As U.S. President George W. Bush prepares to leave the White House after eight years in office, he has once again revisited the sensitive issue of Washington's relationship with Taiwan.
During a meeting at the White House with Asian media reporters held on the eve of his last official trip to Asia, President Bush brought up the issue of Taiwan and his views about the current state of cross-strait relations.
Russia and Georgia have signed a cease-fire accord over the weekend, ending a nine-day conflict. But Russian troops won't leave Georgia easily.
Fighting in Georgia (pop. 4.5 million), one of 12 states in the Caucasus, began last Friday when Tbilisi launched a military incursion into South Ossetia (pop. 70,000) to rout separatist rebels.
Patchy blockade
The trade embargo that sometimes bites
FOR almost half a century, the United States has imposed a trade embargo against Cuba. And yet it sometimes seems barely visible. Across the island, American brands are ubiquitous. Tourists can order a Coca-Cola (made in Mexico) in state-run hotels. Computers running Microsoft software have appeared in the capital’s few electronics stores. A fleet of Ford tankers refuel aeroplanes at Havana’s airport. Taking advantage of an exemption introduced in 2000, American farmers have become Cuba’s biggest source of food imports, a cash trade worth $600m a year. No wonder that some Cubans wonder whether the “blockade” which the government blames for nearly all of Cuba’s problems might be some sort of Orwellian trick. “Does it really exist?” asks a medical student in Havana. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Over the past week, two battles have been fought on the borders of Georgia and South Ossetia; a military campaign, and a fight for the airwaves. In both, the BBC has found itself in the middle.
Last week, a BBC team was filming near the Georgian town of Gori when a Russian fighter jet opened fire on them. My colleagues were lucky - others have been less so. Five news staff - four journalists and a driver - have been killed since the fighting erupted. Others have been threatened and robbed at gunpoint by paramilitaries. War is a dangerous business.
The battle for public opinion has been just as intense. In the early hours of Tuesday morning, viewers to BBC World News - including those up late in the UK - were treated to the extraordinary sight of my colleague Nik Gowing conducting a live interview with Georgian President Saakashvili in his war room during World News America.
The President, "Dad's-Army" style, used a pen to point to a map detailing the latest Russian advance - and this at 3am in the morning in Tbilisi! It's one of around half a dozen interviews President Saakashvili has done with the BBC in the past seven days. For the BBC to have access to someone so influential, as a key moment, is of course vital to our storytelling. But that level of access also carries with it an inherent danger. We need to ensure balanced coverage. Fortunately, during the past week, the BBC has had interviews with the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, the deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ivanov and yesterday, viewers to BBC One were treated to a live interview with a Russian General speaking fluent English, sitting in our studio in Moscow. Another first.
We started a trial this week on the website of a different way of linking from within the body of news stories to related background material - our own and other people's.
The trial will last for about four weeks, for technical reasons is confined for now to the UK edition of the site (which you can select from the left hand side navigation) and is designed to gather your feedback and help us work out the editorial and practical implications of linking in this way from stories.
Linking to relevant background obviously isn't anything new on the site - we've always done it, mostly from the right-hand side of story pages, where we put our own related links, external ones and often a "Newstracker" box listing other news sources. We also do it regularly from textboxes within the main story.
As a rule though we haven't embedded links throughout the text, except for example when listing web sources or in diary-type pages, and of course we do it in our blogs. One of the reasons is we don't want to interrupt a news story by sending the reader off the page in the middle of a sentence.
Lots of amphibians (a third to a half of all species) are dying, and their deaths are the breaking-edge of what many scientists are calling the first mass extinction since the dinosaurs checked out 65 million years ago, researchers say in a new paper published online in the Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists are not sure when this extinction crisis began—it could have started 10,000 years ago, or during the industrial revolution, or this century. But we are definitely seeing an extinction “spasm” right now, say the Berkeley scientists, especially among our clammy, froggy friends. This extinction is unlike the five that came before it, according to the paper’s authors from UC Berkeley, because it has nothing to do with any asteroid impact, or volcanic surge, or great sea cooling. Instead, it may have almost everything to do with us. Amphibians made it through last time, when the dinosaurs disappeared. But with new, people-driven pressures on biodiversity, the survivors are now some of the most vulnerable.
Almost 200 amphibian species have gone extinct in the last few decades alone, with several pressures adding to the crisis. One is a fungal skin disease called chytridiomycosis, which has been implicated in mass frog deaths in Central and South America, and is claiming species almost everywhere else on earth, according to the paper. Scientists believe the disease spreads on amphibians introduced by humans into new environments. Climate change is also implicated, possibly as a trigger for chytrid infections, but also as a force of its own. Many amphibian species are adapted to live only in a small temperature zone, and montane species are particularly vulnerable to temperature shifts that can shrink the small slice of mountainside they inhabit down to nothing.
Habitat loss is another important player, impacting 90 percent of the amphibian species the IUCN lists as at risk of extinction. Warming (and the weather changes that go along with warming) shrinks habitats, as does humanity’s constant bulging expansion over more and more of the earth. Research into treatments for chytrid is ongoing, with new results with beneficial skin bacteria, but with human-caused climate change progressing, and habitats shrinking, the papers authors close their report with the worry that we may not be able to make a dent in this latest mass extinction, and even if we can, we have very, very little time to do so.
A single injection of modified cells could halt the advance of rheumatoid arthritis, say UK scientists.
The Newcastle University team is about to start small-scale safety trials of the jab, which will hopefully stop the immune system attacking the joints.
The Arthritis Research Campaign, which is funding the project, said if successful, the treatment would be "revolutionary".
The classic Australian surf movie from the 1970’s, “Morning of the Earth” has become a massive theatre production.
Transcript
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- President Ma Ying-jeou has questioned his predecessor Chen Shui-bian's claims in the wake of the former head of state's confession that he had remitted undeclared campaign donations out of Taiwan.
Ma, commenting Thursday in Paraguay on a case widely alleged as money laundering by Chen, said it was not the suspect of a crime who could "determine the direction" of the investigation.
The president said involvement in alleged money laundering would make one a crime suspect, and the nature of the Chen's case would have to be determined by the judiciary.
紅色標示的字好像是特殊的藥名或化學專有名詞 不了解是什麼意思
A combination of two inexpensive existing drugs may offer a new way to treat breast cancer, according to UK and Finnish researchers.
The common chemotherapy drug and a brittle bone medicine almost completely stopped the growth of tumours in mice.
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