A masked gunman set fire to a gaming room at a casino in the Philippine capital on Friday, igniting a toxic blaze that killed 36 people, authorities said, but they insisted it was not a terrorist attack. The victims suffocated inside one of the main gambling venues of the upscale Resorts World Manila, while dozens of other people were injured in a panicked crush to escape, police said. The gunman committed suicide inside a hotel room by burning himself about five hours after storming the casino with an M4 assault rifle and a bottle of petrol that he used to start the fire, police chief Ronald Dela Rosa said.
OXON HILL, Md. (AP) — The Scripps National Spelling Bee proves every year that word knowledge is personal and idiosyncratic. Words that baffle most of the audience are considered easy by elite spellers. And spellers get tripped up by words that many older people come across frequently. Here are some memorable words from Thursday's final rounds of the bee.
Jurassic Park — you know, that silly little novel-turned-movie about mankind bringing dinosaurs back from the dead that made a measly $1 billion — is science fiction, but could it ever actually happen? Researchers studying the remains of one special Tyrannosaurus rex thought it just might be when they discovered what they thought was intact proteins deep within the dinosaur's fossilized bones. Now, new research has absolutely destroyed the already hazy dream that dinosaurs could one day be resurrected.
When first announced, the discovery of these proteins proved a very exciting event for many paleontologists and scientists. It was the first time that such a discovery had been made, and seemed to fly in the face of the accepted belief that dinosaur fossils simply couldn't provide the DNA data that would be needed to even begin the process of resurrecting such long-extinct animals. Unfortunately, there was apparently no reason to be excited in the first place, because the proteins detected by lab analysis weren't even that of a dinosaur.
Upon further investigation of the alleged dinosaur DNA, a team of scientists from the University of Manchester have determined that the lab's initial data was contaminated. Having worked with modern species samples in the same laboratory, the cross-contamination of ostrich proteins led the first group of researchers to believe they had somehow found intact dinosaur DNA, when in fact it was simply that of a present day flightless bird. It's an incredibly disappointing result, given the hype that surrounded the initial discovery, but for now it seems Jurassic Park will remain firmly in the realm of fiction.
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