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Yetis, Dragons, Disney Princesses, Animal Theme Parks, a Grinch, Master Builders, and Too Many Spider-People? Check out all the animated movies you’ve gotta check out in 2018!
The new S-Pen looks a lot like the old one but has some new eye-catchy color accents. But now it’s powered, it connects via Bluetooth, and doubles as a remote control in various use cases. And to make things even sweeter, the Note9 doesn’t need a DeX pad for Samsung’s Desktop mode, you just need a proper cable. That’s certainly one way to reinvent those power-point presentations.
Watch the unveiling of the new Galaxy Note9, Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Home.
Kanye talks about his passion for music and fashion, what he thinks of Donald Trump, Kim’s trip to Washington D.C. to meet with him, the two motivating forces in the world, overcoming fear, being too caught up in the past, how he feels about people being mad at him, his daughter, his fashion brand, the meaning behind some of the songs on his latest album, his porn preferences, recording his latest albums, mental health, being bipolar, and wanting everyone to be able to express themselves without fear of judgment.
The word “cancer” should be dropped from some medical diagnoses because the term can scare people into invasive treatments they do not need, Australian and US researchers say.
An analysis published by the British Medical Journal on Monday described “cancer” as particularly problematic when used to describe some thyroid cancers less than 1cm in size, some low and intermediate grade breast cancers, and localised prostate cancer.
Medical technology is now so advanced that early abnormal cell changes and lesions, sometimes described as “pre-cancers”, can be detected at much smaller sizes than could never have been found clinically. However, for some types of cancers, these early changes or lesions will never go on to cause harm in the patient’s lifetime. But identifying these changes can cause distress and prompt patients to undergo treatment to get rid of them.
“The use of more medicalised labels can increase both concern about illness and desire for more invasive treatment,” the analysis said.
“For decades cancer has been associated with death. This association has been ingrained in society with public health messaging that cancer screening saves lives. This promotion has been used with the best of intentions, but in part deployed to induce feelings of fear and vulnerability in the population and then offer hope through screening.
“Although the label needs to be biologically accurate, it also needs to be something patients can understand and that will not induce disproportionate concern.”
The analysis was led by Brooke Nickel from the University of Sydney. Researchers from Bond University in Queensland and the Mayo Clinic in the US also contributed.
A prime example of the negative impact of using the word cancer was seen in low risk papillary thyroid cancer, Nickel said.
“Studies show that progression to clinical disease and tumour growth in patients with small papillary thyroid cancer who choose surgery are comparable to those who monitor their condition,” she said.
Similarly, in localised prostate cancer where active surveillance has been a recommended management option for many years, studies show that internationally most men still prefer radical prostatectomy or radiation therapy.
“While active surveillance is increasingly being recognised as a safe management option for some patients with cancer, there is still a strong belief that aggressive treatments are always needed,” a co-author of the study, Prof Kirsten McCaffery, said.
Cancer Council Australia’s CEO, Prof Sanchia Aranda, said the cancer label had already been removed from other tumours that evidence had clearly shown to be largely harmless. Alternative labelling of cervical abnormalities detected during a pap smear had led more women to follow active surveillance in preference to invasive treatments.
“We would support the authors’ call for a global round table to agree on the literature, and what the best term for some of these conditions should be,” Aranda said.
Aranda agreed that low and intermediate grade breast cancers, called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), were “one of the biggest problems” when it came to over-treatment and over-diagnosis.
“It was assumed when these lesions were first able to be diagnosed that they would all become invasive cancers,” Aranda said.
“It’s becoming clearer that they won’t. For every woman helped with prevention with a DCIS removal, more women will have had unnecessary surgery.
“Mammography is detecting smaller and smaller lesions, which has outstripped our ability to know what they will become and what to do with them.”
When the stone marking William Blake’s grave is unveiled this afternoon, on the 191st anniversary of the poet and painter’s death, it will also mark the conclusion of 14 years of detective work and campaigning for two of his admirers.
When they decided to visit Bunhill Fields in London to find his grave in 2004, they discovered only a stone saying that the remains of Blake and his wife Catherine Sophia lay “near by”.
