Latest news with #Passersby
Metro
6 days ago
- Metro
Bull on the loose charging down streets in UK city
A bull is on the loose in a Birmingham suburb. Passersby filmed the black bull trotting past the Golden Suite hotel in Small Heath today. Where the animal came from is unclear, with footage showing it charging across the road as cars drove by. @johncooper68 bull loose in small heath ♬ original sound – John Cooper Got a story? Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ Or you can submit your videos and pictures here. For more stories like this, check our news page. Follow on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news updates. You can now also get articles sent straight to your device. Sign up for our daily push alerts here. MORE: Boy, three, starved to death by parents 'became invisible to child services' MORE: Peter Tatchell 'laughed at by police before being removed' from Birmingham Pride MORE: Man says cafe staff refused to serve him because of his face tumours
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
More details emerge from hazmat incident at Hayden Corp. on Monday morning
WEST SPRINGFIELD — The 'smoke' that emerged from valves at Hayden Corp. on Monday morning and caused first responders to set up a 300-feet perimeter around the business was cold liquid hydrogen meeting the warm spring air, according to the company. 'We have cryogenic hydrogen tanks on our facility that are designed to vent off excess hydrogen to avoid over-pressurizing the tank,' said Dan Hayden, president of Hayden Corp. 'That's what people driving by saw.' Passersby reported seeing clouds of smoke coming out of Hayden tanks at around 7 a.m. Monday, which caused the area around the facility to be shut down, he said. City officials called it a hazardous materials situation. By mid-morning, the area had reopened, according to a social media post from the West Springfield Police Department. The hydrogen is so cold — roughly minus 437 degrees Fahrenheit — that when it mixes with atmospheric air, it 'liquifies and chills the air around it,' Hayden explained. The hydrogen, while not hazardous to inhale, is explosive, which is why first responders set up the perimeter around the site, blocking off roads to Park, Baldwin and River streets. The West Springfield Fire Department said in a social media post that Eversource shut down power to the area shortly before 9 a.m., a move that affected 156 customers. The West Springfield Police and Fire departments did not respond to requests for comment Monday or Tuesday. Hayden said the company was back in business Tuesday. Policy changes at Hampden County jail policy changes precede new $600K settlement in inmate's death Three WMass drug investigations net 45 guns, 52 arrests, heroin, fentanyl Indian, Italian, Turkish? Dine Springfield Restaurant Week encourages you to try all 3, and more Crunch Fitness opens new location in East Longmeadow Read the original article on MassLive.
AsiaOne
15-05-2025
- AsiaOne
Parisian hailed as a hero for helping thwart crypto kidnapping, World News
PARIS — A Parisian shop-owner who helped prevent a masked gang from kidnapping the daughter of a French crypto businessman has been hailed as a hero after he rushed at the attackers with a fire extinguisher. French prosecutors are investigating after a gang on Tuesday (May 13) attempted to kidnap a woman identified by the local press as the daughter of a crypto boss. The brazen attempted kidnapping on the streets of Paris is at least the third attack against French crypto industry players in recent months, underlining growing threats to the industry's wealthy entrepreneurs. Video widely shared on social media shows three masked men wrestling with two people on the ground — the woman and her husband — while a van waits nearby. A man can then be seen rushing towards the attackers with a fire extinguisher, before they escape into the back of a getaway van. The man then throws the extinguisher at the departing vehicle. Passersby on Wednesday cheered the man — who gave his name only as Nabil — as he spoke to Reuters outside his bicycle shop in Paris' 11th arrondissement. "You're a champion," one woman said, while another man called out to him from across the street. "Thank you very much. That's kind," Nabil replied. Nabil said he knew the couple from the neighbourhood and was full of praise for the woman's husband. He "took a lot of blows to the head and he didn't let go of his wife," Nabil said. "And so they must have thought, 'It's going to be very difficult to get her.' I think that's what made them give up, more than the fire extinguisher." Nabil said he grabbed the fire extinguisher in a panic, hoping to put an end to the attack. "I rushed over with that object, not knowing exactly what I was going to do with it. But I feel like it ended the altercation. So I achieved my goal," he said. [[nid:718000]]
The Guardian
06-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘You feel the huge weight of history': the room where Nazi Germany surrendered
For a building that witnessed one of the pivotal moments of European history, it is oddly unremarkable: a nondescript red-brick schoolhouse on an unexceptional street on the wrong side of the railway tracks in Reims, eastern France. In May 1945 it was the Collège Moderne et Technique. Students came and went. Passersby may have wondered, briefly, at the two US military police officers outside the doors, but Americans were everywhere – the city had been liberated in August 1944. Up on the first floor, however, in a commandeered classroom, Gen Dwight D Eisenhower and his staff were coordinating the final assault on Nazi Germany from what was then the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. It was, as the Baltimore Sun correspondent Price Day said, 'the most secret of secret places in Europe'. And it was here, as neat black lettering on the facade now notes, 'that on 7 May 1945 was signed the act that ended the second world war in Europe'. This Victory in Europe (VE) Day, the 80th, carries more weight than usual. Few of those who attend it are likely to mark the next major anniversary in 2035, and it comes at a time when peace and security on the continent have rarely felt more fragile. In the small museum that Eisenhower's headquarters has now become, the present mayor of Reims confessed to just one minor regret. 'France never appropriated that date of 7 May,' said Arnaud Robinet. 