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Raipur, March 17 (IANS) Two leopards were found dead, apparent victims of starvation, in a forested area of Chhattisgarh, an official said Wednesday.
The leopards, a male and a female, were found in Pandaria in Kawardha district, about 250 km from Raipur.
‘The male leopard was three-years-old and the female one four-years-old. The postmortem revealed they died of starvation,’ the forest department official told IANS.
Berlin, Aug. 28 (ANI): Germany has handed over 29 yellowing blueprints of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The blueprints give chilling details, with gas chambers, crematoria, delousing facilities and watchtowers drawn to scale. Over a million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation at Auschwitz, which the Nazis built after occupying Poland.
“There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened. Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death,” Fox News quoted Netanyahu as saying as he accepted the documents as a gift to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year.
Netanyahu lingered over the large sheets spread on a table.
Stamped with the Nazi abbreviation for concentration camp “K.L. Auschwitz,” one of the largest featured multi-colored sketches, with barracks and even latrines drawn in detail. Other smaller sheets showed architectural designs of individual buildings, drawn from various angles.
His wife, Sara, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi genocide that killed six million Jews during World War II, accompanied the Israeli leader. She watched somberly as the documents, which date from 1941 to 1943, were unfolded.
Also present was Yossi Peled, an Israeli Cabinet minister and former general whose father was killed by the Nazis and whose mother survived Auschwitz in one of the barracks detailed in the blueprints.
A family in Belgium who raised him as a Christian hid Peled himself until age 7. He discovered his Jewish roots in 1948 and was taken to Israel two years later.
In Germany for a visit that combined talks on the Mideast conflict with acknowledgments of the painful past that binds the two countries, Netanyahu drew a clear parallel between the events of the Nazi era and the present day. The world did not do enough to stop the murder of Europe’s Jews, he said, and must be careful now to take rapid action against “armed barbarism.”
Axel Springer Verlag, the publisher of the mass circulation Bild newspaper, obtained the Auschwitz blueprints last year from a German man who said he found them when cleaning out an apartment in what was formerly East Berlin.
The publisher and Germany’s federal archive have confirmed the documents’ authenticity. (ANI)
Washington, July 10 (ANI): Scientists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre have identified a protein that helps TB bacteria resist immune response, and remain latent in the body for decades.
They hope that the new discovery may lead to new drugs to eliminate those strains of mycobacterium tuberculosis that have grown resistant to therapies currently available.
“Tuberculosis can resist the host immune system and remain latent for decades,” said Michael Glickman, of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre.
“To do so, the mycobacterium responsible must resist an arsenal of DNA-damaging mutagens produced within the macrophage, the immune cell in which it lives.
“It’s incompletely understood how it can do that. We’ve identified one such mechanism,” he added.
According to the researchers, secret to TB’s success is a protein called CarD.
“The mycobacterium tailors its translational machinery in response to stress within the host and we have identified CarD as a critical mediator of this response” said Glickman.
The study showed that loss of CarD is fatal to M. tuberculosis living in cell culture.
CarD depletion leaves the pathogen sensitive to killing by oxidative stress, starvation, and DNA damage as it fails to cut its transcription of rRNA.
Glickman said that they were able to show in infected mice that the mycobacterium depends on CarD not just when it is in its early, most active phase of growth, but also later in the course of infection.
He added that drugs that target CarD’s interaction with RNA polymerase could, therefore, lead to sorely needed, new TB drugs.
The study has been published in the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication. (ANI)
London, May 27 (ANI): A dog got stuck in a rabbit hole in Haverfordwest, West Wales, and could manage to crawl out only after it lost a third of his body weight due to starvation for 25 days.
Well-fed Jack Russell Jake lost 2kg when it came out of the hole, and vets feared that he would not survive.
Jake’s owner Jill Thomas, 52, revealed that the dog disappeared near some rabbit holes during a walk.
“We looked everywhere. But once three weeks had gone by we gave up hope,” the Sun quoted her as recalling.
Once Jack became free, it staggered to a farm 500 yards away, where the children had seen missing dog posters.
Afterwards, Jill and her husband Rick tok their pet to a vet, who put the dog on a drip.
