young females getting this condition.
“It’s a very rare organism that’s causing this and it’s thought it has particular properties where the toxin it produces is particularly virulent and therefore is affecting this population more than we would normally expect.”
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A new species of worm takes is the world’s deepest-living land animal, researchers have revealed.
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The inquest heard the nurse realised her mistake much later in bed A community nurse accused of giving a diabetic pensioner 10 times too much insulin is expected to find out on Thursday if she will be struck off.
Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust worker Joanne Elizabeth Evans faces two misconduct charges over the death of Margaret Thomas, 85, from Pontypool.
A Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) panel in Cardiff heard she died six hours after the insulin was given.
Two years ago, an inquest ruled that she had been unlawfully killed.
The hearing was told Mrs Evans went to see Mrs Thomas on 2 June, 2007, after the pensioner had collapsed on the doorstep of her home in Pontnewydd, Pontypool, following a shopping trip.
Mrs Evans tried to inject her patient with two insulin pens, but they both jammed, the committee was told.
‘Well-respected’
She then fetched a regular syringe from her car instead of one usually used for insulin – a substance measured in units, as opposed to millilitres.
Mrs Evans then was said to have wrongly converted the amount “in her head” and injected Mrs Thomas with 3.6ml – approximately 360 units – instead of the 36 units she should have given.
Her colleagues described Mrs Evans as being “well respected” and “very caring”, but also that she had begun to struggle with her workload as she was the only nurse on her patch, due to staff shortages, the panel was told.
It heard Mrs Evans had become stressed because she was not sleeping well following an argument with a neighbours and she also had concerns for her daughter, who had suspected appendicitis.
But Alex Mills, representing the NMC, said Mrs Evans had “made very significant errors that had a very significant impact”.
Mrs Evans is accused of administering “3.6ml of Lantus insulin (approximately 360 units) to Patient A” when the prescribed dose was 36 units, as well as failing to report the incident to a GP or senior nurse.
The hearing continues.
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A group of touring bellringers were locked in a North Yorkshire church tower after a villager took offence to their noise.
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The DC-3 departs from Casey Station. The ice-penetrating radar antennas can be seen under each wing The belly of Antarctica has given up a little more of its mystery.
Survey data taken across a great swathe of the east of the white continent has allowed scientists to map the shape of the bedrock buried deep under the ice.
It reveals in new detail a huge trough hundreds of kilometres long that is cut by fjord-like features.
Researchers tell Nature magazine that this hidden landscape was probably moulded by the action of glaciers more than 14 million years ago.
This was a time when Antarctica was only part way through acquiring the extensive ice covering we know today.
The team behind the survey work believes its data will improve not only our understanding of Antarctica’s past but also its future, as the continent contends with a potentially much warmer world.
“This type of study is important to understand how ice flows in Antarctica and how it will flow in the future,” said Professor Martin Siegert, from the University of Edinburgh, UK.
“The only way you can do that is with models, and models need topography on which to grow and flow the ice. If our topography doesn’t resemble the reality then the outputs from the models won’t either,” he told BBC News.
The new findings have emerged from the Investigating the Cryospheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate (Icecap) project, an international effort to comprehend how the East Antarctic Aurora Subglacial Basin has been shaped over the past 35 million years.
Previous research had given coarse hints of the rock structures buried under more than four kilometres of ice, but Icecap is the first systematic attempt to get a higher-resolution image of the mountains and valleys in this part of Antarctica.
Close in map of the rock under the ice sheet, showing one of the subglacial fjords. All of the green and blue areas currently lie below sea level The team used a refurbished 1942 DC-3 plane to gather its data.
Packed with instruments, it took off from Casey Station on the coast and flew long lines that traced out a great fan across the basin.
Ice-penetrating radar on the underside of the plane looked through the cap to build a picture of the rock bed.
What the data reveal is a complex landscape created after Antarctica was plunged into a deep cooling period.
The snows that fell over ancient mountains produced mighty glaciers, which then merged to form one giant, spreading ice-mass.
