Pretty UK city planning tourist tax after being made ‘hell on earth’ by Harry Potter fans

Travel

The cobblestone streets and ancient architecture of York may evoke a quintessential English idyll for many, but the day-to-day reality experienced by locals speaks to a drastically different view.The North Yorkshire city was the inspiration for parts of the Harry Potter books, and wizarding fans make up a crucial part of its annual tourist numbers.But local officials are now trying to backpedal on this universal appeal after swelling numbers began to make life “hell on earth” for year-round residents.York saw nine million tourists crowd its narrow streets last year, with many attracted by the famous Shambles shopping street, which inspired JK Rowling’s Diagon Alley, as well as the city’s Medieval Minster and Roman walls.The scale of the visitor influx is so great that the council is considering adding a tourist tax to hotel bills. Locals have described central York as “horrific” and said they avoid it at weekends.According to long-term residents, Harry Potter fans make up a sizeable percentage of the tourist hoards, alongside hen parties and stag dos.Shane Sayner, 47, who works as a cleaner in the area, told MailOnline: “It’s absolutely dreadful now with all the hen parties and racegoers. There aren’t enough toilets so people urinate in doorways and you can smell it in the mornings.”It gets chaotic from around 1pm on a Saturday. Parents will take their kids into town and there will be people screaming, drunk, waving inflatable genitalia.” Labour-led York City Council is planning to introduce a new levy to tackle the growing problem, with councillors dubbing it a “no brainer” way to discourage visitors and boost funding to improve local infrastructure.While local authorities cannot impose such levies directly, the council is considering working with hotels and other businesses to set up a voluntary scheme or collect the charges through a business improvement district.Julie Smith, 34, works as a hospital nurse in the city. She told The Sun: “York is teeming with tourists at times, coming here for the Harry Potter type of experience down the Shambles and the Roman walls.”You can’t move at times for people taking selfies. I think asking visitors to York to pay a small fee is not unreasonable.”Sallyann Driscoll, 50, who works at a boarding school, added: “You get the hen dos from Newcastle in the summer and the Chinese, Americans and other foreign tourists hitting the Shambles, which they see as a Harry Potter movie set.“At Christmas, it is horrific. I go in the week and it is lovely, but you won’t get many locals going there on a weekend – it’s hell on earth.”Councillor Pete Kilbane recently suggested that a European-style levy of £2.50 per tourist could raise up to £5 million a year.But experts have warned that the new charge could be too effective and threaten to damage the city’s thriving visitor industry.Andrew Pawson, CEO of Continuum Attractions, told the Express: “Tourism is a vital driver for the city, supporting thousands of jobs and contributing significantly to the local economy.”Any reduction in visitor numbers could have a cascading effect on restaurants, attractions and other businesses.”This boom could be put at risk by imposing additional taxes, which would make an affordable family day out just that little bit more expensive and highlight York as a place erecting barriers to tourism.”

La. Art and Science Museum celebrates Christmas with special event

Science and Health

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – The Louisiana Art and Science Museum is celebrating Christmas with a special event called “Coca-Cola Christmas: A Month of Magic.”The special event is a museum-wide celebration in downtown Baton Rouge and runs through January 5, 2025.There is a winter wonderland on display throughout museum, including a 20-foot Coca-Cola bear, a Santa’s workshop, a North Pole Post Office, and more. In addition to the displays, the Irene, W. Pennington Planetarium at the museum is also offering holiday-themed shows. “Let it Snow” features holiday music classics and scenery. “The Star of Bethlehem” takes you back thousands of years to investigate the star that guided the Wise Men. The Louisiana Art and Science Museum has partnered with Coca-Cola for several years for the “A Very Merry Museum” event. However, the two organizations wanted to expand what they offered to the public in 2024.“The rich history between Coca-Cola and Christmas goes back to the 1940s,” stated Biedenharn. “From the iconic Santa Claus to the recent polar bear, we bring cheer to the holidays. Now, we are happy to bring some of that cheer to the Louisiana Art & Science Museum, and hope it brings many memories to you and your family.”For more information on events going on at the museum, click here.The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday and is located on River Road in downtown Baton Rouge. There is a fee to enter the museum.Click here to report a typo. Please include the headline.Click here to subscribe to our WAFB 9 News daily digest and breaking news alerts delivered straight to your email inbox.Copyright 2024 WAFB. All rights reserved.

