Rome, December 31 - Premier Romano Prodi on Monday vowed to prevent industrial accidents like the ThyssenKrupp steelworks blaze in Turin three weeks ago whose seventh and last victim died Sunday night.
‘’The year has ended in the worst possible way,'’ Prodi told reporters.
‘’Our pledge must be that these things mustn’t happen again,'’ ‘’Workplace safety must be our top priority'’.
Turin city council has called off New Year celebrations in the northern Italian city after the death of Giuseppe Demasi, 26, the last of seven workers severely burned in the December 5-6 fire.
The disaster, in Italy’s traditional industrial heartland, has triggered a flurry of concern over deaths in the workplace. Solidarity strikes and other initiatives have been staged in other regions.
In the first nine months of 2007 there have been 774 deaths in the workplace, 114 fewer than in 2006. According to Eurostat, Italy’s annual average of 2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers is below the EU average of 2.7.
In the wake of the Turin fire there were calls for tougher regulations but Prodi said that companies, especially in the construction sector, were often to blame for failing to apply existing rules.
Parliament passed new laws on workplace security - envisaging three-year jail sentences for the worst failures - in August this year but they have yet to be implemented.
Local prosecutors are investigating the ThyssenKrupp fire, which initially killed four steelworkers and left three in a critical condition, to see what anti-fire equipment was in place and what sort of emergency training workers had.
Construction workers die in New York City, USA: here.
This video is called The Wolseley Frogs (Mating Season). It says about itself:
This video was recorded on 9th March 2007 at The Wolseley Conservation Centre, near Rugeley, Staffordshire, England.
The soundtrack is La Valse d’Amelie by Tierson.
The New Year 2008, will be, among other things, the Year of the Frog.
The campaign says about itself:
The main goal of this campaign is to generate public awareness and understanding of the amphibian extinction crisis which represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity.
There are pro amphibian organizations like Amphibian Ark.
Association of Zoos and Aquariums about Year of the Frog: here.
Exhibition in St. Louis Zoo, USA, about Year of the Frog: here.
The emerging amphibian pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis globally infects introduced populations of the North American bullfrog, Rana catesbeiana; see here.
An eighteenth century story, in German, about frogs dropping massively from the air: here.
Britain: Arts Council to cut funds to 194 organisations
31 December 2007
The funding body Arts Council England (ACE) has told nearly 200 organisations that their funding will not be renewed beyond March 2008. The news has had an immediate impact, with theatre staff being put on redundancy notices, shows being cancelled, and the future of festivals in doubt.
Three quarters of the affected organisations are based outside London. Some of the biggest names in regional theatre, including Bristol Old Vic and the Derby Playhouse, are to lose their funding.
ACE announced that it was cutting funding to 194 organisations, nearly 1 in 5 of their 990 funded organisations. It has called this its “broadest and bravest” grant revision to date, although critics have referred to it more accurately as a “bloody cull.”
Identifying Hatched Turkey Eggs at Archaeological Sites
The history of the domestication of turkeys is one of those great questions in archaeological science. While archaeologists are certain Meleagris spp was domesticated in North America probably at least as long ago as 100 BC-100 AD, there are still difficulties in identifying a domestic bird. Simply put, the skeletons of domesticated precolumbian turkeys aren’t physically different from those of wild turkeys. Archaeological evidence for turkey domestication has thus far relied on the identification of pens, or healed long bone fractures in turkeys, or weird blips in demographic tables, such as an abundance of juvenile bird bones in a site assemblage.
But recent work identifying the calcium absorption rate in eggshell may prove another route of investigation. Researchers Bradley Beacham and Stephen Durand (reported in a recent article in the Journal of Archaeological Science) have been able to identify eggshell that came from hatched birds, as opposed to eggs which were eaten before they were hatched. Most amazingly, this cellular level of evidence exists in archaeological samples, as shown in their recent work at the pueblo site of Salmon Ruins in New Mexico.
What does a [US] Presidential Candidate named Giuliani and a Priest who has been accused of child molestation have in common? Well the Priest works for Candidate Giuliani.
One of Italy’s most colourful priests and the founder of a network of drug rehabilitation centres is expected to be charged with sexually molesting young recovering addicts at the headquarters of his organisation near Perugia in Umbria.
