Monday, May 23, 2005

Former United States president Bill Clinton visited Bucharest on Saturday to attend the Beyond Borders conference, where he delivered a keynote presentation about the meaning of branding, or marketing, a country. The Beyond Borders conference was also attended by several high-profile Romanian personalities, including President Traian B?sescu, Prime Minister C?lin Popescu-T?riceanu, opposition leader Mircea Geoan? and former Prime Minister Petre Roman.

Clinton said that since his last visit to Romania in 1997, things have changed positively. The country had become a NATO member (an event which occurred in 2004), it is soon to join the European Union, and people are more optimistic, with higher hopes for the future.

Clinton praised Romania for its involvement in the relief effort for the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004, stating that “This proves you [Romanians] are involved and you want to be more integrated into the international community.”

As to branding Romania, Clinton advised that Romanians should find a phrase or symbol that truly reflects the country and that its residents believe in. He said, “If 98 percent of Romanians will believe in that phrase, it is good, because they will be able to convince foreigners.”

The former U.S. president said that, before the conference, he had a talk to President B?sescu about marketing. Clinton said that B?sescu wants to launch Romania’s image as “the new tiger of Europe”, making an allusion to Romania’s solid economic growth and political progress in the past few years. Romania’s economy grew in 2004 by 8.3%, one of the highest growth rates in Europe.

Meanwhile, Clinton said he thought a more appropriate phrase would be “find Europe’s future here”. He stated that, “Every Romanian I have met believed in freedom and believed in the future of his country, [a future] which is tied to the US and Europe.”

Clinton also said that, in order to give Romania a competitive advantage over other countries in the region, it should choose elements that are positive and different from its neighbouring countries. “You can simply say Romania is bigger. That gives more room for investment,” he said.

Aside from attending the Beyond Borders conference, Clinton launched the Romanian translation of his autobiography “My Life”, going to a major bookstore in Bucharest to sign 500 copies of the book. “My Life” sells in Romania for 75 new lei, or €21, with 5000 copies launched in bookstores around the country.

Friday, May 5, 2006Acclaimed Hindi music composer Naushad Ali passed away due to old age in Mumbai this morning at the age of 86. Family sources say that he had been in ill health in the recent past.

Naushad Ali, popularly known as Naushad, was born in 1919. He came to Mumbai ( then known as Bombay ) to pursue his career as music composer in 1935. He got his first break in the film Prem Nagar in 1940, and established himself through his work in Sharda. Naushad had composed music for popular Hindi films such as Mughal-e-Azam, Mother India, Baiju Bawra and Pakeezah. He also has the credit of introducing famous singers Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi to Hindi film music. He was awarded the prestigious Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Lifetime Contribution to Hindi Cinema in 1981. His last contribution was to the 2005 film Taj Mahal – An Eternal Love Story.

He was also passionate about Angling as his hobby.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Around 1:40 p.m. CDT, NASA employees reported that two shots were fired in the NASA Building 44 in the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. A SWAT team later reported that Bill Phillips, a contract engineer with Jacobs Engineering, had killed David Beverly as well as himself, leaving a female hostage physically unharmed.

Phillips entered a conference room with gun drawn and ordered all but one person out. Phillips barricaded himself on the second floor of the two-story building, with David Beverly and another female hostage. The building was evacuated and police were summoned. NASA security, Houston police and a SWAT team were on the scene.

Houston news reported at 5:22 p.m. CDT that Bill Phillips, the gunman, and David Beverly, the hostage, were both dead. Police reported that the SWAT team heard one shot and decided to engage, but before they reached the room they heard another shot. When SWAT reached the scene, the male hostage was dead from a bullet to the chest, the gunman was dead from a bullet to the head, and the female hostage, Fran Cranshaw, was gagged and bound to a chair with duct tape, but was otherwise unharmed.

All NASA employees had first been warned to stay in their buildings but were later told by NASA they were free to go home if their working day was over. Mission Control locked its doors during this incident, as this is a standard procedure in such situations. No NASA Mission has been affected by this incident, according to NASA.

In the first press conference, police said that communication to the gunman had not yet been established, but that negotiators had already tried it two times unsuccessfully.

The motive of the hostage-taking, and whether the three people had any connection to each other, is currently under investigation.

The Houston Chronicle reports that last month Phillips had received one e-mail from his employer, Jacob engineering Inc., “describing problems with his work and offering suggestions on improvement.” Jacobs printed that e-mail on March 18, the same day he bought the 38-caliber gun that police suspect was used in the shooting.

Despite reassurances by Cranshaw and Beverly, Phillips would not believe that management was not going to fire him, according to Cranshaw. During the 3-hour standoff, Phillips used a dry-erase board in the room indicating he was tired of being called “stupid,” police said last Saturday.

Michael Sampson, the co-manager of the space agency’s Electronic Parts and Packaging Program, who had known Beverly for ten years, described him as friendly, peaceful person, with a positive attitude to his co-workers.

Relatives describe Phillips as a loner who always kept to himself. He had lost his father in 2003, but had decided not to return to his hometown in Tennessee. Smith, a cousin of Phillips, remarked that in the Christmas card he had received from him last year, Phillips said that he was feeling lonely and without family, but nothing in the card suggested anything so tragic.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.