'There were reasons, but it's a shame. The date chosen for Victory in Europe Day was 8 May. Yet the Germans surrendered here, in the next room, on the seventh. It's been a bit forgotten.' Reims has always marked 7 May. This year, its ceremony will be televised, a day before national commemorations in Paris. The 80th anniversary was vital, Robinet said: 'We're at a turning point. A moment where memory and history separate.' To mark it here, the eternal flame is being brought from the Arc de Triomphe. Besides the official ceremonies there will be talks and documentaries, a specially written play, a son et lumière display, period vehicles, concerts and a bal populaire. Through five days of events, the focus will be on transmission to the next generation. 'Because events elsewhere show us the peace in Europe that was made here is not guaranteed,' he said. 'If you don't know your history, you can't prepare the future.' Next door at the Lycée Roosevelt, as the technical college is now known, Sven Turpin-Mihailovic, 18, agreed. 'You feel the huge weight of history – of the most devastating war in history – heavily here,' he said. 'Yet the same mistakes are being made.' Turpin-Mihailovic and two final-year classmates, Julie Le Bailly, 18, and Doriane Koutcheroff, 17, are among five students preparing a guided tour of the building for VIPs attending next week's commemorations. What happened in the schoolhouse was part of their upbringing, they said. 'My mum used to bring me here all the time,' said Koutcheroff. 'It's incredibly important today that this history is transmitted. We can't forget.' Le Bailly said the schoolhouse, and the commemorative events it will host, stood for 'memory, for peace, and for the courage of those who fought. They're a homage to all of that. And a warning not to commit the mistakes of the past.' Turpin-Mihailovic said the students felt 'like the guarantors of this history, this memory. The ones who will carry it forward. Our generation saw the return of war in Europe. Here, you can almost smell what that felt like, 80 years ago. We mustn't let go of that.' If history records that the allied victory came on 8 May 1945, it is mainly because of Joseph Stalin, who decided he wanted a far statelier, more symbolic capitulation in Berlin, where Germany's aggression began, and which was now in Soviet hands. The Reims surrender was a purely military affair, and relatively low-key. Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Adolf Hitler's successor after the Führer's suicide on 30 April 1945, had wanted separate ceasefires so as to continue fighting the Red Army in the east. Eisenhower, however, refused, and on the afternoon of 6 May, Gen Alfred Jodl, chief of the German armed forces operations staff, was sent to Reims with authority to sign a full and unconditional surrender of land, air and seaborne forces. Final negotiations dragged on deep into the night, with the German delegation pressing in particular for a delay to the ceasefire to enable as many soldiers and civilians as possible to flee west and avoid falling into the hands of the Red Army. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion It was not until 2.41 on the morning of 7 May that the document was finally signed at the long table in the brightly lit war room, its walls hung with huge charts of battlefield and air operations, railways, supply depots and prisoners taken. Eisenhower's chief of staff, Gen Walter Bedell Smith, signed for the western allies, followed by Gen Ivan Susloparov for the Soviet forces, and Jodl for Germany. Maj Gen François Sevez, representing France, signed as a witness, since the surrender was on French soil. Seventeen members of the press had been bussed in from Paris for the occasion. 'The scene seemed to freeze,' the Associated Press correspondent Relman Morin, who died in 1973, would write later. 'It had the character of a picture, somehow, a queer unreality. Here was the end of nearly five years of war, of blood and death, of explosions and bullets whining and the wailing of air raid sirens. Here, brought into this room, was the end of all that.' With Jodl's signature on the act of surrender, Morin said, he was 'signing away the German army, and the Luftwaffe, and the submarines'. With one scratch of the general's pen, 'the state that was to have lasted a thousand years, died.' Because Eisenhower outranked Jodl, he was not present for the signing, but he received the German delegation in his office upstairs. Minutes later, he dispatched a simple message: 'The mission of this allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.' There were no immediate celebrations. The ceasefire was set for 11.01pm on 8 May, and the correspondents present were sworn not to report the surrender until further notice. A few hours later, however, German radio did – and the news was out. 'Nazis Quit!' was the banner headline in a late-night extra edition of the Cleveland News on 7 May, with variations on the same theme in every other US paper. 'The greatest war in history ended today with the unconditional surrender of Germany.' The western allies' leaders – the US president, Harry S Truman, the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the head of the Free French, Gen Charles de Gaulle – announced the end of the war the next afternoon. It was not quite over yet, though. 'Stalin refused to acknowledge the surrender and said Susloparov was not authorised to sign it,' said Bénédicte Hernu, the director of Reims's historical museums. 'He insisted on another, grander surrender in Berlin that would highlight the Soviet role.' De Gaulle fully backed the idea, Hernu said, since he believed the Free French 'had been short-changed by the Americans, too'. The other allies did not object, so Reims became 'the military surrender, and Berlin the political, diplomatic one'. The text – containing hardly any significant changes, but agreed this time by three marshals: Georgy Zhukov, Arthur Tedder and Wilhelm Keitel – was signed at 10.43pm CET. At 11.01pm, as dictated in the Reims capitulation, the fighting in Europe ended. The Museum of the Surrender in Reims, where the war room has been preserved almost exactly as it was on 7 May 1945 – bar a few missing ashtrays, spirited away on the night as souvenirs – closes for renovation after the 80th VE Day events. 'We're modernising it, focusing on explaining what happened here and why, and what is left now,' Hernu said. 'It's about educating and transmitting. No one would have thought, even a few years ago, we'd be asking the same questions as then.'
