Day: February 3, 2023

Luanda – The former U-18 national coach Elisa Pires has been confirmed as head coach of the senior women’s basketball team for Interclube.

According to the official page of the club assigned to the National Police (InterClub), Elisa Pires (former assistant) takes over from the Spanish Julián Martínez.

Martínez was fired due to poor results in the 25th edition of the Champions Clubs’ Cup, which took place in December last year in Maputo (Mozambique).

Prior to the Spanish coach, Interclub was guided by the Angolan Carlos Dinis, who now trains the senior men’s team of this sports association.

In 2022, Elisa Pires won a bronze medal for the national U-18 team, in the African category championship, in Madagascar.

Source: Angola Press News Agency

A powerful arctic blast swept into the U.S. Northeast on Friday, pushing temperatures to perilously low levels across the region, including New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, where the wind chill dropped to -79 Celsius, forecasters said.

Wind-child warnings were posted for most of New York state and all six New England states — Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine — a region home to some 16 million people.

The National Weather Service (NWS) said the deep freeze would be relatively short-lived, but the combination of numbing cold and biting winds gripping the Northeast would pose life-threatening conditions well into Saturday.

Schools in Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts, New England’s two largest cities, were among those closed Friday over concerns about the risk of hypothermia and frostbite for children walking to school or waiting for buses.

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu declared a state of emergency through Sunday and opened warming centers to help the city’s 650,000-plus residents cope with what the NWS has warned was shaping up to be a “once-in-a-generation” cold front.

The bitter cold forced a rare closing of a floating museum that presents a daily reenactment of the 1773 Boston Tea Party, when a band of colonists disguised as Native Americans tossed crates of tea taxed by the king into Boston Harbor in protest.

“It’s too cold for that, we’re closed,” a receptionist at the museum said Friday.

Early Friday, the arctic surge flowing into the United States from eastern Canada was centered over the U.S. Plains, weather service forecaster Bob Oravec said. Kabetogama, Minnesota, near the Ontario border, was America’s coldest spot at 1 p.m. EST, with a temperature of -39.5 Celsius.

Sub-freezing, blustery conditions spread eastward through the day, sending wind-chill factors — measuring the combined effect of wind and cold on the body — plunging into the –40s across much of Maine, NWS meteorologist Brian Hurley said.

In Mount Washington State Park, atop the Northeast’s highest peak, temperatures fell to -43 Celsius on Friday evening, with sustained winds of 145 kph driving wind chill to -76 Celsius, according to Hurley.

By comparison, air temperatures in Eureka, Canada’s northernmost Arctic weather station, were hovering at -40 Celsius on Friday morning.

Boston was at -13 Celsius on Friday evening, while in Worcester, Massachusetts, 64 kilometers to the west, the mercury hit -16 C, with temperatures expected to fall even lower, Hurley said.

Record cold was expected in both cities Saturday.

Forecasts called for a low of –21 Celsius in Boston, exceeding an 1886 record –19 Celsius for the date. Worcester was headed for a low of –24 Celsius on Saturday, which would break its previous 1934 record of -20 for the date.

‘Before the real cold hits’

Despite the extreme cold, Nhon Ma, a Belgium native, was out Friday with his Zinneken’s food truck near Boston University selling Belgian waffles made from homemade batter and keeping warm with three or four waffle irons going at once.

“Those create heat, but of course it’s cold, it’s going to be cold, but we’re here,” Ma said.

In a frigid Biddeford, Maine, about 150 kilometers north of Boston, Katie Pinard, owner of a coffee and book shop, said business was brisk as customers came in from the cold, with some opting to work from her shop, Elements: Books Coffee Beer, rather than commute.

“Yeah, Mainers are pretty hardy, but talk to me tomorrow and we’ll see if we’re busy or not,” she said, looking ahead to Saturday morning, when temperatures were expected to drop to -28 Celsius. “I think people are out and doing what they need to get done before the real cold hits.”

While the Northeast was hunkering down, Texas and parts of the South were starting to warm up in the aftermath of a deadly winter ice storm that brought days of freezing rain, sleet and ice, causing massive power outages and dangerously icy roads.

But the weather was warming up, with temperatures in Austin, Texas, expected to hit 11 Celsius on Friday and 22 Celsius by Monday, forecasts say.

Meanwhile, a Pacific storm was expected to bring another round of heavy snow to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains Saturday night. Periods of moderate rainfall were forecast in lower elevations of central and northern California and the Pacific Northwest through the weekend.

Source: Voice Of America

More than 200 years after Napoleon met defeat at Waterloo, the bones of soldiers killed on that famous battlefield continue to intrigue Belgian researchers and experts, who use them to peer back to that moment in history.

“So many bones — it’s really unique!” exclaimed one such historian, Bernard Wilkin, as he stood in front of a forensic pathologist’s table holding two skulls, three femurs and hip bones.

He was in an autopsy room in the Forensic Medicine Institute in Liege, eastern Belgium, where tests are being carried out on the skeletal remains to determine from which regions the four soldiers they belong to came from.

That in itself is a challenge.

Half a dozen European nationalities were represented in the military ranks at the Battle of Waterloo, located 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Brussels.

That armed clash of June 18, 1815 ended Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambitions of conquering Europe to build a great empire, and resulted in the deaths of around 20,000 soldiers.

The battle has since been pored over by historians, and — with advances in the genetic, medical and scanning fields — researchers can now piece together pages of the past from the remains buried in the ground.

Some of those remains have been recovered through archeological digs, such as one last year that allowed the reconstitution of a skeleton found not far from a field hospital the British Duke of Wellington had set up.

But the remains examined by Wilkin surfaced through another route.

‘Prussians in my attic’

The historian, who works for the Belgian government’s historical archives, said he gave a conference late last year and “this middle-aged man came to see afterwards and told me, ‘Mr Wilkin, I have some Prussians in my attic'”.

Wilkin, smiling, said the man “showed me photos on his phone and told me someone had given him these bones so he can put them on exhibit… which he refused to do on ethical grounds”.

The remains stayed hidden away until the man met Wilkin, who he believed could analyze them and give them a decent resting place.

A key item of interest in the collection is a right foot with nearly all its toes — that of a “Prussian soldier” according to the middle-aged man.

“To see a foot so well preserved is pretty rare, because usually the small bones on the extremities disappear into the ground,” noted Mathilde Daumas, an anthropologist at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles who is part of the research work.

As for the attributed “Prussian” provenance, the experts are cautious.

The place it was discovered was the village of Plancenoit, where troops on the Prussian and Napoleonic sides bitterly fought, Wilkin said, holding out the possibility the remains might be those of French soldiers.

Scraps of boots and metal buckles found among the remains do point to uniforms worn by soldiers from the Germanic side arrayed against the French.

But “we know that soldiers stripped the dead for their own gear,” the historian said.

Clothes and accessories are not reliable indicators of the nationality of skeletons found on the Waterloo battlefield, he stressed.

DNA testing

More dependable, these days, are DNA tests.

Dr Philippe Boxho, a forensic pathologist working on the remains, said there were still parts of the bones that should yield DNA results, and he believed another two months of analyses should yield answers.

“As long as the subject matter is dry we can do something. Our biggest enemy is humidity, which makes everything disintegrate,” he explained.

The teeth in particular, with traces of strontium, a naturally occurring chemical element that accumulates in human bones, can point to specific regions through their geology, he said.

Wilkin said an “ideal scenario” for the research would be to find that the remains of the “three to five” soldiers examined came from both the French and Germanic sides.

Source: Voice Of America