Little piggy went to market

It was an ordinary Wednesday morning when I woke up on 13 March, 1996. It was snowing and I shivered as I pulled on my red school uniform sweater. We’d moved to Scotland three years earlier – my mum, my stepdad and my 11-year-old brother Joe. I loved my school. I was a happy-go-lucky kid and very settled. Dunblane was a safe, close-knit community. Neighbours were friendly and Joe and I had the freedom to play in the park and walk to school by ourselves. After we’d waved Mum goodbye at home, we walked the short distance to school and Joe went off to his class, which was in a prefab structure on the site, and I went to mine, Primary Four, which was a classroom in the main building. The school had a large gym in the middle and a big field at the back. It was coming up to 9.30am and our class was walking through a corridor to the music room, called the “GP room”, to practise singing for a big assembly later that week. But something wasn’t right. I was standing next to my … [Read more...] about ‘I tried to take my life after Dunblane horror – but now I have my happy family’

An independent bookstore claims to be the only shop in the the UK offering two extremely rare Harry Potter first editions - but they will set fans back a staggering £107,500. St Mary’s Books in Stamford, Lincolnshire, is selling an original paperback edition and hardback version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The books, which are an "incredibly rare find", are believed to be the only two on sale in the whole of the country - with the only other paperback available in the USA. The first edition paperback, released in 1997, could once be bought for as little as £4.99 but is on sale at the antiquarian bookshop with the hefty price tag of £12,500. And the hardback edition released at the same time but with only 500 copies printed is for sale for a spellbinding £95,000 - working out to £426 per page. The store bought the paperback version at the end of February from a private seller who had kept it in pristine condition in a safe. The rarer hardback had been sent … [Read more...] about UK book shop has two extremely rare Harry Potter books worth a combined £107,500

For eight minutes and 46 seconds, police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, on a street in Minneapolis on May 25 last year. Another officer, Alexander Kueng, had his knees on Floyd's upper legs whille their colleague J. Thomas Lane gripped Floyd's handcuffed arms. "Please, please, please, I can't breathe," Floyd gasped, pleading about 20 times. His final words reminded many of those of Eric Garner, who died during a police chokehold in 2014 . When Floyd fell unconscious, the officers didn't move. Chauvin and the other officers released their grip only when an ambulance arrived — nearly two minutes after Keung first reported he could not find a pulse, according to prosecutors . Floyd was later pronounced dead at a local hospital. George Floyd was unarmed. At the time, according to a statement by the Minneapolis Police Department, he appeared to be intoxicated and "suffering medical distress." The police said they were responding … [Read more...] about How George Floyd’s death reignited a worldwide movement

An eight-year-old boy was tragically killed after being swallowed by a crocodile while swimming in a river with his little brother. The boy's dad desperately chased the animal and reportedly punched it with his bare hands but the predator wasn't caught till the next day, a search and rescue official said. The child was attacked in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province and swam in a river known to be a crocodile habitat. It is understood the six-metre crocodile was then found by locals and cut open on March 4, the Australian Associated Press reports. The family wept as disturbing footage shows the child's body being pulled from the crocodile's tummy. The search and rescue official said the family "went to the river often to bathe and get water for cooking". In 2018, Indonesian villagers armed with knives, hammers and clubs slaughtered 292 crocodiles in revenge for the death of a man killed by a crocodile at a breeding farm, Reuters reported. Photographs released by … [Read more...] about Boy, 8, cut from 26ft crocodile which swallowed him whole while he was swimming

Google Images is the public face of everything: When you want to see what something looks like, you will probably just Google it. A data-driven investigation by DW that analysed over 20,000 images and websites reveals an inherent bias in the search giant's algorithms . Image searches for the expressions "Brazilian women," "Thai women"or "Ukrainian women," for instance, show results that are more likely to be "racy” than the results that show up when searching for "American women," according to Google's own image analysis software. Similarly, after a search for "German women," you are likely to see more pictures of politicians and athletes. A search for Dominican or Brazilian women, on the other hand, will be met with rows and rows of young ladies wearing swimsuits and in sexy poses. Screenshots of Google image search results for "German women" (left) vs "Brazilian women" (right) This pattern is already visible to the naked eye and can be attested with a simple search … [Read more...] about Google image search cements national stereotypes of ‘racy’ women