Good Afternoon everyone,
Today's topics are, well, heartwarming! Among other stories, there is a story about a 57 year old woman who thought she miscarried, but 9 weeks later she had a beautiful, healthy baby girl. There is a story about a young afghan teenage woman who will be competing in the Olympics. And there is a story about a blind woman who shot a "Robin Hood".
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the stories! See you tomorrow!
Today's Top 5:
1. Lights Out for Asia in 'Earth Hour'(Google News)
2. Afghan Girl Defies Death Threats Over Olympics (Telegraph UK)
3. Garda Plays Down Pier Rescue Heroics
4. Can You Rescue A Rainforest? The Answer May Be Yes (Science Daily)
5. 'My Little Miracle Baby' by Mother Aged 57 Who Thought She'd Miscarried
Honorable Mentions:
1. Blind Luck Helps Archer Make One-in-a-Million Robin Hood shot
2. JK Rowling Visits Prison to Help Inmates Learn to Read
Unpublishable:
Vietnamese Man, on Anti-abortion Mission, Opens Home to Moms and Babies
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/international/asia_pacific/view.bg?articleid=1083702&srvc=rss
© Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.This is a very cool article! I recommend following the link to find out what this one man is doing.
1. Lights Out for Asia in 'Earth Hour'
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iWEjNjkf_cEeuCMbeDumW2q75VtwD8VN8TEG0
Posted 2 Hours ago (current time 3:55pm CST)
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Sydney's iconic Opera House and Bangkok's famous Wat Arun Buddhist temple went dark Saturday night as cities across Asia turned off its lights for this year's Earth Hour, a global campaign to raise awareness of climate change.
A lightning show was the brightest part of Sydney's skyline during Earth Hour, which began at 8 p.m. when the lights were turned off at the city's landmarks.
Most businesses and homes were already dark as Sydney residents embraced their second annual Earth Hour with candlelight dinners, beach bonfires and even a green-powered outdoor movie.
As the clock ticked forward, Asian cities to the west followed suit.
"This provides an extraordinary symbol and an indication that we can be part of the solution" to global warming, Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett told Sky News television, standing across the harbor from the dark silhouette of the Opera House.
During the one-hour event, Sydney was noticeably darker, though it was not a complete blackout. The business district was mostly dark; organizers said 250 of the 350 commercial buildings there had pledged to shut off their lights completely, and 94 of the top 100 companies on the Australian stock exchange were also participating.
The number of participants was not immediately available but organizers were hoping to beat last year's debut, when 2.2 million people and more than 2,000 businesses shut off lights and appliances, resulting in a 10.2 percent reduction in carbon emissions during that hour.
"I'm putting my neck on the line but my hope is that we top 100 million people," Earth Hour Australia chief executive Greg Bourne said.
The effect of last year's Earth Hour was infectious. This year 26 major world cities and more than 300 other cities and towns have signed up to participate.
New Zealand and Fiji kicked off the event this year. In Christchurch, New Zealand, more than 100 businesses and thousands of homes were plunged into darkness, computers and televisions were switched off and dinners delayed for the hour from 8 to 9 p.m. Suva, Fiji, in the same time zone, also turned off its lights.
Auckland's Langham Hotel switched from electric lights to candles as it joined the effort to reduce the use of electricity, which when generated creates greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
WWF Thailand said the campaign in Bangkok saved 73.34 megawatts of electricity, which would have produced 45.8 tons of carbon dioxide.
In Manila, the grounds of the seaside Cultural Center of the Philippines went dark after four city mayors ceremonially switched off its lights. Street lamps around Manila were shut off.
Following Asia, the lights will go out in Europe and then North America as dusk descends there too. One of the last major cities to participate will be San Francisco — home to the soon-to-be dimmed Golden Gate Bridge.
Organizers see the event as a way to encourage the world to conserve energy. While all lights in participating cities are unlikely to be cut, it is the symbolic darkening of monuments, businesses and individual homes they are most eagerly anticipating.
Even popular search engine Google put its support behind Earth Hour, with a completely black page and the words: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn."