Monsignor Pierino Gelmini, 82, is a household name in Italy, a strong supporter of the political centre-right and a frequent guest on television chat shows. Politicians have warmly reciprocated his support, and in 2005, the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi famously handed over a cheque for 10 billion lire (equivalent to ¿1m) to the priest, known as Don Gelmini, on television for the charitable work of his organisation, Comunità Incontro.
Rarely mentioned during his television appearances is the fact that decades ago he was sent to jail for fraud, issuing dud cheques and other offences. And now another scandal appears to be beckoning.
The shadow of accusations of sexual abuse fell across Don Gelmini in the summer when it emerged that he was under investigation for allegedly exploiting some of the charges in his care. It was reported that one of them, Michele Iacobbe, now 34, had first filed a complaint against Don Gelmini in 2002. No action was taken, but he continued to complain about the priest’s misbehaviour, which he said dated back to 1999.
Eight other former wards of the organisation added their voice to his, with great detail. Two of them were minors at the time the alleged abuse happened.
The main Italian newspapers reported yesterday that the preliminary judge in the case was on the verge of committing Don Gelmini for trial on a charge of sexual violence.
When the accusations were first made public, Don Gelmini responded angrily that he was a victim of “the Jewish-radical chic lobby”. The Vatican has advised the priest to give up his role as head of the organisation only if he is sent for trial. But Silvio Berlusconi has again spoken up for him, and Maurizio Gasparri, a member of the right-wing National Alliance party and a minister in Mr Berlusconi’s last government, said the priest’s accusers were “very few and of scant credibility”.
Torturing young people New Labour style in Britain: here.
Saturday, 29 December 2007 SIX YEARS OF GUANTANAMO – the detainees speak
On January 11, 2008 it will be six years since the US authorities first transported ‘war on terror’ detainees to the military prison at the naval camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said Amnesty Internationalyesterday.
‘Half a decade on and not a single detainee has yet been put on trial.
‘The only trials in prospect are unfair military tribunals.
‘Please join us in calling for the closure of Guantánamo Bay.’
The brutal assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto tonight triggered violent convulsions across the country that cast grave doubts on elections scheduled for January 8 as well as marking a dark finale to a tragedy-strewn life.
Angry scenes were replicated in cities across Pakistan, where enraged supporters rioted in the streets, burned trains and businesses, and attacked policemen. Gunfire rang out on the streets of Karachi, the port city where Bhutto spent much of her life. …
But angry accusations were also flung at fundamentalist sympathisers within Pakistan’s military apparatus, whom Bhutto had earlier charged wanted to see her dead.
Bhutto’s violent end echoed that of her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a prime minister who was deposed by a military dictator in 1977 and hanged two years later. Her two brothers were killed in murky circumstances in the following decades. …
There were chaotic scenes of anger and grief at the Rawalpindi hospital where an unconscious Bhutto received emergency treatment.
Thousands of supporters crushed through glass doors; some tried to break into the operating room. Outside some men wept and crumpled to the ground, others yelled “Musharraf is a murderer” or “Long Live Bhutto”.
‘SCOTLAND YARD WILL FIND NOTHING’ – say demonstrators demanding UN inquiry into Bhutto murder: here.
Bhutto’s assassination and the government’s version of events raise fears about the reach of militants and possible official complicity in the attack: here. See also here. And here.
Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country: here.
Antarctica is not a barren polar desert but a rich, complex environment that may contain a thriving “oasis of life,” experts say.
Researchers have uncovered a complex subglacial system miles under the ice where rivers larger than the Amazon link a series of “lake districts,” which may teem with mineral-hungry microbes.
This watery environment may be more than one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, scientists say, which would make it the world’s largest wetland.
“This is essentially a whole new world that ten years ago we didn’t know existed,” said Michael Studinger, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.
“If you peel back the ice sheet, you would expect a watery landscape similar to what we would see on the surface of Earth.”
Dramatic Development
Studinger’s research focuses on “recovery lakes,” part of a series of cascading lakes found earlier this year under the ice sheet.
The lakes—isolated from the atmosphere for more than 30 million years—ebb and flow as they empty into the polar sea. They stay fluid because the ice sheet above acts like a gigantic down blanket, trapping heat rising from Earth’s interior.
