Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Standard Chartered Marathon, nicknamed “The Greatest Race on Earth“, held its third stage in Mumbai, India today. Because of the scorching hot weather in India, marathon runners had to adapt to the weather to overcome the challenge.

More than 30,000 runners participated in this race, joined by local NGOs and disabled who participated in a special charity short-distance running including 6km dream run, 4.3 km senior, and 2.5km wheel-chair classes. Gabriela Szabo, former Romanian Olympic Gold Medalist, named as charity ambassador of the race, was pleased by the participation from experts and NGOs.

An hour into the race, former champion Daniel Rono and Joseph Kimisi took the lead, but then Tariku Jifar from Ethiopia and defending champion John Ekiru Kelai took over Rono and Kimisi. After 40 kilometres, Kelai took a decisive lead and finally retained his champion title in 2 hours 12 minutes 22 seconds.

In the Women’s Group, Mulu Seboka from Ethiopia won the champion with 2H30m03s. Local runners Surendra Singh & Kavita Raut won the Men’s and Women’s Champions in the half-marathon class.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

An anti-APEC rally through the streets of Sydney has attracted around 5000 demonstrators, with up to 18 arrests and two police injured. In the days leading up to the rally, police had warned that the demonstration could attract up to 20,000 people and turn into a full scale riot, however these fears were not realised.

The mostly peaceful demonstration marched from Sydney’s Town Hall to Hyde Park where they were greeted with a carnival atmosphere. The demonstrators protested against the 2003 Iraq invasion, climate change, workers’ rights and globalisation with many blowing whistles, yelling chants and beating drums.

While reports in the media vary, up to 18 people were arrested when they turned violent. Two police officers were injured, one when hit by an iron bar and another when he was hit with a dart. Those arrested have been charged with offences ranging from assaulting police, hindering police, resisting arrest, offensive conduct and breaching a secure area.

Despite the arrests, NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione praised the conduct of the majority of protesters. Mr Scipione credited the huge numbers of police and poor weather for the successful outcome of the rally.

“It certainly caused numbers to dwindle, in fact it surely caused numbers not to turn up,” he said.

“But more importantly, I think it was the combination of the show of force, the police were out there in big numbers, and we don’t apologise for that.

“We always indicated that we would be there, in sufficient numbers to be able to act swiftly against those that broke the law.

“So was that overkill? I don’t think so.”

Security surrounding the APEC summit is the tightest ever seen in Australia with a 5 km fence restricting access to Northern parts of Sydney’s CBD, overflights by airforce jets, police on jet skis, snipers, riot squad members and special laws to crack down on security during the summit.

There have been complaints about the conduct of police which are alleged to of misused special search powers which only apply to the fenced zone surrounding APEC facilities and of heavy-handedness by police. Several protesters claimed that Sydney had been turned into a “police state” as a result of the security measures. Commissioner Scipione said “all allegations of police misconduct would be investigated”.

A second protest, held in Belmore Park attracted around 1,000 people from Vietnamese and Tibetian backgrounds protested against Chinese President Hu Jinato’s human rights record. Organiser of the protest, Tenpa Dugdak said Australian Prime Minister John Howard should make human rights in China an APEC issue.

“It’s so important – this meeting that happened, 21 leaders – great, but [don’t] just discuss about trade, discuss about human rights, environmental problems that can really impact on a global scale,” he said.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

To promote the craft design of indigenous peoples in Taiwan, the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Executive Yuan, the show organizer, made an inception on crafts of indigenous peoples with the “2008 Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Craft Exhibition” in the Ketagalan Culture Center in Taipei, Taiwan.

As of the organizer, this exhibition was set to discover more excellent artisans from indigenous peoples and promote the excellent crafts of indigenous peoples in Taiwan to bring on the sustainability of the traditional indigenous tribes.

Not only this show until June 29, but the 2008 Taiwan Designers’ Week from tomorrow (June 28), in addition to 2008 Taipei In Style from July 10, will bring on the other opportunities for cultural, creative, and the fashion-related industries.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

This past Sunday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill known as “Rocky’s Law” that requires Illinois high schools, through the local school district, to buy catastrophic injury insurance up to US$3 million or medical costs for up to five years, whichever one comes first, that covers student athletes. The insurance must cover student athletes while they are competing.

The legislation was named after Rasul “Rocky” Clark. In 2000, the Eisenhower High School football player became paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a tackle during a game. His school based health insurance covered the costs of his medical treatment. A legislator sponsoring the bill noted that the need for this type of insurance is rare. Clark’s mother attended the legislation signing. Her son died last year.

Before parents can claim money from school insurance, they first must pay out US$50,000. Schools have until January 1, 2014 to comply with the law. Schools cannot charge students more than US$5 to defray the cost of insurance. If a school district already requires student to be covered through private health insurance, they are exempted from this law.

Friday, March 16, 2007

The European Space Agency‘s Mars Express spacecraft has discovered ice deposits in the south pole of Mars that are larger than the state of Texas.

Scientists say that there is enough water in the deposits to cover the entire planet with up to 36 feet of water if the ice was to melt. Some sections of the ice deposits are up to 2.3 – 2.5 miles deep. The ice is composed of carbon dioxide, a little bit of dust, and water (90 percent of the water is estimated to be frozen).

