I love to travel, mainly to Africa where I was born, I enjoy reading and playing bridge. I go for rambles in the countryside. I collect stamps and go to T'ai Chi classes. I love my two cats and my garden birds. I adore the African wildlife and try to help Conservation groups.
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The claimed recent discovery of Bigfoot in the US state of Georgia has turned out to be a hoax - it was a rubber gorilla suit in a block of ice.
Two men said last week they had found a 2.3m-tall (7ft 7in), 226kg (500lb) corpse of the legendary ape-like creature in a wood in June. Two researchers bought the "carcass", encased in ice, for an undisclosed sum. But as it thawed it turned out to be a rubber monkey outfit. Bigfoot has been the subject of decades of hoaxes.
Matt Whitton, a police officer, and Rick Dyer, a former prison officer, told a new conference in California last week that they had made the find while hiking.
A photograph on the men's website showed what appeared to be a large, hairy creature. But Bigfoot experts reacted suspiciously to the men's claims and the story soon began to unravel.
BIGFOOT BASICS
First documented report was prints found by Canadian trader in 1811
Name dates from 1958 reports of giant footprints found in California
Ray Wallace, who died in 2002, claimed to have faked these
Most famous footage shot in 1967 and contested ever since
Steve Kulls - of squatchdetective.com - observed the thawing and said that as the ice melted, the exposed head was found to be "unusually hollow in one small section".
As the process continued the feet were exposed - and were found to be made of rubber. AP news agency reported that telephone calls to Mr Whitton and Mr Dyer were not returned on Tuesday. But the voicemail recording for their Bigfoot Tip Line - which proclaims they also search for leprechauns and the Loch Ness monster - has been updated. It announced the duo were also looking for "big cats and dinosaurs".
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Japan sets sights on whaling activists !
By Chris Hogg - BBC News, Tokyo.
Will three anti-whaling activists from the UK and US end up standing trial in Tokyo? Japan is attempting to press charges against activists for the first time since 2000, when protesters started harassing the Japanese whaling fleet in earnest.
Earlier this week Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department obtained arrest warrants for the three men: Daniel Bebawi from Nottingham, the UK, and Americans Jon Batchelor and Ralph Koo. Police sources in Tokyo accuse the men - members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an anti-whaling group - of approaching a Japanese whaling ship, the Kaiko Maru, and laying a rope in its path in an effort to foul its propeller in February last year. The men are also alleged to have thrown smoke bombs onto the ship which started a fire.
Unconfirmed reports here say Japan's National Police Agency has now approached Interpol and asked them to place the men on their "wanted" list. They want the international police agency to issue a "red notice" which would notify the authorities in Britain and the United States that a national arrest warrant had been issued for these men.
Only a very small proportion of Interpol's "red notices" are made public. The country making the request, in this case Japan, can ask for the matter to be kept out of the public eye. The first Mr Bebawi might know of it might be when British police turn up to arrest him.
Interpol cannot insist that the British authorities use a "red notice" as a basis for a provisional arrest. Some countries do, some don't. Whether or not they do depends on the links between the country seeking the arrest and the country required to carry it out. It can also depend on the seriousness of the crime.
Japan and the UK do not have an extradition treaty. But that does not necessarily preclude the prospect of extradition, according to a British Embassy spokesman in Tokyo. "Any extradition request received from a 'non-treaty' partner would be considered on a case-by-case basis," he said. "For a case to be considered the offence... must be an offence in the UK."
The extradition treaty that exists between the US and Japan lists the offences which are extraditable. These include offences related to disruption of shipping vessels.
They are also for the first time suggesting that the activists may have committed a crime under a UN convention, "The Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts of Violence Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation". This could make the activists liable for arrest in countries that are signatories to the convention.
Japan appears to be taking a tougher line against those who seek to disrupt its whale hunt than it has in the past. So what has changed?
First, there are those in the Japanese parliament and media who have accused the Japanese whaling fleet and its operator of being "wimps" in the face of the attacks by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Japan should not tolerate this kind of humiliation, they argue.
Japan may also feel more confident now that the group has alienated many in the anti-whaling camp with its direct action against the whalers. Professor Jeff Kingston from Temple University in Tokyo believes that Japan has been losing in the court of public opinion over its whaling programme. "It clearly wants to persist with this programme and is seeking to deter other activists from disrupting its hunts," he says.
"Sticking Interpol on the activists is unlikely to deter committed anti-whaling campaigners," he adds. "But it may lead to some shifts in tactics." Captain Paul Watson who has led the Sea Shepherd actions against the Japanese fleet has already described these legal moves by Japan as "absurd" and made clear it will not deter his organisation from stepping up its efforts against the whalers.
