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Daffodils brightening up Sidmouth in tribute to millionaire
Yellow blooms are brightening up a Devon town thanks to the legacy of a man who left more than £2m to a community association.

Keith Owen, a Canadian investment banker, retired with the rank of Squadron Leader after 20 years of RAF service and set up home in Ottawa, Canada in 1976. In 2007 he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2007, and read more

bigfin squid

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Man Who Found World’s Deepest-Dwelling Octopus and Jellyfish Scores 3-of-a-Kind, With Deepest-Dwelling Squid
There’s a dynamic duo of divers out there that can’t seem to keep to stop finding tentacled animals in the deepest of undersea zones, where pressure and temperature prohibit the vast majority of ocean life from surviving.

Whilst read more

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“Nature was more important than some stupid money in my pocket. This is something [that’s] got to be preserved, and I kept my word.”
Thor Vikström, 93, bought the island in the late 1960s and refused to sell it to the parade of developers who knocked at his door. Nature Conservancy of Canada will protect Île Ronde habitat for birds and vulnerable read more

A glassblower at Roberto Beltrami’s workshop, which is trying to compensate for gas-bill increases by raising prices by 15% to 35%.
Murano island, Venice: glass-worker heats a glass artistic creation in a methane powered oven

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Italy’s artisan glassblowers feel heat as gas prices soar
Surging energy prices are posing problems for the artisan glassblowers of Italy’s Murano. They have seen off plagues and pandemics and changed their business model to outrun low-priced competition from Asia. But now methane prices are shattering their read more

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Sea turns red with blood as 1,428 dolphins killed in ‘largest ever’ Faroe Islands hunt
1,428 Atlantic white-sided dolphins were slaughtered in the bay of Skálabotnur on Sunday. Shocking pictures have emerged of scores of hookfin porpoises washed up on the shores of the self-governing Danish archipelago, many of read more

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The Top Coffee-Consuming Countries
Canada stands out as the only non-European country to make the list of the world’s top ten coffee consumers.
The traditional Finnish way of brewing coffee is a variation on Turkish coffee where water and coffee grounds are brought just barely to a boil repeatedly.
In 1616, the Dutch were the first Europeans to read more

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Japan’s COVID-19 deaths drop 5% amid state of emergency during Games
July 25 (UPI) — Japan is staging the Summer Olympics during a state of emergency and without spectators in the Tokyo metro area with coronavirus cases surging though its situation is nowhere nearly as dire with a much lower fatality rate than read more

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Kewanee Graduate Jake Pinnick on Life in Wudan China and Dedicating His Life to the Martial Arts
Several years ago, WKEI profiled a Kewanee graduate and Black Hawk College East Campus graduate, Jake Pinnick, who had left Kewanee to travel to the far East to learn more read more

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When she was just five years old, her father introduced her to the martial art of kung fu, which she continued to practice throughout her entire life. In fact, even the village she lives in is known as a “kung fu village”, solely due to the fact that most of the residents practice it as well. She even met her late read more

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19-Apr-2021 – The world’s biggest kite, shaped like a dragon and stretching over 280 meters, soared in the skies over the city of Weifang.
It took 28 craftsmen 48 days to design and complete the kite. Flying it required 55 people, said Zhang Huagang, general manager of Weifang Tianshun Kite Productions read more

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Nepalese climbers return home after historic winter summit of K2 mountain
A team of climbers from Nepal that made the first winter ascent of K2 received a warm welcome upon returning home on January 26, 2021. The 10 Nepalese climbers reached the summit of the world’s second highest mountain on January 16, climbing to an read more

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — New Year’s Eve got off to a rocky start early Thursday as a 3.6 magnitude struck along the San Andreas Fault just south of Muir Beach and was felt widely in San Francisco and Marin County. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake struck at 5:41 a.m. with the epicenter on the famed fault line in the read more