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Houdini: The Handcuff King (Hyperion £10.99) by Jason Lutes and Nick Bertozzi is a fun biography of another man with pretensions to machismo. The story wisely focuses on one of his stunts, when he leaps off a bridge, handcuffed and manacled, into the icy waters of the Charles river, in Boston. As the panels become elon... |
Siberia (Soft Skull £11.99) by Nikolai Maslov is a memoir about life in the Seventies and Eighties Soviet Union, encompassing brutal military service, lots of bad vodka, and blistering cold. It has none of the subtlety of more cinematic graphic novels - the images plod awkwardly - and is more akin to an illustrated dia... |
A mother has taken issue with a pamphlet given to her daughter at school. |
A New Zealand mother has decried a "disturbing" pamphlet handed to her daughter during high school health class which instructs how to use ice without being caught. |
Morgan Julian immediately complained to Massey High School in Auckland after her daughter was given a booklet explaining how to safely use methamphetamine, clean drug paraphernalia and take the drug without the risk of being charged as a dealer. |
"Meth is illegal. It's also illegal to own a pipe. Be discrete and only keep less than 5 grams for personal use," the pamphlet, which was handed out on May 1, reads. |
It also instructs users to ingest the highly-addictive drug orally instead of smoking it. |
"Swallowing meth allows your body to use its own filters. It saves your lungs from damage, produces a smoother and longer lasting high, and you're less likely to use more." |
The school claims the pamphlet was targeted at drug users in the hopes of minimising risk. |
But Ms Julian said it encourages students to start using. |
"It reads through, very clearly, on ways to do meth and how to hide meth," she told stuff.co.nz. |
"I am all for drug education and keeping our children aware but to blatantly publish a step-by-step guide on how to clean your pipes, swallow instead of injecting and to do it legally, in a way, is disturbing." |
Massey High School said it did not condone illegal drug use and advised the "keeping well" tips were a part of a larger resource on drug education aimed at 15 to 24-year-olds. |
"It is one resource which aims to provide context for students around an issue which negatively impacts far too many young people in New Zealand," the school said in a statement. |
"It is not explicitly taught to the students." |
The Drug Foundation warns methamphetamine can cause users to be "feel agitated, experience mood swings, and see, hear or feel things that aren't there", according to its website. |
Executive director Ross Bell "applauded" the school for acknowledging the risks of ice use and attempting to minimise those through education. |
"People would be living under a rock if they didn't think there wasn't a meth problem in New Zealand," he told stuff.co.nz. |
A small wildfire burning about 6 miles away from Coachella poses no threat to the music festival, authorities say. |
(CNN) - Coachella is heating up, and it's not just because of Beyonc's historic Saturday night performance. |
A small wildfire broke out about 6 miles away from the music festival Sunday, according to the Riverside County Fire Department, but was 100% contained by the afternoon, having consumed 15 acres. |
Officials with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection determined that the fire was human-caused, but said they are still investigating. |
Just over 100 firefighters battled the vegetation fire, according to an incident report page on the fire department's website. Authorities told CNN the fire posed no threat to the Coachella music festival. No injuries were reported and no evacuations were ordered. |
Windy conditions in the area could make battling the blaze more difficult. A high wind watch is in effect in the area, said CNN meteorologist Gene Norman, which could make containing the blaze more difficult. On Sunday, winds were blowing from 35 to 45 mph, with gusts up to 70 mph. |
The winds will strengthen into Sunday evening, Norman said, with the strongest winds expected Monday afternoon, before things calm down again on Monday night. |
JANUARY 27, 2005 --The National Co-ordinator for Initiative Against Human Trafficking (CIAHT), an NGO, Abudulai Danaah has bemoaned the rampant rate of human trafficking in the country. He expressed his dissatisfaction about the recent trafficking of some six girls from the northern region to Nigeria, whose ages range ... |
The girls were Ayishatu Salisu, Adisah Issah, Latifa Issahaku, Barakisu Iddrisu and Salima Ibrahim. Mr Danaah made the statement at a two-day inter regional workshop for co-ordinators and partner organizations on collaboration and networking on human trafficking. It attracted participants from the Immigration and polic... |
He explained that his outfit is liaising with the International Labour Organization and the Ghana High Commission in Abuja, Nigeria to bring the girls back home to rehabilitate them into the mainstream. |
A new air traffic control centre equipped with a sophisticated control system worth over $300 million has been launched here amid fast growth in the region's aviation sector. |
The Singapore Air Traffic Control Centre (SATCC) comes with the newly-developed Lorads III system, which will improve Singapore's air traffic control capacity, said the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS). |
Speaking to reporters on Sunday, CAAS director of air traffic services Rosly Md Saad said: "The new centre will enhance our airports' operational capabilities, safety, efficiency and it helps us meet future demand." |
For instance, the new Long Range Radar and Display System (Lorads) III can track up to 2000 aircraft at a time up to a distance of 500 nautical miles, compared with about 500 aircraft up to a distance of 250 nautical miles for the older system, he said. It will also help reduce separation distances between aircraft, he... |
