A man has died after falling into a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park in the US state of Wyoming.
Colin Nathaniel Scott, 23, of Portland, Oregon, was with his sister and had walked more than 200 yards away from the designated boardwalk when he slipped and fell into the acidic hot spring in the Norris Geyser Basin, park officials said.
Teenagers laugh as steam rises from a hot spring
His sister reported his fall and rangers tried to navigate the highly-fragile crust of the geyser basin to recover his body, but they have now suspended efforts "due to the extreme nature and futility of it all".
A spokeswoman from the park said: "They were able to recover a few personal effects. There were no remains left to recover."
Mr Scott's death occurred in one of the hottest and most volatile areas of the park.
It comes after a number of incidents in which tourists have left the designated path.
"It's sort of dumb, if I could be so blunt, to walk off the boardwalks not knowing what you're doing," said Professor Kenneth Sims, a member of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
"They're scofflaws [a person who flouts a law] essentially, who look around and then head off the boardwalk," he said, adding he was talking generally, not specifically, about Mr Scott's situation.
Mr Scott himself was described as "a very nice young man, a bright spirit" by a former manager.
At least 22 people are known to have died from hot spring-related injuries in and around the park since 1890.
Signs are posted throughout the park, warning people to keep to the designated trails in thermal areas which feature boiling pools, geysers that can blast hundreds of feet into the air and toxic gases.
The crust that makes up the ground in parts of Yellowstone is formed when underground minerals dissolved by the high-temperature water are redeposited on or near the surface.
Communication in the Internet Century usually means using email, and email, despite being remarkably useful and powerful, often inspires momentous dread in otherwise optimistic, happy humans. Here are our personal rules for mitigating that sense of foreboding:
How Google WorksCover of ‘How Google Works,’ by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
1.Respond quickly. There are people who can be relied upon to respond promptly to emails, and those who can’t. Strive to be one of the former. Most of the best—and busiest—people we know act quickly on their emails, not just to us or to a select few senders, but to everyone. Being responsive sets up a positive communications feedback loop whereby your team and colleagues will be more likely to include you in important discussions and decisions, and being responsive to everyone reinforces the flat, meritocratic culture you are trying to establish. These responses can be quite short—“got it” is a favorite of ours. And when you are confident in your ability to respond quickly, you can tell people exactly what a non-response means. In our case it’s usually “got it and proceed.” Which is better than what a non-response means from most people: “I’m overwhelmed and don’t know when or if I’ll get to your note, so if you needed my feedback you’ll just have to wait in limbo a while longer. Plus I don’t like you.”
2.When writing an email, every word matters, and useless prose doesn’t. Be crisp in your delivery. If you are describing a problem, define it clearly. Doing this well requires more time, not less. You have to write a draft then go through it and eliminate any words that aren’t necessary. Think about the late novelist Elmore Leonard’s response to a question about his success as a writer: “I leave out the parts that people skip.” Most emails are full of stuff that people can skip.
3.Clean out your inbox constantly. How much time do you spend looking at your inbox, just trying to decide which email to answer next? How much time do you spend opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time. Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already read (and failed to act upon).
When you open a new message, you have a few options: Read enough of it to realize that you don’t need to read it, read it and act right away, read it and act later, or read it later (worth reading but not urgent and too long to read at the moment). Choose among these options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two. Remember the old OHIO acronym: Only Hold It Once. If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is 100 percent wasted time.
If you do this well, then your inbox becomes a to‑do list of only the complex issues, things that require deeper thought (label these emails “take action,” or in Gmail mark them as starred), with a few “to read” items that you can take care of later.
To make sure that the bloat doesn’t simply transfer from your inbox to your “take action” folder, you must clean out the action items every day. This is a good evening activity. Zero items is the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable. Otherwise you will waste time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at.
4.Handle email in LIFO order (Last In First Out). Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else.
5.Remember, you’re a router.When you get a note with useful information, consider who else would find it useful. At the end of the day, make a mental pass through the mail you received and ask yourself, “What should I have forwarded but didn’t?”
6.When you use the bcc (blind copy) feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially knavish in a transparent culture. When that is your answer, copy the person openly or don’t copy them at all. The only time we recommend using the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread. When you “reply all” to a lengthy series of emails, move the people who are no longer relevant to the thread to the bcc field, and state in the text of the note that you are doing this. They will be relieved to have one less irrelevant note cluttering up their inbox.
