Thursday, November 26, 2009 ATLANTERRA: A Swiss adventurer trying to soar from Morocco to Spain on jet-powered wings ditched safely into the Atlantic on Wednesday after hitting turbulence and clouds so thick he could not tell if he was flying up or down.The bad weather - rather than a mechanical malfunction, as reported earlier by the project's sponsors - thwarted Yves Rossy's bid to become the first person to achieve such an intercontinental crossing.Rossy waved from the cold blue sea while awaiting rescue, his red wing and striped parachute floating beside him. In time, a rescuer helicopter winched him from the wind-swept waters to safety."I am still here - a little bit wet but I am still here," told a news conference after undergoing a medical checkup, still wearing his red and white flying suit. "I did my best," he said.Rossy, a 50-year-old former fighter pilot, took off from Tangiers but a few minutes into what was supposed to be a 15-minute flight he vanished from TV screens providing live footage from planes and choppers accompanying him. For a good 10 minutes, no one knew where he was.Rossy said that about three or four minutes into the flight he hit turbulence and entered clouds that he described as beautiful but disorienting because he could not see and had no reference points.He tried to climb over the cloud cover "but before the blue came again" his flying became unstable. Eventually he found himself wobbling and dropping at up to 300 kilometres per hour until he was just 850 metres above the water. At that rate he would have hit it in about 20 seconds."So the sea comes very fast," he said. "Unstable, at this height, there is no playing anymore. So I throw away my wing and opened my parachute."Rossy said he was disappointed but will keep doing this kind of flight - he did the English Channel last year - and plans to take on the Grand Canyon next spring with an upgraded wing he is now completing."I love to fly and to fly like this is freedom," he said. "The emotions are so strong you become addicted."
Friday, August 14, 2009 MUMBAI: A 26-year-old woman died Thursday of H1N1 swine flu in the southern city of Bangalore, raising India's death toll from the virus to 20, authorities said.The death was the first reported in India's information technology capital, the Press Trust of India reported.Meanwhile in Pune, the worst-affected in India, two more victims of the virus died Thursday, raising the death toll in that western city near Mumbai to 12, the report said. The victims were an 11-month-old boy and a 75-year-old old woman.US media reported movie halls, schools and colleges were ordered closed Thursday for three days to a week in Mumbai, the commercial and financial capital of the country, as fear of the pandemic spread.Prajakata Lavangare, a spokeswoman for the government of Maharashtra state of which Mumbai is the capital, said similar orders were issued in Pune, which is also located in the state.The woman who died in Bangalore was identified only as Roopa, a teacher in
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