Latest news with #IanMcLeod
ABC News
5 days ago
- ABC News
Vegetable-powered vehicle and dinosaur discovery
It's been a busy time on the roads of Australia lately, with many of you packing up the car and heading away on school holidays. That's meant lots of people stopping at service stations filling up cars with fuel or charging them up with electricity. But a man from South Australia powers his vehicle a little differently. He fills it up with vegetable oil! Ordinarily, if you were to put vegetable oil in your car it would stop working! But, Ian McLeod is 95 years old and has spent many years looking for ways to live more sustainably. He bought a ute that had a pre-combustion diesel engine and then converted it so it could be powered by vegetable oil. Ian visits the restaurants around his town and collects vegetable oil that they've used, all of which would usually be thrown out as waste. He takes the oil home, cleans it, and pours it into his you-beaut veggie-powered ute! That's not all though, he's also managed to power his whole house with vegetable oil, which saves a huge amount on bills. It makes you wonder, how else could we be powering our lives more sustainably? Along the New South Wales coastline, there's been some very large creatures making a splash. Yep, it's whale migration season! Yes, every winter tens of thousands of humpback and minke whales make their annual trip from Antarctica all the way up the east coast, searching for warmer waters. It's a special time for those who live along the coastline to pull out binoculars and spy the majestic creatures swimming north. Every year scientists from the Organisation for the Rescue and Research of Cetaceans – with the very clever acronym ORRCA – invite people like you to gaze out to sea and let them know how many whales you see. All this information can be used to understand how many whales are migrating each year, and how healthy they are. Whales can hold their breath for a while, but they'll pop their heads up eventually! So far this year there's been a record 5,000 whale sightings, and that includes some calves that are only a few weeks old. The best time to see whales is when the ocean is calm and steady so if you find yourself near the coast, keep your eyes peeled and have a whale of a time! When you think of a dinosaur, you probably think of a big, scary creature like a T-Rex, or a large shuffling triceratops. But a much smaller dinosaur has been placed in a museum recently. In fact, it was even nicknamed for its habit of darting around the feet of giants like the Stegosaurus. It's about the same size as a dog, but with much bigger feet and a longer tail. It's proper name is Enigmacursor. This dinosaur has been quite a riddle for some time! When the skeleton was first found, it was classified as a nanosaurus – or 'small lizard'… but that was a mistake. Closer study of the skeleton found that the leg bones were quite different, and it was actually a whole new species. The scientists were excited to have a complete skeleton of such a small dinosaur. After all, smaller bones are harder to find. Although it's a newly-discovered species, this pooch-sized puzzler is well and truly extinct. If you've been along to a game of rugby union, you'd know things can get loud. The crowd makes a lot of noise cheering on their team. A whistle from the ref tells players when they need to stop down, and players call out to each other as they pass the ball. Well, imagine for a moment you were playing, and you couldn't hear any of that. The sport of deaf rugby union has been played in Australia for nearly 25 years, to make sure deaf and hard of hearing players have the opportunity to play rugby. Every player has some form of hearing loss, and the sport is played with lots of hand signals so players can communicate with each other and understand the referee. Recently, the very first deaf rugby Union Pacific Rim Championship was held in Queensland. More than 100 players from Australia, Japan, Fiji and Samoa faced off against each other over a few days, with Fiji winning both the men's and women's competitions. The sport of deaf rugby keeps growing, with the Australian team gearing up for a World Cup being held in Japan in 2026. Over in Britain, at a wildlife park, live two European brown bears named Mish and Lucy. The young bears are usually pretty happy in their enclosure, but one day they decided to be a little cheeky and take a bear-cation. The bear pair escaped their enclosure but weren't grizzly at all. They didn't cause any harm, and all the visitors to the park were safely moved inside a building. But the bears didn't keep out of trouble. They made a beeline for a storage room, where they tucked in to a whole lot of honey. The bears seemed to know where the tasty treats were kept, but they weren't loose for long. The team of keepers at the wildlife park carefully encouraged the bears to head back into their enclosure and before long they were both sound asleep with very full bellies.
