Today World Health Day

ISLAMABAD,PAKISTAN NEWS : Like other parts of the globe, World Health Day is being observed in Pakistan on Wednesday with focus on urbanization and health.

The theme of World Health Day 2010 “urbanization and health” was selected in recognition of the formidable health challenges faced in urban settings.

“1000 Cities, 1000 Lives” will be part of a global campaign designed to raise awareness of the potential effects of urbanization on the health of individuals and communities, and undertake activities to protect and promote health in cities.

Various events will be organized on the day at various levels calling cities to open up streets for health activities.

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and this proportion is growing. It is estimated that by 2030, 60% population will be living in urban areas.

The growing trend of urbanization brings many risks, including high population growth rates, air pollution, road traffic crashes, water and sanitation problems, food shortages, lack of sports and recreation facilities, congestion, growth of slum areas, etc.

Urbanization is the main source of many social challenges, many of which directly or indirectly impact the health and livelihood of people living in the cities.

Many health challenges are associated with urbanization, i.e water, environment, violence and injury, noncommunicable diseases and their risk factors like tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity as well as the risks associated with disease outbreaks.

The major drivers or social determinants of health in urban settings are beyond the health sector, including physical infrastructure, access to social and health services, local governance, and the distribution of income and educational opportunities.

According to health experts, solutions exist to tackle the root causes of urban health challenges. Better urban planning can promote healthy behaviours and safety through investment in active transport, designing areas to promote physical activity and passing regulatory controls on tobacco and food safety.

They said improving urban living conditions in the areas of housing, water and sanitation will go a long way to mitigate health risks.

Such actions do not necessarily require additional funding, but commitment to redirect resources to priority interventions, thereby achieving greater efficiency, they added.

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Today World Health Day was first posted on April 7, 2010 at 2:07 pm.
Copyright @ A Pakistan News.Com

Solar-Powered Aeroplane Takes To Swiss Skies

A solar-powered aeroplane designed to fly day and night without fuel or emissions made its first test flight above the Swiss countryside on Wednesday, making the around-the-world dream of two Swiss adventurers possible.

The Solar Impulse, which has 12,000 solar cells built into its wings, is a prototype for an aircraft intended to fly around the world without fuel from 2012 to promote renewable energy. It glided for 90 minutes above western Switzerland at an altitude of 1,000 metres, with German test pilot Markus Scherdel at the controls.

Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist turned aviator, is best known for completing the first non-stop, round-the-world flight in a hot-air balloon in March 1999. It took six years to built the carbon fibre aircraft, which has the wingspan of an Airbus A340 (63.4 metres) and weighs as much as a mid-size car (1,600 kilos).

The other main pilot, Swiss engineer Andre Borschberg, has described it as “ten times lighter than the very best glider”. “We will continue the test flights, the important thing is to know the exact performance of this aeroplane to be able to improve the design of the second one. It will be the second aeroplane that will fly around the world”, Borschberg said after the flight.
Photovoltaic or solar cells supply four electric motors with a maximum output of 10 horsepower each. The plane is ultimately expected to attain an average flying speed of 70 kilometres per hour and reach a maximum altitude of 8,500 metres (27,900 feet). Swiss astronaut and pilot Claude Nicollier, who has flown on NASA missions, is head of test flights. The project’s budget is 100 million Swiss francs, 80 million of which has been secured from sponsors, according to spokeswoman Rachel de Bros.

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Solar-Powered Aeroplane Takes To Swiss Skies was first posted on April 8, 2010 at 12:16 pm.
Copyright @ A Pakistan News.Com

Iphone 4.0

Iphone 4.0, Apple will be hosting an invitation-only media event to introduce the iPhone 4.0 roadmap. Please join us as we blog-the-blogs to create a one-of-a-kind TUAW take on the keynote. As always, we’ll be bringing our Apple love and our best cut-copy-and-paste skills to the table for a fun and frivolous event. (We might even have a few exclusive tidbits from inside the event… time will tell.)

Will Apple be introducing multitasking and iPhone exposé? Or other items on our reader wishlist? One way to find out. Join us and see what Apple has on offer for the next generation of iPhone and iPad firmware — and maybe some hardware announcements as well.

