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Weekly Update: Eight climbers killed in Peruvian avalanche
LIMA: At least eight foreign climbers were swept to their death by an avalanche as they were reaching the summit of the 5,800-metre Alpamayo peak, in Peru’s Andes mountains, rescuers said late Tuesday.
The bodies of four Germans, two Israelis, a Dutchman and an Argentin-ian were found by a mountain guide in and around a crevasse on the mountain, said Jose Chacon, a professional guide in Huaraz, capital of western Ancash department where the accident took place on Monday.
One of those killed was an Israeli woman, Chacon said, adding that two or three climbing parties with a total of about 10 people were making their way up the mountain when a wall of ice and snow broke off near the summit.
Two of the climbers were still alive when they were first found, but they died a few minutes later from the massive injuries caused by their fall, another mountain guide said.
The Alpamayo peak is in the Callejon de Huaylas range, a popular mountaineering venue some 400 kilometres northeast of Lima. It includes the 6,768-metre Huascaran, the second-highest peak of the American continent.— AFP
Steam train to chug again on Himalayan route
SHIMLA: A vintage steam engine will again chug its way up a north Indian Himalayan railway track dating back to the days of British colonial rule, a top official says.
Himachal Pradesh state tourism minister Vijay Singh Mankhotia said the train, nicknamed “the hillpuffer”, was being revived on the popular Kalka-Shimla route to mark centenary celebrations.
He said the inaugural train will leave on November 9, 2003 and initially run once a week.
The toy train on the winding track from Kalka in the plains to Shimla in the high mountains was launched by British Viceroy to India, Lord Curzon, on November 9, 1903.
The track has been described in the “Guinness Railway Book” as “an engineering feat”. It passes through 103 tunnels and 969 bridges to rise to a breathtaking 2,100 metre altitude at Shimla.
Indian Railways and other groups interested in the train’s preservation have appealed to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to grant it world heritage status.
UNESCO bestowed such a status three years ago to another celebrated British-era mountain railway track, at Darjeeling in eastern India.
The steam engine train ran regularly on the Kalka-Shimla route until 1976, when it was mothballed and the engine kept as a showpiece in a railway museum.— AFP
Michael Jackson against locking up music pirates
LOS ANGELES: Pop superstar Michael Jackson on Monday hit out at a proposed new US law that would make musical piracy on the Internet punishable by a possible jail sentence.
The self-styled “King of Pop” feels that, while he would like to see the practice of stealing music off the Internet stamped out, the legislation against the downloading of copyrighted material was too harsh. “It is the fans that drive the success of the music business,” he said.
Jackson’s spokesman in Los Angeles said Jackson felt that lawmakers are tackling the problem in the wrong way in the proposed law.— AFP
Dinosaur goes missing from Australian museum
SYDNEY: Australian police were hunting on Monday for thieves who took a rare 110 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton from a museum exhibition.
Police said the skeleton of the psittacosaurus sinensis was taken from the Newcas-tle Regional Museum, about 120km north of Sydney.
Museum director Gavin Fry said the 60 centimetre tall fossil, with a parrot-like beak, was one of only six of its type in the world and was a direct predecessor of the giant triceratops herbivore.
“It’s not of great monetary value, tens of thousands of dollars rather than millions, but it’s scientific value is undisputed,” Fry said.
He said the theft from an alarmed exhibition gallery was embarrassing for the museum because the skeleton was part of an exhibition of dinosaur remains on loan from China. He believed the dinosaur heist was not premeditated and the thieves panicked when an alarm went off, leaving a trail of dinosaur bones inside and outside the museum.
“It looks pretty opportunistic,” he said. “If a collector had ordered it, they would not be happy to receive damaged goods.” — APP/AFP
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