A - Nobody around to help
B - Not so stupid as we thought
C - One catastrophe after another
D - Only one country affected by this phenomenon
E - Recognition for well done work
F - Very expensive device
G - Wearing very expensive clothes
1
The scale of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew on Haiti’s becoming clearer. The United Nations, citing Haitian authorities, say at least 350, 000 people need immediate help. Homes have been destroyed by the fierce winds and floods are adding to the misery. The nation was still struggling to recover from the devastating earthquake of 2010. Now the strongest storm to hit the impoverished nation in more than half a century has unleashed a new humanitarian crisis. At least 26 people were killed in Haiti, but the
exact toll may take some time to establish because communications are nearly non-existent. Cuba also took a battering from the hurricane. Residents of Baracoa returned on Wednesday to see what was left of their neighbourhood, and their homes. The storm’s now been demoted to a Category 3 but it’s still ferocious. One and a half million people have been urged to leave the southeast coast of America.
2
Reality TV star Kim Kardashian returning to New York badly shaken on Monday after being robbed at gunpoint in her Paris residence by masked men who stole some $10 million worth of jewellery. According to E! News, whose US network broadcasts “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” the celebrity was alone when the robbery took place. Ken Baker of E! News explains:
I’m told by my sources that Kim was alone in her room at the time and it was around 3 a.m. and she was stormed by these robbers and actually they handcuffed her, they ended up gagging her with tape around her mouth, they tied her hands and her feet, ended up putting her in the bathroom, put her in the bathtub, locked the door and proceeded to finish their robbery.
A Paris police source earlier told Reuters that five attackers, wearing ski masks and clothes with police markings, struck around 3 a.m. inside the exclusive apartment block where Kardashian, 35, was staying while attending Paris Fashion Week. Two of the men entered Kardashian’s apartment after threatening the night guard with a hand gun. Kardashian, who has two young children with husband rapper Kanye West, was not beaten but the robbers put a handgun against her temple before tying her up. Kardashian was alone in her Paris residence because her bodyguard was attending a party with her sisters, according to E!. The robbers stole a box containing jewels worth $5.6 million to 6.7 million and a ring worth about 4.5 million.
3
This is Pixel - Google’s new smartphone, compatible with their new virtual reality headset. Executives say it has the best available smartphone camera on the market. The 5 and 5.5 inch screens alone will help with the photographic eye, but that’s not all.
Pixel has a 12.3 mega pixel rear-facing camera featuring an F2.0 aperture and a big 1.55 micron pixels to capture significantly more light than other cameras.
Google’s Vice President of Virtual Reality introduced the new Daydream View headset for VR use.
It’s the first Daydream-ready VR headset. Now if you’re into VR I’ll just say that the specs are there. It has a nice field of view and with the Daydream phone, low latency, and really accurate head tracking. But we didn’t just look at the specs, we obsessed over the details of the design.
Google is teaming up with Verizon, exclusively, to bring Pixel to the market. The phone starts at a price of $649.
4
Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi has won this year’s Nobel prize for medicine for his ground-breaking experiments with yeast. Ohsumi exposed a key mechanism in the body’s defences where cells degrade and recycle their components. Understanding this process, says the Nobel Committee, has led to a better understanding of
diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes. Ohsumi says he’s extremely honoured to get the prize. The Physiology or Medicine prize, the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year, is worth 8 million Swedish crowns, close to $1 million.
5
A new study has pigeons flying up in the pecking order. Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand and the Ruhr University in Germany have found that these birds can distinguish between real
words and non-words. They trained the pigeons to peck their preference: a correctly spelled four-letter
word or a symbol when the letters did not spell anything. Over the course of the study, the birds built a vocabulary of 26 to 58 words. The pigeons also pecked the symbol for more than 8,000 non-words. The birds’ performances rivalled those of baboons who completed similar complex tasks. With these promising results, researchers are rethinking the put-down “bird brain”, at least for these proficient pigeons.
KEY:
1C 2A 3F 4E 5B
