An Italian bookseller has been convicted of stealing a first edition Harry Potter book, signed by J K Rowling, by switching it with a different novel in a shop in central London.

Rudolf Schönegger, 55, swapped a signed version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire worth £1,675 with a copy of Late Call, by Angus Wilson, at Hatchards in Piccadilly on New Year’s Eve.

CCTV footage showed him browsing in the bookshop before removing the rare Harry Potter novel from its shelf behind the till while a staff member had her back turned, and replacing it with the Wilson book moments later. The novel had been on display with a sticker stating its value.

The collector and seller of rare books, who regularly visits shops in the area, had already been convicted of stealing a rare book from a pop-up store at Fortnum and Mason, just metres away, which occurred about three hours after the Harry Potter theft.

On Tuesday, he was also convicted of selling a stolen bound copy of The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, worth £700, and a stolen first edition of Pincher Martin, by William Golding, worth £150. Both sales happened just before Christmas. 

Helen Mills, the manager of secondhand books at Hatchards, told the court: “I went to the till on the ground floor and started serving customers. A colleague passed by in a quieter moment when the queue had gone down and said: ‘Oh, have you sold the Harry Potter?’ We had a first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on sale for £1,675, all the staff knew about it – it would have been a big thing for us to have sold it.

“It is rare for it to be signed by JK Rowling because she doesn’t sign too many. I turned around because we kept it behind the till and it wasn’t there – and where it had been was another book.”

Security staff were called and footage from the store showed the defendant inquiring about the book shortly after 2pm, and then showed him making the swap. The book has yet to be recovered.

Schönegger will be sentenced on 3 April at Westminster magistrates court.

By Carmen Edilsa

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/hopes-for-summit-rise-as-kim-jong-un-makes-first-foreign-visit-mnmnpf5c5

The green-and-gold train believed to have carried Kim Jong-un to Beijing yesterday on his first visit outside North Korea since he took power in 2011 left the Chinese capital today — but who was on it or where it was heading was a well-guarded secret.

Heightened security measures in place in the city led to fevered speculation that Mr Kim was the main passenger, and journalists were banned from taking photos of a lengthy motorcade which made its way to Beijing’s main train station in the afternoon.

The Taiwanese broadcaster EBC reported that Mr Kim was in Beijing with Ri Sol-ju, his wife, and Kim Yo-jong, his sister, although it did not name its sources. The women visited the historic Temple of Heaven site while Mr Kim held talks with President Xi and then toured Zhongguancun, known as the Chinese Silicon Valley, it said.

Chinese censors worked hard today to remove any mention of the trip on social media.The train looks like the one that transported Mr Kim’s late father, Kim Jong-il, to Beijing in 2011. Mr Kim’s apparent visit to China comes weeks after he agreed to meet President Moon and President Trump for talks about growing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry refused to be drawn on whether Mr Kim was in Beijing today. “I don’t have any relevant information on this matter,” she said repeatedly in response to a barrage of questions from foreign journalists. She added that the two countries remained friendly neighbours and that Beijing valued the relationship.

Cheng Xiaohe, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said that the heightened level of security suggested that China’s mystery guest was indeed Mr Kim. Other possibilities include Kim Yong-nam, the 90-year-old head of the parliament, and Kim Yo-jong. “But I lean toward Mr Kim, because having a middle person would be cumbersome,” Mr Cheng said. What was certain, he said, was that President Xi had met the North Korean visitor.

In 2011 Beijing did not disclose visits by Kim Jong-il until after he had returned to Pyongyang. “That’s the usual practice,” Mr Cheng said. “The two sides co-ordinate and release the information at the same time.”

Pyongyang’s offer of engagement with Seoul and Washington has raised questions about whether Beijing’s influence over North Korea has waned, but this week’s visit appears to underline the importance of China’s role on the peninsula.

“As an immediate neighbour, as North Korea’s biggest trading partner, and as the world’s second-largest economy, Beijing cannot be left out in talks to denuclearise the peninsula, which involves lots of detailed work,” Mr Cheng said.

Beijing’s guest and President Xi were bound to have discussed the prospective meetings with Mr Moon and Mr Trump, the professor said. “Beijing also could obtain first-hand information on North Korea’s stance on the nuclear issue, and the visit would provide an important opportunity for Beijing and Pyongyang to jump-start their relations and fix some problems.”

China-North Korea relations have cooled since Mr Kim came to power and began a series of nuclear and missile tests. China responded by applying sanctions. Last year Mr Kim snubbed a Chinese envoy by refusing to meet him face to face.

