Man to leap to Earth from 120,000 feet up
NEW YORK: Some time this year, Felix Baumgartner intends to step out of a capsule lifted 120,000 feet (36,600 meters) by a balloon and leap back to Earth, becoming the first man to break the sound barrier without an aircraft.
And yes, he will be afraid. “Of course. I always use fear to my advantage, for focus,” said Baumgartner, 40, the Austrian-born skydiver best known for gliding 22 miles (35 km) across the English Channel with the help of a 6-foot (2-meter) wing strapped to his back after jumping from 33,000 feet (10,000 meters) in 2003.
The jump, sponsored by a beverage company, will take place from the stratosphere on an unspecified date at an unspecified place in North America, event organizers said on Friday.
The date and place will depend on weather conditions. One aim is to break the 50-year-old record set by Joe Kittinger, who jumped from 102,800 feet (31,333 meters) for the US Air Force in 1960 to mark the highest parachute jump and longest and fastest free fall.
Members of Baumgartner’s team insist another goal is in the interest of science, including monitoring the effects of supersonic travel on the body and how it reacts to the changes in pressure, temperature, acceleration and deceleration.
Airline denies plans for obesity surcharge
PARIS: Air France KLM has denied media reports that it is planning an extra charge for overweight passengers if they were unable to fit into a single seat. Instead, the national carrier said that from Feb 1. overweight passengers who had freely chosen to buy an extra seat for comfort would get their money back on flights that were not fully booked. “Contrary to press reports, Air France is not planning to force corpulent passengers to pay for a second seat,” the statement said. Air France said that since 2005 it had offered overweight passengers an option to buy a second seat at a 25 percent discount. “It is not an obligation; we suggest to such passengers they buy a second seat for their own comfort and in order to be sure the seats are adapted to their needs,” Air France spokesman Jean-Pierre Lefebvre said. Several newspapers had reported that obese passengers flying Air France-KLM would have to pay 75 per cent of the cost of a second seat on top of the full price for the first seat, and that the measure was introduced for safety reasons. Southwest Airlines and United Airlines have a policy where “oversize” people need to buy a second seat and can claim a refund if the plane is not full. This followed complaints from adjacent passengers. In 2006 Air France was sued by a French passenger after the airline told him he was too big to fit in one seat and would have to buy an additional seat if he wanted to fly from New Delhi to Paris. The passenger, who sued on the ground he was deeply humiliated by the situation because he was measured in a public area of the airport, won the case.
The art of forgery goes on show
LONDON: A unique collection of art went on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on Saturday — all of it fake. More than 100 forged paintings and sculptures seized by the capital’s Metropolitan Police are on show for the first time, including fake antiquities and works attributed to Giacometti and contemporary British artist Banksy. If they were real, the collection would be worth more than four million pounds ($6.5 million), organizers said. Many of the items come from the workshop of the most diverse art forger ever known. Shaun Greenhalgh was jailed for four years and eight months in 2007, but not before he produced an astonishing array of fakes in multiple disciplines. One of his most notorious works is the “Amarna Princess”, which was bought by a museum in Bolton, northern England, for 400,000 pounds. It thought it was a rare piece from the era of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. The forger also succeeded in imitating paintings by the English painter L.S. Lowry, as well as Roman vessels and medieval jewelry. The forgers featured in the exhibition often certificates of authenticity signed by experts to help sell their works, some of which are on display alongside the items themselves. Others, such as brothers Robert and Brian Thwaites, even went so far as to stick bits of newspaper from the Victorian era behind fake paintings attributed to an artist of that period, John Anster Fitzgerald. The exhibition, “The Metropolitan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries” will run until Feb. 7.
— Compiled from agencies