- Wrestling is back from the brink. Seven months after losing its
Olympic place due in large part to the perception that it was an antiquated
sport better left in the past, wrestling has been reinstated for the 2020 Games
after the IOC overturned a decision many members thought was a mistake. The
final vote came down to a three-way battle between wrestling baseball-softball
and squash. Wrestling received 49 votes to win in the first round of secret
balloting by the International Olympic Committee, more than doubling up
baseball-softball (24) and squash (22). That means wrestling will join the
program of the 2020 Games in Tokyo. This represents the end of a six-month
ordeal that saw the wrestling body FILA simultaneously rushing to revamp the
organization and reshape the sport while also lobbying to gain support for this
very vote. “With this vote, you have shown that the steps we have taken to
improve our sport have made a difference," FILA president Nenad Lalovic
said. "I assure each of you that our modernization will not stop now. We
will continue to strive to be the best partner to the Olympic movement that we
can be." Prior to the balloting, all three sports made final presentations
to the IOC and afterward, Lalovic called the occasion “the most important day
in the 2,000-year history of our sport.” He admitted that his sport had “made
mistakes” and promised to learn from them and make wrestling better for it. "We
cannot imagine the Games without wrestling," said Sheik Ahmad Al-Fahad
Al-Sabah, a Kuwaiti who heads the Association of National Olympic Committees.
"Wrestling is a founder. Today was a great result." For squash, the
loss was its third as it tried to break into the ranks of Olympic sports and Squash
federation chief N. Ramachandran did not take the result well. He sniped that his
sport would represent the future, not the past, in a thinly veiled dig at
wrestling……..
- Take that, ice cap huggers. You may think the world’s
supply of polar-bear-supporting ice is going away in a hurry, but a new report
by the National Snow and Ice Data
Center shows that about 1 million more square miles of ocean are covered in ice
in 2013 than in 2012, representing a 60-percent increase and flying in the face
of predictions of an ice-free Arctic in 2013. Per the study, Arctic sea ice
averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013, a significant uptick over
its low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded on Sept. 16, 2012. "We
are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15
years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has
stopped,” researcher Anastasios Tsonis said. As far back as six years ago, the
acerbic Arctic prognosticators at the BBC theorized that the Arctic could be
ice free in 2013 -- a theory NASA still espouses today. "[An ice-free
Arctic is] definitely coming, and coming sooner than we previously expected,“
Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Md, said last month. “We're looking at when as opposed to if.” The folks at the
Snow and Ice Data Center admitted that the ice coverage was still well below
the 30-year average and that jumping to conclusions based on one year is
unwise. However, data from the U.K.’s weather-watching Met Office shows that global
surface temperatures have been relatively flat over the past decade and a half.
All of this comes ahead of the next major climate report from the U.N., part of
which was leaked over the weekend and points to numerous causes to explain the
slowdown in warming: greater-than-expected ash from volcanoes, a decline in
heat from the sun, more heat being absorbed by the deep oceans and others. In
other words, the picture is muddled as always and no one agrees on what is
happening to the environment……….