What has caught the attention of the scientists working on the Mars Express project is that this may help reveal whether or not there is any (microbial) life within the ice.

Another perplexing question that scientists are trying to solve is what happened to all the water that produced all the channels on the surface of Mars.

Jeffrey Plaut, who is from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and who is also leading the study, noted that, “We have this continuing question facing us in studies of Mars, which is: where did all the water go? Even if you took the water in these two (polar) ice caps and added it all up, it’s still not nearly enough to do all of the work that we’ve seen that the water has done across the surface of Mars in its history.”

Currently, only 10 percent of the water is remaining and is located at the poles of Mars. It has been suggested that some of the remaining 90 percent of the water that disappeared could either be underground or could have simply left the atmosphere into space.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

An article in the February 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports on an unusual cause for an outbreak of low blood sugar among men in Singapore: illegal use of sexual performance enhancement drugs that were contaminated with a diabetes drug.

Between January and May 2008, 149 men and one woman between 19 and 97 (mean age 51) were admitted to five public hospitals for unexplained low blood sugar. Similar cases were reported in media reports from Hong Kong. Seven Singaporean patients remained in a coma because of prolonged sugar starvation of the brain, and four subsequently died. The diabetes drug glyburide was found in blood and/or urine samples in 85% of cases; 30% admitted having used illegal sexual performance enhancers.

The contaminated products were a counterfeit version of the drug Cialis (meant for the treatment of genuine erectile dysfunction), and three purported herbal preparation (the affected brands included Power 1 Walnut and Santi Bovine Penis Erecting Capsule). All four preparations additionally contained Viagra in varying concentrations. Two herbal products contained traces of the weight loss drug sibutramine, a compound related to amphetamines.

The drug packaging mentioned names of non-existent overseas production facilities, so the source of the contamination with the diabetes drug could not be established.

The authors underline the risks that is known to be associated with purchasing drugs from unreliable providers or from online resellers. The clandestine use of impotence drugs as sexual performance enhancers seems to have provided a good illustration of this problem. They further call for more efforts by national and international health and law enforcement agencies to curb the manufacturing, international transport and sales of untrustworthy medication.

Monday, May 7, 2018

On Saturday, United Launch Alliance launched a Atlas V 401 rocket carrying NASA’s InSight Mars lander and two Mars Cube One (MarCO) miniature spacecraft known as cubesats. The pre-dawn launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 3E in Lompoc, California was declared a success. This was the very first deep space launch from the west coast of the United States, and aimed to send a lander to the surface of the planet Mars to study its interior.

Launched alongside InSight were two MarCO cubesats, the first to be sent beyond Earth, nicknamed ‘WALL-E’ and ‘Eve’ after the protagonists of the 2008 animated science fiction film WALL-E. They were designed as a dual telecommunications relay for InSight during the spacecraft’s descent through the Martian atmosphere.

Traditionally, NASA launched interplanetary spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on the United States’ east coast. There, rockets were sent eastward over the Atlantic Ocean, borrowing the Earth’s rotational velocity to shoot their payloads out into the solar system. Due to congestion on the launch calendar at Canaveral, NASA chose to launch the spacecraft from from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the country’s west coast instead. A launch eastward from Vandenberg would have been dangerous due to densely populated areas being located downrange. Instead, rockets launched from Vandenberg were sent in a south-southeast trajectory. For Insight and MarCO, the spacecraft was placed in a temporary polar orbit after the launch, with the pair being shot towards Mars during a escape burn performed over the North Pole.

Despite a heavy fog settling in at the rocket’s launch pad in Lompoc, the United Launch Alliance declared a “100% chance of favorable weather for liftoff”. Spectators in Lompoc were treated to a mostly obscured view of the launch, though they were witness nonetheless to the sound and shock waves of the Atlas V’s Common Core first stage as it lifted the spacecraft off the ground on-schedule at 4:05 PDT (1105 UTC). People along the coast of southern California and northern Baja California, however, were in clear view of the Atlas V’s main engine burn and the first burn of the rocket’s Centaur upper stage. People in Orange County, California were treated to the sight of InSight and the Centaur almost eclipsing the planet Jupiter in the night sky.

The recently-inaugurated Administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, congratulated the InSight team in an address televised live on NASA TV after the launch, along with the United Launch Alliance on what was their 128th successful launch in a row. The InSight mission part of NASA’s Discovery program, a class of low-cost solar system exploration missions. It was selected to launch in the program after beating the Comet Hopper and Titan Mare Explorer proposals amongst responses to a 2010 request.

Both InSight and the MarCO cubesats are en route to Mars. InSight carries eight scientific instruments, including a seismometer known as Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). The SEIS instrument will be recording the very first seismic measurements of Mars, which scientists hope will shed light on the structure of Mars beneath its surface. The lander was equipped with two cameras, based on the architecture of the Mars Exploration Rover’s navigation camera and hazard avoidance camera, to allow mission scientists to monitor the activity of the instruments. NASA scheduled a November 26 landing for InSight on a broad plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere, known as Elysium Planitia.