Fencing contractor Rick said: “Jake was skin and bone. It was touch-and-go for a while. But he’s a fit little dog and he slowly recovered.”
Jill added: “We’re so glad he’s home. It’s incredible he survived.” (ANI)
Harare (Zimbabwe), May 26 (ANI): Zimbabwe could collapse into “complete anarchy” in a year if foreign aid does not bolster it’s failing economy, a former judge has told Sky News Online.
The nation is battling to pay nurses, teachers, police and soldiers, despite adopting the US dollar as its first currency to tame hyperinflation with its own. Starvation and a cholera outbreak have also been wreaking havoc in the southern African state.
Foreign powers are prepared to boost Zimbabwe with a multi-billion pound rescue package – but only if Mugabe abides by a power-sharing deal.
George Smith, a former High Court judge who served under both Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith and President Robert Mugabe’s regimes, said “It’s essential the outside world comes in with aid as soon as possible, even if it comes in bits and pieces and makes each step conditional.”
The judge, who played a key role in the Lancaster House negotiations in 1980 that brought about Zimbabwe’s independence, admitted “the big problem” with the unity government was Zanu PF’s reluctance to fulfill the power-sharing deal’s promises.
Referring to reports of police refusing to protect farmers from groups seizing their land, he said: “The failure to implement what was agreed and the arrests of political activists and journalists make a lot of people unsure the inclusive government is working as one. The problem is not the president, but there are people in the parties or in the police who are doing their own thing.”
He insisted holding back aid threatened “to destroy” the unity government, with internal political party tensions mounting, as the economy declines.
“Africa should be left to police itself. If aid does not come in, the whole thing will collapse and people are going to suffer,” he said. (ANI)
Harare, May 19 (ANI): At least 700 out of the 1300 inmates in Zimbabwe’s maximum security jail have died of starvation or disease in the last year.
Due to its death rate, Chikurubi prison, located on the outskirts of Harare, has been touted as one of the worst jails in history.
On Sunday alone, six prisoners were found dead in their filthy cell, while the same number died last weekend due to revolting conditions.
Some 100 bodies, many of them mutilated by rats, are stacked up in the prison mortuary. If they are unclaimed, they will be buried as paupers in the prison grounds, The Telegraph reports.
The collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy has crippled the prison system, leaving thousands of inmates with scarcely any food. The provision of medical care has also collapsed, leaving prisoners to die of starvation and disease.
Chikurubi packs about 30 inmates into cells designed for only 10, the paper reported.
A jail warder revealed that the mortality rate in other prisons of the country was almost the same.
“It’s the same at all the rest of the prisons around the country. We often find six died at a time. A lot have AIDS, but die quickly because they don’t have enough food,” he said.
Between November and January, 327 deaths were recorded at Chikurubi – almost a quarter of all the inmates.
The commissioner in charge of jails, Major-General Paradzai Zimondi (a close aide of President Robert Mugabe), is blamed for not doing his job properly.
“He has never been to see what is going on in Chikurubi. He doesn’t care,” the paper quoted the warder, as saying. (ANI)
|Pak Govt. in talks with Taliban for return of Sikhs evicted from Orakzai|World[Kohat{Kohat, May 19 (ANI): The Pakistan Government has started discreet negotiations through religious clerics with the deputy chief of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan for the rehabilitation of Sikh families, evicted from Orakzai Agency.
A high placed source said on Monday, that the tribal administration on the directives of the federal government had assigned the task of holding peace talks with the deputy chief of TTP, Hakeemullah Mehsud.
They would make efforts to pave the way for rehabilitation of Sikh families in the area where they had been living for centuries. The source declined to disclose the names of clerics involved in the talks, and said that meetings were going on peacefully.
He said that the displaced Sikh families were willing to come back. After getting orders for payment of Jazia, the Sikhs had already raised Rs12 million and just requested for one more day to collect the amount.
About 35 Sikh families were forced to leave their permanent abodes in Feroze Khel area of Orakzai Agency after Taliban burnt their houses and looted their shops.
Taliban had imposed Jazia (religious tax) on Sikh community for being non-Muslims living in an Islamic state for the protection of their lives and property.
