logo
Look: Scuba team rescues lost wedding ring from British river

Look: Scuba team rescues lost wedding ring from British river

UPI6 days ago
July 29 (UPI) -- A British scuba diving team came to the rescue of a paddleboarder whose wedding ring fell into the River Great Ouse in Bedford, England.
Ant Crocker said he was on the river near Cardington Lock on Friday when he realized his wedding ring was missing from his finger.
"I tried swimming down but visibility was poor at the bottom and being 2 to 3 meters down, I needed to come up [for air] by the time I got down," Crocker told the Bedford Independent.
Crocker sought help from the Bedford Scuba Divers, and the team assembled Saturday morning to search the river.
Diver Becks Martin surfaced with the ring after only about 10 minutes in the water.
"I didn't think they would find it, so when they did, I gave them all a hug even though they were soaking wet," Crocker said.
He thanked the team on social media.
"A huge thank you to Becks, Tony and Tracy of Bedford Scuba Divers for their efforts and recovering my wedding ring," he wrote.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Events held nationwide as Hiroshima bombing anniversary approaches
Events held nationwide as Hiroshima bombing anniversary approaches

UPI

time7 hours ago

  • UPI

Events held nationwide as Hiroshima bombing anniversary approaches

1 of 4 | The "Enola Gay" returning from its mission on August 6,1945 where it dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. (UPI/File) | License Photo Aug. 3 (UPI) -- Groups around the world will gather this week to commemorate the Aug. 6th bombing of Hiroshima, a nuclear attack that killed 200,000 Japanese people 80 years ago. Events, prayer gatherings and services memorializing the bombings of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, range from an event at a small library in Kansas and a gathering at a church in Spokane, Wash. to a series of reflection ceremonies in the Northeast and a ceremony in a park in a North Carolina park. Japan exited World War II within days of the Hiroshima bombing, an event that changed the rules of war and elicited shock and disbelief on the global stage. The Hiroshima bombing marked the first occasion that a nuclear weapon had been used on a large scale, and raised questions about human rights and what constituted fair rules of engagement. The bombongs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki started a nuclear arms race that accelerated over the decades and remains a constant today. Recent data from the Pew Research Center shows a third of Americans feel that dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified while nearly the same number said it was not. Another third said they are unsure if the drastic measures were warranted. Many of the deaths were instantaneous. Other people died years later as a result of exposure to nuclear radiation, researchers have said.

Washington's Quiet Work
Washington's Quiet Work

Atlantic

time21 hours ago

  • Atlantic

Washington's Quiet Work

In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look. The semiquincentennial of American independence has begun: The anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill are behind us; the reenactment of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys' storming Fort Ticonderoga was a smashing success. Other big moments await, culminating, no doubt, in a big party on July 4, 2026. One hopes and expects that there will be plenty of hoopla, because that is the American way. But 250 years ago today, the real and unspectacular work of American independence was under way. The Continental Army, created in June of 1775, had warily welcomed its new leader, George Washington, without much fuss. A slaveholding Virginia gentleman and loosely religious Anglican was going to lead an army that was mainly made up of New Englanders—including both psalm-singing, Bible-quoting descendants of the Puritans and dissenting freethinkers. For his part, Washington was appalled at what he saw: militia units that elected their own officers and called them by their first names, free Black men carrying weapons, money-grubbing Yankees (as opposed to land-grubbing Virginia gentry), and general squalor. 'They are an exceeding dirty and nasty people,' he told his cousin Lund Washington. Lindsay Chervinsky: The 'dirty and nasty people' who became Americans What happened that summer outside Boston was of monumental importance. If this was to be an American army and not just an assembly of colonial militias, then Washington would have to be the first American general, and not just a provincial. He would have to create a system out of chaos, and hold together a force against a dangerous enemy. Although slightly outnumbered and bottled up in Boston, which connected to the mainland by only the narrowest of peninsulas, the British army was tough, cohesive, professional, and eager to avenge its unexpected defeats and Pyrrhic victories. Washington did the work in many ways—by organizing the army in divisions and brigades, inspecting the troops, regularizing discipline, hammering home the importance of digging latrines, and quarantining soldiers who had smallpox. It helped that he looked the part of a military leader: tall, well turned out, graceful, and the best horseman in the colonies, by most accounts. No less important, he was able to transcend his aversion to those strange New Englanders. Two men utterly unlike his social set in Virginia quickly became his most trusted subordinates: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, a Quaker with a talent for organization, and a tubby Boston bookstore owner, Henry Knox, who became the chief of artillery. The former was eventually made quartermaster of the army and then commander of the southern army, where he displayed a flair for field command. The latter brought 59 heavy-artillery pieces from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the army outside of Boston in the dead of winter, before developing the artillery arm into the equal of its British opponent. Washington quickly realized that his most talented military leader was a third New Englander, the Connecticut merchant Benedict Arnold, who, until he committed treason, was the best field commander on either side of the conflict. In the autumn of 1775, Washington sent him off on a daring march through the Maine wilderness that very nearly wrested Quebec from British control. The commander in chief needed a headquarters guard—what we today call a personal security detail—and so in March 1776, the army created a unit known as the life guard. Washington selected men from each army unit, which meant that the life guard's personnel skewed in favor of New Englanders; as its first commander, he chose a Massachusetts man, Caleb Gibbs, who lasted until 1780. He chose southerners, too, for crucial positions, and not all of them gentlemen—Daniel Morgan of Virginia, for example, was a roughneck leader of riflemen who formed an elite corps. The point was clear: This was an American army, and talented men, no matter their background, could win their leader's trust and rise up the ranks. Washington remains in some ways the most remote of America's national heroes; he is more distant from us than Abraham Lincoln because of his greater austerity and reserve. He mastered his volcanic temper; prudently handled both his subordinates and his superiors; and knew the value of dignity and a certain distance in exercising command. He was brave but not particularly gifted as a tactical leader, and he was prone to devising overly aggressive and complicated plans, but these did not matter as much as the larger leadership qualities that he had brought with him to Boston. Small wonder that many years later, men who were his intellectual superiors—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams—worked for him. His story shows why character and good judgment are far more important in a leader than mere intelligence. Despite wonderful writing about Washington in recent books, including Ron Chernow's 2010 biography and the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Americans do not value him as we once did. The fault lies across the political spectrum. For some (think of the 1619 Project), the fundamental sin of slavery overwhelms every aspect of biography. Washington controlled several hundred enslaved people on his Mount Vernon estate; he often treated them badly, and as of 1775, he felt no shame about that. Being a plantation owner was part of his identity, but not all of it, and more important: Like some of the other Founders, he became uneasy about reconciling the ideals of the Revolution with the practice of holding men and women as chattel—which is why he manumitted all of his slaves in his will. At a deeper level, this view of American history cannot help but crush patriotic pride in what remains, in retrospect, an astounding achievement. The Revolution culminated not in despotism but in a new political order based on liberty and self-government, built on ideals that, described with exceptional eloquence by another slaveholder, Jefferson, eventually blew up the evil institution on which their way of life rested. George Packer: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion A different form of relentless present-mindedness afflicts the current administration, which seeks to purge national parks and museums of references to the darker sides of American history, beginning with slavery but also including the slaughter and dispossession of American Indians, and various forms of discrimination and persecution thereafter. In everything from signage to artwork, the Trump administration reaches for pabulum and kitsch, a false and unidimensional depiction of the American past. As for academic historians, although some exemplary ones are at work—including Gordon Wood and David Hackett Fischer—the contemporary trend is to shun great individuals in favor of subaltern history. There is not much place for a commanding general in a pantheon composed of people overlooked by previous generations. That summer and fall in Cambridge and the other towns surrounding Boston, George Washington's work made a difference. It reminds us that American independence was won by dramatic deeds, to be sure, but also by mastering—slowly and painfully—the undramatic things, such as insisting on rank insignia and saluting, managing gunpowder production, and digging latrines properly. It reminds us that there is such a thing as individual greatness, and that it can make all the difference. And particularly in an age of self-righteous scorn, we would do well to recall how Washington's lifelong struggles with himself—his prejudices, his emotions, his upbringing and background—contributed to final victory. We can still profit by the example.

