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“To everyone else, it is simply a motorbike,” says Josh Quigley. “But, for me, it’s the car for saving my existence.”
After losing his father to leukemia in 2018, after which slipping into despair, Josh made plans to finish an undertaking he had failed five instances earlier than – to cycle around the world.
But this week, at the same time as stopping to rest in London throughout the primary leg of his trial, his bike became stolen.
The loss, Josh says, was “devastating” – but he has no longer given up hope of continuing his journey.
“I first tried to cycle around the sector in 2016,” he tells the BBC. “This was definitely my adventure to happiness, that’s what I usually referred to like it.”
In 2015, after splitting from his lengthy-term female friend, Josh turned into suffering badly with depression and attempted to take his own existence.
“I crashed my vehicle at approximately 70mph at the motorway near my domestic in Scotland,” he says. “I turned into genuinely lucky to survive.
“After that, I thought: ‘I’m going to do something positive about this.’
“I went to look Sir Chris Hoy speak in Edinburgh and simply felt stimulated to head on a motorcycle.
“At that point, I wasn’t a bicycle owner. I become multiple stone obese, I became consuming alcohol four instances per week – but biking changed into my way of looking to get glad once more.”

Despite traveling greater than 10,000 miles via 14 nations on his remaining trip – Josh, now 26, never reached his goal.
“I assume it is fear that receives the higher of me,” he explains. “If I finish I recognize how huge it will likely be and I think that is what holds me returned.”
Even even though he did no longer whole his preceding journeys, Josh believes visiting on his motorbike saved him – describing the journeys as “lifestyles-converting”.
But after his father’s death final yr, Josh started all over again to battle with existence in Edinburgh.
He decided to try the trip one more time.
“It’s were given me out of a darkish location once earlier than so I turned to it again.”

World equity markets have slipped amid concerns on the worldwide boom and as traders digested European earnings.
The Euro STOXX 600 lost 0.3 consistent with cent in early buying and selling on Thursday, with the problem over prospects for international boom underscored via weak South Korean records.
Energy stocks and a ten percent drop in Finnish telecoms equipment maker Nokia dragged down European shares, with a various bag of income for the region’s banks.
The MSCI international equity index, which tracks shares in forty-seven nations, fell 0.Three consistent with cent.
Asian markets had fallen in advance inside the day, losing 0.Five in keeping with cent as South Korea’s financial system unexpectedly shriveled within the first zone, giving a pointy reminder of the fragility of the sector financial system past the US.
Shanghai’s bourse additionally fell sharply past due inside the day, losing extra than according to cent as other Chinese markets lost the floor. Chinese officials warned of protracted pressure on the monetary increase in the international’s 2d biggest financial system.
Those issues on increase additionally played out towards home for European traders, with fears lingering over the country of the German economic system after a survey on Wednesday showed German enterprise morale falling.

Amid that weak spot, principal banks across the world have maintained ultra-unfastened economic coverage. The Bank of Japan on Thursday pledged to preserve hobby rates very low as a minimum till early 2020. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei gave a muted response, while the Japanese yen also reacted little.
“You virtually have a common reaction (from important banks) to a worldwide increase slowdown in terms of financial policy,” Peter Schaffrik, head of European costs method at RBC Capital Markets, stated.
“We haven’t normally visible outright discount, however, it’s far easing relative to what changed into previously communicated to, and implied in the markets.”
There were symptoms of developing power inside the US greenback, which analysts said turned into partially a symptom of the arena’s biggest economy keeping relative energy and others, which includes China, faring worse.
The dollar index, which measures the dollar versus a basket of six major peers, stood at around at 98.001, close to its highest considering that May 2017 hit on Wednesday.
The euro suffered its worst day in over six weeks, falling zero.6 in keeping with cent to a 22-month low following the similar signs and symptoms of the flagging boom in Germany. It changed into last at $US1.1141.
Brent crude oil on Thursday rose above $US75 in keeping with the barrel for the primary time in 2019.

President Donald Trump praised drug-detecting puppies on the US-Mexico border on the Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit Wednesday, calling running canines “the finest system inside the global.”
“Dogs, a positive form of German Shepherd mainly, puppies do a higher task than $four hundred million really worth of device. Can you trust that? Only the dog lovers would remember the fact that, right?” Trump told the crowd.
Trump said that in a briefing from Border Patrol, he asked how $500 million of the device at ports of access as compared to working dogs.

