Page 11 - Simon Rushton News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

SHARE France marked the second anniversary of the Notre Dame fire as architects finalised the start of its restoration programme. Since the fire destroyed much of the cathedral's roof and caused its spire to collapse, the extensive rebuild has focused on consolidation, after which restoration work will begin. French President Emmanuel Macron said that while a lot of good work had been accomplished in the past two years, “we also see what remains to be done”. Mr Macron set a five-year restoration target in the immediate aftermath of the fire, which, if met, would make the cathedral acc...

SHARE Coronavirus surge testing is spreading across an expanding area of London as more cases of the highly-contagious South Africa variant are found. Four London boroughs are now offering surge testing as a response to finding cases of South African mutation, and for the first time the mutation has skipped further afield than the next borough. The South Africa variant is feared because it is highly contagious and appears to be successful, to some extent, in beating vaccine protections notably the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. More than half a million people have been offered tests in the four ...

Organisers turn the page from live to online-only event

One of the people behind the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine criticised Denmark for halting use of the drug completely and said it could lead to many more lives being lost. Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said a mix-and-match approach to coronavirus vaccines could offer better protection than using a single drug. Denmark this week stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine, the first country to impose a full ban because of links to rare blood clotting. "They will have a lot of dead people, many more people than if they had used the AstraZeneca vaccine," Sir Joh...

SHARE One of mysteries of flight for a dinosaur-like reptile with a long neck and heavy head has been uncovered by palaeontologists. The azhdarchid pterosaur was a giant reptile with a head that could measure 1.5 metres and a neck longer than a giraffe, a build that seemed ideal for keeping a creature on the ground. But palaeontologists from the University of Portsmouth have worked out how highly evolved, lightweight vertebra helped the pterosaur to soar. A CT scan of remains found in Morocco revealed a complex image of spoke-like structures – similar to those on a wheel – arranged in ...