While Nantes

While Nantes is a pleasant city, with white and grey stone buildings flanking the mouth of the Loire River, it doesn't have the spectacular architecture, major historical significance or three-star restaurants of some of its French counterparts. So the city decided to create its own unique attraction

In 2007 Nantes opened the combined art installation and amusement park on the site of a former shipyard. Les Machines offers both carnival-style rides for which anyone can purchase a ticket, and smaller machines demonstrated by visitors selected from the crowd. The result is a kind of steampunk amusement park, and a breathtaking juxtaposition of old, new – and weird.

Why not ride on an oversized spider? (Hana Schank)

Les Machines is inspired by Jules Verne, who was born and raised in Nantes, and the installations feel like 19th-century science fiction come to life. Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, for example, inspired the three-storey, 25m-tall Carrousel des Mondes Marin (Marine Worlds Carousel). Visitors can choose to ride on three levels of mechanical sea creatures: squid and crab on the lowest level, suspended fish on the second and boats and jellyfish at the top.
Since the carousel elements are moveable, adults and kids alike scramble into seats and buckle themselves into the mouths of giant fish or aboard boats, pushing pedals and pulling levers to make the machines rock and spew steam.  

Carousel riders can pull levers to make the boats rock and steam shoot out. (Hana Schank)

The island’s biggest showstopper, however, is a 48-tonne mechanical elephant. The creature, which carries 50 riders, stomps the entire length of the park – from the entrance, across the shipyard and past an old warehouse to the carousel, before looping back to discharge passengers and wait for new ones. The wild ride takes a half hour.

The park famous, mechanical elephant delights visitors with its presence and its sprayHanna Schan

Inspired by Verne’s 1880 novel The Steam House, in which British colonists travel through in a house wheeled by a steam-powered elephant, the ride gives passengers the chance to view Nantes’ warehouses, ships and 18th-century mansions from a unique vantage point 12m in the air – the equivalent of being on the third storey of a moving house. It also sprays water at unsuspecting observers.
Smaller machines are housed inside the soaring Galerie Des Machinesmachine gallery including a flying heron and a menagerie of prehistoric-looking metal bugs, spiders and other imaginary pedal-powered slithering insects, all fitted with seats for riders.  

Ebola vaccine

He will discuss the Ebola crisis in a video conference on Wednesday with British, French, German and Italian leaders, the White House says.
Mr Banbury issued a stern warning on Tuesday - telling the UN Security Council by video-link from West Africa that if Ebola was not stopped now, the world would "face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan

Anthony Banbury addressed Security Council members via video link from Accra, Ghana

"If we do not get ahead of the crisis, if we do not reach our targets and the number of people with Ebola rises dramatically as some have predicted, the plan we have is not scalable to the size of such a new crisis," he said.
He called for more money to build treatment centres and more medical personnel to staff them.
It follows the WHO's latest projections suggesting the infection rate could reach 5,000 to 10,000 new cases a week within two months if global efforts to combat the spread of infection were not stepped up.
There have been 8,914 cases overall, including the fatal cases, and the WHO says it expects this number to top 9,000 by the end of the week.

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Out of media player. Press enter toThe progress towards an Ebola vaccine - in 80 secoThe WHO estimates its figures by taking the numbers of confirmed cases and multiplying them from Guinea by 1.5, from Sierra Leone by 2 and from Liberia by 2.5 - to account for under-reporting.WHO assistant director-general Bruce Aylward said on Tuesday that the rate of infections appeared to be slowing in the historic epicentre of the outbreak, but warned that it was too early to read this as success.

'No protocols' Separately, nurses at a hospital in Texas where a colleague contracted the virus from a Liberian patient who died of Ebola say they worked for days without adequate protective clothing and received little guidance on how to prevent the spread of the virus.
It comes after the head of the US Centers for Disease Control, Thomas Frieden, said there had been a breach of protocol by health workers that led to the nurse becoming infected.
"The CDC is saying that protocols were breached, but the nurses are saying there were no protocols," the head of the national nurses union, Roseann DeMoro, told reporters.