Football legend Sir Bobby Charlton has launched a new campaign he calls “There Must be a Better Way” to find a faster method to clear anti-personnel landmines. The initiative which comes under his “Laureus Sport for Good Foundation” and involves physicists, mathematicians and electronic engineers from the University of Manchester and Lancaster University. In addition the Mines Advisory Group, a mine clearance charity, and the security systems company Rapiscan are involved.
Charlton first became interested in the problem of clearing anti-personnel landmines while visiting Bosnia on a Laureus funded Spirit of Soccer camp. He was appalled by the injuries he saw, especially to children, caused by abandoned anti-personnel mines. Later his visited Cambodia where there are estimated to be four to six million mines. Charlton was told it would take 100 years to clear the mines.
On the way back to Manchester, passing through airport metal detectors, he thought that surely there must be a better way to detect landmines than the laborious method he had seen using only a metal detector and a bayonet. As the mines are made mainly of plastic and have only a small amount of metal every piece of metal including shrapnel must be investigated to see if it is a mine.
He contacted Rapiscan and through them the University of Manchester to see if there was anyone who could help. The University has a number of scientists and engineers with relevant experience, including a project EMBody to develop the next generation walk through metal detector, in collaboration with Rapiscan and Manchester Airport, and work on a scanning metal detector used to image steel reinforcing bars in concrete.
An explosive charge is set under a sand-filled wellington bootWhat remains of the boot after the explosion
On June 12th a demonstration was arranged at a disused quarry where Sir Bobby and the Professors of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Physics were shown the power of explosives. This included a demonstration where an explosive charge of about 50g of high explosive, about the same amount as a medium sized landmine, was placed under a sand-filled Wellington boot. The charge was detonated with a resounding bang that echoed around the quarry. The boot was projected tens of metres in the air. And when examined the toe had been cut off and the rubber shredded. The shock wave from the explosives thumped the chests of the scientists even at a safe distance. One commented that there was no chance of using delicate instrumentation anywhere near a possible explosion and they had to seek simple solutions.
“Last time I saw a boot fly through the air like that it was against Bolton” said Charlton, but there was a sombre but excited mood as the scientists headed back to the University, buzzing with ideas.
The train is carrying 20 containers on its first journey from Islamabad railway station, delivering 14 to Tehran and 6 to Istanbul and will cover 6,500 kilometres in two weeks.
Minister for Railways Ghulam Ahmed Bilour said a successful trial phase of the freight train service would be followed by a passenger train service in an effort to boost tourism in the region.
There are also hopes the route will eventually provide a link to Europe and Central Asia.
Emergencies are called as such because they do not come with a warning. That is why having electrical repair kits at home is very important. Nevertheless, you need to know how to use these kits if you want them to be useful to you.
Having electrical repair kits at home allows you to do some electrical repairs by yourself. However, you have to be confident you can accomplish the task at hand safely and accurately. Most electrical repairs cannot be done through mere trial and error; otherwise, you could end up destroying your home in the process.
With electrical kits, electrical repairs are going to be much cheaper since you no longer have to hire professional electricians. However, you might as well hire a professional electrician if you are not experienced and you do not know how to do electrical repairs. Having electrical repair kits is still a good idea, but you will save so much more by ensuring your home is in safe hands.
If you are confident you can do small electrical repairs, electrical kits can provide you the necessary tools to complete simple repairs. Again, do not sacrifice the quality of electrical repairs. For immediate repairs, having electrical repair kits helps solve the problem right away even if you ask the help of the professionals. In a situation where there is someone in the vicinity who knows the job, it is possible that he will not have the needed tools with him. So if you have your own electrical repair kits, the repairs can be done immediately. Even if you know that you have accomplished the repairs quite well, further checking by professionals will give you more peace of mind.
Some electrical kits have instructions to make repairs easier and more convenient users. Still, doing bigger electrical work can be risky so calling a professional electrician is the best, not to mention safest, option.
