Odd Stories: Thieves Evade Lasers to Nab Italian Shipwreck's Bell

Rome - Underwater thieves have evaded an array of laser systems that measure millimetric shifts in the Costa Concordia shipwreck and 24-hour surveillance by the Italian coast guard and police to haul off a symbolic booty - the ship's bell.

The giant cruise liner capsized off the Tuscan island of Giglio after hitting a rock on January 13, killing at least 25 people. Seven people are still unaccounted for.

Prosecutors have accused Captain Francesco Schettino of causing the accident by bringing the multi-storey Costa Concordia, which was carrying more than 4,200 passengers and crew, too close to the shore.

Now prosecutors have opened an investigation to find out who filched the modern-day Titanic's bell.

Judicial sources said on Thursday thieves nabbed the ship's bell more than two weeks ago from one of the decks of the Costa Concordia, which is submerged in 8 meters (26 feet) of water.

Investigators suspect more than one person was involved in stealing the heavy bell, etched with the ship's name and 2006, the year it was christened. Ships bells were traditionally used to signal half-hour intervals in a four-hour watch.

"I can only guess that someone took it as a sort of morbid memento," Giglio's mayor, Sergio Ortelli, told Reuters.

"In my mind, the missing bell is of no importance. We have the ship's statue of the Madonna in our church, and that for us has much more symbolic meaning."

Divers recovered the meter-tall plaster statue of the Madonna in January from the ship's chapel and gave the statute to the parish priest of Giglio.

Divine Comedy is 'Offensive and Discriminatory', Says Italian NGO

By  Alison Flood

Italy - Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: Dante's medieval classic the Divine Comedy has been condemned as racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic by a group calling for it to be removed from classrooms.

The epic poem, written in the 14th century, is split into three parts, tracing the poet's journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is seen as one of the cornerstones of world literature. But the Italian human rights organisation Gherush92, which advises UN bodies on human rights issues, wants it to be removed from school curriculums, or at least used with more caution, because it is "offensive and discriminatory" and young people lack the "filters" to understand it in context.

Gherush92 singled out some particular cantos from Dante's masterwork for criticism: Inferno's 34th, which tells of Judas, endlessly chewed in the teeth of Lucifer, and 28th, in which Mohammed is depicted torn "from the chin down to the part that gives out the foulest sound", as well as Purgatorio's 26th, which shows homosexuals under a rain of fire in purgatory. The work, it says, slanders the Jewish people, depicts Islam as a heresy and is homophobic.

"We do not advocate censorship or burning but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic content," said Valentina Sereni, president of Gherush92, to the Adnkronos news agency. "Art cannot be above criticism."

But Italy's cultural scene has been quick to come to the defence of one the country's most famous works. "The benefits to be gained from reading and studying the Divine Comedy are so many that statements of this kind are just ridiculous," the poet and literary critic Maurizio Cucchi told the news agency. Literary historian, critic and author Giulio Ferroni called the comments "another frenzy of political correctness, combined with an utter lack of historical sense", and said that the Divine Comedy needed to be read in its historical context. "You could also include a few more notes, but it would be folly to abandon the study of a masterpiece that has helped build the image of humanity."

Older Nuclear Plants Pose Safety Challenge: IAEA

(Reuters) - Eighty percent of the world's nuclear power plants are more than 20 years old, raising safety concerns, a draft U.N. report says a year after Japan's Fukushima disaster.

Many operators have begun programs, or expressed their intention, to run reactors beyond their planned design lifetimes, said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) document which has not yet been made public.

"There are growing expectations that older nuclear reactors should meet enhanced safety objectives, closer to that of recent or future reactor designs," the Vienna-based U.N. agency's annual Nuclear Safety Review said.

"There is a concern about the ability of the ageing nuclear fleet to fulfill these expectations."
By Fredrik Dahl

Worldwide - The Fukushima tragedy was triggered on March 11, 2011, when an earthquake unleashed a tsunami that left 19,000 people dead or missing. It also smashed into the coastal power plant causing a series of catastrophic failures at the facility.

Images of the stricken plant shook public confidence in nuclear power and forced the nuclear industry to launch a campaign to defend its safety record.

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano told Reuters last week that nuclear power is now safer than it was a year ago. The report said the "operational level of NPP (nuclear power plant) safety around the world remains high".

It cited steady improvements in terms of unplanned reactor shutdowns in recent years.

But the 56-page IAEA document also highlighted an ageing nuclear fleet, with eighty percent of the 435 facilities more than two decades old at the end of last year.

This "could impact safety and their ability to meet member states' energy requirements in an economical and efficient manner", said the report, which has been submitted to IAEA member states but not yet finalized.

Operators and regulators opting for so-called long term operation "must thoroughly analyze the safety aspects related to the ageing of 'irreplaceable' key components", it added.

LESSONS LEARNT?

About 70 percent of the world's 254 research reactors have been in operation for more than 30 years "with many of them exceeding their original design life," it said.

The document was debated by the IAEA's 35-nation governing board last week, almost exactly a year after the world's worst nuclear accident in 25 years.

Last year's tsunami overwhelmed Fukushima on Japan's northeast coast, knocking out critical power supplies that resulted in a nuclear meltdown and the release of radiation.

The reactors were stabilized by December, but high radiation levels hamper a cleanup that is expected to take decades.

The crisis sparked a rethink about nuclear power and countries such as Germany, Italy and Switzerland have decided to phase out their reactors.

But other states, for example fast-growing China and India, continue to look to nuclear energy to meet their growing energy needs, the IAEA report said, adding that some "are even accelerating their nuclear energy programs".

France is building its first "advanced" reactor and Russia is seeking to double its nuclear energy output by 2020, it said.

"All countries that are using nuclear power are much more serious about nuclear safety," Amano said last week. But environmental group Greenpeace said no "real lessons" appeared to have been learnt from Fukushima.

Odd Stories: England's Biggest Baby Born

Swindon, England - A baby weighing almost 13 lbs. is probably the heaviest born in the country.

Gemma Tevendale says her daughter Suzie Valentia was born naturally not just heavy, but with two teeth as well.

Gemma and her husband James Gzowski were born with a normal birth weight but the secret may lie in Gemma's diet. Her other two children were born at almost 11 lbs. The theory is that her eating a lot of fish, which she admitted to doing, contributed to her heavier than normal children.

Experts say the heaviest ever born previous to this was 12 lbs 9 oz., which is about three ounces less than Suzie.

The heaviest ever recorded was slightly less than 23 lbs and was born in Italy in 1955.