The community failed to raise Rs15 million by April 29 after which their houses were attacked. But they had left the area before the attack, The Dawn reported.
Thirteen Sikh families were still living in Merozai area of lower Orakzai Agency on the land possessed by Shia community where the TTP had no control.
To a question about the collateral damage caused by the shelling and bombardment on militant hideouts in the area, he said that so far dozens of men, women and children had been killed in such attacks. (ANI)
Washington, Apr 30 (ANI): Hollywood actress Mia Farrow has revealed that magician David Blaine gave her some tips on how to endure her hunger strike for Darfur.
The 64-year-old actress, who is three days into her own starvation stunt, admits her mind is feeling “muddled and swimming”.
Farrow said that she is getting advice from Blaine, who survived 44 days without food, while suspended in a perspex box above London, back in 2003.
“Before I began this fast David Blaine (magician and endurance artist) called me. So kind of him,” Contactmusic quoted her as writing on her blog.
“He told me a little about how to prepare and what to expect. He said after six days I won’t feel hunger. He told me to drink four litres of water. Do you know how much water that is!” she added. (ANI)
London, Apr.28 (ANI): Polish construction crew renovating a cellar near the notorious Auschwitz death camp in Poland have discovered a letter written by prisoners more than 60 years ago.
The note, written in pencil then rolled up and inserted in a bottle, contains the names of seven young people who probably thought they were doomed to die at Auschwitz. Workmen found the letter inside a concrete wall.
“They were young people who were trying to leave some trace of their existence behind them,” The Telegraph quoted Auschwitz museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt, as saying.
He said two of the prisoners survived the camp but he did not have further details.
Workmen were tearing out a wall in the basement of a college building in the town of Oswiecim – which was called Auschwitz by the Nazis during World War II – on April 20 when they discovered the bottle, college spokeswoman Monika Bartosz said.
She said the note appeared to have been written on a scrap from a cement bag.
Museum experts have verified the authenticity of the note, which will be handed over to the museum in early May.
The Nazis set up the Auschwitz camp in 1940 in occupied Poland. At least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews – but also non-Jewish Poles, Gypsies and others – died in Auschwitz-Birkenau’s gas chambers, or from starvation, disease and forced labor, before Soviet troops liberated the camp on January 27, 1945. (ANI)
Washington, April 27 (ANI): Scientists have discovered a dinosaur tooth along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia, a find that shows dinos once lived above the Arctic Circle.
Scientists say the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago when a big meteor crash set off volcanoes galore, with dust and smoke filling up the air.
One theory holds that cold, brought on by the Sun’s concealment, is what did them in, but a team of paleontologists led by Pascal Godefroit, of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, argues otherwise.
According to them, some dinosaurs (warm-blooded, perhaps) were surprisingly good at withstanding near-freezing temperatures.
The team’s latest find, a diverse stash of dinosaur fossils laid down just a few million years before the big impact, along what’s now the Kakanaut River of northeastern Russia, is proof of their theory.
Even accounting for continental drift, the dinos lived at more than 70 degrees of latitude north, well above the Arctic Circle.
The scientists also say that the dinosaurs above the Arctic weren’t lost wanderers.
The fossils include dinosaur eggshells – a first at high latitudes, and evidence of a settled, breeding population.
But, life was not easy for the dinosaurs during that period.
The size and shape of fossilized leaves found with the bones enabled Godefroit’s team to estimate a mean annual temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit, with wintertime lows at freezing.
According to the team of scientists, all that dust in the atmosphere must have curtailed photosynthesis everywhere, weakening the base of the food chain and inflicting starvation, and finally extinction, upon the dinosaurs. (ANI)
Auschwitz (Poland), April 26: President Pratibha Devisingh Patil here on Sunday paid homage to the victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where at Nazi forces killed least 1.1 million Jews during World War II.
On visit to the concentration camps, put up by Nazi Germany during World War II, President Patil described it as human misery and height of cruelty.
Patil said that this is an example of the victory of humanity over human misery despite the killing of so many people here, as ultimately a day arrived when they were liberated.
“There is no solution to any problem through such methods. Problem should be and can resolved through discussion and through sitting together,” Patil said.
