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.”

But plenty of companies that deal with Cuba have recently been reminded that the embargo is real. Last month, the United States’ Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is responsible for enforcing it, fined Minxia, a Maryland-based subsidiary of China’s MinMetals Corporation, $1.2m for dealing in Cuban metals. Gate Gourmet, a Swiss-American group, was ordered to pay $600,000 because it supplies in-flight meals to Cuba’s national airline.

Although the embargo has manifestly failed in its objective of removing Fidel Castro’s communist regime, in 1996 it was tightened by the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (better known, after the legislators who sponsored it, as Helms-Burton). This attempts to apply the embargo to foreign companies and individuals. Its extraterritorial pretension riles even many of America’s closest allies. It has notably been invoked to ban the directors of Sherritt, a Canadian firm which runs Cuba’s nickel mines, from entering the United States. (They included a former editor of The Economist). But in deference to those allies, the Act’s draconian Title III, which gives Americans who owned property in Cuba before the revolution the right to sue foreigners who now invest there, has been waived every six months, first by Bill Clinton and then by George Bush.

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.

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". 

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. 

PAUL LOCKYER, REPORTER: These days Grant Hackett, captain of the swimming team, handles the fans and the media with great aplomb.

The amount of rubbish cleared from the Brisbane River every week will be highlighted in a new exhibition for the 2008 Riverfestival program.

The display includes 350 kites made from plastic bags and 700 plastic bottles made into costumes and artwork.

      ·    Mihir Bose - BBC sports editor

      ·     1 Jul 08, 03:00 PM

看完這篇文章的人呀 會知道好多喝醉酒的英文用法 好好笑喔
紅色的不知道是啥

• Mark Easton
• 22 Jul 08, 12:58 PM GMT

At a meeting inside No 10 last November, the prime minister told the drinks industry it was on the naughty step. Unless behaviour improved, relations would become distinctly frosty.

The latest global assessment of cetaceans shows that the marine mammals throughout the world's oceans have experienced mixed fortunes.

The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species reveals that some large species, like humpbacks, have seen numbers increase.

However, it warns that smaller species, including river dolphins, have declined as a result of human actions.

The IUCN added that it was unable to assess more than half of the world's cetaceans because of a lack of data. 

"It shows that if you protect these animals then they can recover," said Randall Reeves, chairman of Cetacean Specialist Group for the IUCN, the global conservation body.

• Mark Easton
• 17 Jul 08, 12:17 PM GMT

Earlier this week I posted some thoughts on the government's new Youth Crime Action Plan which highlighted a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder as a way of spotting those youngsters at greatest risk of becoming criminals.

I reproduce the chart here with our labelling corrected. (The original can be found in the report [pdf] however there is little or nothing in the way of explanation in the accompanying text.)

A CONSERVATION catastrophe has become a human tragedy. The mass poisoning that has killed millions of India's vultures may have indirectly claimed the lives of almost 50,000 people, according to an analysis of the wider impacts of the bird die-off.

Since the 1990s, numbers of long-billed, slender-billed and oriental white-backed vultures have declined at an unprecedented rate. All three species could be driven toward extinction within a decade. The cause is a veterinary drug called diclofenac, which was routinely given to cattle. When the cattle died, vultures that fed on their carcasses were poisoned by the drug. Although now banned in India, diclofenac is still used to some extent.

Chinese officials have admitted that they are concerned about the lack of spectators at some Olympic events.

They have hired volunteers, dressed in yellow shirts, to fill up empty venues and improve the atmosphere inside.

But Wang Wei, a senior official with the Beijing organising committee (Bocog), said other Olympics had experienced similar problems.

Running on a regular basis can slow the effects of ageing, a study by US researchers shows.

Elderly joggers were half as likely to die prematurely from conditions like cancer than non-runners.

They also enjoyed a healthier life with fewer disabilities, the Stanford University Medical Center team found.

IT'S not just the sphere of culture that has an east-west divide. The Earth's inner core of solid iron also behaves differently in each hemisphere, transmitting seismic waves faster in the eastern side than in the west.

The phenomenon has baffled scientists, but now numerical simulations developed by Julien Aubert of the French national research centre's Institute of Geophysics in Paris and his team suggest that the anomaly may be due to subterranean "cyclones" found in parts of the liquid iron outer core.

Monday, August 11, 2008
By Emmanuel Angleys, AFP

QUILLABAMBA, Peru -- Once bleak and lifeless places degraded by years of high-impact farming, Peruvian coffee farms are being transformed by a growing trend for certification schemes offering ethical and environmental guarantees to western consumers.