- Where have all the North Korean gulag prisoners gone? That is the
question international human rights groups are asking after tens of thousands
of prisoners apparently disappeared from an enormous gulag situated in a region
where there have been known food shortages. Based on those facts, various aid
groups are speculating that these prisoners may have starved to death before
the camp closed last year. The camp, creatively known as Camp 22, was a
ginormous labor camp that sprawled across 700 square miles and held 30,000
prisoners at the apex of its run. An August report entitled, "North
Korea's Hidden Gulag: Interpreting Reports of Changes in the Prison Camps”
detailed the hideous atmosphere of the camp and recorded how its population
shrank to 3,000 in the months
before its closure at the end of 2012. At that time, there were reported food
shortages in the area and because prison camps aren't known for being generous
with their food even in the best of times, the logical conclusion is that the
prisoners starved and were, um, disposed of. Even though defectors told aid
workers that as 8,000 prisoners may have been transferred to other camps, that
leaves 22,000 prisoners unaccounted for. As one would expect, North Korean
dictator and part-time Dennis Rodman BFF Kim Jong-Un isn't exactly rushing to
explain that discrepancy or detail the situation in penal colonies called
kwan-li-so -- literally translated as “managed places” – that he began
overseeing after taking over as leader from his father, Kim Jong Il, who died
in 2011. Human rights advocates are calling for a closer investigation of the
situation and urging the United Nations to take time away from doing nothing
about the ongoing crisis in Syria to take a closer look. Satellite imagery of
the camp shows some activity farming and mining activity in the area, where
prisoners once mined coal that was shipped to the Chongjin thermal power plant
to provide electricity for the Kimchaek steel mills………
- The promotional buildup to Canadian indie rock stars
Arcade Fire’s next album has been mysterious and cryptic. Weird graphics and
glyphs featuring the album’s title, “Reflektor,” in a diamond-shaped
contraption have circulated, various multimedia teasers have floated around and
yet, details have been few…until now. On Monday, the band confirmed rock icon David Bowie's
appearance on their new single, “Reflektor,” after a message posted on Bowie's
official Facebook page late in the day said: "We can confirm that David
Bowie has supplied a brief backing vocal on the James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem)
produced track (no saxophone though), which is being issued under the alias of
The Reflektors in the reflekting sleeve pictured here." The post also
resolves the cryptic nature of the single sleeve for the release, which
appeared to feature an album track listing. The supposed track names aren't
track names at all, but rather lyrics from the new release. "The reverse
of the sleeve is designed to look like it has an album tracklisting for the
upcoming album due on October 29th, but it is in fact just snippets of lyrics
from Reflektor," the message added. It was a clever trick and with the
amount of hype and speculation around the entire project, it was a virtual
guarantee that even a faux track listing would become a point of much debate. As
part of the announcement, which took place at 9 a.m. EST, Arcade Fire released
an interactive video produced by the band's longtime collaborator Vincent
Morisset. The concept of interactive videos is one the band has utilized
before, with interactive online films for “The Wilderness Downtown” and “Neon
Bible” in its recent past. Some of the buzz around the “Reflektor” single was
lost when the track leaked online over the weekend, but there is still the
interactive video and a traditional music video directed by T. Anton Corbjin to
come. The interactive video: explores the themes in Arcade Fire's 'Reflektor'
through two devices simultaneously: the computer and smartphone/tablet,”
according to the band………
- Parking spot battles can get violent in a hurry. However,
those battles rarely involved handicapped parking spaces because, you know, the
people who use them are handicapped (theoretically, anyhow) and not really in a
position to scrap with anyone. Furthermore, there are typically five open
handicapped spaces for every one person who actually needs one, meaning there
is no need to throw hands. That’s what makes a dramatic confrontation between two women
over a handicapped parking spot at a Temecula, Calif. shopping center so
compelling. A cellphone video of the two women brawling over the spot outside a
shopping mall has gone viral and the woman who starred in it but is choosing to
remain anonymous rather than step up and claim her much-deserved credit for
bringing something truly epic to the world said she left her two children alone
in her Mercedes Benz with the air conditioning running for about 15 seconds
while she ran an errand. When she returned, the woman who filmed the
altercation while co-starring in it confronted her. “I obviously yelled at her.
I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have apologized for being in a
handicapped spot. I should have taken the kids out of the car and took them to
return the video. What I did was wrong but I’m not a bad person,” the driver of
the Mercedes said. According to the aspiring auteur who recorded the incident, she
started recording because she was concerned for the children’s well-being more
than for the abuse of a handicapped parking space. On the video, she can be
heard asking, “Are you handicapped? Are you handicapped?” She later added, “Two
children. Two children. Two children. 100-degree weather.” The video generated
so much interest on Facebook that it was eventually taken down. The mother of
the two children left in the car said she has received death threats and police
have confirmed that they are investigating the incident……….
No comments:
Post a Comment