2. Afghan Girl Defies Death Threats Over Olympics
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/29/nbrowne329.xml
By Tom Coghlan in Kabul
Last Updated: 2:16am GMT 29/03/2008
A teenage athlete has overcome a campaign of intimidation including death threats to become the only female member of the team to represent Afghanistan at the Beijing Olympics.
Telegraph TV: Afghan athletes' Olympic odysseyFull coverage of the build-up to the Beijing OlympicsMehboba Ahdyar, a shy 19-year-old from Kabul, will face the worlds best 1,500-metre runners in August wearing a veil and a baggy tracksuit. While she is unlikely to mount the winner's podium, few of her opponents will have endured such a perilous training regime to get them to the Games.
Training for Mehboba begins after nightfall. At 8.30pm, when Kabul residents are transfixed by the daily episode of the country's most popular soap opera, a racy Indian drama named Because a Mother-in-Law was Once a Daughter-in-Law Too, Mehboba slips out of her house in a poor suburb and starts running.
She runs up and down the streets for the duration of the programme. It is the only time when, as a woman, she can supplement her official training sessions without threats or harassment.
She recently had to destroy the Sim card on her mobile phone because the number had become known to fundamentalists who bombarded her with death threats.
"They say that they will not leave me alive," she said, with a shrug.
Mehboba, whose father scrapes a living as a carpenter, is a devout Muslim and insists that if she is forced to wear the sort of figure-hugging kit favoured by other international athletes she will not take part.
But such dedication to her faith has not prevented further intimidation. After a Western journalist visited her house this week a rumour spread that she was entertaining foreign men as a prostitute.
Mehboba received a visit from the police, while her family were warned that they might have to leave their house.
In spite of the taunts and death threats, she insists she will run for national pride.
"I will compete against heroes," she said, although she could not name any of the world's leading middle-distance runners. "We have trained for three years. I hope for a medal or at least to break Afghanistan's record."
Her personal best is a full minute outside the 1,500-metre world record, but she has beaten all comers in national competitions.
Three times a week she and her fellow Olympian, Masood Azizi, a 20-year-old sprinter, train for three hours at the national stadium, a concrete track around the field where the Taliban used to perform public executions.
Mehboba and Azizi, along with a wrestler and a Taekwondo competitor will today fly to Malaysia for five months of intensive training to give the four-athlete team their best shot at Olympic glory.
Mehboba was excited and nervous. "I have never left the country," she said, "except for a refugee camp in Pakistan."
3. Garda Plays Down Pier Rescue Heroics
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/garda-plays-down-pier-rescue-heroics-1331738.html
Saturday March 29 2008
The hero garda who braved icy waters to save a man from drowning said yesterday he didn't understand why everyone was making such a fuss about his life-saving deed.
Garda Dermot Moriarty (20), from Anglesboro, Co Limerick, but now stationed in Dun Laoghaire, recounted Thursday night's dramatic rescue and described how he was lowered into the cold waters off Dun Laoghaire to save a 44-year-old man.
"We got the call into the station at around 10.10pm that there was a man in trouble off the East Pier. We immediately went there and, at that stage, civilians had thrown out a lifebuoy."
Gardai saw that the man was unable to reach the lifebuoy and appeared to be losing consciousness.
"We decided action needed to be taken immediately because he didn't look to be in too good shape," said Garda Moriarty, who was then lowered 25 feet into the sea using another lifebuoy.
"Two of my colleagues, Garda Joe Griffin and Sergeant Con Mulhall, lowered me down, along with a member of the harbour police and members of the public. Just when I got to him, he slipped out of consciousness. I suppose it was because of hypothermia."
Lifeboat
The Dun Laoghaire RNLI inshore lifeboat had also arrived by this stage and took both Garda Moriarty and the man back to safety.
He was brought to St Vincent's Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery. But Garda Moriarty's hero status is not sitting well with him.
"I got some good praise from the sergeant but it was just instinctive. And then people started making a big deal out of it but I still don't understand what it's all about," he said.
4. Can You Rescue A Rainforest? The Answer May Be Yes
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080327172031.htm
ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2008)
Half a century after most of Costa Rica's rainforests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute took on a project that many thought was impossible - restoring a tropical rainforest ecosystem.