This would not have been a steady process but one that pulsed back and forth – and it is this advance and retreat of the ice that the scientists believe was responsible for carving the deep fjords they now see in their data.
“The modern ice sheet couldn’t possibly have done this; it has to have been the consequence of an ice sheet that was much smaller than today’s,” explained Professor Siegert.
“Comparing our data with geomorphological evidence from other regions of the world, we can be pretty confident that these fjords were formed by fast-flowing ice at the edge of the ice sheet. It’s the first evidence we have of how the ice was in phases of growth and retreat as it marched across this subglacial basin to form the ice sheet we recognise today.”
A series of radar strips looking down through the ice, in which each strip shows about 2km of depth and about 400km of length; buried mountain peaks are clearly visible and fjords are marked by blue dots Information about local gravity and magnetism gathered on the survey flights indicates that the structures being mapped are what they seem and are not the result of tectonics – of lifting or rifting in the landscape.
That can be confirmed by drilling through the ice to sample the rock below. This is a goal. The ice core pulled up in the process would also be another invaluable snapshot of past climatic change. By examining bubbles of air trapped in the compacted snow, it would be possible for researchers to gauge past atmospheric conditions and temperatures in this region.
Icecap incorporates researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Texas, together with the Australian Antarctic Division and the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre.
The aerogeophysical survey is one of several that is “virtually” lifting the ice shroud covering Antarctica to reveal its rock underpinning.
Only a small number of areas on the continent remain to be assessed using modern high-resolution mapping techniques.
Such work is difficult and expensive, however. The remote and inhospitable conditions make for very challenging logistics.
“There are few parts of the world where you undertake pure exploration and Antarctica is one of them,” said Professor Siegert.
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Aston Villa contact Premier League rivals Fulham to assure them that they have not been in contact with Cottagers boss Mark Hughes despite speculation linking him with their managerial position.
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Several people gathered at the scene in Market Street, Watford A man is staging a stand-off with armed police at a bank in Hertfordshire after threatening staff.
Police were called to the Co-op Bank in Market Street, Watford, at about 1020 BST.
Officers cordoned off a large area of the centre of the town and redirected traffic away from the area.
Police said the man was acting alone and no members of the public were at risk. An eyewitnesses spoke of police with guns.
Early reports suggested the man had a bomb strapped to his leg, but this has not been confirmed by police.
The owner of a tailoring business in Market Street said three police marksmen were aiming their weapons at the bank.
He said: “There are three of them and they are about 30 feet (10m) away from the bank on the opposite side of the road.
“There’s a lot of police around, pulling people back from the bank, and a few helicopters flying overhead.
“People are saying that the man in the bank has got a bomb strapped to himself and, as far as we know, all the hostages have been set free.
“A lady came out of the bank this morning and she was very distressed. I don’t know if she was a staff member, I think she might have been a customer.”
He said local people and business owners in the street had been told by police to stay indoors until the incident was resolved.
He added: “The police now are just telling people to get further and further away.
“They’ve told people to stay inside because, obviously, if he has got a bomb, they don’t know the extent of it or how big it could be.”
James Glisson, who was in a nearby mobile phone shop, said he had seen “military-looking” police officers and dogs passing by, but he could not see if any staff were still inside the bank.
Another eyewitness close to the scene told the BBC that police were using megaphones to speak to the people inside the bank.
He said that police officers nearby said it may be “a robbery that had gone wrong”.
Market Street is in the centre of Watford The police spokeswoman said: “We fully understand people will concerned by what is happened but would ask members of the public not to call the police.”
Hertfordshire Police said they would be updating details of the incident on Facebook and Twitter.
A Hertfordshire police spokeswoman said: “We have now been able to establish that this individual is on his own and no members of the public are at direct risk.
“Clearly, our objective is to resolve this situation as peaceably as possible and thank the public locally for their co-operation and understanding is a fast moving and complex situation.
“Can we ask members of the public to continue their cooperation with officers and listen to any instructions for their own safety.”
In a statement the Co-Op Bank said it was assisting police in managing the situation.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.