After two years of research, they pinpointed the exact site, and after years of fundraising, the Blake Society has been able to mark the spot with an official memorial, to be inaugurated with addresses by Philip Pullman, the Blake Society president and novelist whose His Dark Materials trilogy draws on Blake’s works, the musician Jah Wobble, comedian Will Franken, and other prominent Blakeans.
“When you see the stone that says ‘near by’, it’s so vague,” Luis Garrido said. “We wanted to know the exact spot.”
Finding it proved a bigger challenge than they imagined. Bunhill Fields was a cemetery popular with Dissenters, and when Blake died, largely unrecognised, in 1827, his was the fifth of eight coffins to be buried in the plot.
The graveyard had been arranged in a grid, and the co-ordinates were in the Bunhill Fields burial records, given as “77, east and west, 32, north and south”. But after bomb damage during the second world war, the Corporation of London decided to transform part of the site into gardens, leaving only two remaining gravestones, and moving Blake’s stone next to a memorial to an obelisk commemorating Daniel Defoe.
The burial records were not always precise, according to Carol Garrido, whose skills as a landscape architect were vital. “You could see the handwriting in the burial order book change,” she said. “We imagined someone who was a clerk in the office, writing what the foreman of the gravediggers told them.” By using the two existing graves to find a point of origin, after two years they had found the right place.
William Blake, English mystic, poet, artist and engraver, 1807.Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images
“When I was growing up in Portugal, I didn’t know about his poetry or writing but I saw the illustrated books, the pictures, the beautiful handwriting,” Luis Garrido said. “I decided to study English specifically to be able to read his poetry. There are people all over the world like this. Even if you cannot understand the words, you start reading the pictures and you are transported to a different world. He visualised an England that will become a new Jerusalem, the home of spiritual enlightenment.”
Blake trained as an engraver, illustrating books and reproductions of art in churches around London, but went on to produce his own illuminated books, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and his prophetic works based on his own invented mythology. He has been regularly rediscovered by artists, starting with members of the pre-Raphaelite movement in the 1860s, classical composers such as Benjamin Britten and John Tavener, and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Two of the great graphic novelists, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, have also been inspired by Blake.
“There was no one really comparable to him and he wasn’t part of any establishment, you’d almost call him an outsider artist,” said Jeremy Deller, the 2004 Turner prize winner. “He stood apart from everyone else and was viewed with quite a lot of suspicion, I imagine, by the establishment. But of all the artists of that time, he’s the one who has this huge appeal to artists now because of the way he wrote and the ambition of his work.
“He was interested in the past, present and future – in ancient, pre-Christian culture and ancient history, but also very much in today, the working conditions of children, the state of Britain at that moment. He also looked forward to the future, what might it look like.”
The gravestone, carved by Lida Cardozo, will feature a verse from his epic Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion: “I give you the end of a golden string/ Only wind it into a ball/ It will lead you in at Heavens gate/ Built in Jerusalems wall.”
US authorities are investigating how a “suicidal” airline employee was able to steal a plane from Seattle-Tacoma international airport and fly for around an hour before crashing the aircraft, in a major security breach.
F-15 fighter jets were scrambled to pursue the rogue aircraft after it took off at around 8pm on Friday evening and circled south of Seattle for about an hour. The plane crashed on Ketron Island in the Puget Sound waterway about 25 miles south-west of the airport, with video footage showing smoke rising from the crash site.
FBI agents leading the criminal investigation into the crash have turned their attention to the pilot, a Seattle-area resident who had been working as a ground services employee with Horizon Air, a subsidiary of Alaska Airlines.
Investigators believe the 29-year-old airline employee used his security clearance to steal the Horizon Air Q400 turboprop plane from a maintenance area.
Video showed the plane doing large loops and other dangerous manoeuvres. In recorded comments to air traffic controllers, the man had indicated he intended to crash the plane.
Law enforcement officials in Washington responding to the incident. Photograph: Ted S Warren/AP
The man had crashed by “doing stunts in air or lack of flying skills”, the Pierce County sheriff’s department said on Twitter.