Others caution that increased publicity can only benefit the activists.
Japan has raised the stakes it seems - but can it afford to pay the price if its tactics go wrong?
BBC NEWS REPORT.
The Australian military has offered to help rescue a starving whale calf, separated from its mother and trying to suckle from boats off Sydney.
Hopes are fading fast that the calf will survive as attempts to find it a surrogate mother by luring it out to sea have so far failed. Experts say the calf, nicknamed "Colin" by the Australian media, is growing weaker and has just days to live. They say that unless it feeds soon, it may have to be put down.
Two previous attempts to lure Colin out to sea, where it is hoped that he would stand a chance of being paired with passing whale pod and adopted by a lactating female, have been unsuccessful. Australia's Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon said the navy was ready to step in and help tow Colin out to sea using a fuel bladder, which would act as an inflatable sling, said the BBC's Phil Mercer in Sydney. But officials said rescuers were more likely to rely on two pontoons, offered by the Sea World theme park.
Experts say Colin, aged between one and two months, has not eaten for a week. The calf needs up to 230 litres of milk a day, a spokeswoman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare told the AFP news agency. Colin was first sighted on Sunday just north of Sydney at Pittwater and soon began to try to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave.
Rescuers towed the boat into open sea hoping that the calf would find another female to suckle from, but the attempt failed and the whale returned to an inlet near Sydney. On Wednesday, another attempt also failed. The whale has since been trying to suckle from other boats.
"It sounded like a bit of a vacuum cleaner on the bottom of the boat. I finally got up and here's this whale suckling the side of the boat," sailor Peter Lewis told a commercial radio station. "It was a very, very sad sight. It did it for about an hour, going from side to side on the boat and at times blowing air under the boat, and it just seemed to give a sigh out at one stage as if, you know, 'this isn't working'."
Euthanasia was "the most likely outcome, but we are not at that point yet", Chris McIntosh, a spokesman for the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, told AFP. Another assessment of the whale's condition will take place on Thursday and a decision will be made on what is best for it, said Mr McIntosh.
One suggestion put forward by an Australian scientist was to construct an artificial teat to feed milk formula to the whale. However, experts say that the whale needs so much milk that the idea was not an option. The humpback whales are on the return leg of an annual round trip from the Antarctic to tropical waters to breed.
They can often be seen quite close to Sydney's beaches. "Our hearts are breaking with what's happening with baby Colin," New South Wales state premier Morris Iemma was quoted by Reuters as saying. "It's looking bleak, but every effort is being made."
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Birds 'off the pace' with warming !
Birds are being thrown "out of synchronisation" by climate change. French birds are moving northwards in response to climate change, but not fast enough, scientists have found. Their data came from a large survey in which volunteer ornithologists counted more than 105 species of bird.
In the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, researchers say that the birds are lagging some 182km behind the increases in temperature. This lag may be of particular concern to rare birds or species that have very specific food requirements.
"The flora and fauna around us are shifting over time due to climate change," said Vincent Devictor, who led the research project from the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris.
"The result is desynchronisation. If birds and the insects on which they depend do not react in the same way, we are headed for an upheaval in the interaction between species," he told the AFP news agency. At its worst, this desynchronisation could result in species extinctions, he said.
In 1989, French ornithologists began a systematic survey of breeding birds. Sightings are taken at set times of the year in set locations, and follow a standard protocol. A wide variety of habitats are surveyed across the whole country, including farmland, forests, suburbs and cities.
The result is a dataset that covers virtually all wild bird species in the country, and can be used to track changes over the period. Chaffinches are among the birds found to be nesting earlier in the UK On average, bird populations moved 91km northward between 1989 and 2006.
In order to have kept themselves at a constant temperature as the country warmed, they would have had to move 273km northwards, the researchers calculated. Ben Sheldon from Oxford University, who also studies nature's response to rising temperatures, commented: "At any one site, the community of birds you find there has changed over time. "Now, more of the species that are found in warmer climates are occurring, but that change is not occurring as fast as the change in temperature is," he told BBC News.
This study did not examine whether the failure to "keep up" with rising temperatures was affecting the birds. Evidence from other studies suggests it depends on the species involved, their habitat, how their prey are responding to climate change, and what other threats and constraints they face.
A recent study of great tits in England found they were coping well with rising temperatures, changing their egg-laying times in order to adapt to the earlier emergence of insect prey.
But in the Netherlands, the same species is suffering. "Some species have changed their range hugely over the past two decades," observed Professor Sheldon. "For example, the buzzard - one of our biggest birds of prey - 20 years ago was restricted to the west of Britain, but has now spread as far east as London."