On This Day, Aug. 3: Astronauts carry out first emergency repair spacewalk
On This Day, Aug. 3: Astronauts carry out first emergency repair spacewalk

UPI

timea day ago

  • UPI

On This Day, Aug. 3: Astronauts carry out first emergency repair spacewalk

1 of 7 | Mission Specialist Soichi Noguchi traverses along the Destiny laboratory of the International Space Station between tasks of the mission's third spacewalk on August 5, 2005. Two days earlier, in the first emergency repair conducted in space, astronauts fixed a potentially dangerous problem by removing two strips of protruding cloth from the underside of the space shuttle Discovery. File Photo courtesy NASA | License Photo Aug. 3 (UPI) -- On this date in history: In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain, seeking a western route to India, with a convoy of three small ships -- the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria -- and fewer than 100 crew. They reached land at Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean, on Oct. 12. In 1914, Germany declared war on France and invaded Belgium. The following day, Britain declared war on Germany and World War I was underway. In 1923, by the dim light of a flickering oil lamp in a little farmhouse at Plymouth, Vt., his birthplace, Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office as president of the United States following the unexpected death President Warren G. Harding. In 1943, Gen. George Patton slapped Private Charles Kuhl, who was in a military hospital in Sicily. Kuhl was the first of two privates hospitalized for shock that Patton slapped and berated that month, accusing them of cowardice. The general was later forced to apologize. In 1958, the U.S. nuclear submarine Nautilus crossed under the North Pole. File Photo courtesy the U.S. Navy/UPI In 1975, a chartered Boeing 707 jetliner carrying Moroccan immigrant workers home from France to their families for the summer holidays crashed into a mountainside in Agadir, Morocco, killing all 188 persons aboard. In 1981, U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike. The strikers were fired within one week. In 2004, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor was opened to the public for the first time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. In 2005, in the first emergency repair conducted in space, astronauts fixed a potentially dangerous problem by removing two strips of protruding cloth from the underside of the space shuttle Discovery. In 2007, the U.S. Congress passed a bill allowing the National Security Agency to monitor email and telephone communications between the United States and foreign countries without a court warrant if terrorism was believed to be involved. File Photo by Kevin Dietsch/UPI In 2008, People magazine published the first photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's newborn twins, Vivienne and Knox, after paying up to $14 million, the most ever paid for baby pictures. In 2014, an earthquake in southern China's Yunnan province killed nearly 400 people, injured 1,800 and destroyed thousands of homes. In 2019, a gunman targeting immigrants opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people and injuring another 22. In 2024, American swimmers Nic Fink, Torri Huske, Ryan Murphy and Gretchen Walsh set a new world record time of 3:37:43 in the mixed 4x100-meter medley relay at the Paris Summer Olympics. Team USA won gold, China won silver and Australia took home bronze in the race. File Photo by Richard Ellis/UPI

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store