7.Don’t yell. If you need to yell, do it in person. It is FAR TOO EASY to do it electronically.
8.Make it easy to follow up on requests. When you send a note to someone with an action item that you want to track, copy yourself, then label the note “follow up.” That makes it easy to find and follow up on the things that haven’t been done; just resend the original note with a new intro asking “Is this done?”
9.Help your future self search for stuff. If you get something you think you may want to recall later, forward it to yourself along with a few keywords that describe its content. Think to yourself, How will I search for this later? Then, when you search for it later, you’ll probably use those same search terms. This isn’t just handy for emails, but important documents too. Jonathan scans his family’s passports, licenses, and health insurance cards and emails them to himself along with descriptive keywords. Should any of those things go missing during a trip, the copies are easy to retrieve from any browsers.
Amazon has launched fresh food deliveries in the UK in the latest threat to Britain's embattled major supermarket chains.
The long-anticipated move will see AmazonFresh products made available in parts of London to members of the online retailer's Prime subscription service - for additional charges.
It sees the US giant take on a crowded grocery sector where major players Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons are already engaged in a fierce price war as they try to face down the threat from discounters Aldi and Lidl.
Specialist delivery firm Ocado is also part of the battle.
They are competing over a market that is expected to nearly double in size to £17bn by 2020.
Amazon's offer includes fresh and frozen products from Morrisons, after it struck a wholesale deal with the supermarket earlier this year, as well as products from major brands such as Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Danone, Warburtons and Walkers.
Ajay Kavan, vice president of AmazonFresh, said: "We are launching with a comprehensive offer in a limited area and will take our time to hone and improve our service."
The launch comes a day after Sainsbury's reported falling sales in its latest financial quarter, although it said online sales were up 8% as it introduced a new app.
Sainsbury's has already moved to square up to Amazon in the wider retail space as it looks to complete a £1.4bn takeover of Argos owner Home Retail Group.
Amazon launched a fresh food offering in the US in 2007 and has offered some food and drink items to British customers since 2010.
Members of Amazon Prime in the UK pay an annual subscription of £79.
They can sign up for a 30-day trial of AmazonFresh and will then pay £6.99 per month for the service, with unlimited deliveries for orders of above £40.
Government ministers are under attack from MPs who believe they are failing to address the threat of further floods.
The warning comes in a report which claims that flood defences are getting worse because of a lack of investment and that the country is still without a proper plan for dealing with future damage.
A cross-party group of MPs also accuses the Government of leaving vulnerable communities at the mercy of a short-term approach to climate change.
Sue Procter lost £50,000 worth of stock from her Lancashire garden centre
The parliamentary Environmental Audit committee says there is a lack of long-term planning with spending on defences fluctuating from year-to-year.
Its chairwoman Mary Creagh said: "Flooding is the greatest risk that the UK faces from climate change.
"Our committee was concerned to see that the Government approach to funding is stop-start.
"That leads to inefficient flood defences, it means that the state of the flood defences we already have can fall into disrepair and that presents an unacceptable risk for flood-prone communities.
"For people living in flood risk areas this is a matter of life and limb."
The committee says the Government is reacting to events rather than preparing for them properly - and believes local authorities are not receiving the support they need to help soften the impact of flooding.
The findings have been supported by property and business owners affected by the winter floods that resulted in a £1.3bn bill.
Sue Procter, who lost £50,000 worth of stock from her garden centre at Read near Clitheroe in Lancashire, told Sky News: "I stood there and thought we are finished. I've no more money to put into this place, everything was in."
Mrs Procter said she had been offered a £9,000 grant towards flood defences on the river running alongside her business but had also received a building quote of £20,000 which she could not afford to pay.
She says short-term Government fixes are no longer the answer.
"They (the Government) should have a long-term plan.
"It is no good showing up when everybody is flooded and we are all in need ... because further down the line we have not got anything.
"We can't even get insurance."
Peter Box, environment spokesman for the Local Government Association, said that councils were doing all they could to protect communities and reduce the risks of flooding.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "Our six-year capital investment programme for flood defences will bring an end to year-on-year fluctuations in spending so communities can have certainty in future funding.
"Our National Flood Resilience Review will be published shortly, delivering immediate actions to better-protect communities ahead of this winter.
"This will be followed by our 25-year environment plan later this year setting out a new approach to managing our rivers across whole catchments, keeping homes, businesses and infrastructure safer from flooding."
