This Week in Pictures: February 9 – February 15, 2016

There were no shortage of big news stories breaking around the world last week so we look at back at some of the most important.

In Bavaria, Germany, two commuter trains crashed in head on collision near Bad Aibling, near Munich, on Tuesday morning last week, killing 11 and injuring a further 82, twenty of them seriously. Safety mechanisms that should have prevented both trains being on the same stretch of single-track line, particularly an automatic braking system, failed to prevent the trains colliding at a closing speed of over 100mph. On a blind bend neither driver could see the other train and neither braked, both died.

In New Hampshire, USA, the race for the White House faced its second challenge at the ballot box as the North East state went to the polls. For the Republicans Donald Trump, beaten back into second place in the Iowa Caucus, won with 35.3% of the vote, more than double his nearest rival, whilst for the Democrats Bernie Sanders took a convincing victory getting 60.4% compared to Hillary Clinton’s 38%. This allows both “outsider” candidates to carry some momentum into South Carolina.

Antonin Scalia, long time hardline conservative Supreme Court Justice, died last week at the age of 79, prompting a fierce partisan political row. Whilst his replacement may be nominated by the sitting President, Barack Obama, the Republican party’s Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell said it should be the next President that should nominate a replacement and obstructionist tactics seem likely to be employed to prevent any replacement being confirmed prior to the November election.

In sports Danny Welbeck scored a last minute header for Arsenal at the Emirates off a free kick from Mesut Ozil, giving them a significant 2-1 win over ten-man table toppers Leicester in the English Premier League, and closed the gap to the league leaders down to just two points. But will Wenger’s boys be able to overhaul the Foxes in what remains of the season? You’ll have to read our daily news pages to find out, but in the meantime here’s a look at some of the big stories we covered last week.

1. Back on the memory lane for GamingZion readers: an online casino virus was destroying all useful data from your computer back in the days when DOS OS was popular.

2. We looked at the tragic killing of two Kenyan Casino staff by a sword wielding loser who was then himself killed by his fellow gamblers.

3. LeoVegas Casino announced that it will sponsor the Wembley SSE Arena during 2016.

4. A player in Sweden won SEK 672.275 after starting with a SEK25 wager at Chance Hill Casino.

5. BetVictor Sportsbook extended its sponsorship deal so they remained title sponsor for PDC World Matchplay for 3 more years.

6. DFS operator DraftKings announced the acquisition of MMA daily fantasy site Kountermove.

7. 32Red reported that they will pay a special dividend to all shareholders by March 16.

Meanwhile a hundred years after they were predicted by Albert Einstein scientists announced they had found direct evidence of the existence of Gravitational Waves, ripples expanding outward of large scale stellar impact events. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory project detected a wave from the collision of two black holes, and their success was heralded as opening up an entirely new field of astronomic discovery which will give scientists a greater insight into the universe.