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Bush not to cut C02 WASHINGTON, Mar 15: US President George W Bush has abandoned his campaign pledge to seek restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions and has opposed the Kyoto protocol saying it exempts major pollutant....more Drug helps some with BOSTON, Mar 14: A drug that seeks out and latches onto breast cancer tumors can reduce.....more China lawmakers BEIJING, Mar 15: Chinese lawmakers today signalled growing anger at rampant official corruption ....more |
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Fiji rulers keep
world guessing on return to democracy ADELAIDE, Mar 15: Fiji could still be back on the road to democracy after last year’s racist coup..more Saudi Arabia names RIYADH, Mar 15: Saudi Arabia said today it had identified the 35 people killed in a stampede during....more Israel’s Sharon to ease JERUSALEM, Mar 15: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would ease a blockade.........more Warning for space station CAPE CANAVERAL, (FLA.), Mar 15: A warning of a possible collision with a speeding piece of........more Internet may not be dead LOS ANGELES, Mar 15: The patient is not dead, but the prognosis is unclear...........more |
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Bush not to cut C02 emissions, opposes Kyoto protocol WASHINGTON, Mar 15: US President George W Bush has abandoned his campaign pledge to seek restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions and has opposed the Kyoto protocol saying it exempts major pollutant countries, including Indian and China, from compliance. "I do not believe... That the Government should impose on power plants mandatory emission reductions for carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant under the clean air act," Bush told senior Republicanors in a letter. Citing reasons for going backing on his election pledge, Bush said that a recent energy department study has concluded that regulating carbon dioxide emissions would lead to "significantly higher electricity prices." "This," said Bush "is important new information that warrants a re-evaluation, especially at a time of rising energy prices and a serious energy shortage." "At a time when California has already experienced energy shortages, and other Western states are worried about price and availability of energy this summer, we must be very careful not to take actions that could harm consumers." "This is especially true given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change and the lack of commercially available technologies for removing and storing carbon dioxide." On the Kyoto protocol on global warming, Bush said in the letter, that "I oppose the Kyoto protocol because it exempts 80 per cent of the world, including major poullutant countries such as India and China from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the US economy." Meanwhile, environmental organisations have denounced Bush’s turnabout. At a press conference held in front of the White House, speakers from several environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation and Worldwatch Institute, predicted that the Bush policy would lead to "disaster." Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute said that contrary to President Bush’s statement, carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant. "Unlike other regulated air pollutants, carbon dioxide will stay in the atmosphere for centuries, affecting the health and well-being of generations to come," he said. The U.S., he noted, accounts for one-quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions, but, more remarkably, the growth in U.S. emissions between 1990 and 2000 exceeds the combined emissions growth of all of China, India, Africa and Latin America. In the past few years, as China’s coal-burning has declined sharply, U.S. coal combustion is rising and in the last two years, America has passed China to be the world’s no one coal burner, he said, adding the Bush administration’s return to reliance on coal, "a dirty fuel that is a relic of the 19th century, would be a costly economic mistake." Daniel a lashof, a senior scientist at the National Resources Defence Council said, "bush is turning his back not only on his campaign pledge but on the ... World’s scientists who warn this problem is more serious than we previously thought." (PTI) |
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Drug helps some with advanced breast cancer BOSTON, Mar 14: A drug that seeks out and latches onto breast cancer tumors can reduce the risk of death by 20 per cent among women with advanced cancer, according to a study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. The drug, trastuzumab, is already being used in medical centers. However it is only effective against the 25 to 30 percent of breast tumors that have abnormally high levels of a protein known as her2. More than 44,000 women die each year in the United States from breast cancer. In tests on 469 women with advanced breast cancer, all of whom were positive for her2, the half given trastuzumab lived for 25.1 months compared to the women given a placebo, who lived an average of 20.3 months. All of the volunteers received conventional chemotherapy as well. "Few studies of metastatic breast cancer have demonstrated a survival advantage of this magnitude in association with the addition of a single agent," said the