At times you don t even need complete or complicated electrical repair kits. You just need to have the exact part to be replaced and some simple tools. The important thing too is to get the instructions along with the part. This will guide you in making simple repairs like switch repairs and changing fuses.
Just take note that doing any repairs by you is a risk. To be safe, always follow instructions exactly as they are written. When in doubt, it is best to consult a professional electrician right away. Doing so will prevent any disastrous mistakes or accidents from happening. With the experience of a professional, electrical repairs are going to be more lasting too.
If you want to make sure you have everything you need, putting together your own electrical repair kits is a good idea. You can ask a professional electrician what tools you should include in your kits. You can also take this opportunity to ask a professional electrician what the tools are for and perhaps even get a few tips on how to do minor and easy electrical repairs.
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Talese at home: “You must have a human spirit unmatched since Billy Graham made his first speech! I mean you have to have a real conscience, social conscience, to care [about the Iraq war]. Where are the protests coming out of the Ivy League or the University of Alabama? They’re not there because there’s no conscription. There should be conscription. There should be a draft. There should be. Everybody should serve.”photo: David Shankbone
Gay Talese wants to go to Iraq. “It so happens there is someone that’s working on such a thing right now for me,” the 75-year-old legendary journalist and author told David Shankbone. “Even if I was on Al-Jazeera with a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be pleading with those bastards! I’d say, ‘Go ahead. Make my day.'”
Few reporters will ever reach the stature of Talese. His 1966 profile of Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, was not only cited by The Economist as the greatest profile of Sinatra ever written, but is considered the greatest of any celebrity profile ever written. In the 70th anniversary issue of Esquire in October 2003, the editors declared the piece the “Best Story Esquire Ever Published.”
Talese helped create and define a new style of literary reporting called New Journalism. Talese himself told National Public Radio he rejects this label (“The term new journalism became very fashionable on college campuses in the 1970s and some of its practitioners tended to be a little loose with the facts. And that’s where I wanted to part company.”)
He is not bothered by the Bancrofts selling The Wall Street Journal—”It’s not like we should lament the passing of some noble dynasty!”—to Rupert Murdoch, but he is bothered by how the press supported and sold the Iraq War to the American people. “The press in Washington got us into this war as much as the people that are controlling it,” said Talese. “They took information that was second-hand information, and they went along with it.” He wants to see the Washington press corp disbanded and sent around the country to get back in touch with the people it covers; that the press should not be so focused on–and in bed with–the federal government.
Augusten Burroughs once said that writers are experience junkies, and Talese fits the bill. Talese–who has been married to Nan Talese (she edited James Frey‘s Million Little Piece) for fifty years–can be found at baseball games in Cuba or the gay bars of Beijing, wanting to see humanity in all its experience.
Below is Wikinews reporter David Shankbone’s interview with Gay Talese.
A car bomb was used in an attack on the Indian embassy in central Kabul, Afghanistan on Monday morning. The bombing killed 41, and injured at least 141. It is the deadliest attack in Kabul since 2001, when Afghanistan’s Taliban government was ousted by American armed forces.
The attack happened at the gates of the embassy, located in central Kabul, near many other government buildings including the office of the Interior Ministry of Afghanistan. A security office and part of a wall were destroyed, and the blast was large enough to spread debris to surrounding buildings. Ali Hassan Fahimi, whose office is nearby, said shrapnel landed in his office. “It was so strong… our staff were shocked,” he commented.
Many of the victims were Afghans who were lining up for visas to travel to India. Of the casualties, most were civilians. The dead include embassy workers, a defense attache, a senior counselor, two security guards, an Afghan employee and six police officers.
The foreign ministry of Afghanistan said that they “condemn today’s terrorist attack on the embassy of the friendly and brother country of India.” An Afghan government spokesman, Zamari Bashari, suggested that the attack was retaliation for India’s support for reconstruction in Afghanistan. India called the bombing a “cowardly terrorist attack” and said that they would send a delegation to investigate.
