Archaeologists have discovered an exquisitely preserved Roman mosaic under a vineyard in northern Italy after a century of searching, the local mayor said last week Thursday.
The brightly coloured geometric design, partly unearthed outside Negrar di Valpolicella near Verona, is thought to have been part of a villa archaeologists first started looking for in 1922. The villa is thought to cover an area of around 300 square metres.
Experts are now trying to discover the exact extent of the villa complex. “The result will not come soon and significant resources will be needed,” Negrar di Valpolicella town hall said.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two veteran NASA astronauts lifted off for the International Space Station on Saturday, the first crewed space flight from US soil in nine years and the first ever by a commercial company.
“Let’s light this candle,” Hurley said, right before liftoff.
The reusable first booster stage of the SpaceX rocket separated cleanly about two and a half minutes after liftoff and landed upright on a floating barge off the Atlantic coast.
The second stage also separated smoothly, sending the astronauts in the Crew Dragon capsule on their way to the space station, where they docked on Sunday after a 19-hour journey.
The capsule spent 19 hours chasing down the station at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kph), before carefully aligning to its target and slowing to a crawl for the delicate docking procedure, which took place over northern China.
France’s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire denounced an ultimatum from low-cost carrier Ryanair for its French employees to choose between a five-year pay cut or a number of redundancies in an escalating labour dispute.
The offer from the Dublin-based no-frills carrier, long accused by critics of abrasive labour tactics, comes as the aviation industry grapples with an unprecedented crisis after the collapse in global demand for air travel due to the coronavirus.
“Blackmail is never an option,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told RTL radio. “Jobs will be protected by imaginative solutions, but definitely not through blackmail,” he said.
The Irish company has told French unions to accept plans to cut wages by 20 percent for pilots and 10 percent for stewards and air hostesses from July 2020, or face the redundancy of 23 pilots and 27 cabin crew staff.
Under current plans, staffers who are earning minimum wage would see their work time cut by 20 percent. Employees would progressively regain their salary up until 2025.
Labour Minister Muriel Penicaud said she was “shocked” by Ryanair’s proposal and said the company must go back to the drawing board and “really talk (with employees), but not blackmail.”
At the beginning of March, 10 EU members and Switzerland have agreed to take in a total of 1600 refugee children from the Greek islands, and Luxembourg was the first of these countries to hold up their end of the bargain when they welcomed 12 of them mid-April. Ms Jacobs, president of Caritas Luxembourg, the organisation taking care of them, was so kind to answer a couple of questions to our Teenage Truth columnist.
Bob Weighton, a former teacher and engineer from the central English county Hampshire, died “peacefully” in his sleep at home on Thursday morning, they said.
Weighton took up the title of the oldest man in the world in February after the death of the previous holder, Chitetsu Watanabe of Japan.
He is survived by his three children, 10 grandchildren and 25 great-grandchildren.
The first summer flight from Dusseldorf to the city of Olbia on the Mediterranean island “was told by air traffic control on approach to the destination airport that landing was not possible,” a Eurowings spokeswoman told AFP Monday.
The crew made a number of circuits just off the Sardinian coast before turning around for the two-hour trip back to Germany.
Besides a handful of large airports in Rome and Florence, all Italian airports are in fact shut until June 3 at the earliest.
“We have figured out in the mean time that there was a misunderstanding when putting together the relevant information for the flight,” the Eurowings spokeswoman said.
The press officer for the Lufthansa subsidiary added that “the situation at many European airports is very dynamic” with “operating times or closures often changed at short notice and daily changes to arrival restrictions”.
One minor relief for the no-frills airline: while it was obliged to re-book passengers from the abortive trip to Sardinia onto other flights, only two were in fact on board.
Dormant “zombie fires” scattered across the Arctic region - remnants of record blazes last year - may be coming to life after an unusually warm and dry Spring, scientists warned last week.
“We have seen satellite observations of active fires that hint that ‘zombie’ fires might have reignited,” said Mark Parrington, a senior scientist and wildfire expert at the European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service.
The hotspots, which have yet to be confirmed by ground measurements, are particularly concentrated in areas that burned last summer. The year 2019 was marked by fires unprecedented in scale and duration across large swathes of Siberia and Alaska. “We may see a cumulative effect of last year’s fire season in the Arctic which will feed into the upcoming season, and could lead to large-scale and long-term fires across the same region once again,” Parrington said.
The risk of wildfires increases with hot weather and low humidity, and Europe in particular has seen record temperatures for March and April this year.
“There has been tremendous warmth in the Arctic that will have led to a lot of drying, making the peat soils ripe to burn,” Mike Waddington, an expert on watershed ecosystems at McMaster University in Canada, told AFP.
“A zombie fire is a fire that continues to burn underground and then reignites on the surface after a period of time,” Waddington explained.