Somali rebel group al-Shabab said it has killed 43 soldiers in an attack on a base of Ethiopian troops serving with the African Union's AMISOM force in the Horn of Africa nation.
"Our fighters stormed the Halgan base of AMISOM ... We killed 43 AU soldiers from Ethiopia in the fighting," al-Shabab's military operations spokesperson Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab told Reuters news agency after Thursday's attack, adding "several" of its fighters had also been killed without giving a figure.
"It was a huge blast. It destroyed the gate and parts of the base," he added.
The base at Halgan town lies in a region of central Somalia about 300km north of the capital Mogadishu.
An AMISOM spokesperson had no immediate comment.
Residents said they heard a huge explosion at the base and a heavy exchange of gunfire shortly before dawn.
Residents said they heard a huge explosion at the base and a heavy exchange of gunfire shortly before dawn.
The group often launches gun and bomb attacks on officials, Somali security forces and AMISOM in an effort to topple the Western-backed government and impose its own strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia.
In January, Kenyan troops serving with AMISOM suffered heavy losses when al-Shabab made a dawn raid on their camp in El Adde, near the Kenyan border. Al-Shabab said it killed more than 100 soldiers but Kenya gave no exact casualty figure.
A large sinkhole has shut down part of the Canadian capital, Ottawa.
A number of buildings were evacuated and traffic diverted after the massive hole opened up in a busy area of downtown Ottawa, just a few streets from the Canadian parliament.
There are no reports of injuries or missing people, however, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed footage of a van parked on the side of the road falling into the hole.
Officials said buildings, including a shopping centre and a book shop, remain closed after the smell of gas was reported.
Witness Tom Herlihy said: "I heard the initial rush of air as the gas line erupted and started shooting the high pressure gas into the air ... then immediately thereafter we heard the police sirens and the fire trucks and even Hydro (Hydro Electricity) showing up to clear the area."
All leaks have since been contained.
Water, which could be seen gushing inside the sinkhole at one point, has also been shut off, while power remains out in the area.
The road collapse occurred at Rideau Street and Sussex Drive, which has been under construction for Ottawa's new light-rail transit (LRT) system.
City officials say it is too early to say if the work was related to the sinkhole's appearance
"It's premature at this point to make the connection to LRT, although that could very well be the possibility," Mayor Jim Watson told a news conference.
It is the second sinkhole to open up in downtown Ottawa in as many years.
Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is facing a $20m (£13.8m) lawsuit for allegedly copying a song released by X Factor winner Matt Cardle.
The songwriters behind Cardle's 2011 single Amazing claim Sheeran "exploited" their work on a "breathtaking scale" for his 2015 hit Photograph.
The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in California by Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard, alleges Photograph has the same musical composition as Amazing, which in some instances amounts to "note-for-note copying".
Photograph has sold more than 3.5 million copies worldwide and features prominently in romantic drama movie Me Before You, which was released last week, according to the lawsuit. It has also had a whopping 208 million YouTube views.
Amazing, on the other hand, reached No 84 in the UK charts and had just one million YouTube hits.
Mr Harrington and Mr Leonard are seeking a jury trial, damages in excess of $20m and royalties from the song.
Other named defendants include Snow Patrol's Johnny McDaid, credited as a co-writer of Photograph, units of Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Warner Music Group and its subsidiary, Atlantic Recording Corporation.
According to the lawsuit, Photograph shares 39 identical notes with Amazing.
It also points to a similarity of "words, vocal style, vocal melody, melody, and rhythm".
The complaint reads: "... Sheeran and McDaid, the credited writers of the international hit song Photograph, among others, copied, and exploited, without authorisation or credit, the work of other active, professional songwriters, on a breathtaking scale, unabashedly taking credit for the work of these songwriters by claiming it to be their own.
"This copying is, in many instances, verbatim, note-for-note copying, makes up nearly one half of Photograph, and raises this case to the unusual level of strikingly similar copying.
"While Sheeran, McDaid, and the other Defendants received career-defining accolades, awards, and a fortune for Photograph, the true writers of much of Photograph received nothing..."
Grammy-winning Sheeran, 25 is one of the UK's top-selling artists. He has written and co-written tracks for artists such as One Direction, Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber.
The lawsuit comes after the family of late soul singer Marvin Gaye won a $7.4m copyright infringement lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over their hit song Blurred Lines.