Foreign entities voiced similar sentiments. The United Nations envoy Kai Eide said, “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms. In no culture, no country, and no religion is there any excuse or justification for such acts. The total disregard for innocent lives is staggering and those behind this must be held responsible.” The European Union condemned the attack as a “terrorist attack targeting innocent civilians” and the United States said it was a “needless act of violence”. The foreign minister of Pakistan, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, denounced the attack, saying, “Pakistan condemns terrorism in all its forms and manifestations as this menace negates the very essence of human values.”
What can make a Lead Management Software Program Effective to Make Use Of
by
Richie McWhilly
An appropriate dealing with of leads is such a really important element to be considered to achieve accomplishment as well as sales in any form of enterprise these days. It therefore has such an important function in the progress of a business. The principal role of the lead management would be to guide the enterprisers execute their works in such a tidy means and also to retain all of the essential info inside a well-arranged way. Because of lead management software program, most of the businessmen are able to fix their preceding breakdowns as well as to keep on track of the industry s data and also allows to accumulate the contacts of the clients of that organization. At present, nearly all the well-liked corporations make usage of lead management software program to watch their present and ongoing works and responsibilities. Several of these duties were being controlled manually by the employees of a company before, but with the support of such automation software there’s no more necessity to do this manually. Application of lead management software has spread throughout the whole world nowadays and most establishments use these to obtain benefits.
Each and every company depends upon their customers and prospects to be able to carry on with the flow. The absence of these people who support what the company is offering could gradually come up with a business to be unsuccessful without obtaining any income at all. Definitely, allowing the customer base to develop is the means of getting achievement in any enterprise. In almost any sort of trade, the increase of the volume of its clients is in straight connection with the progress of its reserves. It’s therefore often significant for any businessman to do all he can in upholding that type of association.
Meanwhile it is fantastic for a company to have its clients coming on their personal will without being driven out, following out leads could relatively boost income depending on the techniques being executed by the business owner. This only means taking on an active exploration for a possibility for profits to boost instead of merely waiting around for it to reach on your door. Due to this cause, software program specialists have developed with an application which is created to track and monitor leads more efficiently.
You will find lots of causes that makes lead management software program helpful to use in a company. In making your company develop, it should be of an outstanding quality and handling as well as coping with clients and prospects is quite a huge subject which could enable you to become more productive.
The presence of a well-known internet site or a corporation of any form is based completely on profits and revenues. Maintaining a great earning is really a means of a durable existence of your online website or firm and would basically mean comprehending the difference of your productive sales leads also as your failed ones.
Lead management software is one of the most perfect applications applicable for enterprise of any variety basically because it could assist one to organize, monitor and talk effortlessly with the clients and potential clients as well. Leads could arrive out to be really worthwhile clients whenever you employ them for the personal benefits and supplied that you have the abilities to manage them successfully and correctly.
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The Non-Disclosure agreement for companies working with the UK Government on the National identity card has been leaked on WikiLeaks. The document states, among other things, what rights the Government has to search the properties of companies involved and the obligations on the companies to keep information secret.
Wikileaks logo
Section five of the document states that if a company fails to comply with the agreement, or in other cases at the “sole discretion” of the Home Office, the government may search the property, records and computers of the company. The anonymous individual who leaked the documents has stated that “no search warrant or judicial oversight would be required,” to carry out the search.
The leaker also states that individuals working for the company may have their computers searched “without any suspicion of a crime having been committed,” although the document does require that these searches may only take place “for the purposes of ensuring that all National Identity Scheme information and associated copies are secure in accordance with this agreement or have been destroyed permanently or removed from their possession.
Section two of the document requires that the document is secured in accordance with policy set out by the government, and requires that the information is only disclosed to those who need to have access as part of the identity card programme.
Section four of the document states that it shall be liable to the government for any breach of the agreement, and that, except for obligations required by the Official Secrets Act, the requirements shall no longer apply 25 years after the signing of the agreement, which took place in 2007.