research team, led by Dr. Dennis Slamon of the UCLA School of Medicine in Los Angeles. However, the doctors were surprised to discover that the drug, sold under the brand name herceptin by genentech, caused heart problems in 27 percent of the patients who were also receiving cyclophosphamide and anthracycline-class drugs. "Although the cardio-toxicity was potentially severe and, in some cases, life-threatening, the symptoms generally improved with standard medical management," said the 12 authors, 9 of whom have financial ties to Genentech Inc DNA.N , which paid for the research. In an editorial in the journal, Dr. Elizabeth Eisenhauer of Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, said the study is "a landmark." not only is it important because "improvements in survival among women with metastatic breast cancer are rare,... Many more such targeted therapies are now undergoing clinical evaluation." Because most breast cancer patients can be cured by surgery and radiation if the tumor is caught early, "the risks of trastuzumab will necessitate great caution in its use, especially when it is combined with an anthracycline," which is already known to have toxic effects on the heart, slamon and his colleagues said. The problems of combining trastuzumab and an anthracycline and cyclophosphamide have already prompted the US Food and Arug Administration and Europe’s committee for proprietary medicinal products to only approve the use of trastuzumab with another anti-cancer drug, paclitaxel, better known as taxol. Heart problems were seen in 13 percent of patients given chemotherapy with taxol, which is sold by bristol-myers squibb. (REUTERS) |
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China lawmakers show anger on corruption, budget BEIJING, Mar 15: Chinese lawmakers today signalled growing anger at rampant official corruption by giving work reports by the Supreme Court and the chief prosecutor a tough passage through the annual session of Parliament. Delegates voting on the last day of the National People’s Congress (NPC) also showed reservations about state spending plans, with more than 20 percent withholding support for a 2001 budget that promises a 17.7 percent hike in defence expenditure. More than 30 percent voted against or abstained in polls on reports by the supremepeople’s court and the supreme people’s procuratorate, which vowed last week to wipe out official graft, organised crime and the Falun Gong spiritual group in 2001. China’s Parliament has never rejected a Communist Party proposal, although secret voting has emboldened delegates who are anxious to send powerful signals to the Government and party. The votes in this year’s two-week NPC session showed an increase in dissent over last year, when 29 percent of delegates voted against or abstained from voting on the two documents. This year, 530 delegates voted against the Supreme Court’s report while 337 either abstained or did not vote and 1,953 backed it. The prosecutor’s report got the thumbs-down from 584 with 346 either not voting or abstaining. (REUTERS) |
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Fiji rulers keep world guessing on return to democracy ADELAIDE, Mar 15: Fiji could still be back on the road to democracy after last year’s racist coup, despite the reappointment today of a Prime Minister whose military-backed Government has been declared illegal. Analysts said the reappointment of Merchant Banker Laisenia Qarase as interim Prime Minister was controversial, particularly as it allowed indigenous Fijians to retain political power. But they cautiously welcomed pledges of elections within six months and talk of a renewed commitment to a 1997 constitution that sought to safeguard the rights of Fiji’s ethnic Indians, who make up 44 percent of the population. That constitution was one of the main targets of last year’s coup by indigenous Fijian rebels. "If the early election sticks, it’s a major concession," said the constitution’s co-author Brij Lal, a history professor at Australian National University. "But it could all be a charade," he told Reuters. The key to Fiji’s future as a constitutional democracy, and to a revival of its crippled economy, will be whether a commission set up to review the 1997 constitution continues its work, and whether a timetable for elections holds firm. The latest political moves will be a test for Fiji’s biggest neighbour and donor, Australia, which suggested this week that it might lift political and economic sanctions if it can be sure elections will be held, as promised, around August. But they may also mark the end of political influence for Fiji’s first ethnic Indian Prime Minister, Mahendra Chaudhry, who was toppled in last year’s coup and who is now also being sidelined by his own party colleagues. ilitary in background Fiji’s military is expected to stay in the background, with charismatic coup leader George Speight considered unlikely to be able to inflame indigenous unrest while he remains held on treason charges on a prison island off the capital suva. Speight led his country into economic disaster when he launched his May 2000 coup, frightening off tourists, investors, and aid funds. But he seized the political agenda in a nation long split by racial tensions between indigenous Fijians and the economically dominant ethnic Indians. The latest shifts in power all involve indigenous Fijians, including the country’s ailing President