AN amateur archaeologist has been given a lottery grant to help him dig into Bolton’s hidden past.

Paul Kay, the founder of the Bolton Cambrian Archaeological and Historical Society, believes the moors around Bolton and Lancashire have secrets to be unearthed which may give a rare insight into life in Anglo-Saxon times and earlier.

He has been awarded £9,900 by the National Lottery Awards For All scheme to help set up the society’s headquarters and website, and to start exploring the moors.

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Archaeologists from Cardiff University today began excavating part of the remains of the 2,000 year old Roman Fortress in Caerleon, Newport.

Led by Dr Peter Guest, of the School of History and Archaeology, the team of 50 archaeologists from Cardiff and University College London will excavate the remains of a monumental courtyard building in the south-western corner of the fortress.

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Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) president Avtar Singh Makkar said that members of a Sikh organization recently attacked the office of a music channel MTV at Mumbai as the channel has hurt the sentiments of Sikhs by put up a defamatory poster.

Talking to media persons on Tuesday after flagging off an ambulance and inaugurating CCTV cameras at Gurdwara Sri Fatehgarh Sahib, Makkar said that no one has right to hurt sentiments of Sikhs. He said it was not first time when the sentiments of Sikhs were hurt. He said in past such incidents happened several time and the SGPC had repeatedly request the Union government to induct representatives of SGPC in censor board or any other organization which could check the contents of pictures or serial related with Sikh community and stop any violation.

When asked, “Will he justify the attack on MTV office by group of Sikhs”, he replied it was not attack. He said it was only protest of Sikhs.

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Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”More…

More than 1,600 pairs of wading birds and ducks have had their nests destroyed by flooding in a wildlife catastrophe in the Cambridgeshire fens. Nearly 600 pairs of increasingly scarce ground-nesting waders – lapwing, snipe and redshank – have lost eggs or chicks in the flooding on the Ouse Washes…More…

Ten new clean, green ‘eco-towns’ will be built by 2020. And pigs might fly, say critics. They argue that the government is bulldozing through a programme that will create the slum estates of the future.This is how it will be. Across the fair face of Albion, to the ringing of bells and the soft murmur of doves, appears a leafy flush of eco-towns. They are sun-dappled utopias, urban dreamworlds in which no human need is unfulfilled. Wildlife romps through bird-loud glades.More…

Ottery St Mary The first beaver dam to be built in England for 800 years has been erected on the River Tale in Devon by a pair of the rodents that were brought from Bavaria last year.John-Michael Kennaway, of the Escot Estate in Ottery St Mary, where staff created a two-acre home with ponds and woodland along a section of the river for the two-year-old beavers, said that building the 6ft dam out of mud, bark and twigs meant that the animals were likely to be breeding.More… 

Blackbirds and greenfinches have been identified as the next native birds likely to suffer a devastating population slump.An evolutionary family tree has shown they are closely related to species of birds that have already undergone a severe decline.Animal family trees have been shown previously to pinpoint amphibian species at risk but it is the first time that one has been created for British birds.More… 

The current system for coping with high rainfall and swollen rivers is fundamentally flawed and it is still unclear who is responsible for drainage, said the Local Government Association.“There are glaring gaps in this country’s readiness to cope with widespread and prolonged flooding,” said Paul Bettison, chairman of the LGA’s environment board.More… 

A roe deer with a single horn in the middle of its head has found fame as the “Unicorn” of Tuscany.The 10-month-old deer was born in captivity at the Centre of Natural Sciences, a nature reserve near Prato.While single-horned deers have been spotted before, this particular buck has a uniquely central horn, thought to be the result of a genetic flaw.More…