Latest News Clips 2013.02.21

                      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.”