March 11, 2010
Study suggests too many invasive heart tests given (AP)
AP - A troublingly high number of U.S. patients who are given angiograms to check for heart disease turn out not to have a significant problem, according to the latest study to suggest Americans get an excess of medical tests.
March 11, 2010
CDC uses shopper-card data to trace salmonella (AP)
AP - As they scrambled recently to trace the source of a salmonella outbreak that has sickened hundreds around the country, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention successfully used a new tool for the first time — the shopp
March 10, 2010
India help for Sri Lanka amputees
An Indian charity sends a team to Sri Lanka to provide 1,000 amputees in the war-ravaged north with artificial limbs.
March 10, 2010
Sex drive 'lasts longer in men', research suggests
Men are likelier than women to enjoy sex in old age, researchers find.
Belfast remembers Blitz victims of 1941
(AP)
| BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Nearly 70 years after Belfast was bombed in World War II, the city has its first memorial to nearly a thousand people who died in the Blitz. The city suffered its greatest disaster in the raids in April 1941, and in years afterward people avoided talking about it, John Hughes, spokesman for the Northern Ireland War Memorial, said Friday. "Perhaps it was a bit like the Titanic, where for many years they didn't want to be associated with failure," Hughes said, recalling that the Titanic was built in the city. "But we have lit the candle and I hope it will burn for a little while and encourage people to come and see it." The memorial, which was formally dedicated on Thursday, is a 5-foot-high (1.5-meter-high) bronze relief by Carolyn Mulholland, an artist born in Northern Ireland. Her parents' home was among those damaged in the attack. There are human shapes in the relief, some only in outline to represent those who died. The figures stand in a mass of fallen planks. A thousand people died and hundreds were injured, Belfast's docks and shipyards were destroyed, and 15,000 people were made homeless. "The Blitz was the single greatest catastrophe ever to occur in Belfast in one incident," Hughes said. Belfast got its first taste of bombing on the night of April 7-8, 1941, when 13 people died in attacks on the docks by eight German bombers. Having encountered little resistance, the Luftwaffe returned in force on April 15-16; 180 bombers waged a four-hour assault with 673 bombs and 29,000 incendiary devices; about 900 people died. Thirty more people were killed by bombs in Londonderry, Newtownards and Bangor. More than 200 people died in further attacks on May 4-6. The Blitz memorial is inside the Northern Ireland War Memorial Hall, which stands near the Anglican cathedral in the city center. "I remember walking through here after the attack and people couldn't recognize this part of Belfast. Streets that they knew had gone," said John Potter, curator of the War Memorial. The city recovered to play its part in the war effort, producing 140 warships, including six aircraft carriers, 1,200 Sterling bombers and 125 Sunderland flying boats. Mulholland, who was born in 1944, said one incendiary bomb tore through the family home, just missing her older sister's cot. Her parents kept a piece of linoleum which a hole burned through it as a relic of the attack, she said. ___ On the Net: http://www.niwarmemorial.org/ |