She said the Mahatma Gandhi’s message (of non-violence) not just holds relevance for India but also rest of the world.
While writing in the visitors’ book, Patil stated: “In a place like this, words fail. My head bows in prayers for the peace of souls of (those) countless men and women, old and young alike and the children who were tortured with hard labour and then gassed to death at these Camps. May this be a chilling reminder that such crimes of genocide shall never go unpunished.”
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps where Jews were killed in gas chambers, by systematic starvation, forced labour and executions.
President Patil is on a week-long visit to Spain and Poland. By Ravinder Singh Robin (ANI)
Washington, April 24 (ANI): Mia Farrow has bulked up in a bid to prepare for a three-week fast, which has been planned to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.
The actress will begin her water only strike from the end of April (09), despite doctors fears she could cause irreversible damage to her body.
Farrow has admitted that she’s a ‘little bit’ scared about going on the strike, but has gained weight to help her body cope with 21 days without food.
“I gained nine pounds. That is about as much as I could gain in a month because I know I am going to lose a fourth of my body mass. But that will quickly go. I am just eating fruit and vegetables this week and I am reading certain things and spending time with my kids, trying to be quiet, because among other things it is a very personal and spiritual journey,” Contactmusic quoted Farrow, as telling People.
“I’m taking vitamins this week, but when I wake up on Monday, April 27, it will be strictly water,” she added.
Farrow also admitted that the strike may not last the full three weeks – because of her small frame.
“I am going to try for three weeks. Given my weight, that may not come to pass. I am going to get my blood tested after two weeks and if there is organ damage, I will have to stop. But my goal is three weeks,” she said.
“I won’t be able to go to the doctor at that point, someone is going to have to come to the house and give me a blood test,” she added. (ANI)
London, April 14 (ANI): A cat in Britain has set himself apart from his fellow felines by refusing to eat anything to do with meat and instead wolfing down only organic fruit and vegetables.
Dante was rescued by his owner Becky Page, from Tasburgh, near Norwich, who found him on the edge of starvation.
The two-year-old walks away from any traditional cat food and in its place prefers to feasts on a healthy diet including melon, bananas, broccoli, rhubarb, asparagus, aubergine and Brussels sprouts.
“I tried feeding him meat, fish, everything else cats like, but he turned his nose up,” the Mirror quoted Becky, who grows her own fruits and veggies at home, as saying.
“Just when I thought nothing would work, he wolfed down a plate of veg I was going to throw out. I have to smuggle bits of meat in among the veggies so he gets all the nutrients he needs.
“But sometimes he spots the meat and leaves it. He has a unique appetite – but he’s certainly healthy,” the 21-year-old added.
Meanwhile, Maggie Roberts, director of veterinary services at Cats Protection, are scratching their heads on the possibility of a vegetarian cat, which belongs to a predatory carnivorous species.
Maggie said: “This is extremely rare. Cats are obligate carnivores and cannot be vegetarian.”(ANI)
Fears are growing for two London protesters who have gone on hunger strike to draw attention to the plight of Tamils living in Sri Lanka. Skip related content
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Tamils, Sivatharshan Sivakumar and Parameshwwaran Subramaniyan maintain a hunger strike Â…
The men, who are refusing to take even liquids, have been on hunger strike since Monday.
They are Sivatharsan Sivakumaraval, 21, and Prarameswaran Subramaniam, 28, both students from Mitcham in south London.
They were joined by 400 Tamil protesters who continued their occupation of London’s Parliament Square as the Tamil rally entered its third day. The group want the UK government to take action to help protect the Tamils in their homeland.
The Sri Lankan government has rejected international calls for a ceasefire, claiming it is on the verge of defeating the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group which is fighting for an independent homeland.
Concerns for the two hunger protesters will mount as the length of their enforced starvation continues. Dr Jayendran Namasivayam, a radiologist at Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, east London, has been helping to look after the men.
They have signed statements proclaiming they are on “hunger strike until the last breath with full heart” and will not stop until their demands are met.
The demands include a ceasefire and that food and medical aid be allowed to reach civilians.
On Thursday night Mr Sivakumaraval woke briefly. Asked how long he was willing to continue his hunger strike, he said: “Until we get our requests.” Pressed on whether he was willing to die for his cause, he said: “Yes, for sure.”
