German rescue workers trying to reach four people still missing after the collapse of an ice rink had to halt their efforts yesterday while heavy machinery was used to clear away rubble and make the structure safe. City officials said they had measured the snow on the roof and it was still well within the building’s margin of safety.Nonetheless, town officials had planned to close it after the end of the day’s public skating because the snow was continuing.. The search crews were only able to enter the building a little before 4am.Rescuers hoped the snow could produce an “igloo effect” that might create relatively warm pockets of air.Several hundred people gathered yesterday for a candlelight vigil at the town hall, and church bells pealed for 20 minutes.Prosecutors launched an investigation for possible negligence, an automatic step after a fatal accident.All the victims came from the area around Bad Reichenhall, a town of 15,000 inhabitants on the Austrian border. People in the town questioned why a public building could not withstand a heavy but predictable snowfall.Experts suggested a structural flaw was a more likely cause than the heavy snow that fell on Monday. “There have been no signs of life.”
Hopes were fading of finding survivors from Monday’s accident at the end of a second night of snow and freezing temperatures. Rescuers digging laboriously with hands and shovels found a 5-year-old girl with only minor injuries Monday night, but no other survivors since.A 40-year-old woman and a girl, who police say are not related, remain missing. Eight children were among those already confirmed dead.The roof collapsed after heavy snowfall on Monday afternoon when about 50 people were inside, including many children on Christmas break from school.Rescue efforts had to be halted yesterday after a collapsed ceiling’s crossbeams shifted and put pressure on a remaining wall, leading to fears that the steeply tilted roof could collapse further.Special cranes were brought in to clear the way, and workers spent the night tearing away pieces of the facade and the remains of the roof.
Police official Hubertus Andrae said the body was that of a boy, but didn’t give an age. About 40 of the boar, which belong to Alan Dedames, have been recaptured, but 60 are still free Two have been spotted 40 miles away, near Plymouth. Mr Dedames said: “We are going to use the hunt to try to drive them back to the farm, but we have got to find them first.”
Hounds will be used to try to locate the animals and flush them out of cover. Susie Maund, senior master of the Dulverton Farmers’ Hunt, which will join the hunt, said it was going to be difficult to find the boar “We are going to need all the luck we can get,” she said. “We have got to help Mr Dedames, otherwise the boar are going to be shot.”Mr Dedames said people had started taking pot shots at the loose animals, which were shy and “not dangerous” unless cornered.. “The other two people have not been able to be located yet,” said Andrae. Animal rights activists are believed to have freed the £300,000, 100-strong herd by cutting the wire fence enclosing the animals at Woodland Wild Boar Farm, near South Molton, on 22 December.
Rescue workers recovered a 13th body today from the wreckage of a collapsed skating rink in southern Germany, and said there were no further signs of life as they continued their search for the two remaining people believed still under the wreckage. Hunters on horseback and quad bikes will set out today to try to round up wild boar which have been on the run since being released from a farm in Devon shortly before Christmas. When people ask me what Stephen can do next, all I say is ‘watch this space’.”. Born into a family of West Indian origin in north London, he spent his childhood locked in his own private world, unable to communicate with others. His condition became worse after the death of his father when he was just three years old.Despite the success, his life remains constrained. “While he is very independent and sociable, he still needs to have the reassurance that one of his family is around,” said his sister.He is not just a remarkable artist. There is definitely a voice there, a talent which stands on its own, irrespective of his disability,” she said.It was particularly interesting, she added, that during his period at the City and Guilds Art School in south London, where he has been a student for the past four years, he had retained his own style, rather than be tempted by others.Wiltshire’s life now, which recently included a trip to Hong Kong on a private commission, is a far cry from his earlier years.
“At last,” said the Daily Mail yesterday, “an artist [underlined] who deserves an honour.”Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, said it was wrong to adopt either view. “I wish people would not use him as a means to justify criticism of Damien Hirst and others. There is room enough for everyone and his is a voice that will be heard by those who perhaps do not wish to hear that of Hirst. But that doesn’t mean they both cannot exist.”She said she believed Wiltshire was a better artist than Vettriano “I think it is very interesting. Stephen’s drawings were individual constructions, but could they be seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?”And now, some have used his award as a stick with which to beat contemporary British artists such as Damien Hirst. His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal – there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and, of course, Stephen’s unmistakable style …
His prints sell for several hundred pounds each via his website.Yet his success has provoked a debate within the art world that mirrors that over the artist Jack Vettriano as to whether his work really qualifies as “art”, or is simply a stylised copying.Dr Oliver Sacks, the renowned psychologist, summed up the issue when he described Wiltshire in his 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars: “I thought how unlike a Xerox machine he was. Wiltshire’s speciality is intricate and fantastically detailed drawings of buildings and cityscapes, which has earned him a large following, packed out exhibitions and led to bestselling books. But in the case of Stephen Wiltshire, the moment was somewhat anticlimactic. “I don’t think it really made much impression on him, probably because we interrupted him in the middle of watching the television,” his older sister, Annette, disclosed. “The rest of us in the family were, of course, ecstatic.”
That is because Wiltshire, 31, suffers from autism, an inability to interact with the outside world by conventional means.