Other new features of the system include smoother digital information displays, back-up capabilities in case of failure, and improved sensors for better aerial surveillance. |
Mr Saad said all 300 or so air-traffic controllers have been trained in the new system. CAAS is targeting to recruit 80 new controllers this year and they will also receive similar training. |
CO2 Emissions Can Europe Save Its Cap-and-Trade System? |
Europe's cap-and-trade system for reducing the release of greenhouse gases is broken, but not everybody wants to fix it. Industry has profited immensely from the plummeting prices of CO2 emissions certificates, and from lax checks on questionable environmental projects undertaken overseas. |
Saving the climate? It doesn't seem all that difficult at first glance. All you have to do is fly from Germany to Zambia once in a while, as the German energy giant RWE's environment protection team does. It has made frequent trips to the capital Lusaka in recent years to distribute a total of 30,000 small stoves -- RW... |
The stoves were intended to help poor families cook in a more environmentally friendly way. Biomass was to replace charcoal as cooking fuel. In an advertising brochure for RWE, the company that "travels around the world to help our climate" touts the campaign with the slogan "New Cooking Pots -- Less CO2." But RWE does... |
Besides, the project wasn't entirely altruistic, because RWE will receive credits for its effort. The stoves in Lusaka are expected to save 1.5 million tons of CO2 by 2020, and in return, RWE's coal-fired power plants would be allowed to emit 1.5 million tons elsewhere. This sale of indulgences is called a "Clean Devel... |
In the end, the flood of such projects undermines the entire emissions trading system. "The most important tool of climate protection no longer works," says Eva Filzmoser of Carbon Market Watch in Brussels. Four years ago, the Austrian national began a solo effort to take a closer look at the emissions trading market. ... |
They included the supposed cleanup of African garbage dumps, as well as the retrofitting of old coolant factories in China, which only seemed to be in operation because they yielded climate certificates. |
It is because of Filzmoser and her staff of five employees that, starting in May, at least the most questionable of these projects will no longer be approved by the United Nations Climate Change secretariat. "The trade has turned into a big flop," she says, "a system of fraud." |
The European Commission estimates that 1.7 billion tons in excess pollution rights were on the market in late 2012. Because of this oversupply, the price of emitting a ton of CO2 plummeted to only 4. The CDM projects were not the only reason for the price drop. Because of overly optimistic economic forecasts prior to ... |
In recent years, they were allowed to save their certificates for the so-called third trading period, during which emissions reduction allowances are to slowly be reduced. This third period began in early 2013 and is supposed to last until 2020. The emissions trade, as well as the simultaneous gradual capping of emissi... |
To reach the target, however, many companies don't have to do anything at all, and not just because the cushion of their accumulated certificates often keeps them going for years. The EU will soon have reached its not overly ambitious emissions reduction targets because of the economic slowdown. As production dropped, ... |
Given such conditions, coal is seeing a renaissance that was hardly thought possible. Because certificates are so cheap, it is much more cost-effective to pollute the air with coal-fired power plants than switch to more environmentally friendly energy generation technologies. |
To address the problem, European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard has proposed a drastic step: She wants to temporarily cut supply by remove 900 million emissions certificates from the system. The proposal is known as backloading. Not too long ago Hedegaard, from Denmark, was still convinced that the sy... |
The industry lobby in Brussels is making a show of being outraged. The general director of BusinessEurope, one of the most powerful lobbying groups, wrote to European Parliament President Martin Schulz to demand a debate on backloading. For each of its counterproposals, the industry also presented supporters from the p... |
The lobbyists' fight doesn't seem to be lost yet. While the Environment Committee voted in favor of backloading, the Industry Committee opposed it. The critical vote is planned for mid-April. |
But industry's anti-backloading front in Brussels doesn't seem to be unanimous. Some companies have changed sides, like Düsseldorf-based energy giant E.on. In a joint memorandum with the non-profit public policy group Germanwatch, the company said it supported backloading. "Emissions trading is dead," E.on CEO Johannes... |
Unlike pure production operations, energy groups like E.on could pass on almost any price to their customers, says Gordon Moffat of the European Confederation of Iron and Steel Industries. "Emissions trading seems tailor-made for the energy sector." |
E.on's environmental forays are merely "industry interests disguised as climate protection," says Holger Krahmer, a member of the European Parliament for Germany's pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP). But German industry could hardly find a more fawning supporter than the Leipzig liberal, who is also his party's e... |
Krahmer believes that climate protection threatens "civil liberties" and "fundamental human rights." What exactly those rights are isn't quite clear, not even in his booklet on the politics of climate policy. Backloading, at any rate, will be nothing but another deathblow to the poorly designed emissions trading system... |