Ratu Josefa Iloilo. The President won cautious international support with the surprise appointment on Wednesday of his nephew Ratu Tevita Momoedonu as caretaker Prime Minister. Momoedonu was a Minister in both the Chaudhry and the post-coup Governments. That move seemed to open the way for a Government of national unity to fill the political vacuum created when Fiji’s court of appeal declared the Qarase Government illegal on March 1. But Momoedonu resigned on Thursday and Qarase was reinstated. That shuffle appeared to be aimed at formally meeting the constitutional criteria for dissolving Parliament, as a caretaker Prime Minister can not be appointed until the incumbent quits. "This is the way of getting exactly the same administration back and calling it constitutional," said University of the South Pacific Politics and history Professor Stewart Firth. protecting their position But the apparent acceptance of the court of appeal ruling by Iloilo, Qarase, and the mercurial Great Council of Chiefs, a powerful gathering of traditional rulers, has still raised hopes for an early return to democracy. "They’re definitely protecting their positions, but the one big concession they’ve had to make is to bring the election forward and to have it under the 1997 constitution," Firth said. "That’s a pretty big concession ... But in the meantime they are in control." Deposed Prime Minister Chaudhry may try to challenge the latest moves in the courts. But analysts believe the open split between the abrasive former trade unionist, who wanted fresh elections called immediately, and his former deputy Tupeni Baba, who backed a Government of national unity, may have served Iloilo’s ends. In Fiji, the President can dismiss a Prime Minister who he believes cannot command majority support from the Parliament. "The fact that Chaudhry and Baba both approached the President with contrary advice shows their house is divided," Brij Lal said. "They played into his hand." For now, this week’s political manoeuvring looks unlikely to reignite the violence that flared against ethnic Indians during Speight’s coup. "I don’t think we are going to see further unrest," said Firth at the University of the South Pacific. "For the ordinary Fijian villager, nothing really changes." (REUTERS) |
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Saudi Arabia names 35 victims in Haj stampede RIYADH, Mar 15: Saudi Arabia said today it had identified the 35 people killed in a stampede during last week’s Haj pilgrimage to holy sites in the kingdom. The Health ministry said the victims were 10 Pakistanis, five Turks, four Egyptians, three Indians, three Sri Lankans, two Indonesians and two Afghans. An Ethiopian, a Bangladeshi, a Palestinian, an Algerian, a Sudanese and a French national also died. The victims were aged between 29 and 78, and 23 of them were women, it said. Nearly two million Muslims performed the final rituals of the annual Haj last week. The 35 people who died were crushed or suffocated on a bridge outside the holy city of Mecca as pilgrims tried to push their way to one of three pillars which they stone in a ritual symbolising the stoning of satan. The Haj has been darkened by similar fatal incidents in recent years. The biggest reported tragedy was in 1990 when 1,426 pilgrims were crushed to death in a stampede in a tunnel.(REUTERS) |
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Israel’s Sharon to ease Palestinian blockade JERUSALEM, Mar 15: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he would ease a blockade on parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip despite the palestinian authority’s desire to continue its nearly six-month-old uprising. Sharon yesterday told his 13-member security cabinet at its first meeting since he took office last week that he would selectively lift restrictions in Palestinian areas where violence dropped. Palestinians had taken to the streets hours earlier to demonstrate against the blockade, which hampers their movement and has dealt a severe blow to their already ailing economy. In the latest violence, Israeli troops killed Ahmed Bannar, 19, at the Karni commercial crossing on the Israel-Gaza border. At least 345 Palestinians, 65 Israelis and 13 Israeli Arabs have been killed in the violence that erupted in late September after peace talks reached deadlock. Israel said it had imposed the blockade, which has been criticised by Washington and the European Union, for security reasons. Palestinians brand the closure collective punishment. Raanan Gissin, Sharon’s spokesman, said easing the blockade was in line with the Government’s policy of differentiating between "terrorists" and the rest of the population. He said local military commanders had been given orders to lift the blockade in areas where fighting eased, but knew they were free to reimpose restrictions should violence flare. "The minute there is calm in a certain area we will not wait and see for how long, we will lift it (the closure)," Gissin said. "If it’s quiet there, no attacks, you lift it. If the next night there is a terror attack, you reimpose it." A statement from Sharon’s office said Israel would allow raw materials into Palestinian areas, fishing in Gaza, the building of a power plant and, where security permitted, free passage in the West Bank and Gaza and an easing of the blockade. "At this time it must be stated that the Palestinian authority has no desire to stop the