Fifteen people killed in attack on Nigerian college

Friday, September 19, 2014

Officials said at least fifteen people were killed in an attack on a teachers training college in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano by a group of armed gunmen on Wednesday. Over 30 others were wounded.

News agencies have reported while there has been no claim of responsibility, suspicion will likely fall on the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. The group has previously targeted Western-style schools within the country, including past attacks on secondary schools.

According to official reports, police first approached the group in the area of the school, concerned about their unusual activity, and the attackers engaged police in a firefight. The attackers gained entry to the school and started throwing bombs.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan described the incident as a “dastardly attack”. He has already declared a state of emergency in three northern states, and is being criticized along with the country’s armed forces for failure to prevent extremist attacks.

A police spokesman said police killed two attackers at the scene.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, today unveiled the country’s final annual budget before the general election. The biggest announcements included abolishing stamp duty on homes under £250,000 for first-time buyers, whilst increasing it to 5% on homes over £1 million. In his statement to the House of Commons, the Chancellor claimed that the Labour government had made the right calls in countering the global recession, but warned that introducing cuts too early would jeopardise the recovery.

Opposition leader David Cameron attacked the Budget, saying that the headline stamp duty plans were stolen from his own Conservative party. He criticised the amount of government debt, expected to be £167 billion this year, pointing out that it was more than every previous Labour government’s borrowing added together. Cameron continued his call for spending cuts to decrease the deficit, saying it was time for a “radical change of direction”. Darling however maintains that it is too soon.

“I know there are some demanding immediate cuts to public spending,” said the Chancellor to the Commons. “I believe such a policy would be both wrong and dangerous. To start cutting now risks derailing the recovery – which is already bringing down borrowing more rapidly than expected.” This year’s expected government debt is less than the £178 billion that was forecast in December 2009’s pre-Budget report.

There will be an estimated 2.2% real terms rise in government spending this year, and several spending announcements were made. However Darling warned that cuts will follow after 2011, and could be “the toughest for decades”. The Conservatives have said that if they win the upcoming election, they will introduce an “emergency Budget” less than 50 days after taking office.

Among the plans announced by the Chancellor today are a green investment bank to support renewable energy and low-carbon industries. This will have £2 billion, half raised by sale of government assets, including the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, and half raised from private investment. Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds will also have to provide loans worth £94 billion to businesses, with small and medium sized companies receiving at least half of this. These companies will also have access to a new credit adjudicator to oversee banks’ decisions on loans.

There will be a sharp rise of 10% in tax on cider, with wine, beer and spirit duties rising at 2% above inflation as planned. These changes will occur from midnight on Sunday, and tax on alcohol is set to increase a further 2% for two years from 2013. The previously scheduled increase in fuel duty will still happen, but will now be staggered over a longer period.

Other changes include a freeze of the threshold for inheritance tax for the next four-years, whilst higher winter fuel payments for pensioners will be maintained for another year.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Norwegian national assembly voted Wednesday to change the existing marriage and adoption laws. After debating for several hours, the vote resulted in a 84 to 41 majority in favour of the new law which allows homosexual couples to marry and adopt children.

For the past several weeks, there have been extensive debate over the change, with both sides staging demonstrations in most of the larger cities in Norway. The last time Norway changed the laws regarding marriage was in 1993, when gay and lesbian people were allowed to form partnership unions with similar rights as marriages. The existing law attracted criticism in the last few years for discriminating against homosexuals, as they were denied marriage, adoption, and the use of assisted reproductive technology.

The new law, as proposed, allows marriages between homosexuals, granting them the same rights to religious services in connection with their marriage, as well as the right to adopt children with the same requirements being applied as to heterosexuals. The new law also allows lesbian couples to use assisted reproductive technology.

The new law does not require The Church of Norway to marry gays or lesbians, but it allows ministers to perform this service if the national church council permits it.

Another part of the new proposal, which would have concealed the identity of sperm donors, failed to gain a majority during the vote. Citing the right for children to know their biological parents as more important, a majority of the representatives voted against this part of the proposal.