Krahmer, however, questions even the assumption that CO2 emissions can in fact cause the earth's temperature to rise. There is, he says, simply no reason to price emissions. |
Both Krahmer and FDP Chairman Philipp Rösler are unimpressed with government arguments that low prices for emissions certificates have threatened funding for many projects associated with the country's shift away from nuclear power and toward green energy, known as the Energiewende. "Ongoing interventions discredit the... |
Green Party politician Bas Eickhout, however, believes that the system has already been discredited by lazy compromises with lobbyists. "What we get is typically European, a Swiss cheese perforated with compromises," says the Dutch politician. Letting a little air out of the inflated certificate trade isn't enough, he ... |
That's because a new flood of emissions rights is about to hit the market, this time from Russia and Ukraine. European countries are also allowed to trade their certificates with these countries. The compensation options in Ukraine have developed phenomenally, says a local analyst. From January 2012 to March 2013 alone... |
In return for that many certificates, the Ukrainians would have had to extract an improbable five million tons of high-quality coal from scrap heaps in the last five years, the Ukrainian edition of Forbes calculated. The dubious climate argument is that the extracting activity (which had often been planned years in adv... |
According to the Ukrainian analyst, the TÜV Rheinland technical inspection organization likes to certify these supposed climate-protection projects. One such case is in the Donetsk region, where TÜV retroactively certified a few million certificates for one of these waste-heap projects in late 2012. TÜV employees trave... |
TÜV claims that performing a "retroactive" inspection within a few weeks in December 2012 covering the period from 2008 to 2012 is completely normal. Questions regarding the validity of the assumption that much of the coal in the waste heaps would have spontaneously combusted absent these measures went unanswered by TÜ... |
RWE's Zambia project is similarly dubious. Eva Filzmoser of Carbon Market Watch heard about it again recently. Employees with the project had reported to her that almost two-thirds of the stoves could no longer be found. In addition, the farmers hired to provide combustible biomass were only able to harvest a ton of bu... |
Nevertheless, the TÜV Süd technical inspection organization credited the project with more than 43,000 tons in CO2 savings. The Munich-based inspectors, who had already been temporarily suspended by the UN because of lax inspections, characterize their work as "successful verification." But a former employee on the pro... |
One week prior to Kevin Durant shocking the sports world that he will be playing for the Warriors next season, retired 14-year NBA veteran and former Warriors forward Stephen Jackson was speculated to have been offered a coaching job in Oakland to be part of Steve Kerr's coaching staff. But ESPN's The Jump fr... |
Jackson reconfirmed on Sunday he is planning to attend the Warriors training camp in hopes of making the roster. But according to CSN Bay Area, the Warriors reportedly stated that Jackson has not been invited to attend their training camp. |
This is the same Stephen Jackson who claimed that his 2006-2007 Warriors team (you may not remember, but if you do, their standouts were Matt Barnes, Monta Ellis, Al Harrington, Jason Richardson, Baron Davis, and Mike Dunleavy), who boasted a 42-40 record during the regular season under then-head coach Don Nelson, coul... |
Perhaps Jackson realizes now that he was crazy for saying that. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? Jackson figures he could follow in KD's footsteps and put on a Dubs uniform. Or maybe Jackson is thinking about wanting to smooth things over with KD for a reprised rap collabo of "Lonely At The T... |
Since Durant made his decision to join Dub Nation, there has been a lot of chatter about some other former Warriors—and retired, or unsigned players per their advanced ages like Ray Allen and Jermaine O'Neal—who have made it public about pondering a chance at claiming a spot to play for the Warriors. There are cur... |
LONDON (Reuters) - Patients going for surgery should bathe or shower beforehand but their surgical site should not be shaved, and antibiotics should be used to prevent infections before and during surgery, but not afterwards, the World Health Organization said on Thursday. |
In new guidelines aimed at halting the spread of potentially deadly superbug infections in hospitals and clinics worldwide, the WHO said obsessive dedication to cleanliness and hygiene was crucial, as was the careful use of anti-infectives. |
Surgical site infections are caused by bacteria getting in to the body through incisions made during surgery. They put millions of patients worldwide at risk each year and exacerbate the spread of antibiotic resistant superbugs such as MRSA. |
“No one should get sick while seeking or receiving care,” Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, said in a statement as the new recommendations were published. |
The guidelines range from simple precautions such as ensuring patients take a bath or shower before surgery and ensuring surgical teams use the best possible methods in cleaning their hands, to advice on when to give antibiotics to prevent infections, what disinfectants are best before incision, and which sutures docto... |
Importantly, the guidelines recommend patients are given antibiotics to prevent infections before and during surgery only - a measure the WHO described as crucial to slowing the spread of antibiotic resistance. In a change to current common practice, the guidelines said antibiotics should not be used after surgery unle... |
