|
|
BBC radio
steals march LONDON, Feb 4: The BBC is winning the battle of the radio waves .......more More Russian ships trying to reach Iraq, says US MUNICH, Feb 4: US Defence Secretary William Cohen has said an ......more
Nobody will be spared ISLAMABAD, Feb 4: Pakistan’s Army ruler Gen Pervez.....more
WASHINGTON, Feb 4: US President Bill Clinton has....more |
|
Israeli-Palestinian talks DUBAI, Feb 4: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat reiterated his determination to announce the establishment of a Palestinian state within this year as his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak about West Bank land crumbled last night......more Russia to station troops MOSCOW, Feb 4: Russia’s 42nd Guards Militarised Division -comprising 15,000 personnel - is to be permanently stationed in Chechnya.. ....more Scientists present theory LONDON, Feb 4: One of nature’s strangest phenomena, ball lightning, may have been explained by two New Zealand scientists whose theory was published in an International Science Journal......more Targeted therapies PARIS, Feb 4: Targeted therapies that attack the blood supply or alter the molecular makeup of cancer cells will become the main treatment for the ....more |
 |
BBC radio steals march as king of the dial LONDON, Feb 4: The BBC is winning the battle of the radio waves with more listeners tuning into its stations and spending more time listening to its programmes than its commercial rivals, according to latest figures from Rajar. BBC radio strengthened its lead over commercial stations in the three months to end December with a 51.3 percent share of Britain’s listeners compared to commercial radio’s 46.7 percent, figures from the Audience Research Group showed. "Commercial radio did not lose audience share, it just remained stable in a growing market. We still account for two-thirds of 15-44 year olds which is where most advertising is directed," said Rachell Fox, operations director of the Commercial Radio Companies Association. In the previous quarter, BBC radio was inching ahead with a 50.3 percent share of radio listeners while its commercial competitors sunk 1.4 percentage points to 47.8 percent. Listeners tuned into BBC stations for an average of 16 hours and 42 minutes a week with an average reach of 30.93 million listeners in the fourth quarter 1999, compared with 15 hours 12 minutes for commercial radio and 30.86 million listeners. "Radio has seen off the launch of breakfast television and is going from strength to strength. For BBC radio, good presenters and new and improved schedules are paying off," said Jo Hamilton, BBC radio strategy manager. The BBC has traditionally dominated older radio listeners, while commercial radio — which first entered the fray in the early 1970s — has been more popular with a younger audience. But BBC radio — which draws 65 percent of adult listeners — is starting to attack a younger audience with its flagship radio one and more recent five live networks which have lapped up newcomers to radio. While in 1987, listeners had an average choice of 6.5 channels in Britain, they now have a choice of 15 channels. During that time, the BBC has only added one new national channel — five live — bringing its total to five. Both sides concede the real battle will begin when digital radio takes off, giving birth to many more channels. But that is not expected for some years yet. The internet is also a key unknown. But many see radio as the future internet medium, a belief which has sent radio stocks such as capital radio soaring higher in recent months. "So far so good. Hours spent listening to the radio have gone up 14 percent among internet users compared to a 25 percent slide in hours spent watching television," said Justin Sampson, operations director of the radio advertising bureau. (REUTERS) |
|
More Russian ships trying to reach Iraq, says US MUNICH, Feb 4: US Defence Secretary William Cohen has said an increasing number of Russian ships were attempting to run an international embargo against Iraq. But he said there was no evidence Moscow was officially supporting that smuggling effort. Mr Cohen also said a day after a US warship detained a Russian tanker leaving the Gulf that Baghdad was increasing smuggling efforts to circumvent the decade-old embargo on oil and arms. He said the United States would "intensify our intervention efforts" to halt this. "There has been more activity on the part of some Russian tankers and ships," he told reporters travelling with him to Munich from Washington when asked if Russian ships had recently increased efforts to sneak prohibited items into or out of Iraq. "We have no information that would indicate that is being sanctioned by the Russian Government," Mr Cohen added. But he stressed that "when we suspect that there is a ship in violation, whatever its flag or origin, it’s going to be intercepted." Mr Cohen said in an interview that inspectors from the US warship monterey who boarded the Russian tanker would take samples of the oil and examine such items as log books to try and determine where the oil on the ship came from. "If it is Iraqi oil, then it will be diverted and disposed of," Mr Cohen said. Speaking to reporters flying with him to attend an international security conference in Munich, Mr Cohen said Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein appeared to be increasing efforts to break the embargo. "I think that, over all, there has been an increase on the part of iraq to intensify its smuggling operations and we are simply going to have to intensify our own intervention to prevent that from taking place," he said. "I think that Saddam will do whatever he can to circumvent the sanctions. If there is a laxity on the enforcement part, then they will seek to exploit it." Iraqi has not been able to sell its oil on the open market since UN sanctions were imposed after its 1990 invasion of neighbouring Kuwait. In 1996, the UN Security Council launched an oil-for-food programme to allow Iraq to export limited amounts of oil to buy humanitarian goods for its people. Iraq is not only prohibited from exporting large amounts of oil, but is forbidden from importing weapons or so-called "dual-use" items that might be used in the production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. US and British warships in the Gulf and Red Sea are the chief enforcers of the embargo. The US military said last October it had diverted at least five ships carrying cargo to Iraq during a month-long period after searching for contraband. (REUTERS) |
