Bengo’s Latest News Clips 2013.02.21
1.
Shock Wave
of Fireball Meteor Rattles Siberia, Injuring 1,200
The New York Times February 15, 2013
MOSCOW
— Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, and
students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that
arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments
passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in.
The
scenes from Chelyabinsk, rocked by an intense shock wave when a meteor hit the
Earth’s atmosphere Friday morning, offer a glimpse of an apocalyptic scenario
that many have walked through mentally, and Hollywood has popularized, but
scientists say has never before injured so many people.
Students
at the institute crammed through a staircase thickly blanketed with glass out
to the street, where hundreds stood in awe, looking at the sky. The flash came
in blinding white, so bright that the vivid shadows of buildings slid swiftly
and sickeningly across the ground. It burst yellow, then orange. And then there
was the sound of frightened, confused people.
Around
1,200 people, 200 of them children, were injured, mostly by glass that exploded
into schools and workplaces, according to Russia’s Interior Ministry. Others
suffered skull trauma and broken bones. No deaths were reported. A city
administrator in Chelyabinsk said that more than a million square feet of glass
shattered, leaving many buildings exposed to icy cold.
And
as scientists tried to piece together the chain of events that led to Friday’s
disaster — on the very day a small asteroid passed close to Earth — residents
of Chelyabinsk were left to grapple with memories that seemed to belong in
science fiction.
“I
opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were
summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a
dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several
seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in along with
its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on the desk.”
“God
forbid you should ever have to experience anything like this,” she wrote.
2.
Horsemeat
scandal: traces found in school dinners and hospital meals
Public
sector caterers and Whitbread chain dragged into scandal as FSA raids three
food companies in north London and Hull
Matthew
Taylor, Damian Carrington and Felicity Lawrence
The Guardian, Friday
15 February 2013
More
than a third of the products tested in Ireland contained horse DNA Photo: ALAMY
Rogue
horsemeat was on Friday identified in school dinners and hospital meals for the
first time as officials from the Food Standards Agency confirmed new police
raids on three more food companies.
Official
tests of processed beef dishes sold in supermarkets revealed that 2% of those
tested so far had found horsemeat but as those results were being announced the
scandal was confirmed to have spread to both public sector caters and major
restaurant chains owned by Whitbread.
In
Lancashire cottage pies destined for 47 schools across the county were
withdrawn after testing positive for horsemeat. It was not clear how long the
contaminated food had been on the menu or how many pupils may have eaten it.
In
Northern Ireland a range of burgers bound for hospitals were withdrawn after
officials confirmed they contained equine DNA and food giant Compass, which
supplies over 7000 sites in the UK and Ireland including schools and hospitals,
said a burger product it supplied to two colleges and a small number of offices
in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland had tested positive.
3.
Did Oscar
‘Blade Runner’ Pistorius kill his girlfriend on V-Day?
The Washington Post February 15, 2013
If,
as I do, you love track and field, you know who Oscar Pistorius is.
If
you are someone who is moved by stories of individuals who triumph over
adversity, you no doubt know the story of Oscar Pistorius.
Until
Thursday, his life has been one of those heart-wrenching, awe-inspiring stories
that allow people — regardless of circumstances — to know that with the love of
families, the support of a community and sheer determination, all can achieve
their dreams. In April 2012, Time Magazine named Pistorius, one of six
athletes, in its list of “The World’s 100 Most Influential People” and remarked
that he is “the definition of global inspiration.”
Born
without fibulas in his lower legs, both of Pistorius’s legs were amputated
below the knee before he was one-year-old. He earned the nickname of “Blade
Runner” because of his J-shaped prostheses, called “Flex-Foot Cheetah blades.”
Each blade is a “custom-built, high-performance carbon fiber foot designed
primarily for sporting activities.”
On
its Web site, Össur, the manufacturer of the Flex-Foot Cheetah blade, claims
its product is preferred by “amputee athletes around the world and used by
champions such as Oscar Pistorius. Athletes Jerome Singleton, Jonnie Peacock,
April Holmes and countless others also use the Flex-Foot Cheetah as their
competitive foot of choice.”
Pistorius
fought a four-year battle to compete against able-bodied athletes at the
Olympics as the first double-amputee runner in Olympic history. He won that
battle and, at the 2012 London Games, represented South Africa in the 400
meters and 4 x 400 relay. Pistorius did
not advance to the finals in the 400 meters. However, he retained his
Paralympic title in that event.
Pistirius
forever changed the meaning of determination and our view of what it takes to
be an athlete after he competed in the Olympics last summer. Thousands of
people around the world cheered him on because, as Washington Post columnist
Sally Jenkins observed, “There is no artificial enhancer that can give a man
without legs the will to run in the Olympics. Oscar Pistorius’s prosthetic
calves are hardly his greatest advantage. You can’t manufacture his brand of
emotional gasoline, or build aspiration out of carbon fiber, or put it in his
blood with EPO, either. The substance he runs on is called the athletic heart,
and there is no external way of acquiring it and it’s why our fretting over
so-called ‘enhancement’ is misguided.”
