2010年12月16日星期四

Ministries

 The government of Cote d'Ivoire's incumbent Laurent Gbagbo, who is fighting over the presidency with Alassane Ouattara, wants to promote good governance by carrying out an audit in all ministries, his prime minister has indicated.
"The government will organize an audit in all ministries," Gilbert Marie Ake N'gbo said after a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
The audit will be used as an "operational guide," he said, describing it as a "strong signal" regarding the government's resolve to institute good governance.
He explained that the operation will help the government know what went wrong in the past and improve on what was done well.
Ake N'gbo also announced that each member of his government will declare his wealth and this shall include buildings and other materials.
"Time has come for everyone to state how they got their wealth, " the prime minister said.
Since the publication of the presidential run-off results on Nov. 28, the West African country has been locked in a stalemate with two presidents and two prime ministers to form two governments.
The international community include the United Nations throw behind Ouattara to press Gbagbo to quit, while the 65-year-old incumbent persists in the standoff with the backing of the army and the complete set of power apparatus.
Ouattara reappointed Guillaume Soro to the post of prime minister, who consequently formed a 13-member government being holed up in an Abidjan hotel.
Gbagbo has been in control of the country's southern part including the economic city Abidjan, while Soro, the leader of the ex-rebel New Forces, has taken the northern part since the 2002- 2003 civil war.
Soro had previously served as the prime minister under Gbagbo in accordance with a peace accord signed by the rival sides in March 2007.
Gbagbo was justified by the Constitutional Council, which rejected the election results published by the electoral commission, ruling that the outgoing president won the second round of the race.
"The government is at work," Ake N'gbo declared on Tuesday.

Suspects

 The International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo said Wednesday he will summon six Kenyans whom he suspects of masterminding the 2007/08 post election violence in Kenya.
Addressing a news conference at the Hague, Ocampo said Finance Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and son of Kenya's founding leader Jomo Kenyatta, Industrialization Minister Henry Kosgey, former Higher Education Minister William Ruto and former police chief Mohammed Hussein Ali were behind the country's post election violence which killed over 1,300 people and displaced 650,000 others in 2007/08.
He said Head of the Civil Service and Secretary to the Cabinet Francis Muthaura and radio presenter Joshua Arap Sang will also be summoned for instigating the country's worst political violence in Kenya's 47 years of independence.
According to Ocampo, the six stand accused for crimes against humanity in what he calls an orchestrated campaign to displace, torture, persecute and kill civilians during Kenya's election crisis in 2007 and early 2008.
Ocampo said each of the six will be served with a court summons, but if they fail to turn up or if they attempt to hinder the investigation - for example by intimidating witnesses - Ocampo says he will request arrest warrants.
The former police chief Ali stands accused of unleashing police officers to shoot unarmed demonstrators in Western city of Kisumu, and Ruto is widely accused of instigating violence.
Ocampo started a formal probe in March 2010 into the 2008 post- election violence.
The East African nation has been struggling with the formation of a local tribunal after two failed attempts in parliament.
Foreign governments reiterate that the special tribunal is the key test of the commitment of the coalition government and the 10th parliament to the accord brokered by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, to end the violence and pave the way for the power-sharing agreement.
The ICC judges gave the prosecutor the go ahead to start investigations in March after his last December application. He had submitted a list of 20 prime politicians, government officers and businessmen he planned to investigate on their role in the violence.
An estimated 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in the weeks after the results of general elections held at the end of December on 2007 were disputed, sparking intra- communal unrest.
The former UN chief brokered a political settlement that resulted in the formation of a coalition government by the rival political parties in 2008.

2010年12月13日星期一

Ancient bone

A 2,400-year old bronze vessel containing soup with bones has been discovered in a tomb excavated in Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Liu Daiyun, a Shaanxi Provincial Archeological Institute official said Saturday.

The vessel is 20 centimeters tall and has a 24.5 centimeters diameter. It contains bones soaked in liquid.