When the researchers planted worn-out cattle fields in Costa Rica with a sampling of local trees, native species began to move in and flourish, raising the hope that destroyed rainforests can one day be replaced.
Carl Leopold and his partners in the Tropical Forestry Initiative began planting trees on worn-out pasture land in Costa Rica in 1992. For 50 years the soil was compacted under countless hooves, and its nutrients washed away. When it rained, Leopold says, red soil appeared to bleed from the hillsides.
The group chose local rainforest trees, collecting seeds from native trees in the community. "You can't buy seeds," Leopold says. "So we passed the word around among the neighbors." When a farmer would notice a tree producing seeds, Leopold and his wife would ride out on horses to find the tree before hungry monkeys beat them to it.
The group planted mixtures of local species, trimming away the pasture grasses until the trees could take care of themselves. This was the opposite of what commercial companies have done for decades, planting entire fields of a single type of tree to harvest for wood or paper pulp.
The trees the group planted were fast-growing, sun-loving species. After just five years those first trees formed a canopy of leaves, shading out the grasses underneath.
"One of the really amazing things is that our fast-growing tree species are averaging two meters of growth per year," Leopold says. How could soil so long removed from a fertile rainforest support that much growth?
Leopold says that may be because of mycorrhizae, microscopic fungi that form a symbiosis with tree roots. Research at Cornell and BTI shows that without them, many plants can't grow as well. After 50 years, the fungi seem to still be alive in the soil, able to help new trees grow.
Another success came when Cornell student Jackeline Salazar did a survey of the plants that moved into the planted areas. She counted understory species, plants that took up residence in the shade of the new trees. Most plots had over a hundred of these species, and many of the new species are ones that also live in nearby remnants of the original forests.
Together, these results mean that mixed-species plantings can help to jump-start a rainforest. Local farmers who use the same approach will control erosion of their land while creating a forest that can be harvested sustainably, a few trees at a time.
"By restoring forests we're helping to control erosion, restore quality forests that belong there, and help the quality of life of the local people," says Leopold.
That quality-of-life issue is drinking water. It's in scarce supply where forests have been destroyed, since without tree roots to act as a sort of sponge, rain water runs off the hillsides and drains away.
Erosion is also out of control. "You might drive on a dirt road one year, and then come back the next to find it's a gully over six feet deep," says Leopold. "It's a very serious problem."
Does the experiment's success mean that rainforests will one day flourish again? Fully rescuing a rainforest may take hundreds of years, if it can be done at all.
"The potential for the forest being able to come back is debatable," Leopold says, but the results are promising.
"I'm surprised," he said. "We're getting an impressive growth of new forest species." After only ten years, plots that began with a few species are now lush forests of hundreds. Who knows what the next few decades - or centuries - might bring?
The findings were published in the March 2008 issue of Ecological Restoration.
Adapted from materials provided by Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research.
5. 'My Little Miracle Baby' by Mother Aged 57 Who Thought She'd Miscarried
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=548590&in_page_id=1879&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=picbox&ct=5By BETH HALE -
Last updated at 17:47pm on 29th March 2008
The arrival of little Freya is the conclusion of a remarkable and moving story.
Last week the Daily Mail revealed how Mrs Tollefsen had feared the worst when, suspected of suffering ovarian cancer, she was sent for a scan on a growing bump.
She was stunned when the sonographer congratulated her on being nearly 30 weeks pregnant. It followed several years of desperate attempts to have a baby using IVF treatment in foreign clinics.
The special needs teacher and her partner Nick Mayer, who is 11 years her junior, thought their final hope had been dashed last August when she suffered what appeared to be a miscarriage.
But nature had other ideas. Mrs Tollefsen was still pregnant and on Tuesday - just nine weeks after that fateful scan - she went in to hospital where Freya was delivered by Caesarean section weighing 6lb 6oz.
Two days later both mother and daughter were so well that doctors allowed them home. Last night Mrs Tollefsen spoke of her joy at having the daughter she had longed for.
"The doctor held her up, I took one look and burst into tears," she said.