“They said, ‘Sir, certainly, the puppies are higher.’ I said, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ It’s high-quality,” Trump said. “We also have a number of puppies and they’re top notch puppies and we cherish them.”
The Trump own family has broken with subculture — by means of not having a pet at the White House — making them the primary pet-free first own family in view that earlier than Thomas Jefferson, who stored a Mockingbird and more than one endure cubs.
President Woodrow Wilson saved a flock of sheep and a ram at the White House garden, and President William Taft had a Holstein cow, Pauline Wayne, who later retired to Wisconsin, in keeping with the Historical Society of Washington. First woman Grace Coolidge had a pet raccoon, Rebecca, whom she walked on a leash at the South Lawn. Coolidge also adopted an opossum.

Trump lived with a poodle, Chappy, together with his first wife, Ivana, who wrote in her memoir, “Raising Trump,” that “Donald changed into now not a canine fan.”
“When I instructed him I changed into bringing Chappy with me to New York, he said, ‘No,'” she wrote. “‘It’s me and Chappy or nobody!’ I insisted, and that becomes that.”
Chappy, she later said, “had the same dislike of Donald.”
Trump floated the idea of getting a canine for the duration of a campaign rally earlier this 12 months in El Paso, Texas.
“I wouldn’t mind having one,” the notoriously puppy-averse Trump stated.
“How might I look taking walks a dog on the White House garden sort of no longer — I do not know, I don’t experience accurate, feels a touch phony to me,” Trump stated.
He delivered that human beings have requested and told him it is “properly politically” to have a canine, but “it’s not the connection I even have with my humans.”

If you needed to sketch a global map, you’d possibly start with an area this is acquainted.
Perhaps you will start through drawing your very own continent, or perhaps you’d recognition on the unique borders of u . S. You live in. Then, you’d probably circulate to drawing the outlines of neighboring nations, in the end working your manner to ways and distant lands.
This would be a logical manner for everybody to think about this sort of mission, and it gives a few insight as to how human beings consider the sector.
We begin with what’s familiar, and construct it out till it’s an entire picture.
Assembling the World through Economy Size
What if we assembled a world map in a very extraordinary order?
Today’s two animations come to us from Engaging-Data, and that they technique the arena map from an exchange angle: assembling nations at the map in the order of their financial footprints.
GDP (Nominal)
The first map, shown below, makes use of nominal GDP to gather international locations in ascending order:

This model of the map suggests the smallest economies first, with the larger economies at the end.
For this cause, the first economies appearing on the map have a tendency to be developing nations or countries with smaller geographical or demographic footprints.
For example, even though the Falkland Islands are rich on a consistent with capita basis, the British Overseas Territory has fewer than 4,000 humans, which offers it a minor footprint on a worldwide level.
GDP in step with Capita (Nominal)
Now, allow’s test the equal map, built so as of GDP in step with capita:

Kensington and Chelsea council has provisionally rejected a suggestion to call a footpath in the front of the Russian embassy in London in honor of the murdered Moscow democracy campaigner and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.
A cross-party institution of MPs requested the Conservative-run council in November to designate the footpath Boris Nemtsov Way. Nemtsov becomes a trenchant critic of Vladimir Putin and a former deputy high minister. He became gunned down in February 2015 on a bridge subsequent to the Kremlin.
Five Chechens were convicted of the assassination however Nemtsov’s circle of relatives have accused the Kremlin of a cowl-up and say those who ordered the killing have not been introduced to justice. The murder is considered one of a string of Russian political killings that consists of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London with radioactive tea.
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In 2018, Sergei and Yulia Skripal have been poisoned in Salisbury with a state-evolved nerve agent. The British authorities blamed Moscow and expelled 23 Russian diplomats suspected of spying.
In a letter to Kensington and Chelsea council, the MPs Stephen Kinnock, Mark Pritchard, and Tom Brake said the footpath initiative would “send a robust message [to Moscow] that political assassinations are unacceptable”.
It could display “that the legacy of Boris Nemtsov and the imaginative and prescient of a democratic Russia he fought for a stay on”, and that “Britain stands at the facet of freedom and people who protect the guideline of regulation”, they said.
The name exchange could not have an effect on neighborhood postal addresses and could follow handiest to the embassy constructing and its consular phase, they made clean. Three world capitals – Washington, Kiev, and Vilnius – had named streets out of doors their Russian embassies after Nemtsov, the MPs stated, with Ottawa possibly to be subsequent.