Shortly after the crash, local police officials described the crash as a suicide unrelated to terrorism. Paul Pastor, the county sheriff, said there was no indication the person flying the plane had intended any harm to others. Pastor said the man “did something foolish and may well have paid with his life”.
On Saturday morning, the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, said in a statement that Donald Trump was monitoring the situation.
The man can be heard on audio recordings telling air traffic controllers that he is “just a broken guy”.
Debra Eckrote, a regional chief with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), described the wreckage of the aircraft as “highly fragmented”.
“The wings are off. The fuselage is kinda positioned upside down,” Eckrote said Saturday morning during a press briefing.
“With the daylight, the fire’s out, we’ll be able to identify the parts and pieces of the wreckage and focus on the areas that we’re looking for,” she continued.
Passengers at Seattle-Tacoma airport were stranded Friday night. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters
The plane had been positioned in a maintenance area of the airport when it was taken, an Alaska Airlines spokesperson said Friday night. It had not been scheduled for passenger flight and was empty except for the pilot.
The emergency shut down the airport, known as Sea-Tac, and the surrounding skies. Flights were grounded with some passengers tweeting that their plane stopped abruptly on the runway.
Air national guard fighter jets based in Portland, Oregon, rushed to the area within minutes of the unauthorized takeoff. Arriving ahead of sonic booms, they tailed the airliner over the Chambers Bay golf course, which hosted the US Open in 2015, before the pilot began turning barrel rolls over the Puget Sound.
“It was unfathomable, it was something out of a movie,” witness Royal King told The Seattle Times. “The smoke lingered. You could still hear the F-15s, which were flying low.”
Speaking on Saturday, Eckrote said fighter pilots and the air traffic controllers worked to bring the plane down without loss of life. The Washington state governor, Jay Inslee, praised the fighter pilots: “Those pilots are trained for moments like tonight and showed they are ready and capable,” the governor said on Twitter.
The plane crashed in a wooded area of Ketron Island, a speck in Puget Sound believed to be home to 12 people. Firefighters and police boarded a ferry to extinguish the resulting blaze, which burned into the night.
The Horizon Air chief operating officer, Constance von Muehlen, confirmed the plane was taken by a Horizon Air employee. “Our hearts are with the family of the individual aboard, as well as all our Alaska Air and Horizon Air employees,” von Muehlen said by video.
Horizon Air is a division of Alaskan that flies short routes in the western US.
The NTSB are expected to conduct a detailed review of the crash, including a technical examination of the wreckage and an inquiry into human factors that contributed to the crash.
Security concerns raised by the crash would likely be part of that months-long investigation. That investigation will occur in parallel with the FBI-led criminal inquiry, which is ongoing.
“The greatest threat we have to aviation is the insider threat,” Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent and transportation security expert, told the Associated Press.
“Here we have an employee who was vetted to the level to have access to the aircraft and had a skill set proficient enough to take off with that plane.”
In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 and the domestic violence helpline is 0808 2000 247.In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14and the national family violence counselling service is 1800 737 732. In the US, the suicide prevention lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 and the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233).Other international helplines can be found atwww.befrienders.org
A last-minute technical problem has delayed Nasa’s unprecedented flight to the sun.
Saturday’s launch countdown was halted with just one-minute, 55 seconds remaining, keeping the Delta IV (four) rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the Parker Solar Probe. This followed earlier trouble in the countdown.
Nasa says it will try again on Sunday.
Once on its way, the Parker probe will venture closer to our star than any other spacecraft. The $1.5bn mission is already a week late because of rocket issues.
Thousands of spectators gathered in the middle of the night to witness the launch, including the University of Chicago astrophysicist for whom the spacecraft is named. Eugene Parker predicted the existence of solar wind 60 years ago. He’s now 91 and eager to see the solar probe soar.
From its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the Parker Solar Probe will blast off on a course that swings past Venus and loops around the sun before diving ever lower into the star’s brutally hot atmosphere, the corona that shines like a halo in a total solar eclipse. The US space agency aims for lift-off at 3.48am local time (8.48am BST).