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Iphone 4.0 was first posted on April 8, 2010 at 9:00 pm.
Copyright @ A Pakistan News.Com

Kate Winslet , Mendes Split

LONDON : Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet and her director husband Sam Mendes have separated after nearly seven years of marriage, the British couple’s lawyer has said.

The Hollywood A-listers’ split was “amicable.”

Winslet, winner of the 2009 best actress Oscar for “The Reader”, married Mendes, awarded the Academy Award for best director in 2000 for “American Beauty”, in May 2003.

“Kate and Sam are saddened to announce that they separated earlier this year. The split is entirely amicable and is by mutual agreement,” London lawyer Keith Schilling said in a statement Monday.

“Both parties are fully committed to the joint parenting of their children,” Schilling added. “They ask that the media respect the privacy of the family.”

Winslet and Mendes have a six-year-old son, Joe, and Winslet has a nine-year-old daughter, Mia, from her previous marriage to Jim Threapleton, an assistant director she met while making the low-budget “Hideous Kinky”.

The 34-year-old British actress rose to global prominence as the romantic heroine in the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” alongside Leonardo DiCaprio.

She was married for just over three years to Threapleton, but they divorced in December 2001. Mendes and Winslet became a couple within two months of her split from Threapleton.

They made their first public appearance in Britain together in 2002 when they attended the premiere of Mendes’s second film, “The Road To Perdition”.

Mendes, 44, directed his wife in the 2008 drama “Revolutionary Road”, an experience he described as “exhilarating”, and confessed he saw “a side of her I just didn’t know”.

The film, about a disintegrating marriage in 1950s suburban America, reunited her with DiCaprio and won her a Golden Globe for best actress.

Often described as one of Hollywood’s “golden couples”, Winslet and Mendes were based in New York.

They tended to shy away from the celebrity party circuit and instead concentrated on home life. “As a family we do normal things that other families would,” Winslet said last year.

Mendes attended the ceremony with Winslet when she won the Oscar last year, but this year she went to the event alone.

Educated at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University, he made his name as a theatre director, before his spectacular success with “American Beauty” which won five Oscars, including a best actor gong for Kevin Spacey.

His next project will be the 23rd James Bond film, expected to go into productilm career also includes World War II drama “Enigma” in 2001 and the 2006 romantic comedy “The Holiday” with Cameron Diaz and Jude Law.

She scooped the best actress Oscar for “The Reader” last year, after being nominated for an Academy Award five times previously without success.

“I feel like an unlikely hero,” she once said of her success. “I was not the privileged kid things like this could happen to.”

The star is currently filming the HBO TV mini-series “Mildred Pierce”, with drly had a strong influence on her career choice — both her parents were actors and her grandparents ran a theatre in her home town of Reading, just outside London.

Japan’s Biggest Internet Forum

Japan’s biggest Internet forum, where anonymous netizens trade anything from cooking tips to death threats, has long been an anarchic zone of uninhibited free speech and a magnet for controversy.

This week the raw commentary on 2channel — which with 10 million visits a month is one of the world’s largest online bulletin boards — saw tempers flare anew.

A massive hacker attack from South Korea crippled the site in retaliation for users’ online slights against Olympic skater Kim Yu-Na, after she beat Japanese rival Mao Asada to take gold at the Vancouver Winter Games.

The site was attacked on Monday, the anniversary of a 1919 uprising in Korea against Japanese colonial rule, and shut down for two days.

Japanese web users counter-attacked by bombarding South Korean sites, including that of the presidential office, according to South Korea’s JoongAng Daily, which called the tit-for-tat flaming “infantile”.

The Japanese site, www.2ch.net, does not ask for personal ID details and hosts unfiltered views, in contrast to most chat forums where registration and vetting have become the norm in a bid to keep discussion orderly.

“This is a vast group of bulletin boards on everything from hacking to porn,” the site tells users. It boasts about 1,000 topics, from politics to sport to manga comics.

“Sender information cannot be detected, so you can access it from your office, school or prison,” users are told. “Please write as you like.”

