Stu Williamson said he would love to snatch the title from Bryson William Verdun Hayes of Devon, England, who became the oldest man to perform a tandem parachute jump last year at 101 years and 38 days old, according to Guinness World Records. The Seattle man celebrated his 100th birthday by skydiving out of a plane, and says it is his new life mission to do it again next year, to become the world’s oldest skydiver.
InsideEdition.com’s Keleigh Nealon (http://twitter.com/KeleighNealon) has more.
JAKARTA — A powerful 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck the popular tourist destination of Lombok in Indonesia on Sunday, killing 10 people and damaging many buildings, authorities said.
The quake hit Lombok island early in the morning when many people were still sleeping. Around 40 people were injured and many fled into open fields away from collapsed buildings.
“We jumped out of our beds to avoid anything falling on our heads,” said Jean-Paul Volckaert who was woken by the quake while sleeping in the Puncak Hotel near Senggigi on Lombok.
“I’ve been walking around but so far there is no damage. We were very surprised as the water in the pools was swaying like a wild sea. There were waves in the pools but only for 20 to 30 seconds,” he told Reuters via telephone.
Skywatchers will be treated to the longest “blood moon” eclipse of the 21st Century on Friday.
As it rises, during this total eclipse, Earth’s natural satellite will turn a striking shade of red or ruddy brown.
The “totality” period, when light from the Moon is totally obscured, will last for one hour, 43 minutes.
The eclipse is visible from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, most of Asia and South America and in the UK from around 21:00 to 22:15 BST.
On the same night and over the coming days, Mars will be at its closest point to Earth since 2003 – visible as a “bright red star” where skies are clear.
Why will the eclipse last so long?
The Moon will pass right through the centre of the Earth’s shadow, at the shadow’s widest point.
“This is actually almost as long as a lunar eclipse could be,” Prof Tim O’Brien, an astrophysicist at University of Manchester, explained.
Warning of the potential for a new family separation crisis within South Florida’s sprawling Haitian and Central American neighborhoods, immigrant advocates and Haitian-born recipients long shielded from deportation are calling for the Trump administration to extend their Temporary Protected Status prior to the 2019 deadline.
Parents who came to the U.S. following the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and their U.S.-born children — plus many Haitians who were already living in the U.S. — say they fear mass deportations and family separations if the federal government does not act quickly.
“I’m scared to death,” said 11-year-old Christina Ponthieux, whose parents are both recipients of the protected status. “This is our home.
Members of the community gathered Tuesday in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood and argued that their home country, which in recent weeks has been plagued by political instability and civic unrest, is in no position to receive tens of thousands of returning citizens and their U.S.-born children. And after building up lives of their own in South Florida, the families don’t want to leave.
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(CNN)Hundreds of thousands of vaccines provided for Chinese children have been found to be faulty, inciting widespread fury and prompting the country’s President, Xi Jinping, to describe the incident as “vile and shocking.”
China’s Food and Drug Administration (CFDA) has launched an investigation into vaccine manufacturer Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology, revoking its license for human rabies vaccines and beginning a recall of all unused vaccines produced by the company.
Five senior executives of the company, including the chairwoman, were taken into custody for questioning by Changchun police, who announced they had begun an official criminal investigation into the company.
In Chinese, the term Changsheng is a play on words meaning “long life.”
Online message boards have been inundated with hundreds of thousands of comments since the news broke Sunday, with parents and consumers using the hashtag “#Changsheng bio-tech vaccine incident,” to post reactions on Weibo, a Chinese platform likened to Twitter.
“My home country, how can I trust you? You just let me down again and again,” one user said. “Our trust has been overdrawn again and again, it’s so irresponsible for everyone’s life,” said another.
Many of the defective vaccines were already on the market and being given to Chinese children, as part of the mandatory national vaccination program. A number have now been recalled, but there is no information at this stage as to how they could affect the health of those children who have already been injected.
One mother, surnamed Zhen from Baoding, Hebei province, told CNN she had…
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A record-setting heat wave is the latest weather catastrophe to beset Japan. On Sunday, a weather station outside Tokyo reached the hottest temperature ever recorded in the island nation, and emergency responders have been swamped with requests for help in the searing heat.
This summer has been one of catastrophe for Japan. The heat arrived in mid-July, following record rains that killed at least 200 people and a typhoon that strafed the country’s southern islands. Things really began cooking this weekend, though, and reached a fever pitch on Monday.