Another recent study found a number of species in the UK, including the chaffinch, were laying eggs earlier than 40 years ago.
The French team suggests more research on the issue is vital if better conservation options are to be developed.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Camera spots rare clouded leopard - The Bornean clouded leopard was only classified as a distinct species in 2007
Automatic cameras have captured images of a clouded leopard in Borneo's Sebangua National Park, an area where the cats have not been recorded before. Researchers say confirmation of the leopards' presence highlights the need to protect the region's habitat.
The park is one of the world's largest deep peat-swap forests, but is at risk from illegal logging and forest fires. The images are helping a team of scientists identify what big cat species are found in the area.
The motion-activated remote cameras that captured the remarkable images were located on the northern edge of the Sebangau National Park, Indonesian Borneo.
"The Bornean clouded leopard is a top priority for our programme," said Professor David Macdonald, director of Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, which is part of the Sebangau Felid Project.
"We are very excited by this evidence that they occur at Sebangau - a great deal remains to be discovered about these beautiful felids, which are a flagship for conservation in South-East Asia."
Based on estimates of density and population range, the team says the clouded leopards number no more than 10,000 sexually mature adults.
The cat was first classified as a separate species in 2007 after genetic testing highlighted at least 40 differences from clouded leopards found on mainland Asia.
The project aims to protect Indonesian Borneo's wild cat species, which also include the leopard cat, marbled cat and flat-headed cat.
As well as capturing the first image of the Bornean cloud leopard (Neofelis diardi) in the park, the cameras have also photographed a number of other species, including Malaysian sun bears, bearded pigs and lesser mouse deer.
The national park is also home to the world's largest remaining population of Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii), and a "substantial" number of Bornean southern gibbons (Hylobates albibarbis).
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Eat kangaroo to 'save the planet' !
Switching from beef to kangaroo burgers could significantly help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, says an Australian scientist.
The methane gas produced by sheep and cows through belching and flatulence is more potent than carbon dioxide in the damage it can cause to the environment.
But kangaroos produce virtually no methane because their digestive systems are different.
Dr George Wilson, of the Australian Wildlife Services, urges farming them.
He says they have a different set of micro-organisms in their guts to cows and sheep.
Sheep and cattle account for 11% of Australia's carbon footprint and over the years, there have been various proposals to deal with the problem.
Now Dr Wilson believes kangaroos might hold the answer.
He said: "It tastes excellent, not unlike venison - only a different flavour."
The country already produces 30 million kangaroos farmed by landholders in the outback.
But Dr Wilson is keen to see that population dramatically increased to produce the same amount of kangaroo meat as that currently produced by conventional livestock.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Diary: Protecting mountain gorillas !
In July 2007, armed men entered the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park and killed five critically endangered mountain gorillas at point-blank range, leaving the bodies where they fell.
Since September, rebel forces have controlled the area, threatening to kill any conservationists or gorilla rangers who attempted to enter the area.
Diddy and Innocent are long-serving rangers who have spent their working lives protecting the remaining gorillas in the war-torn region.
In this weekly diary, they describe life on conservation's frontline and the frustration of how recent events are hampering their efforts.
FRIDAY 8 AUGUST - GOOD NEWS AT LAST
Emmanuel (left) with Innocent and one of the massacred gorillas in July 2007
Big news for us this week; our friend and colleague Emmanuel de Merode has been appointed as the new head of Virunga National Park by the Congolese government.
Emmanuel was the former director of WildlifeDirect, the NGO that has helped raise funds for our work through our online blogs.
He is very experienced here in Virunga, and is well respected by the international community and the local Congolese alike.
We are absolutely thrilled with this development and we are looking forward to seeing Virunga move forward under his leadership.
With Emmanuel at the helm, it is hoped that we can make inroads into stabilising the park and regaining access to the Gorilla Sector, which is currently controlled by Laurent Nkunda's rebels.
At the end of the day, it will only be once peace returns to the area that we rangers will be able to get back to the job of monitoring and protecting the mountain gorillas.
We reluctantly have become a paramilitary force, but we would much prefer to drop our weapons and simply return to being wildlife rangers.
Another challenge Emmanuel will have to tackle is the charcoal trade that is continuing to be a threat to the forests of Virunga.
Last month alone, we confiscated 702 bags of illegal charcoal at our roadblock at Kibati.
After being sworn in by the Military Tribunal in Goma, Emmanuel will step into the role on 13 August, taking command of the 680 rangers serving within the park.
We all wish him the best of luck.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Raptors' reputation 'put to rest' !