|
Nobody will be spared from accountability, says Gen Musharraf ISLAMABAD, Feb 4: Pakistan’s Army ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf has admitted that the accountability process in the country is not as fast as he desired, but there will be no let up in our resolve. There will be no slackness in our resolve and nobody will be spared from accountability, he said in an interview to state-run PTV, the first part of which was telecast last night. He said the first 25 or 26 corruption cases were in the final stages and would be sent to the courts soon. Once the courts began trial, other cases would be filed in courts, starting a cycle. Simultaneously, the Government would continue to increase number of courts, he said. Musharraf said people were drawing parallels between his Government and martial laws in the past when a lot of activity was witnessed in the form of martial law administrators and military courts, but there were very few cases of bigwigs being nabbed. We need to bring about long-term, long-lasting structural changes to rehabilitate the system which is in decay... He said. We are heading towards structural change, The military ruler said, citing the Federal Investigating Agency (FIA) was now probing white collar crime as well. To improve governance, he said, his regime was concentrating on setting right the bureaucracy which was highly politicised. (PTI) |
|
|
WASHINGTON, Feb 4: US President Bill Clinton has indicated that he has not ruled out a visit to Pakistan during his South Asia tour next month. Well, I probably will visit Pakistan, Clinton told former Pakistani Premier Benazir Bhutto during a prayer breakfast meeting here yesterday. Bhutto who was one of the invitees to the meeting urged Clinton to visit Pakistan during his tour to India and Bangladesh beginning March 20. Clinton’s advisers, it is learnt, are wrestling with the problem whether he should go or not go to Pakistan. On one side is the argument that he will cut a sorry figure if he seems to be coddling a dictator. However, the CIA and defence intelligence chiefs have warned publicly that the subcontinent may explode into another war on present trends. Congressman Douglas Bereuter has also advanced the argument that Clinton must go in order to ensure that the US will remain influential there. (PTI) |
|
Israeli-Palestinian talks crumble over West Bank DUBAI, Feb 4: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat reiterated his determination to announce the establishment of a Palestinian state within this year as his talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak about West Bank land crumbled last night. Regional news agencies quoted Mr Arafat as saying at a meeting of the Palestinian Central Council that the Palestinian people were determined to go ahead in their struggle for the establishment of an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. Meanwhile, media reports said Israeli-Palestinian talks were plunged into crisis last night after the Palestinian leader walked out of a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister in a dispute over West Bank land. The meeting was aimed at giving a boost to negotiations between the two sides ahead of a February 13 deadline for a framework accord on the most contentious issues dividing them. Mr Arafat and Mr Barak gave up their plan for a joint news conference after the two-hour meeting at the Israeli-Gaza border. "Today’s meeting has reached a crisis. We did not reach an agreement concerning the withdrawal from 6.1 per cent of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank," chief Palestinian negotiator Yaasser Abed Rabbo said. The reports said it was the second blow to Mr Barak in his peace efforts as his talks with Syria lay in deep freeze. "The talks with the Palestinian are going through a difficult patch marked by significant tensions and substantial differences," Mr Barak said.He said differences surrounded the map of an Israeli withdrawal from 6.1 per cent of the West Bank which was due to have taken place on January 20 and on the issue of subsequent withdrawal, demanded by the autonomy agreements. Meanwhile, the 129-member Central Council of the Palestinians said the Palestinians would declare an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital by September. "A sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital must become a reality no later than September," it said in a statement after its two-day meeting in Gaza city. Israel and the Palestinian national authority have set a date of September 13 to come to a final peace agreement on all outstanding issues between them,including the thorny questions of occupied Jerusalem and any future Palestinian state.(UNI) |
|
Russia to station troops permanently in Chehnya MOSCOW, Feb 4: Russia’s 42nd Guards Militarised Division -comprising 15,000 personnel - is to be permanently stationed in Chechnya. This was announced by Deputy Defence Minister General Alexander Kosovan in Khankala, a Chechen town cleared of militants. "It will stay there forever and nobody will leave the place," the General said during his visit to the front. Commenting on an Itar-Tass report concerning despatch of a fresh Taliban contingent to Chechnya, Defence sources here felt that, with the onset of summer, the anti-Taliban alliance would launch a massive counter-offensive. With their elite soldiers in Chechnya, the Taliban may find it hard to retain the 90 per cent of Afghan territory under their control. The mercenary unit is under the command of the one-legged Dadulla, who lost his limb some years back while fighting troops belonging to the anti-Taliban alliance. Amidst all this come hardliner Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s stern words, as quoted by defence analyst Svetlana Sukhova in the daily segodnya, "send a thousand people to Chechnya and get a thousand bodies back." Joint Command spokesman General Viktor Kazantsev has said that of the seven to ten thousand foreign militants, only 2,000 remain in the last posts in Grozny. Russian Justice Minister Yuri Chaika, in Chechnya to set up the judicial machinery which is in shambles, told mediapersons