“Preventing surgical infections ... requires a range of preventive measures. These guidelines are an invaluable tool for protecting patients,” Kieny said. |
According to WHO figures, some 11 percent of patients in poor and middle-income countries who have surgery pick up an infection during their operation. In Africa, up to a fifth of women who have a caesarean section get wound infections. |
But surgical site infections are not just a problem for poorer countries. In the United States, according to the WHO, they contribute to patients spending some 400,000 extra days in hospital at an additional annual cost of an $900 million. |
Ed Kelly, a WHO service delivery and safety expert, noted that some of the recommendations would mean reversing previous practice, such as the shaving of body hair before surgery. |
The new advice not to shave is based on extensive evidence that shaving greatly increases the risk of micro-abrasions and small cuts in the skin, he said, which in turn raise the risk of bacteria entering the body. |
Kelly said the list of 29 recommendations, drawn up by 20 international experts, were valid for any country and suitable to local adaptations, and take into account costs, resources and the strength of available scientific evidence. |
It is the habit, if not the necessity, of most musical organizations that, having set up shop to do one thing, they do it forever without broadening their scope, alter ing their outlook or even stopping to consider if a change of pace or direction might be beneficial. |
By good fortune, the New York Pro Musica is different. It established itself years ago as a concert organization, but it has long since gone be yond the conventional con cert format in its effort to bring Medieval and Renais sance music to the public and has devised some en trancing and durable theater pieces in the pr... |
“The Play of Daniel” and “The Play of Herod” have be come familiar to thousands of Pro Musica followers in recent years, and now, thanks in part to the Ford Founda tion, a new show has been created by this remarkable group. |
“An Entertainment for Elizabeth,” which was given its first New York perform ance at Hunter College As sembly Hall on Friday night, takes us back to the 16th century and to the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England to enjoy a popular diversion of that time and place, the masque. |
Since, according to a pro gram note, “an authentic Elizabethan masque text would have required undue explanation to clarify the topical allusions for a mod em audience,” a text in the manner of an Elizabethan model was commissioned from John Hollander, the American poet. |
He devised a charming con ceit having to do with dance that has enabled Pro Musica not only to set forth a varied and diverting program of Elizabethan music but to of fer a sampling of the dances of the period as well. Thus, in addition to the madrigals and songs one would expect as a matter of course, we are shown how... |
Julia Sutton has based the dances on directions supplied by manuals of the period Thoinot Arbeau's “Orcheso graphie,” (1589), Fabritio Ca roso's “II Ballarino” (1581) and “Nobilta di Dame” (1600) and Cesare Negri's “Nuove Inventione di Balli” (1604). |
No one could possibly say for sure just how authentic in every point of style this “entertainment” might be, but it certainly reflects care ful scholarly attention to de tail while retaining just enough of the “let's pretend” attitude to remind one that some things may not be quite as they would have appeared in Elizab... |
In any case, the 90 minutes or so filled up by “An Enter tainment for Elizabeth” pass very quickly, and at the end the spectator‐listener is left with a vivid memory of bril liantly costumed personali ties moving vivaciously in a handsome Tudor setting to instrumental and vocal music that dwells on love and gai ety and... |
Pro Musica offered a re peat performance yesterday afternoon, but seems to have no plans for presenting the show again this season. There is the likelihood, how ever, that “An Entertainment for Elizabeth” will be pre sented in repertory, so to speak, next season with “The Play of Daniel” and “The Play of Herod,” and al... |
A Rotorua mother has failed in her attempt to have a conviction for ill-treating her child overturned, following a car crash when she drove "significantly" intoxicated. |
Kirsty Bentley was found guilty of one charge of ill-treatment of a child following a jury trial in the Rotorua District Court. |
The charge followed a crash, caused when Bentley lost control of the vehicle she was driving and crossed the centre line, then rolling. |
Her seven-month-old daughter was restrained in her car seat at the time of the crash, and suffered bruising but no other injuries. |
She entered a guilty plea and was charged with five other offences related to the same crash. |
Bentley was under the influence of alcohol at the time of the offending and was emotionally upset following an argument with her partner. |
She had appealed against her conviction in the Court of Appeal last month, specifically raising an issue about the prosecution's lack of proof she appreciated her conduct was likely to cause suffering or injury at the time of the offence. |
A ruling dismissing her appeal was released today. |
A summary of facts published with the Court of Appeal decision outlined how Bentley and her daughter had been returning from a family holiday in Ohope to their home near Okere Falls near Rotorua when the crash occurred. |
A disagreement over whether to make a detour to visit her mother in Kawerau caused a "heated" argument with Bentley's partner. |
Her partner drove there nevertheless and arrived about midday. |
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