violence, to implement agreements it signed and to implement the principle of solving conflicts in a peaceful manner," Sharon told the cabinet. The statement said the Palestinian authority and its forces were "intensively dealing in terrorism" and so Israel would not make goodwill gestures to the PA. Gissin said the selective lifting of the closure was also meant to send a message to the Palestinian authority that if it acted to end the uprising, "What happened in a selective area can happen all over". "We’re trying to give them quite a lucrative carrot here so we won’t have to use a stick," he added. Chanting "get out occupation", about 500 flag-waving Palestinian protesters marched towards a military checkpoint near the West Bank town of Ramallah during what was to have been a "day of rage" declared by Palestinian organisations. Israeli soldiers later wounded 10 Palestinians when they fired rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas at stone-throwing youths who lobbed rocks at Army positions nearby. After the soldiers withdrew from a roadblock to a nearby hill, youths planted Palestinian flags in the ground. "We broke the Israeli siege with our hands and it is a message to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the siege will not kill the Intifada (uprising)," said Marwan Barghouthi, a West Bank Fatah leader. Palestinians sent a bulldozer to fill in a trench ploughed by the Army as part of its blockade of Ramallah. Israel said it had sealed off the city to prevent a group of Palestinian militants from carrying out a bomb attack in nearby Jerusalem. Israel eased the closure on Ramallah on Tuesday by opening two entrances to the city. The Army said it had loosened its hold on four other West Bank cities in recent days, but reclosed roads around Qalqilya after gunmen fired on an Israeli car. At least 23 people from a crowd of about 100 Palestinian protesters in the West Bank town of Qalqilya were hurt, one of them critically, during a clash with Israeli troops, Palestinian medical sources and witnesses said. Several hundred protesters also gathered in the town of Jenin to demonstrate against the blockade. A Palestinian woman died on her way to hospital after Israeli troops turned her away from a roadblock at the entrance to Jenin, a relative said. The Israeli Army denied it had delayed her passage, saying its soldiers offered to let the taxi pass and to bring a doctor to the checkpoint to treat the unconscious woman. (REUTERS) |
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Warning for space station false alarm, NASA says CAPE CANAVERAL, (FLA.), Mar 15: A warning of a possible collision with a speeding piece of space junk that sent the international space station scrambling for a higher orbit turned out to be a false alarm, NASA said today. Astronauts used thrusters on the space shuttle Discovery, which is docked with the space station, to boost the orbit of the far-flung outpost by about 10 miles (16 kms) on Wednesday. Mission control’s worry was a piece of hardware lost by a spacewalking astronaut earlier in the week. The shoebox-sized piece of a foot restraint floated away from the shuttle-station complex on Sunday. But given the high speeds of both objects at the time, when ground trackers sent up a warning that the debris was on a near-collision course with the station, flight directors were suddenly faced with the possibility of a devastating impact. But NASA reported on Thursday that their readings had been wrong. "Two hundred miles (322 kms) up in space, traveling at 17,000 miles an hour (27,359 kms). It’s difficult to track an object that small. We felt like we had a pretty good handle on where it was," lead flight director John Shannon told reporters. Shannon said the escape maneuver was a good call, better safe than sorry, but the errant hardware "was really no threat at all to the station or the shuttle." Discovery arrived at the space station last week to deliver a new crew and about five tons of supplies and equipment. When the shuttle departs on Saturday, it will bring home the first space-station crew of Americans William Shepherd and Russians Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalyov, who have lived there since Nov. 2. No astronaut has ever been injured by orbiting debris but it is a safety concern along the lines of meteoroid impact. Were either to punch a hole in a spacecraft, it would cause rapid decompression. The Russian Space Station Mir never fully regained its structural integrity after colliding with a progress spacecraft that was approaching at a rate of feet (metres) per second, not miles (kilometers) per second. Meanwhile, the orbiting crews reported they finished unloading almost five tons of supplies from the Leonardo Cargo module, a new 150 million Italian-built component designed to dock to the station while in orbit, then return on the shuttle for re-use. The space station, which has been under construction since 1998, received its first serious scientific equipment on this mission. The human research facility will study the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the bodies of astronauts who take up residence on the station in the years to come. Leonardo is being stocked with packing material, empty food containers and dirty laundry for the return to earth. Discovery will leave behind the second live-aboard crew, the expedition two team of Yury Usachev, Susan Helms and James Voss. Construction of the orbiting outpost is expected to finish in 2006. A partnership of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Europe is building the station.(REUTERS) |
