Word: britishers
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...Here at the World Conker Championships, held annually in the village of Ashton in southeast England, the British game grows up, drawing an international roster of children and their nostalgic parents. This year, nearly five hundred competitors from as far away as Jamaica and the Ukraine are competing for bragging rights, a trophy and a garish crown adorned with chestnuts. The event feels like a cross between Halloween and a college football game. Five thousand spectators don fancy costumes (think nuns, pirates, horses and Dumbledore) and, from 9:30 in the morning, guzzle beer and munch on sausages...
...getting hit in the eye with a conker is really minimal," says Lisa Fowlie, president of the Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH). The institute sponsored this year's competition to show that safety inspectors are not the anti-conkers killjoys they have been presented as in the British press in recent years and that they, in fact, encourage teachers to keep conkers in schools. "Otherwise [kids] are going to be fat and lazy and horrible," she says...
...Britain playing the role of the Russian bear at the other end of the globe? Not exactly. Six other countries (Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand and Norway) have also laid claims to sectors of Antarctica; those of Chile and Argentina overlap with the British claim. (The United States recognizes none of them, but reserves the right to make its own claim down the line.) Each of those seven claims include coastline, and every coast presents an opportunity under Article 76 of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea: If you can prove that the continental shelf extends...
...will the British claim be the last, since all claims under the law of the Sea have to be submitted by the spring of 2009. And that's the point. A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry told reporters that London was merely "safeguarding for the future," and that no challenged claim - as the British one is sure to be - can be acted on. But the claim points out the limits of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, and a codicil adopted in 1991. It does an admirable job of protecting the land - banning nuclear material, declaring the Antarctic to be a "natural...
...that ecosystem that could be endangered. So could the ban on mining on the Antarctic continent itself, which can be lifted by unanimous agreement at any time. That is highly unlikely, but just a couple of decades ago, so was the prospect that the ice caps would melt. The British claim, and those that are sure to follow, amounts to a long-shot move that enables resorting to a future temptation. For the sake of Antarctica, let's hope we've got beyond oil and gas before that temptation ever arises...