The individual leaking the document has stated that he did so “to bring attention to the manner of construction of the ID scheme and the highly secretive approach being adopted by the UK government.”
Despite the criticism of the scheme, the Home Office has stated that the cards are required to “help protect people from identity fraud and theft,” and “disrupt the use of false and multiple identities by criminals and those involved in terrorist activity.”
The song, which is in aid of charity, is already tipped to be the Christmas No. 1 in the UK and Ireland. The song will also be launched as a charity mobile phone ringtone to raise funds for Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. Mycokemusic.com said it was going to put the track on its website from Thursday with all profits to be donated to charity. The single will be available to buy in shops from the 29 November.
RuPaul: “There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palette; their emotional palette, their physical palette.”photo: David Shankbone
Few artists ever penetrate the subconscious level of American culture the way RuPaul Andre Charles did with the 1993 album Supermodel of the World. It was groundbreaking not only because in the midst of the Grunge phenomenon did Charles have a dance hit on MTV, but because he did it as RuPaul, formerly known as Starbooty, a supermodel drag queen with a message: love everyone. A duet with Elton John, an endorsement deal with MAC cosmetics, an eponymous talk show on VH-1 and roles in film propelled RuPaul into the new millennium.
In July, RuPaul’s movie Starrbooty began playing at film festivals and it is set to be released on DVD October 31st. Wikinews reporter David Shankbone recently spoke with RuPaul by telephone in Los Angeles, where she is to appear on stage for DIVAS Simply Singing!, a benefit for HIV-AIDS.
DS: How are you doing?
RP: Everything is great. I just settled into my new hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. I have never stayed downtown, so I wanted to try it out. L.A. is one of those traditional big cities where nobody goes downtown, but they are trying to change that.
DS: How do you like Los Angeles?
RP: I love L.A. I’m from San Diego, and I lived here for six years. It took me four years to fall in love with it and then those last two years I had fallen head over heels in love with it. Where are you from?
DS: Me? I’m from all over. I have lived in 17 cities, six states and three countries.
RP: I miss the Atlanta that I lived in. That Atlanta is long gone. It’s like a childhood friend who underwent head to toe plastic surgery and who I don’t recognize anymore. It’s not that I don’t like it; I do like it. It’s just not the Atlanta that I grew up with. It looks different because it went through that boomtown phase and so it has been transient. What made Georgia Georgia to me is gone. The last time I stayed in a hotel there my room was overlooking a construction site, and I realized the building that was torn down was a building that I had seen get built. And it had been torn down to build a new building. It was something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime.
DS: What did that signify to you?
RP: What it showed me is that the mentality in Atlanta is that much of their history means nothing. For so many years they did a good job preserving. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a preservationist. It’s just an interesting observation.
DS: In 2004 when you released your third album, Red Hot, it received a good deal of play in the clubs and on dance radio, but very little press coverage. On your blog you discussed how you felt betrayed by the entertainment industry and, in particular, the gay press. What happened?
RP: Well, betrayed might be the wrong word. ‘Betrayed’ alludes to an idea that there was some kind of a promise made to me, and there never was. More so, I was disappointed. I don’t feel like it was a betrayal. Nobody promises anything in show business and you understand that from day one.
But, I don’t know what happened. It seemed I couldn’t get press on my album unless I was willing to play into the role that the mainstream press has assigned to gay people, which is as servants of straight ideals.
RP: Not court jesters, because that also plays into that mentality. We as humans find it easy to categorize people so that we know how to feel comfortable with them; so that we don’t feel threatened. If someone falls outside of that categorization, we feel threatened and we search our psyche to put them into a category that we feel comfortable with. The mainstream media and the gay press find it hard to accept me as…just…
DS: Everything you are?
RP: Everything that I am.
DS: It seems like years ago, and my recollection might be fuzzy, but it seems like I read a mainstream media piece that talked about how you wanted to break out of the RuPaul ‘character’ and be seen as more than just RuPaul.