The 21-year-old has reportedly been on hunger strike since Monday evening while his fellow hunger striker has had no food or water since Monday at 6am.
THE RAIN gods have beaten politicians this year in drought-prone Bundelkhand. A bumper monsoon – the first in 10 years – has led to a bumper crop.
And election time is also harvesting season in the region’s seven impoverished, parched districts. “We’ll think about the elections later,” says Ramakant Patel, (43) overseeing workers on his 70-acre farm in Gadhar village in the Jalaun district, 200 kilometres south-west of the state capital of Lucknow.
“Anyway, what does it matter? Year after year we pleaded for better irrigation, for some help when our brothers were committing suicide,” he says. “Now God has come to our rescue, why should we care about the politicians?” Impoverished Bundelkhand – all seven districts are listed among the poorest in the country – has suffered severe drought for five years.
There are only the most basic irrigation facilities in the region, with the odd canals full of debris and poorly maintained. So when the rains stayed away, crops failed, indebtedness grew and farmers began committing suicide.
Some died of starvation. There is no official record of how many because the Bahujan Samaj Party state government responded by denying the deaths – and handing out relief cheques of Rs 600 to Rs 800 to the families left behind.
The village square is deserted; there are no farmers lounging, talking about the weather – or politics. In fact, there is no sign of the approaching national election.
No banners or posters, no public meetings. Even the politicians are waiting for the harvesting season to end.
They know no one will listen while the frenzy continues. “Yes, we will vote,” says Patel.
“Voting has become a ritual in our country. But it doesn’t really matter who comes to power, does it? They are all the same.
” The rage has built up over the years. In 2007, 90 per cent of the land in Bundelkhand was left unsown because the farmers had not even recovered the cost of the seeds.
The following year, per capita income for the region’s 1.2 crore people dipped to Rs 18,597 per annum, less than half the national average. But a good monsoon last year has changed everything, at least for the time being.
Giant harvesting machines – an unusual sight in Bundelkhand – are rolling in from Punjab. There are celebrations in the villages as the harvesting machines rattle across the fields, disgorging grain by the tonne in the larger farms.
The small farmers are frantically busy with their sickles, stashing away the yield before joining the teeming labourers in the bigger fields. There was such impatience to get at the wheat that the villagers even bypassed the traditional harvest festival in mid-March.
“When you have gold in your fields after a gap of so many years, it is impossible to keep the sickles waiting,” says Ramsingh Rajput (40), a farmer with 40 acres in Jalaun. “We feel like a woman who is blessed with a child after years of prayers.
Johannesburg (South Africa), Apr.1 (ANI): A horrifying investigative film has exposed how prisoners in President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe are dying from either disease or hunger.
The documentary, shown last night on South Africa’s state broadcaster SABC, documented the “living hell” for prisoners across 55 state institutions.
“Hell Hole”, as the film is titled, is a grim account of a crisis in which dozens of inmates die each day, reports The Times.
Describing the conditions in two of the main prisons in the capital, Harare, in late 2008, a prison officer said: “We have gone the whole year in which – for prisoners and prison officers – the food is hand-to-mouth. They’ll be lucky to get one meal. Sometimes they will sleep without. We have moving skeletons, moving graves. They’re dying.”
The film was made by SABC’s Special Assignment programme and shot over three months with cameras smuggled into the prisons.
The reaction in South Africa, where the authorities try to deny the extent of the crisis in its neighbouring country, is certain to be fierce.
The film shows how prison staff have converted cells and storage rooms into “hospital wards” for the dying and makeshift mortuaries, where bodies “rotted on the floor with maggots moving all around”.
They have had to create mass graves within prison grounds to accommodate the dead.
Prisoners described how the sick and the healthy slept side by side, packed together like sardines, along with those who died in the night.
Prisoners in the film are suffering from slow starvation, nutrition-related illnesses and an array of other diseases to which they are exposed as a result of living in unhygienic conditions.
A former prisoner, a young man, struggled to convey the horror of these conditions: “That place, I haven’t got the words … I can describe it as hell on earth – though they say it’s more than hell.”