‘Weather-related travel delays’ cause Giants game cancellation

Travel

Press Eye22 December 2024The Elite League match between Belfast Giants and Fife Flyers on Sunday has been postponed because of “weather-related travel delays”.The game at the SSE Arena was scheduled to start at 16:00 GMT.”The Stena Line Belfast Giants regret to confirm that this afternoon’s Elite League fixture against the Fife Flyers has been postponed due to weather-related travel delays,” said the Giants,”All tickets will remain valid for the rescheduled date, which will be communicated in due course.”Related topicsIce Hockey

47-Million-Year-Old “Alien Plant” Baffles Scientists With Strange Features

Science and Health

An strange, extinct plant once thought to be related to modern ginseng is now considered the lone representative of an unknown family. Credit: Florida Museum of Natural History photo by Jeff Gage
The discovery indicates a greater diversity in the fossil record of flowering plants than was previously acknowledged.
In 1969, fossilized leaves of Othniophyton elongatum—a name meaning “alien plant”—were discovered in eastern Utah. Initially, scientists speculated that this extinct species might have been part of the ginseng family (Araliaceae). However, this assumption is now being reconsidered as new fossil specimens suggest that Othniophyton elongatum is even stranger than previously believed.
Steven Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has spent years studying 47-million-year-old fossils from Utah. During a visit to the paleobotany collection at the University of California, Berkeley, he encountered an exceptionally well-preserved and unidentified plant fossil. It had been collected from the same region where the Othniophyton elongatum leaves were originally found.
In a new study published in the journal Annals of Botany, Manchester and his colleagues demonstrated that the fossils, including the leaves examined in 1969, belong to a unique plant with distinctive flowers and fruits. Careful analysis confirmed that the fossils from 1969 and the Berkeley collection represent the same species. However, the leaves, fruits, and flowers attached to the woody stem in the Berkeley specimens were unlike anything seen in other plants of the ginseng family, to which Othniophyton elongatum was initially assigned.
“This fossil is rare in having the twig with attached fruits and leaves. Usually, those are found separately,” Manchester said.
The authors extensively analyzed physical features of the old and new fossils, then methodically searched for any living plant family to which they could belong. There are over 400 diverse families of flowering plants alive today, but the authors couldn’t match the fossils’ strange assortment of features with any of them.
These fossils, initially discovered in the 1960s, look similar to the compound leaves present in some species of the ginseng family of plants. Credit: Manchester et al., 2024
Resisting the urge to tidily lump the obscure specimen in with a living group, the team then searched for extinct families it might have belonged to but came up empty-handed once again.
The authors say their results underscore what may be a pervasive problem in paleobotany. In many cases, extinct plants that existed less than 65 million years ago are placed within modern families, or genera — the taxonomic groups directly above the level of individual species. This can create a skewed estimate of biodiversity in ancient ecosystems.
“There are many things for which we have good evidence to put in a modern family or genus, but you can’t always shoehorn these things,” Manchester said.
The species does not belong to any living family or genus
The fossils were discovered in the Green River Formation near the ghost town of Rainbow in eastern Utah. Roughly 47 million years ago, the area was a tectonically active, massive inland lake system that provided the perfect conditions for fossil preservation. Low-oxygen lake sediments and showers of volcanic ash slowed the decomposition of many fish, reptiles, birds, invertebrates, and plants, allowing some of them to be preserved in amazing detail.
Researchers who had studied the original leaf fossils of this species had very little to work with. Without flowers, fruits or branches, they were limited to analyzing the shape and vein patterns of the leaves. Based on the arrangement, researchers thought it might be a single leaf made up of multiple smaller leaflets. This type of compound leaf is a defining feature of several plants in the ginseng family.
Though this species in the ginseng family looks like it has many individual leaves, it actually has compound leaves, each with seven small leaflets arranged in a radiating pattern. Distinguishing leaves from leaflets is a difficult when found in isolation. Credit: Illustration from Gartenflora, volume 18 (1869), CC0
But the new fossils had leaves that were directly attached to stems, which painted a very different picture of what the plant once looked like.
“The two twigs we found show the same kind of leaf attached, but they’re not compound. They’re simple, which eliminates the possibility of it being anything in that family,” Manchester said.
The fossil’s berries ruled out families like the grasses and magnolias. The flowers did resemble some modern groups, but other features ruled those out, too. Even with such a pristine fossil in their repertoire, researchers were left with more questions than before.
Researchers could now see the fossil in a new light
Stumped, the team set the fossil aside for several years. Then the Florida Museum hired a curator of artificial intelligence who established a new microscopy workstation. When viewed through the digital microscope’s powerful lens and computer-enhanced shadow effect illumination, the authors could see subtle peculiarities they’d missed during prior observations.
When they focused on the fossil’s minute fruits, they could see micro-impressions left behind by their internal anatomy, including features of the small, developing seeds.
“Normally we don’t expect to see that preserved in these types of fossils, but maybe we’ve been overlooking it because our equipment didn’t pick up that kind of topographic relief,” Manchester said.
Graduate student and paleoartist Ashley Hamersma created this reconstruction of Othniophyton elongatum as it would have appeared when it was alive, complete with leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds and stubbornly persistent stamens. Credit: Illustration by Manchester et al., 2024
One of the plant’s strangest newly seen features was its stamens, the male reproductive organs of the flower. In most plant species, once the flower is fertilized, the stamens detach along with petals and the rest of the flower parts, which are no longer needed for reproduction.
“Usually, stamens will fall away as the fruit develops. And this thing seems unusual in that it’s retaining the stamens at the time it has mature fruits with seeds ready to disperse. We haven’t seen that in anything modern,” Manchester said.
With all modern families ruled out, they compared the traits to extinct families. Once again, there was no match to be found.
Julian Correa-Narvaez, the lead author of the study and a doctoral student at the University of Florida, played a major role in gathering information to identify the fossils. “It’s important because it gives us a little bit of a clue about how these organisms were evolving and adapting in different places,” he said.
Plant families can contain astonishing amounts of diversity. Seemingly disparate plants like poison ivy, cashews, and mangoes are all in the same family, along with over 800 other species. It’s unclear how much diversity in this mysterious extinct group has been lost to time.
This isn’t the only enigmatic species that has come out of the Green River Formation. Similar situations have unfolded when plant fossils from the locality surprised researchers, leading to the discovery of other extinct groups. “The book published in 1969 has all these interesting mysteries that remain,” Manchester said.
With digital access to museum specimens through tools like iDigBio, researchers can continue to study and understand the natural history of plant evolution.
Reference: “Vegetative and reproductive morphology of Othniophyton elongatum (MacGinitie) gen. et comb. nov., an extinct angiosperm of possible caryophyllalean affinity from the Eocene of Colorado and Utah, USA” by Steven R Manchester, Walter S Judd and Julian E Correa-Narvaez, 9 November 2024, Annals of Botany.DOI: 10.1093/aob/mcae196
Walter Judd of the Florida Museum of Natural History is also a co-author of the study.