Kumagaya, a town located about 40 miles northwest of Tokyo, suffered through temperatures of 41.1 degrees Celsius (106 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday. That set a new all-time heat record for Japan, besting a 2013 reading of 41 degrees Celsius (105.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Tokyo also set an all-time record for the city, reaching 40.8 degrees Celsius (105.4 degrees Fahrenheit).
But the heat has hardly been confined to the metro area. According to Kyodo News, nearly 70 percent of weather stations monitored by the Japan Meteorological Agency have recorded temperatures in excess of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit). At least 241 of the 927 stations in the network have cracked 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Only Hokkaido to the north has managed to keep its cool.
By Ceylan Yeginsu
LONDON — Dim the lights. Silence the piped-in music. Turn down the checkout beeps. For an hour on Saturdays, a British supermarket chain is introducing a weekly “quieter hour” aimed at helping people with autism have a better shopping experience by easing sensory overload.
The move by the supermarket, Morrisons, which begins on Saturday and runs from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., has been welcomed by the National Autistic Society, which says that even small changes can make a big difference in the lives of people with autism and their families.
“Around 700,000 people are on the autism spectrum in the U.K.,” Tom Purser, of the National Autistic Society, said in an email. “This means they see, hear and feel the world differently to other people, often in a more intense way, which can make shopping a real struggle.”
Autism is a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people communicate and relate to others and how they experience the world around them. More than 60 percent of people with autism avoid shops, and 79 percent say they feel socially isolated, according to figures published by the society.
These are the images that show what will soon be known as the world’s next tallest building rising from the desert. When the 3,280-feet-tall (1,000-meter-tall) Jeddah Tower, in Saudi Arabia, opens in 2020, it will knock Dubai’s iconic Burj Khalifa off its throne as the tallest skyscraper in the world by 236 feet (72 meters). Construction of the landmark is estimated to cost $1.4 billion.
When CNN visited the site at the end of 2017, the tower was 252 meters (826 feet) high and already had expansive views of the kingdom.
A tall order?
The tower will be the crown jewel of Jeddah Economic City, a commercial and residential project of 57 million square feet (5.3 million square meters), that will feature homes, hotels and offices, as well as tourist attractions.
But the project hasn’t been smooth sailing.
There have been various delays since construction began in 2013. Since November 2017, two of the project’s most prominent backers — Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a prolific investor and businessman, and Bakr Bin Laden, chairman of Jeddah Tower’s construction company Bin Laden Group — have been caught up in the kingdom’s anti-corruption purge, which saw hundreds questioned on accusations of corruption.
Jeddah Economic Company, the developer behind the skyscraper, however, has confirmed to CNN that the project will be completed by 2020, as scheduled.
Al-Waleed’s company declined to provide comment to CNN, while Bin Laden Group couldn’t be reached.
In a striking image by Korean photographer Nina Ahn, a solitary figure stands by a window, street lights glimmering around her. Another shows a woman in her 20s sitting alone on a guardrail beside an empty highway in Seoul.
The photographs are intended to capture the loneliness of South Korea’s youth — specifically a subculture referred to as “honjok,” a neologism combining the words “hon” (alone) and “jok” (tribe).
The term is often used to describe a generation that embraces solitude and independence, reflecting the country’s growing number of single-person households and changing attitudes towards romance, marriage and family.
“It’s a sense of giving up,” Ahn said in a phone interview from Seoul. “We live in a generation where simply working hard for a bright future doesn’t guarantee happiness, so why not invest in ‘me’ time?
“The fact that my photos carry a sentiment of dreariness means that (it) is the face of the current generation.”
Jacqueline Charles, who has reported on the Caribbean for the Miami Herald since 2006, has been awarded a 2018 Maria Moors Cabot Prize — the most prestigious award for coverage of the Americas.
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced Wednesday that Charles was among the four recipients of this year’s Cabot Prizes, the oldest awards in international journalism.
While Charles covers various Caribbean nations, Haiti is her specialty. The Cabot judges highlighted that in their citation:
“Charles’ great contribution has been as a narrator of the agonies of Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest country, crippled by misgovernment and battered time and again by nature.”
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BY MIMI WHITEFIELD
mwhitefield@miamiherald.com