Readable, teachable news.
Sunday, November 24, 2024
The enormous cruise ship, The Costa Concordia, no longer lies on its side, rusting in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Tuscany, Italy.
Salvagers spent 19 hours—and more than $824-million—setting it upright.
It was the largest salvage operation of its kind.
The 13-deck Costa Concordia was carrying 4,200 people on Jan. 13, 2012 when its captain steered it too close to the shore.
J. K. Rowling is writing a new movie set in the wizarding world.
It won’t feature the character Harry Potter, but it is inspired by one of the boy wizard’s textbooks: Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, “written” by fictional author Newton Scamander.
Warner Brothers film studios told Rowling they wanted to make a movie based on the fictional textbook, used by Potter and his friend, Ron Weasley.
The new movie will feature the adventures of a 21-year-old Newton Scamander.
Scamander is an expert in Magizoology, the study of magical creatures.
It’s a bit worse for wear, but it’s back and it can still hold a tune.
It’s a Boston Steinway baby grand piano and it was stolen in a brazen robbery from Toronto General Hospital last July.
A “baby grand” is a huge piano that weighs more than 225 kilograms. That’s one reason why the robbery was so bizarre.
Another reason is that the thief hired some movers and they simply walked out with it, right in broad daylight.
The movers didn’t know they were stealing the piano. They just thought they were being hired for a moving job.
Several people from the hospital stopped the movers and asked them what they were doing. They said they were taking the piano away to be repaired.
A man named Artem Stanislav Timofeyev, who is 27 years old and works as a model, has been arrested by Toronto police and charged with the theft.
A group of scientists associated with the United Nations has just issued a report on “climate change.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed that human habits and activity is responsible for global warming and for higher sea levels.
If this continues, according to the report, there will be more dramatic changes in plant and animal life.
Some critics believe that the current situation is more likely due to short-term factors or weather cycles. They believe that the climate situation will change on its own eventually.
But the UN report says the reality is clear and the facts are there.
Luckily, because humans cause the problem, humans can help solve the problem.
More than 500 people—including American actor Ashton Kutcher—will become “astronauts” next year.
They have each paid $200,000 for a two-hour flight on SpaceShipTwo.
The aircraft will take them very high and very fast—in fact, they will break the sound barrier.
A British company called Virgin Galactic, which is owned by a well-known and famously daring billionaire named Sir Richard Branson, tested its new aircraft last week.
During the test, the spacecraft flew 69,000 feet high over the Mojave Desert, in the U.S.
Last month, many Tłı̨chǫ people travelled hundreds of kilometres in the Northwest Territories to participate in their aboriginal government.
They travelled by airplane or by canoe.
The annual journey by canoe to this “gathering” is called “Trails of Our Ancestors.”
The annual gathering is an important part of the Tłı̨chǫ government because it provides an opportunity for Tłı̨chǫ citizens to ask questions, provide recommendations and offer direction to the elected chiefs and Assembly members.
Everyone knows it’s dangerous to use a cell phone or text while driving.
In the future, it could be illegal to text someone who is driving.
That’s because it may cause the driver to pick up the phone and text back—which could cause a crash.
Three judges in the U.S. state of New Jersey have “agreed in principal” that if someone knows that the person they’re texting is driving, and the driver crashes into someone, both people (the driver and the texter) might be considered responsible for the accident.
Countries around the world are trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about the situation in Syria.
The Middle Eastern country has been waging a civil war since 2011.
That’s when Syrians staged protests against the country’s leader, Bashar al-Assad.
al-Assad and his supporters fought violently against the protesters.
The two groups have been fighting ever since.
Has Lego gotten grumpier?
A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad.
The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.
Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project.
They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010.
They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, angry, afraid, disgusted, surprised or sad.
They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley,” by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them were “smiley.”
Radio-Canada, the French-language branch of the CBC, announced on June 5 that it was changing its name to “ICI”.
So many people objected to the change, however, that on June 10 the president of the CBC said the broadcaster would keep the name Radio-Canada after all.
The organization uses the tagline “Ici Radio-Canada” on its TV and radio news stories. It wanted to “rebrand” itself with a name that could be used for all of its services – television, radio, satellite and website – so it planned to drop “Radio-Canada” from its name and be known simply as “ICI.”
But many Canadians were very upset about the name change. They objected to removing the word “Canada” from the name because the organization is part of Canada’s heritage, and because it is paid for with money from Canadian taxpayers.
CBC/Radio-Canada was created by the government in 1936 to be Canada’s national public broadcaster. The organization gets most of the money it needs to operate – about 60 per cent, or $1-billion a year – from the government.
Its official purpose is to provide programming that is “predominantly and distinctively Canadian,” and to “contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.”
Federal Heritage Minister James Moore, who is in charge of giving money to CBC/Radio-Canada, also opposed to new name. He said taxpayers would only be willing to pay for the broadcaster if it was Canadian in content and in name.
