LONDON: From TV documentaries and the private memories of her sons to a slew of new “revelations” and renewed theories about her death, Britain’s Princess Diana is once again front page news 20 years after she died.
Diana was killed at age 36 on Aug. 31, 1997 along with her lover Dodi Al-Fayed when a limousine carrying them crashed in a Paris tunnel as it sped away from paparazzi giving chase on motorbikes.
The first wife of heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, Diana was the glittering princess at the center of a royal soap opera played out in the glare of the media, making her probably the most recognized woman around the world.
Her passing prompted the biggest public outpouring of grief seen in Britain in recent times, and few since have captivated the world like she did.
“There will never be anyone else like Diana,” said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of “Diana: The Last Word.”
Previous anniversaries of her death have gone by with little fanfare, suggesting that the “People’s Princess,” as she was dubbed by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had perhaps lost some of her allure and relevance.
But, with her sons Prince William and Harry to the fore, the 20th anniversary has seen her dominate front pages of newspapers as she did in her prime as the world’s most photographed woman.
“There was a period in the early 2000s where very little was heard of Diana,” commented Ken Wharfe, her ex-royal protection officer. He said her two sons’ desire to continue her work by supporting causes such as helping Aids sufferers, the homeless and combating land mines, had made her relevant again.
The princes have also been increasingly willing to speak about the trauma of her death and its lasting emotional impact.
In broadcasts aired over the last six months, William, 35, said the shock of losing his mother still lingered while Harry, 32, revealed he had sought counselling in his late 20s to help deal with the grief.
“She still is our mum,” Harry said in an intimate TV documentary entitled “Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy.” “Of course, as a son I would say this, she was the best mum in the world. She smothered us with love, that is for sure.”
Ashley Gething, the documentary’s director, told Reuters he was impressed with Diana’s achievements. “What amazed me was what she would actually done... All these enormous issues like championing the homeless, often in the face of criticism of politicians and editors of national newspapers.”
Dark Days
Almost 10 million Britons tuned into that documentary, while another TV program “Diana In Her Own Words,” aired earlier this month, was watched by 3.5 million Britons, giving broadcaster Channel 4 its highest viewing figures for a year.
That program featured videoed conversations, never shown before on British TV, of Diana speaking candidly with her speech therapist about her sex life with Prince Charles and her sorrow at the spectacular collapse of her marriage.
Similar shows have been aired or are planned in the United States, where many have been gripped by Diana’s story, from her fairytale marriage to Charles in 1981 to their subsequent separation and bitter divorce. More than 33 million Americans tuned in to watch her funeral in September 1997.
The days after her death were some of the darkest in Queen Elizabeth’s 65-year reign and some monarchists fear the attention lavished on Diana will rekindle resentment toward the House of Windsor.
Many Britons were angered at how Diana was ostracized by the royal family after her 1996 divorce from Charles, with Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s lover who later became his wife, a particular focus of enmity.
With renewed focus on the popular Diana, an ICM poll for the Sun newspaper this month found that just 22 percent of respondents wanted Charles, 68, to be the next king while more than half wanted the next monarch to be his son William.
It also showed that 36 percent of the 2,000 people questioned felt Camilla, 70, should be Princess Consort and not queen. Only 27 percent backed her having the regal title.
“Anything retrospective can open old wounds and does open old wounds,” Seward said, although she believed the impact would soon wane. “People forget quickly and I do not think it has any long lasting effect.”
Instead she and other royal commentators say Diana’s lasting impact was a royal family more in touch with the public.
“This program of bringing the royal family into the 21st century is being continued by her two sons who, for my part, are the future of the British monarchy,” Wharfe said.
Princess Diana beguiles the world 20 years after death
Princess Diana beguiles the world 20 years after death
Microsoft and OpenAI dueling over artificial general intelligence, The Information reports
- The report comes at a time when one of the most pivotal partnerships in the field of AI is under strain
Microsoft and OpenAI are at odds over a contractual provision related to artificial general intelligence, The Information reported on Wednesday.
Under the current terms, when OpenAI achieves AGI, Microsoft’s access to such a technology would be void. Microsoft wants OpenAI to remove that clause but so far OpenAI has refused, the report said.
“We have a long-term, productive partnership that has delivered amazing AI tools for everyone. Talks are ongoing and we are optimistic we will continue to build together for years to come,” OpenAI and Microsoft said in a joint statement emailed to Reuters.
The report comes at a time when one of the most pivotal partnerships in the field of AI is under strain.
OpenAI needs Microsoft’s approval to complete its transition into a public-benefit corporation. But the two have not been able to agree on details even after months of negotiations, according to sources.
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion to support the startup’s development of AI technologies on its Azure cloud platform.
An Alaskan brown bear has a new shiny smile after getting a huge metal crown for a canine tooth
- The 360-kilogram Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown
- “He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said
MINNESOTA: An Alaskan brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.
The 800-pound (360-kilogram) Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.
“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.
The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown.
The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.
Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.
“This is the largest crown ever created in the world,” she said. “It has to be published.”
Tundra and his sibling, Banks, have been at the Duluth zoo since they were 3 months old, after their mother was killed.
Tundra is now 6 years old and, at his full height on his hind legs, stands about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall. The sheer size of the bear required a member of the zoo’s trained armed response team to be present in the room — a gun within arm’s reach — in case the animal awoke during the procedure, Routley said. But the procedure went without a hitch, and Tundra is now back in his habitat, behaving and eating normally.
Other veterinary teams have not always been as lucky. In 2009, a zoo veterinarian at Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, Nebraska, suffered severe injuries to his arm while performing a routine medical exam on a 200-pound (90 kilogram) Malaysian tiger.
The tiger was coming out of sedation when the vet inadvertently brushed its whiskers, causing the tiger to reflexively bite down on the vet’s forearm.
Bears get paws on the honey in UK wildlife park escape
- The pair made a beeline for their food store where they scoffed snack’s including the seven-day supply of honey
- During the hour-long drama, the bears were “continuously monitored both on the ground and via CCTV“
LONDON: Two young bears escaped from their enclosure at a UK wildlife park and devoured a week’s worth of food store honey before falling asleep, the attraction said on Tuesday.
Mish and Lucy, both aged four, got out of their enclosure at Wildwood Devon in southwestern England on Monday afternoon.
The pair made a beeline for their food store where they scoffed snack’s including the seven-day supply of honey, a park statement said.
The bears “posed no threat to the public at any point” although visitors on site were escorted to a secure building as a precaution.
During the hour-long drama, the bears were “continuously monitored both on the ground and via CCTV” until they were returned to their enclosure by keepers and promptly “fell asleep,” Wildwood added.
Police attended the scene and an investigation was underway to determine how the animals managed to break out, it said.
The park spread across 40 acres (160 hectares) of gardens and woodland is home to an array of wildlife including brown bears, wolves and arctic foxes.
Gender not main factor in attacks on Egyptian woman pharaoh: study
- Earlier scholars believed Queen Hatshepsut’s stepson Thutmose III unleashed a posthumous campaign of defilement against her out of revenge and hatred, including because he wanted to purge any notion that a woman could successfully rule
TORONTO, Canada: She was one of ancient Egypt’s most successful rulers, a rare female pharaoh who preceded Cleopatra by 1,500 years, but Queen Hatshepsut’s legacy was systematically erased by her stepson successor after her death.
The question of why her impressive reign was so methodically scrubbed has attracted significant debate, but in new research published Monday, University of Toronto scholar Jun Wong argues far too much emphasis has been placed on her gender.
“It’s quite a romantic question: why was this pharaoh attacked after her death?” Wong told AFP, explaining his interest in a monarch who steered ancient Egypt through a period of extraordinary prosperity.
Earlier scholars believed Queen Hatshepsut’s stepson Thutmose III unleashed a posthumous campaign of defilement against her out of revenge and hatred, including because he wanted to purge any notion that a woman could successfully rule.
“The way in which (Hatshepsut’s) reign has been understood has always been colored by her gender,” Wong said, referencing beliefs that Thutmose III may have viewed her as “a kind of an evil stepmother.”
His research, which builds on other recent scholarship and is being published in the journal Antiquity, argues Thutmose III’s motivations were far more nuanced, casting further doubt on the theory of backlash against a woman in charge.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt roughly 3,500 years ago, taking over following the death of her husband Thutmose II.
She first served as regent to her stepson, the king-in-waiting, but successfully consolidated power in her own right, establishing herself as a female pharaoh.
Experts say she expanded trade routes and commissioned extraordinary structures, including an unparallelled mortuary in the Valley of the Kings on the Nile’s west bank.
Wong reassessed a range of material from damaged statues uncovered during excavations from 1922 to 1928.
He said there is no doubt Thutmose III worked to eliminate evidence of Hatshepsut’s achievements, but his efforts were “perhaps driven by ritual necessity rather than outright antipathy,” Wong said.
Thutmose III may have been trying to neutralize the power of his predecessor in a practical and common way, not out of malice.
He also found that some of the statues depicting Hatshepsut were likely damaged because later generations wanted to reuse them as building materials.
“For a long time, it has been assumed that Hatshepsut’s statuary sustained a vindictive attack,” Wong said, arguing that a fresh look at the archives suggests “this is not the case.”
Crash dummies used in car safety tests are still modeled after men despite higher risks for women
- Maria Weston Kuhn, a survivor of a near-fatal accident, created a nonprofit to help change that
- Her organization is asking members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would mandate the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to upgrade the standards
Maria Weston Kuhn had one lingering question about the car crash that forced her to have emergency surgery during a vacation in Ireland: Why did she and her mother sustain serious injuries while her father and brother, who sat in the front, emerge unscathed?