In October last year the Zimbabwe Association for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Offender (Zacro) released a report noting that there were 55 prisons in Zimbabwe, with the capacity to hold 17,000 inmates.
But in October 2008 it was estimated that more than 35,000 people were in jail. (ANI)
London, March 27 (ANI): A new research has determined that warm summers are dramatically reducing populations of daddy long legs, which in turn is having a severe impact on the bird populations which rely on them for food.
The new research, by a team of bird experts, including Newcastle University’s Dr Mark Whittingham, spells out for the first time how climate change may affect upland bird species like the golden plover – perhaps pushing it towards local extinction by the end of the century.
It also points a way forward to how we can attempt to strengthen habitats to help wildlife adapt to our changing climate and prevent such consequences.
Previous research has shown how changes in the timing of the golden plover breeding season as a result of increasing spring temperatures might affect their ability to match the spring emergence of their cranefly (daddy long legs) prey.
The new research shows the true effects are much more severe.
Higher temperatures in late summer are killing the cranefly larvae, resulting in a drop of up to 95 per cent in the number of adult craneflies emerging the following spring.
With these craneflies providing a crucial food source for a wide range of upland birds like the golden plover, this means starvation and death for many chicks.
“The population of Golden Plovers in our study will likely be extinct in around 100 years if temperature predictions are correct and the birds cannot adapt to feed on other prey sources,” explained Newcastle University’s Dr Mark Whittingham, who worked on the study with scientists from RSPB Scotland and Aberystwyth and Manchester universities.
“Our study models the impacts of climate change on the ecology of the animal. In this case, we show that higher August temperatures, as predicted from climate change models, are correlated with lower numbers of daddy-long legs,” he added.
“Daddy long-leg abundance is key for Golden Plover chicks in terms of growth and survival. Worryingly, our work is likely to apply to other upland bird species that also rely on daddy-long legs as a prey resource, such as Curlew,” he further added. (ANI)
Washington, Feb 16 (ANI): The Global Crop Diversity Trust has announced that it is on track to save from extinction 100,000 different varieties of food crops from 46 countries, making it one of the largest and most successful biological rescue efforts ever undertaken in history.
“We are moving quickly to regenerate and preserve seed samples representing thousands of distinct varieties of critical food crops like rice, maize, and wheat in 46 countries that were well on their way to total extinction,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Trust.
“I think it is fair to say that without this effort, many of them would have been lost forever,” he added.
In many countries, stresses as mundane as poor refrigeration and inadequate funding and as dramatic as war and economic collapse threaten seed collections of crop varieties that do not exist anywhere else in the world.
The imperiled seeds targeted for rescue by the Trust are samples of staple crops stored in crop gene banks in Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, and Central and South America.
They include rare varieties of barley, wheat, rice, banana,/plantain, potato, cassava, chickpea, maize, lentil, bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea and yam.
According to Fowler, the Trust already has agreements in place with 49 institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000 crop samples identified as endangered.
The initiative is one of the biggest rescue efforts ever of any threatened biological species and by far the largest rescue of endangered domesticated crop varieties.
While many of the imperiled varieties may no longer be growing in farmer’s fields-and exist only in seed collections- they could be critically important to the future of global food production.
For example, farmers in the developing world desperately need new crop varieties that can help them overcome pests and diseases, poor soils, and rapidly changing climate conditions while keeping pace with the food demands of a growing population.
The plant breeders they turn to for help depend on publicly-accessible national, regional and international crop gene banks to provide them with the widest variety of genetic traits that can allow farmers to overcome these challenges.
“Growing conditions and food demands change rapidly and breeders never know which variety stored in a crop gene bank somewhere in the world is going to be that proverbial needle in the haystack that will provide the critical trait that can literally make the difference between abundance and starvation,” said Fowler.
“So, while these seeds being saved represent crop varieties from the past, they could easily play a role in the crops of the future,” he added. (ANI)
New York, January 28 (ANI): Lindsay Lohan’s representative has rubbished reports that the star is battling an eating disorder, after snaps of the actress looking shockingly thin surfaced.
The actress was said to be heading back to her former skinny self following speculations claiming relationship trouble with girl lover Samantha Ross.