The archeologists also unearthed a bronze pot containing an odorless liquid, which may be an ancient wine, Liu said.

Experts will analyze the "bone soup" and "wine."

Tomb

Chinese archeologists have unearthed a number of lacquerware and bronze ware items in a tomb in central China's Hubei Province.

The tomb may have belonged to an Eastern Zhou dynasty (770 BC- 221 BC) official who died about 2,300 years ago.

The tomb was found in Shayang County, Jingmen City. Other items found include clay sculptures and bronze basins, Huang Wenxin, a researcher at the Hubei Provincial Archeological Institute, said Saturday.

Archeologists are searching for gravestone inscriptions or bamboo slips to identity the tomb's owner.

2010年12月1日星期三

Asia must

Asian countries must keep up with the rapidly evolving and improving medical science, especially in specialized fields like neurosurgery, Malaysian Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai said on Monday.

"This is a worldwide phenomenon and Asian countries must also keep pace," said the minister when opening the 8th Asian Congress of Neurological Surgeons (ACNC) here on Monday.

Liow said technological advances had revolutionized the ways that doctors work and treat their patients with the emergence of new technologies that enable better visualization, earlier diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

The 8th ACNC saw the participation of more than 600 delegates from Asia and beyond. Held concurrently is the First Asian Neurosurgical Nursing Congress initiated by Malaysia.

The closing of the events is on Wednesday.

2010年11月24日星期三

Wesley Snipes

Attorneys for Wesley Snipes are asking a judge to extend the actor's bail as he prepares for a second appeal of his three-year prison sentence, according to media reports Thursday.

U.S. District Judge William Terrell Hodges on Wednesday ordered prosecutors to respond to Snipes' motion by next Tuesday.

Snipes' bail was revoked last week by Hodges, but the judge did not set a surrender date. The actor has been free on bail while appealing his 2008 conviction for willful failure to file income tax returns.

At the time of his convictions in 2008, prosecutors said Snipes had earned 38 million U.S. dollars since 1999, but had not filed tax returns or paid any federal taxes.

The deadline for Snipes to file his next appeal -- a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court -- is Dec. 28, although a 60-day extension is possible, according to his motion.

The 48-year-old Snipes starred in the "Blade" trilogy, "White Men Can't Jump" and other films. He has recently been in Atlantaworking on a new movie called "Master Daddy."

2010年11月10日星期三

Smoking increases

Women who are current or past smokers face a greater risk of dying from breast cancer, according to a new University of California, San Francisco study published by HealthDay News on Monday.

The study involved 2,265 multi-ethnic women diagnosed with breast cancer between 1997 and 2000. Researchers examined whether smoking affected death rates from breast cancer, non-breast cancer-related causes and death from all causes.

Results showed that 164 deaths from breast cancer and 120 deaths from non-breast cancer causes occurred during an average of nine years of follow-up.

Those women who were current or past smokers also had a twofold increase in the risk of dying from non-breast cancer-related causes compared with women with breast cancer who had never smoked.

"We found that women who are current smokers or have a history of smoking had a 39 percent higher rate of dying from breast cancer, even after we took into account a wide array of known prognostic factors including clinical, socioeconomic and behavioral factors," said Assistant Professor Dejana Braithwaite from the division of cancer epidemiology, department of epidemiology and biostatistics at the university.

The analysis was also conducted to examine whether body mass index, molecular breast cancer subtype or menopausal status modified risk.

Compared with those who never smoked, women who were current or past smokers and also had a HER2-negative tumor subtype had a 61 percent increased risk of dying from breast cancer, smokers with a body mass index less than 25 kg/m2 had an 83 percent risk and postmenopausal women 47 percent.

HER2 stands for "human epidermal growth factor receptor 2" and is a protein giving higher aggressiveness in breast cancers.

"The implication of this research is that it is important for physicians to improve smoking cessation efforts, especially among women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, in order to improve breast cancer specific outcomes and overall health outcomes," Braithwaite said.