World Vignettes

Clinton gets stuck in HK elevatorHONG KONG: Even the President of the United States can get stuck in an elevator. On Friday, Bill Clinton go...

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Clinton gets stuck in HK elevator

HONG KONG: Even the President of the United States can get stuck in an elevator. On Friday, Bill Clinton got stuck in the elevator for 10 long minutes. Finally, the elevator doors were pried open and Clinton was freed, along with his wife, Hillary, chief of staff Erskine Bowles and some secret service agents. Apparently a lightning bolt in a thunderstorm triggered a power surge that knocked out a computer at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The loss of power stopped Clinton’s elevator after he spoke to a group of business leaders. A backup power source supplied to allow the elevator reach another floor did not help in getting the elevator doors open, presidential spokesman Barry Toiv said. The agents with Clinton radioed for help, Toiv said. “After a 10-minute wait, they pried open the doors,” Toiv said. “Nobody was overly concerned. The President and others were cracking jokes,” he said.

Hotter than sun

WASHINGTON: THEhottest place in the solar system other then the sun, researchers say, may be volcanoes on a moon of Jupiter called Io. Using instruments on the Galileo spacecraft, which is orbiting Jupiter, researchers calculated the temperature of lava spewing from volcanoes on Io. They found that 12 vents had temperatures of 2,200 degrees, and that one vent was as hot as 3,100 degrees . The temperature of lava erupting to the surface on earth is generally around 2,000, according to standard references. “The very hot lavas erupting on Io are hotter than anything that has erupted on earth for billions of years,” said Alfred McEwen, lead author of a study conducted in the journal science. He added, “They are the highest surface temperatures in the solar system other than the sun itself.” Io is so far from the sun, about 1.9 billion km, that most of its surface is well below freezing level.