‘It’s been amazing’: Wellington business owner excited about sales the Saturday before Christmas

Business News

Retailers were keeping their fingers crossed that shoppers would take advantage of Super Saturday.According to the National Retail Federation, more than 157 million people were expected to shop on the Saturday before Christmas.The Wellington Mall was packed on the last Saturday before Christmas, commonly known as Super Saturday.Your neighborhood: Local coverage from WPBF 25 NewsThe store manager at Ella Bella Collection, Giovanna Najjar, enjoys being busy.”It’s been amazing, actually,” Najjar said. “We sensed a shift about 10 days ago. The craze started, everybody is serious, and we’re getting these rushes that come out of nowhere. But it’s really fun, and we really enjoy it.”According to the National Retail Federation, as of early this month, shoppers had already purchased 50% of the items on their list, and only 10% were completely done shopping.Shopper Chris Antle admits he was doing some last-minute shopping Saturday.”I just kind of came here with no game plan, and it was successful,” Antle said.HOLIDAY TRAVEL: Holiday travel rush begins at Palm Beach International Airport and on the roadsWhile the holiday season can be one of the happiest times of the year, it can also be one of the most stressful.Rachel Needle, a licensed clinical psychologist in Palm Beach County, says one way to mitigate that stress is to create a budget and stick to it.”Make sure that you set limits that you’re comfortable with,” Needle said. “You don’t have to spend a lot of money for something to be special and thoughtful, so think outside the box if you need to.”Needle advised not to overdo it: create a list of tasks so you don’t spread yourself thin and prioritize your own mental health.”Know that everything doesn’t have to be perfect, and that’s OK,” Needle said.Follow us on social: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube

WELLINGTON, Fla. — Retailers were keeping their fingers crossed that shoppers would take advantage of Super Saturday.According to the National Retail Federation, more than 157 million people were expected to shop on the Saturday before Christmas.

12 Books and Bibles for Christmas Reading and Gifting

Arts & Culture, Books

Add a few of the latest editions of Bibles, some classic books, and a couple of Word In Black favorites to your holiday shopping list.

Everyone has at least one friend who’d rather be curled up with a book during the holidays than socialize with family members and friends. In fact they are often found either with an earpiece secretly listening to their audible library addition or their third Kindle reader and thanking God for yet another one. Those are usually the easiest to purchase gifts for, if we just know their areas of interest.
RELATED: Where Do Folks Leaving Traditional Church Go?
These suggestions for your shopping list represent a few of the latest editions of Bibles, some classic books, and a couple of personal favorites. 

Bibles
CSB Grace BibleBy 2K/Denmark and Cambridge University

This Bible is changing the game for young readers with dyslexia and other reading challenges. Cutting-edge, research-backed design principles — like unique letter shapes and extra space between letters, words, and lines — make Bible reading more accessible and engaging than ever

The Breathe Life BibleBy Thomas Nelson
This Bible “invites you to experience scripture through the lens of the BREATHE acronym: believe, reconcile, exalt, act, trust, hope and elevate,” according to its website. The intent is that the life of the Bible is so internalized that readers become better “agents of reconciliation.”
First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New TestamentFrom InterVarsity Press
The First Nations Version reimagines the New Testament through the lens of Native storytelling, blending simplicity, clarity, and beauty in English while staying true to the Bible’s original language. This groundbreaking translation, shaped by over five years of collaboration, brings together Indigenous voices from 25+ tribes, organizations like OneBook and Wycliffe Associates, and a diverse council of Native elders, pastors, and young adults from across North America.

The New Revised Standard Version Updated EditionPublished by the National Council of the Churches of Christ
“The NRSVue extends the New Revised Standard Version’s (NRSV) purpose to deliver an accurate, readable, up-to-date, and inclusive version of the Bible,” according to the website. “It also continues the work of offering a version as free as possible from the gender bias inherent in the English language, which can obscure earlier oral and written renditions.”
The New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary
This commentary comes from a multiethnic team of scholars, bringing together diverse perspectives to create something that’s not just reflective in their backgrounds, but also deeply contextual, informative, and — hopefully — prophetic and inspiring.
Books
A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation
Read Gustavo Gutierrez’s classic liberation theology to discover the reason for the grief his readers express at the news of his recent death.
Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying HumanBy Cole Arthur Riley
Unable to find a suitable liturgy for her own worship, Riley has written something for herself and young people of faith like her.
The Day God Saw Me As BlackBy D. Danyelle Thomas
This book was written as a manifesto on the church whose walls are not wide enough to include those who’ve been systematically excluded from the mainstream of hope and faith.
Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy SpiritBy Francis Chan
The author, pastor, and church planter reminds the reader of the Holy Spirit, the member of the Trinity that is often neglected, to the detriment of the believer. 
The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts EternityBy William Paul Young
A personal favorite and teaching tool of mine. I recently heard a testimony that it was from The Shack she learned how much God really loves her. No strings attached. No ifs, and, or, buts. The book received a ton of criticism when it was published, and again when the motion picture was made. But read it for yourself and let me know your thoughts.
They Like to Never Quit Praisin’ GodBy Frank A. Thomas
It’s not a new book, but it holds its place as a classic for anyone who feels the call to preach. It highlights the strength and joy of celebration in preaching in Black preaching.
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