The site was launched in 1999 by a college student, Hiroyuki Nishimura, who has since written several books and is a regular on television shows.

Not counting online role-playing games, it is easily Japan’s biggest bulletin board by number of users and page views, according to research firm NetRatings Japan.

The site has given space for discussion on touchy subjects, including Japan’s royal family, and gay and lesbian life.

Companies and pollsters review the site to build marketing strategies and study the raw pulse of users and consumers.

At their best, the site’s postings have spawned books and movies, including a passionate chronicle by a shy man known as the Train Guy who dated a woman and sought advice from fellow 2channel users.

But no-holds-barred messages also voice sexist, nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments, many targeting Chinese and Koreans.

South Koreans were furious recently when a writer said the mob killing of a Korean college student in February in Irkutsk was “Russia’s good deed”.

At times, users have threatened crimes on the site.

One of them was Tomohiro Kato, who sent messages from his cellphone shortly before he killed seven people in a stabbing frenzy in Tokyo’s neon-lit electronics district in 2008, Japan’s bloodiest crime in years.

Nishimura, who gave up control of the site last year but maintains interests in many Internet companies, is unabashed about the darker side of 2channel.

“Ten million people come to the site every month. There is no city in the world with a population of 10 million that has no crime,” he said.

Tsutomu Kanayama, professor of journalism and communications at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, said 2channel laid bare the pluses and minuses of the social media revolution.

“Mainly because of the anonymity system, it has gone too far and is now full of offensive and meaningless comments,” he said.

“But on the other hand, it’s a positive trial for a future cyber-forum where anyone can pose real opinions freely. It has both a light and a dark side.”

Sony Developing Handheld Devices To Counter Apple

Japanese electronics giant Sony is developing a new lineup of handheld products to counter Apple’s stable of portable devices, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper, citing “people familiar with the matter,” said the products under development include a smartphone capable of downloading and playing PlayStation games being developed with Swedish cellphone partner Ericsson.

Another project is a portable device that the Journal said blurs the distinctions between a netbook computer, an electronic book reader and a PlayStation Portable, or PSP.

The multifunction device is reportedly designed to compete against Apple’s upcoming iPad.

The new smartphone and the multifunction device were expected to work with Sony’s online media platform due to launch this month in the United States offering movies, TV shows and music like Apple’s iTunes, the Journal said.

It said the new products were targeted for launch this year.

Sony Ericsson is to release its first smartphone, the Xperia X10, a device powered by Google’s Android operating system, in April.

Sony refused to confirm the report but stressed that the electronics giant is interested in networked portable products.

“Sony and Sony Ericsson have been strengthening their collaboration in the networked mobile space,” it said in a statement.

“However, it is not our strategy to discuss future products or business plans before we make a formal announcement. Any media report that suggests details of the product or business is based on speculation.”

Apple has sold more than 40 million iPhones. The iPhone and iPod Touch are competing with Sony’s PSP in the handheld gaming market. The iPad is expected to rival the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle in the e-reader market.

Kate Winslet Named Best Actress

LONDON: Brit actress Kate Winslet has been named the Best International Actress at this year’s Bambi Awards in Germany.

Winslet, 34, had been awarded the prize for his role in the reader, in which he played a German woman with a secret Nazi past.

“Since we made the reader I am always trying to find a way back – that was special,” the BBC quoted Winslet, who made the film in Germany, the newspaper said.

The actress, struggled to maintain solid bronze trophy and 18 carat gold that was presented at the ceremony.

“This is very heavy, so I’ll put this down,” he laughed.

Bambi The annual awards recognize achievement in film, television, music and sports, and the panel praised it as “the actress who has just fallen into their roles, but places in the soul of his duties”

Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmitz, a German woman in her thirties whose teenage lover is unaware of the dark secret of her past.

The awards, presented annually Hubert Burda Media, honoring the best of international and national music, film, television and sports.

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Kate Winslet Named Best Actress was first posted on December 1, 2009 at 2:43 pm.
©2009 “India News“.

