Birds fly over the great pyramid in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2007. 12 deaths have been recorded in Egypt from the avian flu strain since was first detected in February 2006 and has spread to at least 19 of the country's 26 provinces. The H5N1 strain has hit at least 45 countries and killed more than 150 people worldwide.

Yahoo! News Anthropology & Archaeology slideshow, AP via Yahoo News!, USA, February 07, 2007.

Denver entrepreneur Phil Anschutz's The O2 entertainment venue in London is axing projects in the wake of losing a license for a Las Vegas-style super-casino...

The $1.1 billion O2 project, which is being built around the Millennium Dome on London's Greenwich Peninsula, has "postponed" a major exhibition of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen artefacts, according to British news stories...

Anschutz scales back in U.K., Paula Moore, Denver Business Journal, Colorado, USA, February 05, 2007.

Conversely, from a UK newspaper we have:

Regeneration setback after failed casino bid

... Despite the failed bid, an exhibition on Tutankhamun's tomb and treasures will still take place in November...

Anschutz scales back in U.K., Samantha Payne, News Shopper, UK, February 07, 2007.

Previously: Dome loses UK super-casino race, January 30, 2007.

Defining directions

Sir — In 'Mathematics in Ancient Egypt' (Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31, January 2007) Assem Deif emphasises the alignment with true north of the Great Pyramid, even contrasting it with a famous astronomical site in Paris. But because of precession and the angle of the axis of Earth to the plane of the ecliptic, over time "true north" changes, and is surely now just a few thousand years later, not precisely where it was at the time the Pyramid was built. How do you define directions for determinations of alignment in a situation like this?

Ronald Edge
Chicago
USA

Mr Edge,

As you said, true north changes due to the precession. Now Polaris is our north star and in 13,000 years (half the precession period) it will be Vega. At the time when the GP was built (around 2570 BC) it was Alpha Dacronis (Thuban in Arabic) according to different astronomers, so it seemed the AE knew it. How I don't know. But there has been work done in this respect (Bauval's The Orion Mystery for example)...

Letters: Defining directions, Ronald Edge, Al-Ahram, Egypt, Issue No. 830, February 01 - 07, 2007.

Dr. Zahi Hawass came to Florida on the 8th of January 2007 because he found out that has a condition of his eye called macular holes. Due to the nature of this condition doctors in Egypt decided it best to send Dr. Hawass to an esteemed medical facility in the U.S. called the Bascom Palmer Institute. An eye operation was performed by Dr. William Smitty. Dr. Smitty will follow up to find out whether the surgery was successful for the next 2 - 2 1/2 weeks.

Although the doctors are not precisely sure why this condition occurred, they suggest that it may possibly be due to a stone that fell on Dr. Hawass' head during a recent excavation...

I'm a bit late with this one as Dr. Hawass has been giving lectures this week.

Dr. Hawass in U.S. For Eye Surgery, Zahi Hawass, Guardian's Egypt, January 2007.