Monday, January 2, 2006

So more staff can be hired for Bolivia’s education, health and social programs, President Elect Evo Morales announced that he and his cabinet will take a 50% pay cut. The 46-year-old leader slashed his future salary of about $3600 a month to $1800.

Raising Bolivia from its situation as one of the poorest countries in the world is a primary intention of the president elect. “It’s a question of sharing the country’s situation among us all.” said Morales. “This is a democratic revolution and we will answer the Bolivian people’s call.”

Cabinet ministers and all 157 members of Morales’ party that were elected to Congress will also take a 50% pay cut, Morales said. The salaries of 157 substitute congressmen will be eliminated.

Morales, who is known across the country as “Evo”, is Bolivia’s first native Indian president. Growing up in poverty has marked his politics. He often says, “For a handful of people there is money, for the others, repression.”

Evo will soon move from his rented single room of a shared house to Bolivia’s presidential palace.

Morales also met with business and civic leaders on Tuesday in a conciliatory meeting. Morales said his government would create a stable legal and economic environment to attract investment and create jobs which was applauded by the Bolivian elite.

“I do not have a professional education, but it is important that we co-operate. You have the professional capacity, I have the social consciousness”.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

In findings published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell, a team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, China have announced the first-ever cloning of a primate from post-embryonic cells, namely two macaque monkeys. They used somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same method that was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.

In somatic cell nuclear transfer, scientists remove the nucleus, which is the organelle that contains the chromosomes, from an unfertilized ovum, or egg cell, and implant the nucleus from a somatic cell, or non-reproductive cell, into that ovum. The ovum is then stimulated and develops in the normal way, growing into a whole organism that has the same nuclear DNA as the donor organism, though it will have all of the ovum’s mitochondria and other cellular machinery. Clones like these have been described as identical twins to their donors, but younger.

The scientists implanted 21 ova into surrogate mother monkeys, resulting in six pregnancies, two of which produced living animals. The young clones were named “Zhong Zhong” and “Hua Hua,” both derived from Zh?nghuá, the Chinese-language word for the Chinese people. They are both cynomolgus monkeys, or crab-eating macaques (Macaca fascicularis). The scientists also attempted to clone macaques using nuclei from adult donors. They implanted 42 surrogates, resulting in 22 pregnancies, but there were still only two infant macaques, and they died soon after birth. The Scotland-based team that created Dolly the sheep in 1996 required 277 attempts and produced only one lamb.

Generally, the older the donor organism, the more difficult it is to get the DNA from the harvested nucleus to reactivate the genes that allow the clone organism to grow. Previous efforts to clone rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) using embryonic donor cells have been successful, but the current attempt used significantly older donors: fetal fibroblast cells, which are key cells in connective tissue, and adult monkey cumulus cells.

“We’re excited — extremely excited,” said study co-author Muming Poo. “This is really, I think, a breakthrough for biomedicine.” He went on to say that the cloned monkeys could be used as test subjects for the study of neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s. Primates are already a popular model organism for neurological studies. In the United States, for example, non-human primates are used in less than 0.3% of all animal experiments, most of them involving neuroscience, and macaques in particular are a well-established animal model of atherosclerosis, which causes heart disease.

“I think it’s a very exciting landmark. It’s a major advance,” agreed reproductive biologist Dieter Egli of Columbia University. “It should be possible to make models of human disease in those monkeys and study those and then attempt to cure it.”

About 90% of the laboratory animals used in the United States are rodents. Although the first cloned mouse was born in 1998, cloned mice are not currently common in laboratory settings. This may be because producing inbred mouse lines is still relatively effective.

Although the announcement raised enthusiasm from researchers, it also drew caution from bioethicists. “Cloning one individual in the image of another really sort of demeans the significance of us as individuals,” says Harvard Medical School’s Dr. George Daley, speaking specifically of cloning humans. “There’s a certain sort of gut sense that it violates sort of natural norms.” While Muming Poo concedes it is now theoretically possible to clone a human, he says his lab has no plans to do so.