French police scientists have entered Notre Dame cathedral for the primary time to start collecting evidence on the reason of the fireplace that devastated the roof and destroyed the spire ultimate week.
Three one-of-a-kind businesses will begin to take samples and look for clues that would endorse how the blaze started out and ripped through the centuries-antique gothic architectural masterpiece remaining week. Police are treating the blaze as accidental.
It has taken 10 days to secure the cathedral structure to permit for a radical exam of the charred interior. Investigators have already interviewed cathedral group of workers and people who had been carrying out renovations.
Police consider an electrical brief circuit could have been on the heart of the hearth. Investigators are expected to look via the fireplace-damaged cathedral for remains of cables, lighting or elements of circuitry that might provide clues, but DNA proof might be complicated to acquire from the huge fireplace site.
Investigators are also looking to establish whether or not all the appropriate strategies were accompanied at about 6.20pm ultimate Monday when the primary alarm went off at the cathedral. The staff reportedly made assessments, however, did no longer see anything unusual until a second alarm sounded approximately 20 mins later.
The scaffolding firm that had positioned up a great shape of metal scaffolding at the Notre Dame for renovations admitted this week that a number of its workers had smoked at the website online, however, dominated out that a cigarette butt might have started the hearth that destroyed the cathedral’s o.K.Framed roof.
A spokesman for the own family-owned Le Bras Frères stated some workers for its scaffolding unit had knowledgeable police that they had “sometimes” smoked on the scaffolding, regardless of a smoking ban on the website.
“We condemn it,” the spokesman stated. But he insisted the hearth commenced inside the constructing and smoking turned into no longer guilty. “It was now not a cigarette butt that set Notre Dame de Paris on fire.”

Less than 100 years ago, the Japanese Emperor turned into seen as a god in human form. But over the last three decades, Emperor Akihito has accomplished everything to humanize himself.
He met his destiny spouse, Michiko Shoda, at a tennis tournament. Later becoming the first Japanese Emperor within the royal household’s 1,500-year history to marry a person outdoor of the aristocracy. When the couple had kids, they have become the first Japanese royals to raise them without help — and reportedly even made their kids p.C. Their own faculty lunches.
After Japan turned into a hit with the aid of a deadly earthquake and tsunami in 2011, Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko wore muted informal apparel to kneel beside survivors in a school fitness center — something that might have been remarkable for preceding emperors.

Now, Akihito turns into the first emperor in cutting-edge history to abdicate.
As the gentle-spoken “humans’ emperor” palms the name to his fifty nine-12 months-vintage son, Naruhito, on the quiet of this month, he will be remembered as a person organized to interrupt with traditions.
But Japan’s leader is not on my own in his desire to modernize the monarchy.
There are some forty-three nations around the arena with reigning monarchs. Some are operating to replace their photo to win — or maintain — their public’s approval.
For royals, figuring out the way to live applicably might be key to their survival.
While royals with absolute power do not need to answer to their public, those in a constitutional monarchy — as in Japan or the UK — might be legislated out of power if the tide turns against them. Although it might be an onerous, drawn-out technique to remove the British royal circle of relatives, as an instance, it might much less tough for Commonwealth international locations to emerge as republics.

It’s something that one united states of America, at the least, speak me to approximately.
In Australia, opposition leader Bill Shorten has said that if his birthday party wins the upcoming election, he will hold a plebiscite on whether or not u . S. Must grow to be a republic. If they voted to grow to be a republic, it’d be step one in a process to take away the Queen as head of state.
“Royal families the world over ought to interact in a very delicate balancing act between lifestyle and modernity,” said Boston University companion professor Arianne Chernock, who researches European monarchies. “If they stray too a long way one way or the other, they may be imperiled.”
Moving with the instances
Royals have been enticing within the balancing act of seeking to stay relevant at the same time as retaining what makes them special for hundreds of years, says Chernock. England’s Queen Victoria, who ruled from 1837 to 1901, was initially worried that photos could make her too handy, before realizing they could also assist her to connect to her subjects.
Today, it is the UK’s 34-12 months-vintage Prince Harry who’s pushing the British monarchy to move with the instances — although he too has been looking for the stability.