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Internet may not be dead but sex appeal has gone LOS ANGELES, Mar 15: The patient is not dead, but the prognosis is unclear. That appeared to be the main sentiment yesterday as a muted annual spring internet world — one of america’s major internet shows — opened quietly without the bells and whistles that accompanied more recent openings, when high flying dot-com companies ruled the Nasdaq exchange. With many dot-com companies having fallen by the wayside in the last 12 months, there seemed little to celebrate and the mood among participants was somber. Not even Meg Whitman, head of the Internet Phenomenon Ebay Inc Ebay.O , could lift the gloom at the show, where the number of exhibitors was down sharply from last year and much of the usual sizzle was gone. "The internet is not dead," Whitman, Chief Executive of the profitable and fast-growing auction site, said in somewhat defensive remarks in her keynote address. "I believe the internet’s best day’s are still ahead." While Whitman offered some inspiring statistics about the still rapid growth in worldwide internet use and also attempted to put this year’s internet stock blood bath in a longer term perspective, it was her acknowledgment of the industry’s ills that seemed to resonate most. Many of the other panels at the conference, with topics like "why e-commerce companies fail," "after the gold rush," and "staying alive," were clearly directed at an industry in crisis. And while total registration appeared even with last year’s levels, the number of exhibitors dropped markedly. At last count, there were 500 exhibitors presenting, down from 900 a year ago, and organizers said the final tally might drop some more since last-minuted cancellations were higher than usual. Overheard on the trade show floor was one weary exhibitor explaining how his company had committed to attending a year ago, and never would have made the same decision today. "The show has definitely gone through a transition," said Courtney Muller, Vice President of Internet World Events. "It is definitely quieter than it was last year, when it was just a boom event." Muller said many of last year’s dot-com exhibitors were no longer around and she said that other companies that had participated in past shows had slashed their marketing and travel budgets this year as a way to control costs. Too bad, since she said using the internet to achieve cost savings was one of the big messages of this year’s show. Now that countless business-to-consumer internet businesses have tried and failed, Muller said, internet world was getting down to business, highlighting the ways all kinds of companies could streamline their operations online. "Ninety per cent of companies have still not realized the potential of using the internet," explained Muller, who said the companies exhibiting technical business solutions far outnumbered those with gimmicky consumer products. "It’s really a business show at this point." Good news for accountants and propeller heads, perhaps, but not for those on the outer fringes of the industry who know little of such things as customer relationship management, but came mainly in search of a good time and a lot of freebies. T-shirts and other giveaways that have become a trademark of high-tech trade shows were almost nonexistent and there was little in the way of entertainment on the trade show floor. There were some after show parties, but nothing as extravagant as events last year held at venues like the playboy mansion and featured top bands like Santana. Still, Ebay’s Whitman served as a reminder that it was possible for internet companies to not only survive, but flourish. The auction site remains one of the few profitable pure-play dot-coms and its rate of growth appears so far to be impervious to the larger economic downturn. In last year’s fourth quarter alone, Ebay signed up an additional 3.5 million registered users. It is predicting it will have some 3 billion in annual revenues by the year 2005, which would mean a 50 percent rate of growth annually. Looking beyond Ebay, Whitman pointed out that internet stocks had created 512 billion dollars in new wealth between 1995 and 1999, which meant a significant net gain even after the reversal of fortunes seen last year. Whitman did offer a few opinions on what other companies had done right and wrong and suggested the whole industry may have underestimated the wisdom of "old economy" companies that they once regarded as dinosaurs. "I don’t think it should come as a surprise when internet companies with business models similar to wal-mart get beaten by wal-mart, or companies with business models similar to staples get beaten by staples," she said. Another big impediment to consumer shopping online, she said, was the continued lack of high-speed broadband internet access in most homes. Broadband has widely been identified as a key to making the internet more user-friendly, but it has not been adopted as quickly as most experts had forecast a few years ago. Today, Whitman said, fewer than five percent of US households have broadband internet access, but those who do spend about 61 percent more time online. (REUTERS) |
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