RP: Well, RuPaul is my real name and that’s who I am and who I have always been. There’s the product RuPaul that I have sold in business. Does the product feel like it’s been put into a box? Could you be more clear? It’s a hard question to answer.
DS: That you wanted to be seen as more than just RuPaul the drag queen, but also for the man and versatile artist that you are.
RP: That’s not on target. What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn’t change what I decide to do. I don’t choose projects so people don’t see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system. A friend of mine recently did the Oprah show about transgendered youth. It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American baseball league and the National baseball league, when they are both so similar. We’ll learn the difference to that. One of my hobbies is to research and go underneath ideas to discover why certain ones stay in place while others do not. Like Adam and Eve, which is a flimsy fairytale story, yet it is something that people believe; what, exactly, keeps it in place?
DS: What keeps people from knowing the difference between what is real and important, and what is not?
RP: Our belief systems. If you are a Christian then your belief system doesn’t allow for transgender or any of those things, and you then are going to have a vested interest in not understanding that. Why? Because if one peg in your belief system doesn’t work or doesn’t fit, the whole thing will crumble. So some people won’t understand the difference between a transvestite and transsexual. They will not understand that no matter how hard you force them to because it will mean deconstructing their whole belief system. If they understand Adam and Eve is a parable or fairytale, they then have to rethink their entire belief system.
As to me being seen as whatever, I was more likely commenting on the phenomenon of our culture. I am creative, and I am all of those things you mention, and doing one thing out there and people seeing it, it doesn’t matter if people know all that about me or not.
DS: Recently I interviewed Natasha Khan of the band Bat for Lashes, and she is considered by many to be one of the real up-and-coming artists in music today. Her band was up for the Mercury Prize in England. When I asked her where she drew inspiration from, she mentioned what really got her recently was the 1960’s and 70’s psychedelic drag queen performance art, such as seen in Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What do you think when you hear an artist in her twenties looking to that era of drag performance art for inspiration?
RP: The first thing I think of when I hear that is that young kids are always looking for the ‘rock and roll’ answer to give. It’s very clever to give that answer. She’s asked that a lot: “Where do you get your inspiration?” And what she gave you is the best sound bite she could; it’s a really a good sound bite. I don’t know about Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, but I know about The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What I think about when I hear that is there are all these art school kids and when they get an understanding of how the press works, and how your sound bite will affect the interview, they go for the best.
DS: You think her answer was contrived?
RP: I think all answers are really contrived. Everything is contrived; the whole world is an illusion. Coming up and seeing kids dressed in Goth or hip hop clothes, when you go beneath all that, you have to ask: what is that really? You understand they are affected, pretentious. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s how we see things. I love Paris Is Burning.
RP: Absolutely. It’s not good, I don’t like it, and it makes me want to enjoy this moment a lot more and be very appreciative. Like when I’m on a hike in a canyon and it smells good and there aren’t bombs dropping.
DS: Do you think there is a lot of apathy in the culture?
RP: There’s apathy, and there’s a lot of anti-depressants and that probably lends a big contribution to the apathy. We have iPods and GPS systems and all these things to distract us.
DS: Do you ever work the current political culture into your art?
RP: No, I don’t. Every time I bat my eyelashes it’s a political statement. The drag I come from has always been a critique of our society, so the act is defiant in and of itself in a patriarchal society such as ours. It’s an act of treason.
DS: What do you think of young performance artists working in drag today?
RP: I don’t know of any. I don’t know of any. Because the gay culture is obsessed with everything straight and femininity has been under attack for so many years, there aren’t any up and coming drag artists. Gay culture isn’t paying attention to it, and straight people don’t either. There aren’t any drag clubs to go to in New York. I see more drag clubs in Los Angeles than in New York, which is so odd because L.A. has never been about club culture.
DS: Michael Musto told me something that was opposite of what you said. He said he felt that the younger gays, the ones who are up-and-coming, are over the body fascism and more willing to embrace their feminine sides.
