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Saturday, August 8, 2009

A powerful typhoon has killed dozens of people, affected over 28,000 people in the Philippines, and caused the evacuation of 21,190 people from south east China.

The Philippines were hit by 175 kilometers per hour (kph) winds with gusts of up to 210 kph, as well as heavy rain which triggered flooding and landslides.

Ten Philippine villages have been inundated by four and five feet deep flooding. Thousands cling to tree tops and are stranded on roof tops awaiting rescue by helicopter. Over 12,000 have been evacuated and over 1,000 are homeless.

Landslides have trapped Korean and Canadian mountaineers whose guide could not be rescued. Landslides have closed highways and have caused traffic jams ten kilometers long. Three French tourists and their two Filipino guides have been killed due to landslides on Mount Pinatubo. Five miners remain missing after a landslide destroyed their living quarters.

Electricity is down in some areas of the Philippines resulting in a collapse in contact as radios and cellphones have not been re-charged.

Botolan town hit by a flash flood has been declared as in a state of calamity.

School classes have been cancelled in various locations across the Philippines, and many city roads are not traversable due to flood waters.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) has reported that over 28,629 people have been affected and of these 10% have been evacuated.

On August 8, the typhoon is diminishing but still recording 150 kph winds with gusts reaching 185 kph according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa).

A capsized fishing boat off the coast of the province of Hainan has initiated search and rescue efforts for nine missing fishermen. School classes have been suspended, boats called into port, and businesses closed in China’s Fujian Province. The provincial government used cell phone text messages to contact 8.4 million warning its residents of Morakot’s approach to mainland China.

Typhoons occur in the South China Sea every year between May and September.

Monday, March 7, 2005

Nobel Laureate in Physics Hans Bethe died in his home in Ithaca, New York on March 6, 2005, according to Cornell University, where he was professor emeritus of physics.

Hans Albrecht Bethe (pronounced Bay-ta) was born on July 2, 1906 in the city of Strasbourg, then part of Germany (now part of France). He studied physics at Frankfurt and obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich.

Bethe, whose mother was Jewish, fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazi Party came to power. Bethe, along with hundreds of other Jewish academics, were fired from their posts as a result of one of Adolf Hitler‘s first anti-Semitic acts. Bethe moved first to England and in 1935 to the USA where he taught at Cornell University.

Between 1935 and 1938, he studied nuclear reactions and reaction cross sections. This research was useful to Bethe in more quantitatively developing Niels Bohr‘s theory of the compound nucleus.

During World War II, he served as a prominent member of a special summer session at the University of California, Berkeley at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer, which outlined the first designs for the atomic bomb and served as the beginning of the Manhattan Project. When Oppenheimer started the secret weapons design laboratory, Los Alamos, he appointed Bethe as Director of the Theoretical Division.

After the war, Bethe argued that a crash project for the hydrogen bomb should not be attempted, though after President Truman announced the beginning of such a crash project, and the outbreak of the Korean War, he signed up and played a key role in the weapon’s development. In 1968, he reflected upon the choice, noting that “It seemed quite logical. But sometimes I wish I were more consistent an idealist.” Though he would see the project through to its end, in Bethe’s account he was primarily hopeful that the weapon would be impossible to produce. He later characterized Stanislaw Ulam was the “father” of the hydrogen bomb, and Edward Teller as its “mother,” and himself as its “midwife.”

Among his many honors, Bethe received the Max Planck medal in 1955, and in 1961 he was awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work in identifying the energy generating processes in stars. In 1967, Bethe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his studies of the production of solar and stellar energy, stellar nucleosynthesis. He postulated that the source of this energy are thermonuclear reactions in which hydrogen was converted into helium.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Bethe campaigned for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, arguing against the nuclear arms race and against nuclear testing. In 1995, at the age of 88, Bethe wrote an open letter calling on all scientists to “cease and desist” from working on any aspect of nuclear weapons development and manufacture. In 2004, he signed a letter along with 47 other Nobel laureates endorsing John Kerry for president of the United States citing Bush‘s apparent misuse of science.