In terms of sheer energetics, this is a mission like no other. To break free of Earth’s influence, the spacecraft requires 55 times more launch energy than a voyage to Mars. So it is that the Parker Solar Probe, itself no larger than a family car, is perched on a Delta IV Heavy rocket which stands 72m tall, 15m wide, and holds more than 600 tonnes of fuel.
The return for lighting that propellant is a spacecraft that travels faster than any human-made object in history. On its closest approach, the Nasa probe will tear around the sun at 430,000mph. At that speed it would take seven seconds to reach Penzance from John o’Groats, congestion on the M5 notwithstanding.
After the first Venus flyby in late September, the spacecraft will reach the sun in November and beam home its first data in December. Over the seven year mission, it will slingshot around Venus six more times, drawing on the planet’s gravity to trim its orbit about the sun. In all, the Parker probe will circle our home star 24 times and come within 4m miles of its visible surface, the photosphere.
Even at such a distance from the sun the spacecraft will fly through the corona where temperatures reach 3m celsius. The probe can only take the heat because the atmosphere is so desperately thin. More challenging is the onslaught of sunlight at such proximity. To survive that, the probe hunkers down behind a 12cm-thick heat shield that will reach a blistering 1,400C. Should the spacecraft tilt and see the sun it will melt like the wax and feathers that held Icarus aloft.
“Nothing about this mission is easy. It’s a very harsh environment,” said Nicky Fox, project scientist on the mission at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. “All of us working on the mission will breathe a sigh of relief when she comes out of the corona for the first time.”
The Parker Solar Probe team test the spacecraft in a thermal vacuum chamber at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Photograph: Ed Whitman/Johns Hopkins APL/Nasa
For an object so fundamental to life on Earth, the sun remains steeped in mystery. One such puzzle surrounds the corona itself which is 500 times hotter than the 5,500C visible surface. As Fox puts it, that is like walking away from a campfire and finding that the temperature goes up. “We know that something in that region is causing this incredible heating, but we don’t know what it is,” she said. With its suite of instruments, the Parker Solar Probe will fly through the corona in search of answers.
A further mystery is what powers the solar wind, the ionised gas that races away from the sun at more than a million miles per hour. The idea that such a wind existed was ridiculed when it was first proposed by a young physicist named Eugene Parker in the 1950s. But in time scientists came to understand how the solar wind buffeted our planet, lit up its dramatic aurorae, and generated space weather that can send satellites off course, knock out power grids, and expose astronauts to extreme levels of radiation. The mission takes the name of the 91-year-old who once played down his contribution by declaring that all he did was write a paper.
“These are questions that have puzzled scientists for decades and decades,” said Fox. “We are going to the last major region of our solar system that has yet to be explored. It is a voyage of discovery.” Armed with fresh findings from the probe, researchers hope to grasp better the vagaries of space weather, and so predict its impacts more accurately.
In the poetic language of the US space agency this is “a mission to touch the sun”, but in understanding our nearest star, scientists will learn about those cast throughout the universe. The probe is heading for the sun close to the solar minimum, the time when sunspots are rarest on the surface. Over the course of the mission, the Nasa probe will gather observations as the star ramps up its activity and sunspots spring up all over. If everything goes to plan, the spacecraft will fly through at least one vast eruption from the sun known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
From their distant offices on Earth, the scientists on the mission will have limited control over the spacecraft. Communications take nearly eight minutes to reach the vicinity of the sun, so the probe is pre-programmed to respond to glitches as best it can. Should it sense it is turning and heating up, the probe will fire small thrusters to keep its heat shield firmly between it and the sun.
The final Venus flyby will put the Parker Solar Probe in a stable orbit around the sun, but eventually, the spacecraft will run out of the hydrazine fuel needed to hold its shield in position. When that happens, the spacecraft will slowly turn and expose itself to the full intensity of the sun’s glare. “It will break into pieces, and they will get smaller and smaller, until she becomes part of the solar wind,” said Fox. “At least that’s the romantic story I tell myself to deal with it going.”