yesterday that Federal soldiers have captured 1,000 hardened militants, according to a Novosti despatch from the battlefield that is Chechnya. British mediaperson Giles Whittle has been detained by Russian security services in Grozny. He was quoted as saying that he wanted to find out whether 2,000 rebels had really managed to break the federal cordon and fled the city. Earlier, a correspondent of United States’ radio Liberty had been detained. Mercenary snipers had caused "heaviest loses" among Federal forces, a Defence spokesman said here. Russian official sources appear to be of divided opinion regarding reports that dreaded extremist Shamil Basayev had been severely wounded. There are moves being made in the Duma for sending a fact-finding mission to Chechnya, according to local media. Tycoon Boris Berezovsky, one-time close aide to former president Boris Yeltsin, has expressed his desire to be included in any Duma team to be sent to Chechnya. He had brokered peace between breakaway Chechnya and the Kremlin two years previously.(UNI) |
|
Scientists present theory on ball lightning LONDON, Feb 4: One of nature’s strangest phenomena, ball lightning, may have been explained by two New Zealand scientists whose theory was published in an International Science Journal. University of Christchurch scientists John Abrahamson and James Dinniss believe the bright, hovering spheres first recorded in the middle ages are fluffy balls of burning Silicon created by ordinary fork lightning striking the earth. "Most ball lightning is seen outside in thunderstorms, so we start with a normal lightning strike on soil," Mr Abrahamson told BBC radio. "If you look at what the lightning does to the soil, it penetrates underneath the surface of the soil and we suggest the heating of the soil...Brings about a hot vapour which then, after the lightning has gone, erupts above the ground in just the same manner as you blow air through your lips to get a smokers’ puff," he said. Around one in 100 people claim to have seen ball lightning, but scientists have never been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation for it. It is typically described as having a diameter somewhere between a golf ball and a beach ball and lasting for around 15 seconds, floating in the air not far from the ground. Ball lightning can be any colour, but is normally white or yellowish, with an intensity roughly equivalent to a 100 watt light bulb. In their article in nature magazine, Mr Abrahamson and Mr Dinniss suggest that the extreme heat generated at the point where lightning strikes can sometimes turn the silica-carbon mixture contained in soil into silicon and silicon compounds with oxygen and carbon. The process is similar to the techniques used in industry to extract pure silicon from sand. The silicon forms tiny "nanoparticles" which link together into chains which are lifted above the ground by air currents, Mr Abrahamson and Mr Dinniss wrote. The particles then burn slowly, giving off heat and light. The scientists have not yet been able prove their theory by recreating ball lightning in the laboratory, but believe it explains all the commonly observed features of the phenomenon. (REUTERS) |
|
Targeted therapies are main weapons against cancer: Expert PARIS, Feb 4: Targeted therapies that attack the blood supply or alter the molecular makeup of cancer cells will become the main treatment for the disease, a leading cancer expert has said. Just as antibiotics reduced the potency of major killers like tuberculosis in the last century, gene therapy, angiogenesis inhibitors and new organic molecules will be the new weapons against cancer which is expected to replace heart disease as the leading cause of death in the coming decades. "There are many types of drugs being targeted from the molecular defects that cause cancer, to the pathways that regulate whether the cells will proliferate or not, to the body’s immune response to cancer and its response to its blood supply," said John Mendelsohn, President of the University of Texas and the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. "I believe there is a great hope that in this century specific therapies will be applied to cancer in the same way specific antibiotics (were) applied to the common causes of death and bacterial infections during the past century," he told a cancer summit in Paris. According to Mendelsohn, "cancer will never be eradicated but it will move down the list (of major killer diseases)". Unlike conventional cancer therapies that kill healthy as well as cancerous cells with devastating side effects, the new treatments are designed to attack only diseased cells. Gene therapies delivered into the body through a harmless virus will replace defective genes in the cancerous cell. Angiogenesis inhibitors will block the development of new blood vessels, cutting off oxygen and nutrient supplies to tumours. Antibodies that bind to cell receptors, which act like doors into the cell, are also being developed and tested which will inhibit the function of the diseased cell. Mr Mendelsohn told the first world summit against cancer that major breakthroughs in cancer research and the knowledge that cancer is caused by malfunctions in key growth regulatory genes have enabled scientists to develop more specific treatments. Scientists also understand the steps that trigger the characteristic uncontrolled cell growth of cancer and how the body’s immune system responds to the disease. New technologies like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and gene arrays have improved screening for the disease and are enabling scientists to detect cancer at many different levels and much earlier. Mr Mendelsohn is one of 170 cancer experts at the two-day summit which aims to improve global care of cancer patients. In addition to bringing together the world’s top cancer experts, Government officials, patients and advocacy groups, the organisers hope to mobilise international efforts and increase funding for research into the disease that kills six million people worldwide each year. Delegates at the summit will also sign the charter of Paris against cancer on Friday. The 10-point plan is the first global charter to combat cancer. It will cover all aspects of research, screening, patient rights and improvements in access to the latest therapies. (REUTERS) |
|
|