ABC News
21-06-2025
- Automotive
- ABC News
Ian McLeod, 95, powering his farm ute and house on waste vegetable oil
The blue farm ute in Ian McLeod's shed costs a couple of dollars a week to run, and his farmhouse power bills are virtually non-existent. In a world searching for sustainable and affordable energy, the 95-year-old farmer is quietly perfecting a personal power system, running on waste vegetable oil. "Most of the farms around here have brand new utes, so when I bought a SsangYong for $1,800 online, people thought I was mad," Mr McLeod laughed. "But when Rudolph Diesel first made the diesel engine, he used vegetable oil. "I thought to myself, 'I could do that,' so I set about finding a ute with a pre-combustion diesel engine and converting it. "Modern engines have to have the highest-grade fuel possible, whereas I deliberately went the other way. "I went for an engine that would run on low-grade fuel." Alongside the ute in Mr McLeod's shed at Glenroy in south-east South Australia are engines and mechanical inventions to purify the vegetable oil he collects from local restaurants. "Nine times out of 10, when I go to a restaurant, they say, 'Just take the oil'. They don't want it. All I have to do is clean it." For that job, Mr McLeod took an old electric separator and made a centrifuge out of the inner bowl, which purifies about 15 litres of oil an hour. "It costs me peanuts because the engine driving the separator is running on the same oil anyway," he said. "My main engine for generating power for the house runs on neat vegetable oil and starts from stone-cold on a freezing, cold morning. "I'm gradually getting it better all the time." For the best part of nine decades, Mr McLeod's remarkable mind for mechanical ingenuity has been known only by close friends, family and his wife Shirley, 92, a retired nurse. "Up until the past four or five years, people had virtually ignored Ian … now they realise he's worth knowing and a lot of people are pests now!" she laughed. As a child, Mr McLeod recalls being awed when his father took him by the hand and showed him a huge steam engine on a thrasher on their outer Melbourne farm. "That sowed a seed in me," he said. By the time he was eight, he had built his first steam engine using a turbine he made inside a Malt Extract can from his mother's kitchen. Mr McLeod also drew on his mechanical mind to overcome the trauma of his early school years. "I was a happy little kid, but I used my left hand to write, and the teacher in charge had a mind to change that and belted me. "It's a sad story; I stuttered then for 40 years and wet the bed until I was about 11 because I was just a bundle of nerves," he said. "So making these little steam engines and fixing things around the farm used to help me; it gave me back a bit of confidence." The McLeods came to the black-soil plains of Glenroy via a converted scrub block at Dorodong in Western Victoria, and the family farm at Bulla near Melbourne. The journey, marked by challenges met with determination, imagination and perseverance, is one which the pair look back upon fondly. "We got away to a pretty rough start on the family farm when the Depression ripped the rug out from under my father and his brother," recalled Mr McLeod. "Shirley was from Northern Queensland and her family pioneered the sugar industry up there. "Times got so tough at one stage, she wanted to go back. "I arranged with her early on — I told her she was free to leave with one condition: I'm coming too." And while they've faced tough times, Mrs McLeod said they had "gone through them together". "Some of our happiest years were when we first started on our own at Dorodong with a shed, two young children and second-hand tractors that Ian rebuilt," she said. Later, at Glenroy, Mr McLeod set his sights on irrigated cropping. "I hired a post-hole digger and, with the help of some local fellows, put five irrigation bores down in one day by hand. "I had to put multiple bores down because I didn't have enough money to buy the piping to connect them." Mr McLeod said he bought a stationary irrigator, which he converted to become self-propelled — one of the first in the country. "It became a useful machine. Then a company from Corowa got wind of it, hopped in a plane, hired a car, came out to the farm and crawled all over it, took photos and said, 'Thanks very much Mac', and I have never heard from them since," he laughed. Over his many years on the land, Mr McLeod has bought broken-down, second-hand and wrecked tractors and headers "for $25 or so" and rebuilt and redesigned them to create exactly the machinery he required for growing his crops. "We harvested our first crop of sunflowers with a $25 header that I rebuilt," he recalled. "I built a windrower, joined two old, wrecked tractors together; made a grain dryer for our maize crop, built weigh scales … I always looked for opportunities to mechanise and become more efficient." As the seasons change in the south-east, and Glenroy's flood-plain past is met with a two-year drought, the McLeods reflect on a long life on the land. "We just live quietly out here in our little nest. We're not part of the social set," Mrs McLeod said. "We've faced some tough times and plenty of good times," Mr McLeod agreed. "When things go wrong, that's an opportunity to find a way around it. "When things go smoothly, I get bored."