• This article was amended on 11 August 2018 to correct the cost of the mission from $1.5m to $1.5bn.
Smart speakers are taking over British homes. A recent YouGov survey found the number had doubled in three months, with around 10% of Brits owning one – and that 75% of these were Amazon Echo devices. The overwhelming majority are used for basic tasks like playing music and answering general knowledge questions – but with the right tips, tricks, skills and accessories you can get the Echo’s digital assistant Alexa to do just about anything…
Top hacks and tips
Privacy please
You can always mute the mics on an Echo device to stop it listening, but if you’re concerned you’ve been over-sharing, deleting your recordings and query history is the next step. Doing so is easy: you can select individual recordings in the Alexa app, or take the nuclear option and delete your daily, weekly, monthly or entire history through the Alexa privacy settings on the Amazon website.
‘Dinner’s ready!’
If you have multiple Alexa devices you can use them as an intercom in your home. Just approach one and say: “Alexa, drop in on… (insert name of other Alexa device)”; then speak through it and hear whoever is on the other end.
Music all over the house
If you have multiple Echo speakers dotted around, you can use them to play multiroom music, similar to the way expensive systems such as Sonos work. Just add them to appropriate groups and play music to just downstairs, upstairs or all of them at the same time.
Routines
Once you’ve got voice control over lights and other bits, the next stage is to set up customised commands, or “routines” in Alexa speak. Creating them is simple via the Alexa app: just add devices, give the routine a name and set the actions. Want to turn off all the lights when you tell Alexa goodnight? Now you can.
What was the name of that light again?
Controlling lights and other smart home devices is great, if you can remember what they’re called. If you keep forgetting the light’s name, you can use Alexa groups to give each device multiple names. Every time you try to turn it on with the wrong name, create a group with that name and add the light to it. Next time you say that name, it’ll work just fine. You can have any number of groups with the same light or device in them.
An easy upgrade: smart bulbs on display at CES International, Las Vegas, Nevada, earlier this year.Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP
Top accessories
Echo Buttons
Official accessories are few and far between, but Echo Buttons are little light-up buttons that you pair with your Echo via Bluetooth for playing games. Most of the options are quiz-based, with the Echo acting as your gameshow host. Up to four can be connected at any one time for party play.
Echo Dot battery
If you’ve ever wished you could put your Echo Dot somewhere without a power cable hanging out, or take it on the road with you, you’ll need a battery. There are several available for under £30, such as the Smatree Portable Battery Base that simply clips around the Dot and plugs into the power port on its side. However, since the Echo Dot uses micro USB for power you can use just about any USB battery pack – it just won’t look as pretty. You’ll still need wifi for it, but you can always use your phone as a hotspot.
‘Alexa, turn on the lights’
Once you’ve got your Echo set up as the beginnings of your smart home, voice controlled lightbulbs are one of the easiest and best upgrades you can make – just swap your dumb bulb for a smart one.
A variety are available from £10 upwards. Philips’s popular Hue bulbs can connect directly to the Echo Plus but need the Hue Hub with other Echo devices.
Alexa can switch bulbs on and off via voice or change their colour. Using routines you can also get them to turn on at sunset or any other time, or in combination with other bits, eg to flash red when someone presses your connected doorbell button.
‘Alexa, turn on the fan’
Smart bulbs are great, but you can also give Alexa the ability to control almost anything plugged into a power socket. Smart plugs cost from £10 upwards, with Belkin’s wifi-connected WeMo and TP-Link’s Smart WiFi Plug proving popular.
Once hooked up, Alexa can turn on or off anything plugged into it, including fans, lamps and coffee machines.
Alexa, show me the front door.
Using an Echo Show or Spot, you can have a live feed from cameras such as Google’s Nest or Amazon’s Ring. One of the best is the £179 battery-powered Ring Video Doorbell 2, which can be installed just about anywhere without wiring. Simply say “Alexa, show me the front door”, to see who’s calling.
