Thursday, January 4, 2018

Thursday, the Trump administration announced plans to open nearly all previously closed offshore waters of the U.S. for gas and oil drilling activities. These waters would include over 90 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf, including areas which were protected thus far such as California and Maine, where drilling has already been blocked for decades. As a result of this plan, drilling would become allowed as well in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. On 20 December 2017, the Congress already voted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling. The proposal means, among others, the reversal of an indefinite ban which the previous US president Barack Obama had put in December 2016 on drilling in the Arctic and Eastern Seaboard.

It was US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who announced the plan in a conference call: “This is a clear difference between energy weakness and energy dominance. We are going to become the strongest energy superpower.” The plan itself is called “The Draft Five Year Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Programme”, and its realisation is scheduled in the period 2019-2024. It is aimed at boosting the US domestic energy production.

Environmental activists, who for decades have worked hard to protect vulnerable ecosystems in the concerned waters from oil drilling activities, oppose the plan. A coalition of 60 environmental groups has already opposed to the plan, as well as almost a dozen attorneys general and over 100 US lawmakers. A statement that “These ocean waters are not President Trump’s personal playground” has been signed by environmental groups such as Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, League of Conservation Voters.

The plan comes on the heels of last week’s announcement by the Trump administration of a rollback of the safety regulations for offshore drilling. These regulations were put in place after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, in which 11 people lost their lives and a huge amount of oil was spilled.

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Wednesday, March 9, 2005 File:Plastic bag stock sized.jpg

They are cheap, useful, and very plentiful, and that is exactly the problem, according to researchers. A report issued on Feb. 23 by a cadre of environment and economics researchers suggested that Kenya should ban the common plastic bag that one gets at the checkout counter of grocery stores, and place a levy on other plastic bags, all to combat the country’s environmental problems stemming from the bags’ popularity.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Chemotherapy is usually associated with a collection of side effects ranging from digestive problems to hair loss, but a study published this week in Human Reproduction demonstrated that female cancer patients may find they have something in common with much younger women in one specific area — their ovaries.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh examined donated ovarian tissue from fourteen female cancer patients, most of whom had Hodgkin lymphoma, and compared it to tissue from healthy women. They found the samples from women who had been treated with a specific chemotherapeutic regimen known as ABVD not only contained greater numbers of dormant ova — egg cells — than those from women treated with harsher regimens but also more than samples from healthy women. ABVD is named for combining several drugs known as adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine.

These reproductive cells were not merely more plentiful in ABVD patients. They also appeared immature, “new” in the words of lead researcher Evelyn Telfer. This challenges the conventional belief that girls are born with all the ova they will ever have and the numbers can only go down as the cells are either used up by the reproductive cycle or succumb to damage or natural aging. However, further research is needed to confirm this. The study covered relatively few patients by scientific standards, and David Albertini of the Center for Human Reproduction in New York has suggested the cells may not actually be freshly grown. Instead, they may have always been there and were merely rendered more detectable by ABVD treatment.

The ability to grow new egg cells may have significant implications for women in Western societies, many of whom postpone childbearing to establish careers, sometimes into their late thirties or forties. However, Telfer warns against making use of these findings too soon: “There’s so much we don’t know about the ovary. We have to be very cautious about jumping to clinical applications.”

The experiments had been discussed earlier this year at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Friday, March 18, 2011

At 9:00 p.m. PDT Monday (0400 UTC Tuesday), Microsoft rolled out the first stable Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) release, available in 39 languages, for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Internet Explorer is the most used web browser, responsible for 56% of webpage hits. The new version adds support for new technologies with relation to the HTML5 specification and several feature changes. The browser was released as a beta with a campaign promoting the benefits of HTML5.

It includes support for SVG and the HTML5 canvas, audio, and video tags. It has a failing Acid3 score of 95/100, below Mozilla Firefox 4.0’s 97/100, rating and the 100/100 in Google Chrome 10. The program is the first of its series not to run on Microsoft Windows XP. It includes a redesigned layout of the address bar and the ability to pin sites to the taskbar on Windows 7, along with several minor improvements.

The browser received mixed reviews. “IE9 as a Consumer Browser — Not Worth It,” Jason Mick, DailyTech, concluded. A study by Which? on Tuesday showed that IE9’s Tracking Protection Lists, an optional anti-tracking feature, may mislead users. “We’re disappointed with the way these lists work, and feel consumers who install multiple lists could be left with a false sense of security.” Dr. Rob Reid, Which? Policy senior advisor, said.

In a more positive review, a PC Magazine reviewer said that the positives of the new browser outweighed the negatives, and it is “a major improvement over its predecessor.”

The announcement comes after the company launched a campaign to get Internet Explorer 6 usage down to 1%. Microsoft delayed the Japanese release “to reduce load on network bandwidth at such a critical time” with reference to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this past Friday.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Today, London-based football club Chelsea F.C. sacked José Mourinho from the position of the club’s manager.

Chelsea, the last years’ Premier League champions, have sixteenth position in the league table and very poor performance this season, winning just four games out of sixteen in 2015-2016’s season. The Portuguese Mourinho has managed the club for seven seasons, in two spells, won the Premier League thrice, FA Community Shield and FA Cup once.

Chelsea, battling relegation, won only fifteen points and are 20 points behind Leicester City. Mourinho signed a four-year contract in August. Mourinho’s last game as Chelsea’s manager was played against Leicester City, in which his side lost 2–1.

Chelsea, on the club’s website released a statement, saying that José and the board agreed this performance was not good and both sides agreed to the move. The statement also said José would still be a much loved figure at Stamford Bridge, and described him as “the most successful manager in our 110-year history.”

Previously, when José was sacked after winning two titles, he won the Champions League with Inter and La Liga with Real Madrid. Before his first signing for Chelsea, he won the Champions League with FC Porto.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Robert Mugabe, president of the Republic of Zimbabwe bitterly slated opposition and the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, in a speech he made earlier today. This is his first speech after the recent disputed elections in which Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won the parliamentary voting. However announcement of an overall victory for the MDC has come to a standstill as results from 23 out of the 210 constituencies are still being recounted.

Mr. Mugabe asked his 15,000 strong audience to “maintain utmost vigilance in the face of vicious British machinations and the machinations of our other detractors, who are allies of Britain” while speaking at the Gwanzura Stadium in Zimbabwe’s capital city of Harare.

The audience wore shirts adorned with Mugabe portraits and waved banners reading “Defending our land from imperialists” and “Zimbabwe has no place for sell-outs” in support of Zanu-PF policies. “Down with the British” was chanted, Mr. Mugabe saying the British are “like thieves fronting their lackeys among us, which they pay to confuse our people”.

“We, not the British, established democracy based on one person, one vote – democracy which rejected racial or gender discrimination and upheld human rights and religious freedom,” he said in response to the international criticism he has lately received, especially from Gordon Brown.

The speech was made in a celebration of 28 years since the day of Zimbabwean independence, which Mr. Mugabe called the day on which his nation “finally shook off the chains of British racist settler colonialism”.