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
MND widow welcomes assisted dying bill vote
A widow whose terminally ill husband died after refusing food and drink has welcomed a vote by MPs to back a bill that would legalise assisted dying. The Terminally Ill Adults Bill, which was approved with a majority of 23 votes on Friday, would allow terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to get medical assistance to end their own lives - if eligible. Pauline McLeod, from Sheriff Hutton near York, said her spouse Ian, who was living with motor neurone disease (MND), had found life "intolerable" before he died in 2023. She said the bill represented a "very, very positive change". Mrs McLeod said her late husband endured a "long and painful death" after refusing food and drink for three weeks. He had previously tried to take his own life in 2022. "It's not a peaceful, humane death that we would like for people," she said. Critics have argued the bill risks vulnerable people being coerced into ending their lives. Some peers have indicated they will attempt to amend the legislation to introduce more safeguards when it goes to the House of Lords for further scrutiny. Mrs McLeod said she believed law change would give terminally ill people "peace of mind". "A lot of people who are terminally ill are actually very frightened of what's going to happen to them," she added. "Even if they never take up the option of assisted dying, they will still feel that option is there, and that's going to be a huge comfort to them I would imagine." Under the proposals, mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with a life expectancy of less than six months, would be eligible for an assisted death. "In a civilised society we should be allowed the chance of a humane, peaceful death," said Mrs McLeod, whose husband lived with symptoms of MND for three years. "It's not acceptable to allow people to die such agonizing and uncomfortable deaths." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North. Widow of MND sufferer calls for assisted dying Esther Rantzen urges Lords not to block assisted dying 'People should die naturally' - mixed views on new bill Assisted dying bill: What happens next?
BBC News
21-06-2025
- Health
- BBC News
MND widow welcomes MPs vote on assisted dying bill
A widow whose terminally ill husband died after refusing food and drink has welcomed a vote by MPs to back a bill that would legalise assisted Terminally Ill Adults Bill, which was approved with a majority of 23 votes on Friday, would allow terminally ill adults with six months or less to live to get medical assistance to end their own lives - if McLeod, from Sheriff Hutton near York, said her spouse Ian, who was living with motor neurone disease (MND), had found life "intolerable" before he died in said the bill represented a "very, very positive change". Mrs McLeod said her late husband endured a "long and painful death" after refusing food and drink for three had previously tried to take his own life in 2022."It's not a peaceful, humane death that we would like for people," she have argued the bill risks vulnerable people being coerced into ending their peers have indicated they will attempt to amend the legislation to introduce more safeguards when it goes to the House of Lords for further scrutiny. 'Huge comfort' Mrs McLeod said she believed law change would give terminally ill people "peace of mind"."A lot of people who are terminally ill are actually very frightened of what's going to happen to them," she added."Even if they never take up the option of assisted dying, they will still feel that option is there, and that's going to be a huge comfort to them I would imagine."Under the proposals, mentally competent, terminally ill adults in England and Wales with a life expectancy of less than six months, would be eligible for an assisted death."In a civilised society we should be allowed the chance of a humane, peaceful death," said Mrs McLeod, whose husband lived with symptoms of MND for three years."It's not acceptable to allow people to die such agonizing and uncomfortable deaths." Listen to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Toronto Star
07-06-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Star
Justice Department cutting up to 264 jobs as it faces ‘budgetary pressures'
OTTAWA - The federal Department of Justice is set to lay off as many as 264 employees as it navigates what it calls 'significant budgetary pressures.' Ian McLeod, a spokesperson for the department, said in an email the department is taking 'difficult but necessary' steps to manage available resources, given ongoing budget pressures that 'can no longer be sustained.' He said 264 positions in the department 'may no longer be required' and that the employees in those roles were notified this week. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW McLeod said the department has implemented measures aimed at addressing budgetary pressures over the past year, including staffing restrictions. He said the department also underwent a 'thorough examination of its organizational structures' and identified opportunities for cost savings. McLeod said the affected positions were chosen based on 'functions and work that may not continue,' given the department's reduced budget. He said it's unlikely that all 264 positions will be eliminated. The number of federal public service jobs dropped by almost 10,000 in the past year, marking the first decrease since 2015. As of March 31, there were 357,965 people working for the federal government, down from 367,772 in 2024. Between 2024 and 2025, the Justice Department lost 29 workers, going from 5,637 to 5,608 employees. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Hundreds of workers in other federal organizations — like the Canada Revenue Agency, Employment and Social Development Canada and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada — have also been laid off recently. Prime Minister Mark Carney has promised to cap, not cut, the federal public service, but has not said what that cap would be. He has also promised to launch a 'comprehensive' review of government spending with the aim of increasing its productivity. McLeod said the Justice Department will keep taking 'proactive measures,' like staffing restrictions, careful prioritization of work and streamlining of functions across the department 'to minimize further impacts on staff as much as possible.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2025. Politics Headlines Newsletter Get the latest news and unmatched insights in your inbox every evening Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. Please enter a valid email address. Sign Up Yes, I'd also like to receive customized content suggestions and promotional messages from the Star. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Politics Headlines Newsletter You're signed up! You'll start getting Politics Headlines in your inbox soon. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page.