Sonos via voice
The Echo’s speaker is adequate but if your ears are more demanding, Sonos’s excellent multiroom speakers are Alexa-compatible. The Sonos One has Alexa built in, but you can control any of the Play series of speakers via an Alexa device, including the Dot by adding the Sonos skill. Then it’s as simple as saying: “Alexa, play music on kitchen”, or whatever your Sonos speaker is called.
Top skills
Alexa, how do you say ‘What’s the time?’ in Japanese?
If you’re learning a new language, or just curious, the Translated skill is worth a spin. It’ll translate phrases from English into 36 other languages,; all you have to do is ask. You can slow down the translation, or repeat it if you didn’t quite manage to catch it.
Children’s favourite: Paloma Faith.Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Paloma’s Bedtime
To add some celebrity stardust to your kids’ bedtime, turn to popstar Paloma Faith’s Paloma’s Bedtime skill. It’ll sing lullabies, read stories, play sleep sounds such as white noise, water or wind, and other bits. You have to like Paloma Faith, but it appears children frequently do.
Earplay
If you’ve ever wished radio dramas or audiobooks were interactive, you need to check out the series of Earplay skills. They feature choose-your-own-adventure-style stories through Alexa. There are a few good free ones to choose from with shorts and demos of others that are worth your time.
‘Alexa, ask TrackR to find my phone’
Lost your smartphone again? Alexa can help you find it with the TrackR skill. Activate the free skill on Alexa, link it with the free app on your Android or iPhone, then simply ask Alexa to make your phone ring, even if it’s on silent.
7-Minute Workout
Alexa can help you exercise. The 7-Minute Workout skill will guide you through an exercise routine. You can pause it to give yourself a breather, and there are images and tutorials available in the Alexa app on your phone to help you get the exercises right.
VW Polo Price £14,235 0-62mph 10.8 seconds Top speed 116mph MPG 62.8 CO2 103g/km
After a sorry litany of rusting, incompetent and comically unreliable runabouts, our first proper car was a maroon-coloured VW Polo with hardwearing “salt and pepper” fabric seats. We bought it as a hand-me-down from a distant aunt and its first journey was a heroic stint from England to Scotland to show off our first-born to my much-loved grandparents (living proof that a fruitless diet of mince and tatties will give you at least 90 years on this planet). Sitting on our mantelpiece to this day is a picture of my wife changing the baby’s nappy on the rear parcel shelf as the rain lashes down… We remember our early cars with the same nettle-sting clarity as when we recall teenage summers of stolen cider and stolen kisses.
Anyway, this is all to say that when I got behind the wheel of VW’s latest Polo I was feeling rather wistful. However, other than the name, there isn’t much to link my early 90s model with this one, the sixth edition of the VW’s world-thrashing supermini, but the reverie added a patina of wonder to the drive.
Compared to the outgoing model, the MK V, virtually every component is new. You’d have thought that after 40 years of forensically finessing its Polo, VW would have run out of ideas, but no. There are improvements across the board and this new one is the most advanced generation yet. It’s packed with class-leading technologies. It may be the biggest Polo yet, but it’s still a compact and petite car. However by making excellent use of the available space you’d easily think you were sitting in a Golf (the next model up the VW pecking order). More than 14m Polos have been built, with about 1 in 10 making their home in Britain. We are the car’s biggest market worldwide. Whatever Polo has, we Brits want it.
From the outside, this Polo is quite different from the smooth lines of the model that went before. The previous one had so few protuberances it looked like a large, sucked lozenge. This one looks busier. Its sides are enlivened (that’s a fun word, isn’t it?) by two long creases. All the old-school angles and folded-paper corners remind me of two things: my dear old maroon Polo and the Seat Ibiza. Style and tech usually flow down from the top of VW’s pyramid (and, lo, Bugatti begat Lamborghini and Bentley and Porsche and Audi and VW and Skoda and Seat), but here there’s some reverse blowback and the Ibiza’s style is informing the Polo’s. No matter, the Seat is an excellent car, who wouldn’t want to follow it?