Mary Weiland

Mary Weiland, Mary Weiland was the wife of Scott Weiland, frontman for the 1990s grunge band Stone Temple Pilots.

He was stoned most of the time, strung out on heroin, often with his wife Mary Forsberg Weiland at his side.

Mary Weiland was just 16 when she entered into a life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll that included heroin and crack.  Scott Weiland is credited with the breakup of the band because of his wild behavior.
Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness

In March 2007, twenty-four hours after Mary Weiland dragged her husband Scott’s pricey rock-star wardrobe onto their driveway and torched it, she was locked up in a mental hospital. Watching all this were her frightened extended family, a conflicted husband wrestling with demons of his own, and a tabloid industry gone gleeful at the “Bonfire in Toluca Lake!”

To the outside world, Weiland had led what seemed to be an enviable life. A successful international model in the nineties, she married her longtime sweetheart—famed lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots and, later, Velvet Revolver, Scott Weiland—in 2000. Mary was the sane one, went the story—it was the tempestuous, unpredictable Scott who was crazy. In her gripping memoir Fall to Pieces, Mary Weiland reveals that the truth is somewhere in between.

From her earliest days in San Diego, Weiland displayed signs of trouble: a black depression that sometimes left her immobile for days, a temper that sent her into wild rages she didn’t understand, an overdose. But her fierce determination to “have more” led to early success as a model. At sixteen, she fell in love at first sight with Scott Weiland, then an aspiring musician who was hired to drive her to and from modeling gigs. Slowly, her casual relationship with beer and pot grew into an affair with cocaine and heroin that rivaled her love for Scott, who was addicted as well. From rehab to rehab, from breakup to reconciliation to eventual marriage, the couple fought their way back, welcomed the babies they’d dreamed of, and hoped their struggles were behind them. Then came the bonfire breakdown and the full onset of Mary’s bipolar disorder, a widely misunderstood and misdiagnosed mental illness that affects more than five million Americans and had been, in fact, stalking Mary Weiland since her teens.

With refreshing candor, innate comic timing, and earned wisdom, Weiland recounts the extreme highs and lows of her life, including an unforgettable love affair with the man she always knew she’d marry, the careers and rock tours that took them around the world, and her fight to finally come to grips with the addictions that could have killed her. In her journey to understand and manage her bipolar disorder, she takes the reader on a wild ride into the dark and back into the light. Fall to Pieces: A Memoir of Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Mental Illness

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Mary Weiland was first posted on November 12, 2009 at 8:51 pm.

Online News Reader Fast Flip Launched By Google

WASHINGTON: Internet giant Google unveiled its “Fast Flip” online news reader on Monday, featuring stories from major media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Google, which launched Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, compared using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine “really fast without unnatural delays.”

Fast Flip allows users to quickly browse through news stories from the websites of Google’s three dozen partners.

A Web surfer can quickly jump from one article to the next using large arrows at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page.

“As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting,” Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, said in a blog post.

Other companies supplying content include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has had a strained relationship with some US publishers and Bharat said the Internet company would share advertising revenue from Fast Flip with its media partners.

The firm’s popular news aggregator website Google News has drawn fire from a number of US newspaper owners for linking to their articles without payment.

The Internet search and advertising heavyweight has dismissed the criticism and countered that it is providing newspapers a free service by driving traffic to their websites.

“Partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads” on Fast Flip, Bharat said. “This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content.”

The new feature, the Google engineer argued, will allow readers to scan articles faster, thus reading more of them and bringing more ad revenue to publishers.

“The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet,” he continued. “However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution.”

With print advertising revenue and circulation declining, US newspaper publishers have been actively searching for ways to earn more money from the Web, including possibly charging for content online.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by “most viewed,” “most popular” or even “recommended.”

It shows only the first page of a story and users who want to read more have to click through to the website of the host publication.

Through the feature, users can share content with friends or members of a social network and Google said it is offering a mobile version.

For the moment, Fast Flip is considered an experimental “Google Labs” product. It is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.

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Online News Reader Fast Flip Launched By Google was first posted on September 15, 2009 at 3:16 pm.
©2009 “News Trends“.