By Carmen Edilsa

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180327111752.htm

Pioneering early people who lived at the end of the last ice age actually carried on with life as usual despite plummeting temperatures, a study at a world-famous archaeological site in North Yorkshire suggests.
Leading researchers, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of York, found that a dramatic climate event with a sudden drop in average temperatures, severe enough to halt the development of woodland, had no substantial impact on human activity at Star Carr -- a middle Stone Age archaeological site dating to around 9,000 BC.
The study sheds new light on significant debate about the sensitivity of hunter-gatherer societies to environmental change.
The prehistoric community, who persevered through the cold snap that would last more than 100 years, left a plethora of worked wood, animal bones, antler headdresses and flint blades buried in layers of mud as evidence of their continued productivity and endurance.
Simon Blockley, Professor of Quaternary Science at Royal Holloway, said: "It has been argued that abrupt climatic events may have caused a crash in Mesolithic populations in Northern Britain, but our study reveals, that at least in the case of the pioneering colonisers at Star Carr, early communities were able to cope with extreme and persistent climate events.
"We found people were in fact far more affected by smaller, localised changes to their environment -- Star Carr was once the site of an extensive lake and people lived around its edge.
"Over time the lake gradually became shallower and boggier, turning into fenland which eventually forced settlers to abandon the area."
The early Holocene, the current geological epoch which started some 11,500 years ago when the glaciers began to retreat, was dominated by climatic instability characterised by extreme weather events triggered by ice-ocean interaction during the final wastage of the northern hemisphere ice sheets.
The rich archaeological record at Star Carr gave the researchers the rare opportunity to directly compare the palaeoclimate record with evidence of human activity through time in the same location.
The researchers examined human activity by looking at archaeological remains recovered from layers of wetland deposits at the edge of the extensive former lake basin in the Vale of Pickering.
They found evidence of houses, large wooden platforms built on the lake edge and large quantities of artefacts and bones preserved in the lake muds and these were radiocarbon dated. Pollen, macrofossils and isotopes taken from lake sediment cores allowed the researchers to build a high-resolution picture of the climate of the area over thousands of years.

By Carmen Edilsa

one day a policeman who was a draftsman saw the picture and the drawing as if he were an adult person, his father put the photo back in all the media, but to the great surprise she saw the photo and identified with it, she I call and they agreed to do a DNA test, the result was positive, since that day his father stopped looking

His family went out to meet and all the Chinese people were happy

Mr. Wang looking for his daughter

she travels to meet her parents

 China meets to celebrate the meeting

your family welcomes you

his father an example for all his country

 
By: Fabiola

The Portuguese scored twice, the second goal.

Ronaldo only needed 167 seconds to make his presence felt in the Allianz Stadium, with the first goal of the Champions League in 119 he has qualified for the tenth consecutive European game.
ByFabiola

https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/donald-trump-white-house-easter-egg-roll-struggles.html 

Donald Trump has been in office for 437 days. In that time, he’s learned a lot, like how to shield himself from the wind and how to eat a salad. But he has not, apparently, learned what exactly the White House is. 

During the annual White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, under the watchful, bespectacled gaze of an adult in a bunny costume, the president thanked his wife, Melania, for organizing the event. He went on: 

I also want to thank the White House Historical Association, […] and everybody who works to keep this incredible house, or building, or whatever you want to call it — because there really is no name for it. It’s special. And we keep it in tip-top shape. We call it sometimes “tippy-top shape,” and it’s a great, great place. 

 

 

“Page Six” unearthed Morrone’s 2015 review of The Revenant, which I believe is about a wilderness bear attack, and maybe also revenge and/or parenting, but I did not see it. Anyway, the review appears on Morrone’s lifestyle blog (of course), and she starts out complimenting Leo in general, only to share her not-so-positive thoughts on the film:

I had been dying to watch The Revenant ever since the trailer came out a few months ago. I’m a huge Leo and Tom Hardy fan. The first time I noticed Tom Hardy’s acting was in Mad Max. I know, pathetic. Revenant was overly hyped up, and by the time I saw it, I wasn’t too impressed. Maybe it throws your judgement off when people speak so highly about it something.

But Morrone also wrote that she thought Leo and Tom Hardy’s “acting was beyond amazing” in the film. “This may be the year Leonardo DiCaprio finally wins an Oscar!,” she accurately predicted. Romantic!

 

But to a large number of baseball fans and connoisseurs of literary nonfiction best sellers, not to mention (and this is key) hundreds of people who currently work in baseball front offices, Williams isn’t any of those things. In their eyes, Kenny Williams is a chump. Specifically, the chump whom writer Michael Lewis, in his still massively influential 2003 book, Moneyball, portrayed as a useful idiot being duped by Oakland A’s Master Strategist Billy Beane into making what Lewis called a “fucking A” trade. (The trade was complicated, but Lewis basically paints second baseman Ray Durham as one of the most vital assets in the game, and Williams as the idiot who didn’t appreciate him.) The movie’s irresistible narrative of underdog disruption of a flabby, lazy system cast Beane as the insurgent and Williams as the Establishment, the new guard taking advantage of the clueless old one. Never mind that, 15 years out, it sort of looks like Williams won the trades Lewis wrote about. The message was clear: Moneyball was the vanguard, the future.

That future is here, though. For two decades, there have been old-school baseball guys to serve as foils for the math nerds and Harvard Business kids bum-rushing the sport. But all general managers are smart now, and they’re all smart in the same way. The nerds have taken over. Which means there are no more marks for them to exploit.

That fact is the reason that Major League Baseball, now approaching its opening day, just had the strangest off-season in recent memory. For the first time that anyone can remember, baseball’s hot-stove season just … never warmed up. Top free agents like Jake Arrieta, Yu Darvish, J. D. Martinez, and Eric Hosmer spent most of their winters waiting for huge offers that never came: Arrieta reportedly told teammates that he’d be signing a six-year, $200 million deal for 2018; ultimately he agreed to a three-year, $75 million contract with the Phillies well after he should have reported for spring training (typically, rosters are mostly set by Christmas). And agent Scott Boras, who has essentially single-handedly run baseball’s off-season for two decades.
http://www.newsnow.co.uk/

The area provides water from the iconic coffee region of the country and is particularly appreciated by hiking enthusiasts 
By: Fabiola