RP: I think they are redefining what femininity is, but I still think there is a lot of negativity associated with true femininity. Do boys wear eyeliner and dress in skinny jeans now? Yes, they do. But it’s still a heavily patriarchal culture and you never see two men in Star magazine, or the Queer Eye guys at a premiere, the way you see Ellen and her girlfriend—where they are all, ‘Oh, look how cute’—without a negative connotation to it. There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palette; their emotional palette, their physical palette. Is that changing? It’s changing in ways that don’t advance the cause of femininity. I’m not talking frilly-laced pink things or Hello Kitty stuff. I’m talking about goddess energy, intuition and feelings. That is still under attack, and it has gotten worse. That’s why you wouldn’t get someone covering the RuPaul album, or why they say people aren’t tuning into the Katie Couric show. Sure, they can say ‘Oh, RuPaul’s album sucks’ and ‘Katie Couric is awful’; but that’s not really true. It’s about what our culture finds important, and what’s important are things that support patriarchal power. The only feminine thing supported in this struggle is Pamela Anderson and Jessica Simpson, things that support our patriarchal culture.
Modern Footwears All About Function, Style, Beauty And Art
by
Jasmine Cai
Modern footwears include various types, models, themes, as well as detail. However, along with criteria involving design and function, makers likewise think about comfortableness when putting on shoes. Footwear companies attempt to make sure today’s boots and shoes never produce suffering or anguish to the wearer’s lower limbs and feet with typical usage.
The motivation steering the design of modern-day footwear began with women’s shoes. It inspires the makers to answer to the requirements of modern-day women to provide footwear for just about any cultural function, wherever the event. Men’s shoes lack significantly in adaptability. At first designed primarily to safeguard female feet against damage, nowadays every woman’s closet feature shoes as a necessity. Curiously, female flip flops became the foundation for creating modern-day foot gear. Today such sandals are found in staggering variations. One can find women’s sandals for leisure strolls, physical chores, everyday wear and costume sandals. No matter if these come in open or enclosed shapes, females wear sandals just about everywhere, including in the family residence, while on the job, for enjoyment, and at any moment in daytime or evening. Men and women shopping for shoes nowadays might have trouble selecting from the unlimited versions on offer. Casual footwear, for instance, can be found in unique styles, brand names and measurements. Accompanying female dresses are pumps, flat heels, slide shoes, sling backs and high heels. But the top spot among women’s shoes belong to the latest fashion foot gear. Another feature of footwear nowadays is its versatility. Casual shoes do not simply mean comfortable shoes for everyday wear. Besides its suitability for informal occasions they can also combine with formal dresses and outfits. Ideas of style and innovation go into the make of the modern casual shoe, unlike the past when practical purpose and comfort dominated the designs. Gents shoes developed according to an exclusive type of design. Diverse fabrics, patterns, tones and sizes accompany the production of male footwear today. The present-day marketplace for male footwear originated in the practical purpose of shoes motivated by what the classic workforce wanted. But today the sway of fashion, sports and tradition exerted changes in the conception of men’s shoes. Not unlike present-day women, men can choose from a variety of shoes for the workplace or social life. Over the last number of decades rapid developments took place in the production of different styles in men’s foot gear. There are shoes for sailing excursions, trainers, boot styles and for leisure walks. However, the actual expansion lies in men’s sports shoes. The product range in sports sneakers is substantial, with particular designs for each sport and event. Regardless of the comments of critics, shoe makers nowadays attempt to come up with modern footwears that last long and are worthwhile. No one would question the influence of famous people in shaping the development for what turns into fashionable shoes. People invest in footwear to feel and seem fantastic like popular stars, and not simply because it is well-designed. Modern shoe manufacturers make society wonder about the role and reason for footwear given evolving notions about creativity, innovation and sheer artistic invention.
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Modern Footwears All About Function, Style, Beauty And Art