The study looked at the impact of an increase in the number of hen harriers on the south of Scotland moor. Conservationists have claimed new research shows that rising numbers of birds of prey need not "spell disaster" for other threatened species. RSPB Scotland said the study of hen harriers at Langholm Moor showed they could "live together" with waders.
The analysis, carried out between 1992 and 1999, shows some species flourished despite the rise in raptor numbers. Research biologist Dr Arjun Amar said it "laid to rest" the idea hen harriers had wiped out other types of bird.
The study was carried out by scientists at RSPB Scotland, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Macaulay Institute and the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability. It found that hen harriers in the area had increased from two breeding females in 1992 to a maximum of 20 five years later.
The number of peregrine falcons also increased. By 1999, red grouse numbers in the area had fallen to a level where grouse shooting was considered unviable and ceased. However, it had also been claimed that other species - particularly waders - had been affected. The new research now shows numbers of curlew and lapwing actually increased during the period studied.
It is also claimed that although golden plover numbers declined this could not be attributed to the hen harriers. The study did show a fall in their principal prey, meadow pipits. Dr Amar said the results disproved what had been claimed in the past. "These analyses lay to rest the idea that letting hen harrier numbers increase at Langholm meant that other species like curlew, lapwing and golden plover were wiped out," he said. "On the contrary, populations of some of these species actually rose."
Prof Des Thompson, of Scottish Natural Heritage, said the evidence in the research was very significant. He said: "This robust science, building on the other important scientific work on Langholm in the 1990s, provides solid evidence that harriers were not implicated in changes in number of waders."
Langholm Moor is currently the site of a major conservation project. It hopes to find ways to allow birds of prey to flourish while at the same time running an economically viable grouse shoot.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Pet dogs can 'catch' human yawns !
By Jennifer Carpenter - Science reporter, BBC News.
Yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too. The copying activity suggests that canines are capable of empathising with people, say the researchers who recorded dogs' behaviour in lab tests.
Until now, only humans and their close primate relatives were thought to find yawning contagious. The team - from Birkbeck College, University of London - reports its findings in Biology Letters.
Yawning, although sometimes a response to extreme stress, is more often a sign of tiredness; but the reason for why yawning is catching is not fully understood.
There is evidence that autistic individuals are less inclined to yawn into response to another human yawning, suggesting that contagious yawning betrays an ability to empathise, explained Birbeck's Dr Atsushi Senju.
Dr Senju and his team wondered whether dogs - that are very skilled at reading human social cues - could read the human yawn signal, and set out to test the yawning capabilities of 29 canines.
The way we have selected dogs has emphasised certain traits
The team created two conditions, each five minutes long, in which a person - who was a stranger to the dog - was sat in front of the animal and asked to call its name. Under the first condition, the stranger yawned once the dogs had made eye contact with them.
"We gave dogs everything: visual and auditory stimulus to induce them to yawn," Dr Senju, told BBC News.
Under the second condition, the same procedure was followed, but this time the stranger opened and closed their mouth but did not yawn. This was a precaution to ensure that dogs were not responding to an open mouth, explained Dr Senju.
The team found that 21 out of 29 dogs yawned when the stranger in front of them yawned - on average, dogs yawned 1.9 times. By contrast, no dogs yawned during the non-yawning condition. The researchers believe that these results are the first evidence that dogs have the capacity to empathise with humans; although the team could not rule out stress-induced yawning - they hope to in future studies.
Dogs have lived cheek by jowl with humans for millennia
"Dogs have a very special capacity to read human communication. They respond when we point and when we signal," Dr Senju told BBC News.
The researchers explained that along with floppy ears and big soppy-eyes, humans have selected dogs to be obedient and docile. The results from this study suggest the capacity for empathy towards humans is another trait selected in dogs during domestication.
Dr Senju thinks that these traits would have been useful to humans when they began to live side-by-side with canines approximately 15,000 years ago.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Lonely honey bear has toy friend !
A tiny pet kinkajou - known as a honey bear - has become "inseparable" from a cuddly toy lemur.
Owner Jodie Lynn bought her new exotic pet the £1 toy from a charity shop to keep him company on the trip from England to his new home in Aberdeen. Young Kito now cuddles it most of the time and also tries to feed it.
Ms Lynn told the BBC Scotland news website: "Kito has settled in really well thanks to the toy lemur. He's got a toy monkey too but doesn't like it." She bought the 15-week-old kinkajou four weeks ago.
Ms Lynn, who runs Aberdeen's East Coast Exotics pet shop, said: "I just wanted to get him something for his box to keep him company and the lemur stood out. "Within about an hour he was feeding it and cleaning it. "They are inseparable."
Kito eats foods such as fruit, yoghurt and baby food.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
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