The ‘Mean Girls’ star was rumoured to be “surviving on candy and Red Bull” while she sorted out things with her crop-haired partner.
Her rep, however, has insisted, things were fine with the singer and that it was just stress taking its toll on her health.
“Lindsay is aware that she’s lost some weight due to stress, but we recently did a photo shoot and she ate two full meals,” the New York Post quoted her rep as saying. (ANI)
Nairobi – Tens of thousands of Kenyans celebrated Barack Obama’s inauguration at parties across the east African nation as images of their favourite son were beamed onto big screens.
Thousands gathered at a public viewing at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Conference Centre, clapping and cheering as President Obama spoke.
In Kogelo, the Western Kenyan village where his late father grew up and where his grandmother still lives, residents slaughtered goats and bulls and feasted in Obama’s honour.
Earlier in the day, around 3,000 people gathered at a school in Kogelo to watch traditional dancers in brightly coloured costumes.
In nearby Kisumu, thousands danced into the evening as music blasted out from loudspeakers.
Parties were expected to continue late into the night as Kenyans, who often do not need much of an excuse to enjoy a few beers, take the chance to fete the new president.
Kenyans are fiercely proud of Obama, and the celebrations allowed people to forget their woes, which include a food crisis threatening 10 million people with starvation and memories of the ethnic clashes that killed over 1,500 people one year ago following disputed elections.
Many Kenyans, and indeed Africans, hope that President Obama’s Kenyan roots will help bring a new focus on the continent’s myriad problems.
At the very least, many say they feel a new sense of self-respect since a black American with humble roots in Kenya can reach the White House.
Kogelo has already seen concrete benefits, with electricity, water and road upgrades following Obama’s election.
The tiny Kisumu airport is also expected to be upgraded quickly to accommodate Air Force One should President Obama wish to fly in to visit his grandmother. (dpa)
Harare – Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has set a Monday meeting with opposition leaders as the last chance to present concerns before a government is formed, with or without them.
“This is the occasion when it’s either they accept or it’s a break,” said Mugabe, quoted in the state-owned Sunday Mail. “After all, this is an interim agreement. If they (the opposition) have any issues them deem outstanding, they can raise them after they come into the inclusive government.”
Regional leaders from neighbouring countries are expected to attend the meeting as observers.
Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the opposition MDC, has previously threatened to pull out of a power-sharing deal with Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party, saying that Mugabe’s party is unfairly trying to hold onto the majority of the most-powerful ministries, despite the MDC’s wins in last year’s elections.
The MDC won a majority of legislative seats in elections last year. Tsvangirai won the most votes in a presidential election last year, but not an outright majority. He pulled out of a run-off election, citing unfair and violent tactics by the Zanu-PF.
Tsvangirai has also cited recent abductions and jailings of MDC members as reasons to be wary of any power-sharing deal with the Zanu-PF. He blames the abductions on supporters of Mugabe and said at least 11 members of his party are still missing while 32 are in police custody facing charges of toppling Mugabe.
But, upon returning to Zimbabwe on Saturday, he said he was committed to a power-sharing deal with Mugabe. However, he vowed not to be rushed into joining an inclusive government.
“I am very conscious of the plight of the people of this country and I hope that the meetings that are going to take place may actually find a lasting solution to the crisis,” he said Saturday. “I must emphasize that the MDC will not be bulldozed into an agreement which does not reflect the aspirations of the people.”
Tsvangirai is expected to meet his party’s top leadership Sunday ahead of the Monday meeting.
Mugabe and Tsvangirai signed a power sharing deal in September, but they have not formed a government of national unity. The agreement would keep Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s president, with Tsvangirai becoming prime minister
The once-prosperous nation is facing its worst-ever economic and humanitarian crisis. Acute shortages of all essentials have pushed inflation to the highest levels in the world – officially at 231 percent as of last July.
The United Nations says more than 5 million face starvation if there is no food aid. Additionally, a cholera outbreak has claimed more than 2,200 lives as the country fails to import adequate stocks of water-treatment chemicals.
The raging epidemic coincides with a strike, now in its fourth month, by doctors and nurses demanding a review of their salaries. They are demanding that hospitals replace archaic equipment and that medicines be available in hospitals. dpa
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