A statue of Big Ian, folks?

JUST over a week ago, art teacher Mark Robla used the cover of darkness to hoist up his carved plaster version of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the severed head sculpture he created sat atop a plinth reserved for the “official” 11ft statue of the Iron Lady in her home town of Grantham.

Robla suggested his plaster cast, believed to have cost next to nothing, was a better use of taxpayers’ money rather than the £300,000 the council was spending.

The thought occurred to me, Dr Ian Paisley is the nearest thing we had to Thatcher – loved and hated – so I am asking for a friend: what would the good folks of Ballymena think of a statue of Big Ian?

A FIREBALL that illuminated the skies was a chunk of asteroid entering the atmosphere, say scientists.

The meteor was spotted around 10pm on Sunday and sent a sonic boom across southern England.

It disintegrated in the atmosphere with only a few fragments likely to have hit the ground.

The spectacle was filmed by the Natural History Museum’s UK Fireball Alliance.

The group’s Dr Ashley King said: “The video tells us its speed was about 30,000 miles per hour, which is too fast for it to be human-made ‘space junk’.”

Civil servant Sam Harris, 28, of Leeds, witnessed the “breathtaking” sight from bed, saying: “There was a trail of orange and green it was incredibly bright.”

A MAN who knocked his victim out in a one-punch attack has been jailed for five months.

Andrew Elliott targeted the other man outside a fast-food outlet in Belfast on November 8 last year.

The 21-year-old, of University Street in the city, pleaded guilty to what his lawyer described as a random assault.

A prosecutor told Belfast Magistrates Court: “He seems to have blocked his way and then punched him to the face, rendering the victim unconscious.”

District Judge Amanda Henderson said: “It clearly crosses the custody threshold.”

NEANDERTHALS had the ability to perceive and produce speech like us, scientists have claimed.

By studying CT scans, researchers were able to create virtual 3D models of the ear structures in Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.

Software was then used to estimate their hearing abilities as up to 5khz.

This encompasses most of the frequency range of modern human speech.

Prof Mercedes Condevalverde, of Alcala University, Madrid, led the study.

She said the research “demonstrates that Neanderthals possessed a communication system as complex and efficient as modern human speech”.

COSMIC Asteroid footage