December 22, 2004

The government of Zambia has launched a new national agricultural policy, according to a report by the Times of Zambia. The newspaper reports that the policy was announced yesterday by the country’s Minister of Agriculture & Co-Operatives, Mr. Mundia Sikatana.

At the event marking the launch of the new program, Mr. Sikatana described the policy as addressing the issues of food security, economic growth and poverty reduction. The policy will cover all sectors of agriculture in the nation, and will be implemented by the ministry of Agriculture.

Mr Sikatana went on to say that the policy contained detailed strategies to cover a variety of sectors within the agricultural industry, including livestock, fisheries, irrigation, and agricultural finance. The new policy also continues Zambia’s previous policy of prohibiting the import and use of genetically modified foods within the country. This policy is controversial due to areas of poverty within the country, and the smuggling of genetically modified grains into the country earlier this month.

The Zambian government has previously been criticised by some for its annual ban on fishing during December. It is unclear whether this policy, which was widely applauded by environmentalists and implemented to protect sensitive fish stocks, will be affected by the new agricultural policy.

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Victoria Wyndham was one of the most seasoned and accomplished actresses in daytime soap opera television. She played Rachel Cory, the maven of Another World‘s fictional town, Bay City, from 1972 to 1999 when the show went off the air. Wyndham talks about how she was seen as the anchor of a show, and the political infighting to keep it on the air as NBC wanted to wrest control of the long-running soap from Procter & Gamble. Wyndham fought to keep it on the air, but eventually succumbed to the inevitable. She discusses life on the soap opera, and the seven years she spent wandering “in the woods” of Los Angeles seeking direction, now divorced from a character who had come to define her professional career. Happy, healthy and with a family she is proud of, Wyndham has found life after the death of Another World in painting and animals. Below is David Shankbone’s interview with the soap diva.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Toyota has been accused by a U.S. House of Representatives committee with misleading the public and investigators over its recent recalls.

The accusations, in a statement from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, claim that Toyota both relied on a flawed study in its assessment of the issue of sticking accelerator pedals at the heart of the recalls, and then made misleading statements about its response. According to the authors of the letter, Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, Toyota dismissed, rather than investigated, the idea that the cars’ computers were at fault. In a statement, James Lentz, the president of Toyota’s American division, claimed that hardware issues were to blame, and that dealers were repairing the faulty part. Toyota also released a study commissioned from the research firm Exponent that said electronic systems were not to blame.

According to the House committee, however, the study involved only six vehicles, none of which had problems with their electrical systems, and was insufficient to produce an accurate result. “Our preliminary assessment is that Toyota resisted the possibility that electronic defects could cause safety concerns, relied on a flawed engineering report and made misleading public statements concerning the adequacy of recent recalls to address the risk of sudden unintended acceleration.”

The company is under a criminal investigation, and has received two subpoenas for documents from two House committees relating to the recalls, although whether they are directly related to the letter is unclear. The documents are related to accelerator issues in several models, as well as brake problems with the Prius hybrid car, and were served earlier in in February by a federal grand jury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Toyota has released upwards of 75,000 pages of documents under the requests.

In a separate, though related, development, it has emerged that Toyota last year negotiated a limited recall for two models, the Toyota Camry and Lexus ES, that were affected by the accelerator recalls, saving the company an estimated $100 million. A confidential internal presentation in July 2009 made the claim, and a month later, a Lexus ES, one of the models under the limited recall crashed in California, killing four people. The claims apparently referenced a September, 2007 recall of floor mats that could trap gas pedals, the same problem that triggered a full recall of numerous Toyota cars to fix the same problem. In the same presentation, the company claimed to have avoided recalls of another model related to rust, as well as delaying new federal safety regulations.