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Sometimes things, purely odd, happen. However the disaster on September 6, 1952, prompted the introduction of stringent safety measures to protect spectators at air shows and no member of the public has been killed at a British air show since.

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At the Farnborough Air Show in Hampshire on 6 September 1952, thousands of spectators watched as a De Havilland 110 aircraft broke the sound barrier and then disintegrated in the sky above them and fell to earth. The De Havilland 110 fighter had just broken the sound barrier when it broke up over the spectators, showering them with debris. Among the dead are the pilot, John Derry, and the flight test observer Anthony Richards. The two airmen had completed one fly-past in which they amazed 130, 000 spectators by breaking the sound barrier to produce a sonic boom.

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Above: players and fans at the Australian Open tennis tournament did their best to keep cool.

An egg cooked after ten minutes on an outside court where air temperatures reached 60C. The official temperature in the shade at 4.53 pm was 45.4C, the hottest since 1908.

A heatwave scorching southern Australia, causing transport chaos by buckling rail lines and leaving more than 140,000 homes without power, is a sign of climate change, the government said.

"It is the worst heatwave most will have lived through," senior forecaster Terry Ryan said in a front-page story headlined "Heat Wave Hell". But this lot looked like they were enjoying it.

Heatwave in Melbourne plays havoc with the Australian Open  read more »

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Monday, Oct. 23, 1989, Time Magazine Cover Story: The Can't Do Government

After almost nine years of the Reagan Revolution, Americans may wonder whether the Government -- from Congress to the White House, from the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget -- can govern at all anymore. Abroad and at home, challenges are going unmet. Under the shadow of a massive federal deficit that neither political party is willing to confront, a kind of neurosis of accepted limits has taken hold from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other.

On this day, February 4 in 1789, 69 members of Congress cast their ballots to elect George Washington the first president of the United States. As the former leader of the Continental Army and chairman of the Continental Congress, Washington possessed the necessary credentials for the presidency, if not the enthusiasm. After months of appearing to sidestep, and even outright rejecting the idea of assuming the presidency, Washington reluctantly accepted Congress’ decision. Runner-up John Adams became Washington’s vice president.

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Snow and freezing weather threaten to shut down Britain

Arctic blizzards are set to cause a national shutdown on Monday as forecasters warn of the most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years.

The Met Office is warning of an "extreme weather event" across large swathes of England, Scotland and Wales with up to 10in of snow expected even in the usually warmer south and as much as 1ft on higher ground. With freezing temperatures expected to endure for at least a week, there were predictions that resulting disruption and an expected spike in absenteeism could cost the British economy as much as £600 million a day, as the public transport system grinds to a halt and schools and offices are forced to close.

New weather warning after storms kill 21 in France and Spain

As hundreds of thousands are left without power, forecasters fear floods will follow worst weather for a decade
With 680,000 people still without electricity in France and 50,000 in Spain...  read more »

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PARIS – Looking at the shows that kicked off Paris' haute couture week on Monday, you'd never know the world was the midst of the most serious financial turmoil since the Great Depression.

Designers here delivered opulent, flamboyant collections that, instead of reflecting the gloomy economic reality, transported the viewer into a world of beauty and fantasy. "My job is to make women dream," Christian Dior designer John Galliano told The Associated Press. "Of course I'm aware of the credit crunch, but it is not a creative crunch - not at the house of Dior, anyway."

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Cambodian wedding ceremonies are blissful and beautiful affairs. However, the country's convoluted - and probably costly - divorce process has knocked a simple and efficient solution into the mind of an estranged Cambodian couple on how to separate marital assets easily and equally, including dividing a house into two halves. Literally.

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A Cambodian couple who separated after 40 years of marriage may have taken things too literally when it came to splitting their assets: the husband cut the house in two. "It is the strangest thing I've ever seen," said May Titthara, who wrote about the case for The Phnom Penh Post, an English-language newspaper in the Cambodian capital. "People there never saw this happen in a divorce. It is very interesting for them."

Moeun Rim and his wife, Nhanh, split the building following an argument. Mr Rim has removed his share of the property and the couple have also divided their land into four parts; two for their children, and two for them. Divorce cases in Cambodia can be costly and may take a long time to settle.  read more »

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BELÉM, Brazil, Jan 27 (IPS) - A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message "SOS Amazon" to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).

The mass message reflects "our concern about global warming, whose impact we will be the first to feel, although we, the peoples of the Amazon, have protected and cared for the forests," Francisco Avelino Batista, an Apurinán Indian from the Purus river valley in the Brazilian Amazon, told IPS.

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