“It was a head-on crash and they were closest to the point of contact,” said Kuhn, now 25, who missed a semester of college to recover from the 2019 collision that caused her seat belt to slide off her hips and rupture her intestines by pinning them against her spine. “That was an early clue that something else was going on.”
When Kuhn returned home to Maine, she found an article her grandma had clipped from Consumer Reports and left on her bed. Women are 73 percent more likely to be injured in a frontal crash, she learned, yet the dummy used in vehicle tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dates back to the 1970s and is still modeled almost entirely off the body of a man.
A survivor becomes an activist
Kuhn, who is starting law school at New York University this fall, took action and founded the nonprofit Drive US Forward. Its aim was to raise public awareness and eventually encourage members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would require NHTSA to incorporate a more advanced female dummy into its testing.
The agency has the final word on whether cars get pulled from the market, and the kind of dummy used in its safety tests could impact which ones receive coveted five-star ratings.
“It seems like we have an easy solution here where we can have crash test dummies that reflect an average woman as well as a man,” Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican who has introduced the legislation the past two sessions, told The Associated Press.
Senators from both parties have signed onto Fischer’s “She Drives Act,” and the transportation secretaries from the past two presidential administrations have expressed support for updating the rules.
But for various reasons, the push for new safety requirements has been moving at a sluggish pace. That’s particularly true in the US, where much of the research is happening and where around 40,000 people are killed each year in car crashes.
Evolution of a crash test dummy
The crash test dummy currently used in NHTSA five-star testing is called the Hybrid III, which was developed in 1978 and modeled after a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man (the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than today’s average). What’s known as the female dummy is essentially a much smaller version of the male model with a rubber jacket to represent breasts. It’s routinely tested in the passenger seat or the back seat but seldom in the driver’s seat, even though the majority of licensed drivers are women.
“What they didn’t do is design a crash test dummy that has all the sensors in the areas where a woman would be injured differently than a man,” said Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Humanetics Group, which has spent more than a decade developing and refining one.
A female dummy from Humanetics equipped with all of the available sensors costs around $1 million, about twice the cost of the Hybrid used now.
But, O’Connor says, the more expensive dummy far more accurately reflects the anatomical differences between the sexes — including in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs, which one NHTSA study found account for about 80 percent more injuries by women in a car crash compared to men.
Such physical dummies will always be needed for vehicle safety tests, and to verify the accuracy of virtual tests, O’Connor said.
Europe incorporated the more advanced male dummy developed by Humanetics’ engineers, the THOR 50M (based on a 50th percentile man), into its testing procedures soon after Kuhn’s 2019 crash in Ireland. Several other countries, including China and Japan, have adopted it as well.
But that model and the female version the company uses for comparison, the THOR 5F (based on a 5th percentile woman), have been met with skepticism from some American automakers who argue the more sophisticated devices may exaggerate injury risks and undercut the value of some safety features such as seat belts and airbags.
A debate over whether more sensors mean more safety
Bridget Walchesky, 19, had to be flown to a hospital, where she required eight surgeries over a month, after a 2022 crash near her home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, that killed her friend, who was driving. While acknowledging the seat belt likely saved her life, Walchesky said some of the injuries — including her broken collarbone — were the result of it pinning her too tightly, which she views as something better safety testing focused on women could improve.
“Seat belts aren’t really built for bodies on females,” Walchesky said. “Some of my injuries, the way the force hit me, they were probably worsened.”
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement to the AP that the better way to ensure safety — which it called its top priority — is through upgrades to the existing Hybrid dummy rather than mandating a new one.
“This can happen on a faster timeline and lead to quicker safety improvements than requiring NHTSA to adopt unproven crash test dummy technology,” the alliance said.
Humanetics’ THOR dummies received high marks in the vehicle safety agency’s early tests. Using cadavers from actual crashes to compare the results, NHTSA found they outperformed the existing Hybrid in predicting almost all injuries — including to the head, neck, shoulders, abdomen and legs.
A separate review by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research arm funded by auto insurers, was far more critical of the dummy’s ability to predict chest injuries in a frontal crash. Despite the vast expansion in the number of sensors, the insurance institute’s testing found, the male THOR dummy was less accurate than the current Hybrid dummies, which also had limitations.
“More isn’t necessarily better,” said Jessica Jermakian, senior vice president for vehicle research at IIHS. “You also have to be confident that the data is telling you the right things about how a real person would fare in that crash.”
The slow pace of changing the rules
NHTSA’s budget plan commits to developing the female THOR 5F version with the ultimate goal of incorporating it into the testing. But there could be a long wait considering the THOR’s male version adopted by other countries is still awaiting final approval in the US
A 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, which conducts research for Congress, cited numerous “missed milestones” in NHTSA’s development of various crash dummy enhancements — including in the THOR models.
Kuhn acknowledges being frustrated by the slow process of trying to change the regulations. She says she understands why there’s reluctance from auto companies if they fear being forced to make widespread design changes with more consideration for women’s safety.
“Fortunately, they have very skilled engineers and they’ll figure it out,” she said.