The Polo comes with a range of engines, from a non-turbo 1-litre 3-cylinder up to a 2-litre GTi. For me, the engine to go for is one of the small petrol units. Being a 3-cylinder power plant produces an unusual rhythm, but you soon get used to it. And your wallet won’t have any trouble adjusting to the awesome consumption figures! You also get a generous garnishing of technology options. Choose from an 8in infotainment screen, radar cruise control, rear cross-traffic alert, blind-spot monitor, switchable dampers, LED headlamps, park assist that does the steering and braking, various connectivity options and a wifi hotspot. You can select from five dashboard decors, nine seat-cover options and 12 different exterior colours. Sadly, maroon is no longer available.
Hamza bin Laden, the son of the late al-Qaida leader, has married the daughter of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker in the 9/11 terror attacks, according to his family.
The union was confirmed by Osama bin Laden’s half-brothers during an interview with the Guardian. Ahmad and Hassan al-Attas said they believed Hamza had taken a senior position within al-Qaida and was aiming to avenge the death of his father, shot dead during a US military raid in Pakistan seven years ago.
Hamza bin Laden is the son of one of Osama bin Laden’s three surviving wives, Khairiah Sabar, who was living with her husband in a compound in Abbottabad, near a large Pakistani military base, when he was killed. He has since made public statements urging followers to wage war on Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv and is seen as a deputy to the terrorist group’s current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Alia Ghanem at home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a picture of her son Osama bin Laden.Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
“We have heard he has married the daughter of Mohammed Atta,” said Ahmad al-Attas. “We’re not sure where he is, but it could be Afghanistan.”
Western intelligence agencies have been increasingly focusing on the whereabouts of Hamza bin Laden over the past two years, seeing him as more likely than anyone else to galvanise followers. His marriage to the daughter of Atta, an Egyptian national, appears to confirm that the 9/11 alumni remains a central hub of al-Qaida and that the organisation itself continues to be organised around Osama bin Laden’s legacy.
Another of Bin Laden’s sons, Khalid, was killed in the US raid in Abbottabad. A third, Saad, was killed in a drone strike in Afghanistan in 2009. Letters purportedly written by Osama bin Laden and seized from the compound suggested he was grooming Hamza to replace him, partly to avenge the death of Saad.
Bin Laden’s wives and surviving children have returned to Saudi Arabia, where they were given refuge by the former crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The women and children remain in close contact with Bin Laden’s mother, Alia Ghanem, who told the Guardian in an interview that she remained in regular touch with surviving family members.
Ahmad al-Attas, brother of Osama bin Laden.Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
“When we thought everyone was over this, next thing I knew was Hamza saying I am going to avenge my father,” said Hassan al-Attas. “I don’t want to go through that again.
“If Hamza was in front of me now, I would tell him: God guide you. Think twice about what you are doing. Don’t retake the steps of your father. You are entering really negative and horrible parts of your soul.”
The family claimed they did not have any contact with Osama bin Laden from 1999 until his death in 2011. They said they had not heard from Hamza bin Laden nor received any messages from him.
In recognition of his apparent status within al-Qaida, the US government labelled him a specially designated global terrorist in January 2017, meaning his assets could be blocked and anyone who dealt with him faced arrest.
A snake has been seen eating a pigeon on a busy street in east London.
Photographs and video posted on social media showed the snake coiled around the bird on the pavement outside a shop on Leytonstone High Road on Saturday morning.
The Evening Standard reported that onlookers had fed the already dead pigeon to the snake. A spokeswoman for the animal charity RSPCA, which was called to the incident, said it did not believe the snake hunted down and killed the bird.
The snake was taken to a nearby wildlife centre, where it was being assessed, the animal welfare charity said
Rebecca Benson, an RSPCA inspector, told the Press Association: “I’m very keen to find out how he came to be in such a dangerous situation.
“Exposed like that on a street could have meant anything might have happened to him – he could have been run over by a car or attacked by another animal.
“It might be that he is an escaped pet or, more worryingly, someone may have deliberately dumped him and left him to fend for himself.”
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