Price for corgis rockets in UK after queen’s death
Prices for corgis, the dogs beloved by Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth, have soared to new highs since her funeral last week, AFP reported the UK’s largest pet marketplace as saying
Pets4Homes told AFP it was currently experiencing “over ten times the volume of daily searches for corgis when compared to this time last week”.
It added: “The prices asked for by registered corgi breeders have today hit a new high, with average asking prices doubling over the past three days.”
One of the small herding dogs now sells for over £2,500 for the first time, even outstripping prices reached during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand spiked for four-legged companions.
The dogs were a busy presence in the queen’s court, following her from room to room and featuring in official photos.
They were even given a starring role in the spoof James Bond clip filmed with the queen for the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
NASA spaceship strikes target asteroid
A NASA spaceship struck an asteroid seven million miles away in order to deflect its orbit, succeeding in a historic test of humanity’s ability to prevent a celestial object from devastating life on Earth.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impactor hit its target, the space rock Dimorphos, just after midnight Irish time, ten months after blasting off from California on its pioneering mission, AFP reports.
“We’re embarking on a new era, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid impact,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
Dimorphos – a 160-metre asteroid roughly comparable in size to an Egyptian pyramid – orbits a half-mile long big brother called Didymos. Never seen before, the “moonlet” appeared as a speck of light around an hour before the collision.
Its egg-like shape and craggy, boulder-dotted surface finally came into clear view in the last few minutes, as DART raced toward it at roughly 23,500km/ph.
NASA scientists and engineers erupted in applause as the screen froze on a final image, indicating that signal had been lost and impact had taken place.
Half of world’s birds species in decline
Almost half of all bird species are in decline globally and one in eight are threatened with extinction, according to a major new report warning that human actions are driving more species to the brink and nature is “in trouble”.
The four-yearly State of the World’s Birds report, which provides a snapshot of the plight of species globally and more broadly a barometer for biodiversity, comes as the United Nations steers an international process to protect nature.
“One in eight bird species is threatened with extinction, and the status of the world’s birds continues to deteriorate – species are moving ever faster towards extinction,” said the report released last week by BirdLife International.