Although somatic cell nuclear transfer was used successfully in amphibians as early as 1952, getting it to work in mammals took much longer. Dolly, the first cloned mammal, was born in 1996. Teams have been trying to clone monkeys for decades, but primate DNA is notoriously difficult to work with. “The trick is we choose the right chemicals to turn on these genes we transfer into the egg,” Mu-ming Poo told the press. “So that’s what we did different. I think that’s the key.” One of the agents used to treat the ova was messenger RNA from the human Kdm4d gene.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Wednesday morning, the Frankfurt Book Fair opened its gates to the first of an estimated 280,000 visitors this year in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the biggest book fair in the world. It also organises the participation of German publishers at more than 25 international book fairs and is the co-founder of the Cape Town Book Fair in South Africa. It maintains the most visited website worldwide for the publishing industry.

The German Publishers & Booksellers Association, which runs the Frankfurt Book Fair, says that the book market is thriving. It declared on Tuesday that the high number of exhibitors and the record numbers of 7,448 exhibitors from over 100 countries, showing 391,652 books, including 121,267 new books of this year, proves that the book market is thriving.

Publishing houses have long since expanded into non-traditional markets. TV and merchandising rights have long played a role, but have become more and more important for larger projects. Two other media forms have also become more standard elements of the value chain. E-books and audiobooks are both big topics of this year’s Book Fair.

The various awards handed out during and around the fair show the variety and scope of media and interests represented at the Frankfurt Book Fair:

• On Sunday, October 7, Australian writer Michelle de Kretser, born in Colombo. Sri Lanka, was awarded the LiBeratur-award for the German edition of her book ‘The Hamilton Case’, previously published in English with Little, Brown and Company, New York. The LiBeratur-award for an outstanding publication of a woman from Africa, Asia and Latin America in German language in the previous year, was awarded for the 20th time.

• On Tuesday, October 9, German author Julia Franck was honoured with the German Book Prize for her novel ‘Die Mittagsfrau’. Against the background of two world wars, Julia Franck tells the disturbing story of a woman who leaves her son, without fnding herself.
• On Wednesday, October 10, the software award GIGA-Maus for family friendly and educational entertainment was awarded to Wii Sports (Nintendo) for best software of the year. The award of the children judges went to Buzz! Junior: Robo Jam(Sony, PS2).
• On Sunday, October 14, the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers will be awarded to Saul Friedländer, for his retelling of the Shoah as one of the most important historiographers of the time.

Prizes still open include the German Young Literature Award on Friday and the Fantasy Final of the first German Cosplay Masters at the comic-centre of the book fair.

Sunday, January 2, 2005

< 26 December-31 December 2004 • Index • 11-18 January 2005 >

Articles dated 1 to 10 January 2005 are included in the compilation below.Experimental Format

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The California Controller’s office reports that eleven state agencies have given US$13.3 million in pay and travel advances that have not been collected.

Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order to recover uncollected loans by the agencies. A press release from the governor’s office states, “The Governor’s Executive Order seeks to recover taxpayer dollars by directing state agencies and departments to clear salary and travel advances within 30 days through an expense claim.” Any outstanding balance will be deducted from employees’ paychecks under the governor’s order after the 30 days.

Under California state law, state employees are permitted to receive advances for hardship, travel, and other circumstances. These advances cannot be collected by agencies after three years without the employee’s consent.

State Controller John Chiang said in a statement, “The state’s poor debt collection and accounting practices are fleecing public coffers at a time when vital public programs are being decimated by unprecedented budget cuts.” Chiang’s office expects there will be more money unaccounted for, including some from the California Highway Patrol (CHP). California state law mandates that anyone convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol is required to pay for the investigation. The CHP has not collected this money.

The California Department of Transportation, also called Caltrans, has the largest debt of the eleven agencies: $3.2 million. Cal Fire, or the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, “had an outstanding balance of $1.44 million as of June 30, 2008. An overwhelming portion of that balance was related to employee salary and travel advances,” according to a controller’s office audit.

Chiang’s office had informed former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger there were outstanding debts, but Schwarzenegger’s administration did not take action.

All eleven agencies have agreed to hand over any delinquent accounts to the controller’s office, who will collect these debts.