She knew her baby had been developing normally but was unable to relax until medical staff checked Freya and told her everything was well.
"It's always in the back of your mind - 'Is everything OK?',' said Mrs Tollefsen at her home in Romford, Essex. "I looked at her and she had blonde hair, tiny features, everything was perfect."
It was Mr Mayer, a warehouse manager, who had the first cuddle. Then, in a tiny pink babygrow bearing the words I Love My Mummy, Freya was carried in to her mother.
Worth the wait: Baby Freya at home with her parents Susan Tollefsen and Nick Mayer, who say: 'She is our perfect little person'
"They put her on my chest and I think I just sat staring at her for a couple of hours," said Mrs Tollefsen. "I was stroking and cuddling her and said to her 'I've been waiting for you for such a long time, now you have come you really are a little miracle baby'.
"I know everyone thinks their own baby is the best in the world, and we are prejudiced, but she really is beautiful.
"It's amazing to look at her with all her perfect little fingers and toes. You almost can't believe you carry a baby then out comes this perfect little person."
Freya was created using a donor egg and Mr Mayer's sperm and the embryo was implanted at a clinic in Moscow.
Mrs Tollefsen said Freya is already proving to be a daddy's girl. "I think she's got his nose and mouth, and when she sleeps she looks like him," she said.
"At the hospital they asked him if he wanted to do the first feed and at first he was saying 'my hands are too big' but the nurse left him and when she came back she said he was doing a great job. He's being very much a hands-on dad, changing nappies and feeding her."
Mrs Tollefsen has admitted she has thought about what will happen when Freya is older. But she will "cross that bridge when we come to it" and feels as healthy and capable as any other mother.
"People have been very supportive," she said. "Everyone has said 'what a wonderful story'." Mrs Tollefsen, who met Mr Mayer in 1998, had thought her hopes of having children were over after years of caring for a sick mother and holding down a full-time job.
The couple investigated British fertility clinics but were turned down because of her age.
Honorable Mentions:
1. Blind Luck Helps Archer Make One-in-a-Million Robin Hood shot
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/27/nhood127.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox
Last Updated: 2:53am GMT 27/03/2008
An archer has achieved a one-in-a-million feat of marksmanship after splitting one arrow with another. What makes the shot even more remarkable is that Tilly Trotter is blind.
The 74-year-old grandmother pulled off the shot, known among archers as a "Robin Hood", at a practice session of the Wellington Bowmen in Somerset.
Mrs Trotter, who has been an archer for two years at the invitation of granddaughter Charlotte, said: "The second arrow made such a noise going into the back of previous arrow I thought I had hit the ceiling or done some expensive damage.
"Then I heard people jumping up and down shouting that I'd done a Robin Hood.
"It was a one-in-a-million shot and a bit of a fluke really."
Mrs Trotter, from Uffculme, North Devon, lost most of her sight following a head injury 17 years ago. "I can see movement but I have no central vision," she said.
advertisementHer husband, Tony, is crucial to her success, telling her how near her shots are to the target each time she shoots.
"He isn't allowed to tell me to aim left or right before I let loose an arrow," Mrs Trotter said. "I can only make my own adjustments to my aim before I shoot."
She may dismiss the shot as a fluke, but she also won a gold medal at the British Blind Sports National Championship last year.
Peter Jones, a spokesman for the Grand National Archery Society, said: "It's a very rare feat - like getting two holes in one on the same round of golf."
2. JK Rowling Visits Prison to Help Inmates Learn to Read
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/JK-Rowling-visits-prison-to.3927155.jp
29 March 2008
HARRY Potter author JK Rowling gave prisoners learning to read a "real boost" when she visited them in jail, says a literacy charity. The writer presented awards to inmates at Edinburgh. She had been
invited to carry out the honours by the Shannon Trust, the charity that helps prisoners across the UK learn to read. The trust's David Ahern said: "We were delighted that JK Rowling was able to visit. She gave the prisoners a real boost… a real incentive to continue learning. Prison can be a lonely place for learners, so knowing there are international figures like JK Rowling supporting them makes a huge difference."
The full article contains 116 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment