DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AP) – The alleged leader of the militant wing of a United States (US)-based Iranian opposition group went on trial yesterday, state TV reported. He’s accused of planning a 2008 bombing at a mosque that killed 14 people and wounded over 200.
In 2020, Iran’s intelligence service detained Jamshid Sharmahd, an Iranian-German national and US resident. Iran said he is the leader of Tondar, the militant wing of the opposition group Kingdom Assembly of Iran.
Sharmahd’s family said he is only the spokesperson for the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, known in Farsi as Anjoman-e Padeshahi-e Iran, and has accused Iran of kidnapping him in Dubai. His hometown is Glendora, California.
Sharmahd confessed to having a relationship with both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), state TV reported. It said he was in contact with nine FBI and CIA agents and his last meeting was in January 2020.
At the time of his detention, Iran alleged Sharmahd was behind the 2008 bombing that targetted the Hosseynieh Seyed al-Shohada Mosque in the city of Shiraz and that he was planning other attacks around Iran. Besides the 14 killed in the bombing, 215 were wounded.
Sharmahd, who supports restoring Iran’s monarchy that was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, had been previously targetted in an apparent Iranian assassination plot on US soil in 2009.
Iran hasn’t said how it detained Sharmahd, which came against the backdrop of covert actions conducted by Iran amid heightened tensions with the US over Tehran’s collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.
Sharmahd had been in Dubai, trying to travel to India for a business deal involving his software company, his son said. He was hoping to get a connecting flight despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic disrupting global travel.
KINGSTON UPON HULL, UNITED KINGDOM (AFP) – On the banks of the River Humber in northern England, the winds of change are blowing through Hull, where factory workers busily craft turbine blades in a green revolution.
Hull, known for a once-thriving fishing industry, the poet Philip Larkin, rugby league, and the city’s eponymous football club recently bought by Turkish TV personality Acun Ilicali, is home to Britain’s biggest wind turbine blade plant.
That has placed Hull at the centre of the United Kingdom (UK) government’s long-term plan to slash carbon emissions, tackle climate change and cut rocketting household energy bills.
German-Spanish giant Siemens Gamesa is rapidly expanding its facility to meet booming demand and keep the country’s much-trumpetted 2050 net-zero target on track.
The need for cheaper sources of energy became increasingly urgent this week, as the government scrambled to head off a cost of living crisis, faced with runaway electricity and gas costs that are fuelling decades-high inflation.
Britain unveiled financial support for households after the UK energy regulator lifted prices to reflect the spiking natural gas market.
A wind turbine blade is moved outside for shipping at the Siemens Gamesa blade factory in Hull, northeast England. PHOTO: AFP
“We are doing our bit to tidy the world up and get cheaper and cleaner energy for everybody,” blade painter Carl Jackson told AFP from the factory floor.
“I think wind power is a big part of the future. It’s been a massive boost to jobs and the economy in Hull,” added Jackson, who joined when Siemens Gamesa opened six years ago.
The hub has since manufactured 1,500 hand-made turbine blades and now employs more than 1,000 people.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of last November’s United Nations (UN) climate change summit in Glasgow, has vowed to “level up” economic opportunity in places like Hull, which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit.
Siemens Gamesa built the GBP310-million plant jointly with Associated British Ports in 2016, and it is now undergoing a major extension to build bigger blades.
The Hull factory manufactures about 300 turbine blades per year, with each measuring 81 metres in length – about the same as the wingspan of an Airbus A380 aircraft.
A wind turbine, comprising three such blades, can power an average house for 24 hours with one single rotation.
New, even longer 100-metre blades will provide enough power for up to two days.
In the cavernous Hull factory, staff assemble balsa wood, fibreglass and resin into vast blade moulds to start a journey that will eventually harness the ferocious winds of the North Sea.
That enables Britain to cut carbon emissions while curbing its dependency on imported energy and lowering prices in the long term, said Plant Director Andy Sykes.
“Over the course of last year, 25 per cent of the UK’s (electricity) was delivered from wind power,” said Sykes.
“That will only continue to grow and help drive down the cost of energy by reducing the need for the import of energy.”
The group will open another factory in Le Havre, northern France, this year in a push for cleaner energy across Europe, where wind generated an average 16 per cent of electricity according to 2020 industry data.
Scotland recently awarded a string of vast offshore wind projects after Johnson vowed to make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind”.
Hull is also expanding into the broader renewable sector, with plans for biofuels, green hydrogen, and carbon capture, as well as solar and tidal power generation under the city’s “Green Port” initiative.
The local authority is eager to slash carbon output from the Humber estuary region, which accounts for 40 per cent of Britain’s industrial emissions – particularly from the cement, gas, oil, petrochemicals and steel sectors.
“You really have to decarbonise the Humber area for the UK to be really able to address significant parts of its net zero challenge,” Hull City Council climate officer Martin Budd
told AFP.
“And this Siemens offshore wind plant provides a key activator to achieve that.”
The Humber estuary’s high seabed makes it ideal for offshore turbines.
At the same time, the estuary expels an estimated 12.3 million tonnes of carbon
per year.
Budd said tackling climate change was vital to saving low-lying Hull from flooding.
“We are the second most vulnerable UK city after London to flooding. So the survival of the city depends on tackling climate change,” he added.
The UK wants offshore wind farms to provide one-third of the country’s electricity
by 2030.
Climate change specialist Nick Cowern, an emeritus professor at Newcastle University, cautioned that Britain also needed to develop chemical storage capability.
“It’s realistic to put wind power at the centre of the UK’s low carbon electricity generation approach, which is a major part of the effort towards net zero,” he told AFP.
He added that while wind and solar were safe long-term bets, gas still had a significant role to play.
“Until we have the ability to store electricity as hydrogen – or alternatives like ammonia – and be better grid-connected to our neighbours in continental Europe and the Nordic countries, gas will still be needed during periods of low wind speeds and low solar generation.”
PARIS (AFP) – Global warming is causing plants in the United Kingdom (UK) to burst into flower around a month earlier, with potentially profound consequences for crops and wildlife, according to a research last Wednesday that used nature observations going back to the 1700s.
Trees, herbs and other flowering plants have shifted seasonal rhythms as temperatures have increased, according to the study led by the University of Cambridge.
The results are “truly alarming” because of the ecological threats posed by early flowering, said a professor from Cambridge’s Department of Geography Ulf Buntgen, who led the research published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Crops can be killed off if they blossom early and are then lashed by a late frost, but reasearchers said the bigger threat was to wildlife.
This is because insects and birds have evolved to synchronise their own development stages with the plants they rely on. When they are no longer in phase, the result is an “ecological mismatch”.
“A certain plant flowers, it attracts a particular type of insect, which attracts a particular type of bird, and so on,” Buntgen said in a press release from the university.
Researchers say the early flowering could pose a number of ecological threats. PHOTO: AFP
“But if one component responds faster than the others, there’s a risk that they’ll be out of synch, which can lead species to collapse if they can’t adapt quickly enough.”
To track the changes in flowering patterns, researchers used a database known as Nature’s Calendar, which has entries by scientists, naturalists, amateur and professional gardeners, as well as organisations such as the Royal Meteorological Society, going back more than 200 years.
Looking at more than 400,000 observations of 406 trees, shrubs, herbs and climbing plants across swathes of Britain, they found that the average first flowering date from 1987 to 2019 is 30 days earlier than the average first flowering date from 1753 to 1986.
The changes seen in recent decades coincide with accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change, especially higher temperatures.
Spring in Britain might eventually creep into the historically wintry month of February if global temperatures continue to increase at their current rate, said Buntgen.
That rapid shift in natural cycles could reverberate through forests, farms and gardens.
Buntgen said scientists need to have access to data that track whole ecosystems over long periods of time, if we are to truly understand the implications of climate change.
“We can use a wide range of environmental datasets to see how climate change is affecting different species, but most records we have only consider one or a handful of species in a relatively small area,” said Buntgen.
There is growing concern among scientists about the scale of the impact of a rapidly warming world, on everything from extreme weather events to loss of biodiversity.
The United Nations (UN) last month confirmed that the past seven years have been the hottest on record, while the average global temperature in 2021 was around 1.11 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels measured between 1850 and 1900.
Parents and guardians of some 70 students selected for a free tuition programme attended a virtual briefing session yesterday, organised by the Community and Communication Bureau of RPN Kampong Panchor Mengkubau Village Consultative Council in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports and the Brunei-Muara District Office.
The free tuition programme, Curahan Ilmu, is in its fifth iteration.
The briefing explained preparations parents and guardians need to do before and during classes.
Students chosen for the programme comprise orphans and children who are aid recipients under the Community Development Department (JAPEM).
The students will take part in the study sessions for 10 months starting on February 13.
The sessions will be held online. There will also be in-person sessions at Dato Mohd Yassin Primary School and the residence of the Curahan Ilmu Programme Co-Chairperson Fatimah binti Haji Jamil, subject to circumstances and advice from the relevant parties.
Subjects that will be taught are: Malay and English Language, science and mathematics.
The programme produced 10 out of 26 students who achieved five A’s during the Primary School Assessment (PSR) in 2021.
Two achieved four A’s and one B, while others achieved three or two A’s. One achieved an A, and only one did not manage to obtain 100 per cent passing grades.
To improve the vigilance and safety of these students during the learning session, all students must undergo rapid antigen test (ART) for COVID-19 before entering the school for in-person classes, said the co-chairperson.
An online briefing session for parents and guardians of students for the ‘Curahan Ilmu’ programme. PHOTO: JAPEM
MIAMI (AFP) – Ireland’s Leona Maguire captured her first LPGA title on Saturday, firing a five-under par 67 to win the Drive On Championship by three strokes.
The 27-year-old former amateur world number one sank seven birdies against two bogeys to finish on 18-under 198 for the 54-hole event at Crown Colony in Fort Myers, Florida.
“It has been a long time coming. You don’t know if it’s actually going to happen until it does,” Maguire said.
“I tried to stay really patient today and didn’t get ahead of myself. Wanted to go out and just shoot a number. I didn’t want anybody to have to hand it to me. I wanted to go out and win it myself.”
Maguire kept calm under the pressure of delivering the biggest triumph of her career.
“Just really proud of the way I played,” she said. “I was trying to go out and shoot 20-under par. That was my goal today. I was feeling really calm. Was staying in the moment.”
American Lexi Thompson fired a final-round 65 to grab second on 201, one stroke ahead of compatriot Sarah Schmelzel, who shot 64.
China’s Lin Xiyu, who had a 63, shared fourth on 203 with Thailand’s Patty Tavatanakit and Americans Stacy Lewis, Marina Alex and Brittany Altomare.
Maguire, the first Irish winner of an LPGA event, had the lowest final-round score in a major by any man or woman with a 61 at last year’s Evian Championship in France.
“She’s such an amazing player, Thompson said of Maguire. “She has been striking it well and has made some great putts out here this week. She’s an amazing talent and I think (the victory) will help her out a lot.”
Leona Maguire of Ireland kisses the trophy. PHOTO: AFP
CNA/ THE NEW YORK TIMES – If almost all of us started walking for an extra 10 minutes a day, we could, collectively, prevent more than 111,000 deaths every year, according to an enlightening new study of movement and mortality.
Published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, the study used data about physical activity and death rates for thousands of American adults to estimate how many deaths every year might be averted if everyone exercised more.
The results indicate that even a little extra physical activity by each of us could potentially stave off hundreds of thousands of premature deaths over the coming years.
Already, science offers plenty of evidence that how much we exercise influences how long we live. In a telling 2019 study published by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than eight per cent of all deaths in the United States (US) were attributed to “inadequate levels of activity”.
A British study from 2015 likewise found that men and women who exercised for at least 150 minutes per week – the standard recommendation in Britain, Europe and the US – reduced their risk of premature death by at least 25 per cent compared to people who exercised less.
More dramatically, a 2020 examination of the lifestyles and death risks of about 44,000 adults in the US and Europe concluded that the most sedentary men and women in the study, who sat almost all day, were as much as 260 per cent more likely to die prematurely as the most highly active people studied, who exercised for at least 30 minutes most days.
But much of this past research relied on people’s often unreliable memories of their exercise and sitting habits. In addition, many of the studies that delved into the broader, population-level impacts of exercise on longevity tended to use formal exercise guidelines as their goal.
In those studies, researchers modelled what would happen if everyone started working out for at least 150 minutes a week, an ambitious and perhaps unachievable goal for the many people who previously have exercised rarely, if at all.
Using those results, they began creating a series of statistical what-ifs. Suppose, the researchers asked, everyone who was capable of exercising began exercising moderately, such as by walking briskly, for an extra 10 minutes per day, on top of how much or little they currently worked out? How many deaths might not happen?
The researchers made adjustments to account statistically for those people who were too frail or otherwise unable to walk or easily move around. They also considered age, education, smoking status, diet, body mass index and other health factors in their calculations.
In the new study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute and the CDC decided instead to explore what might happen to death rates if people started moving around more, even if they did not necessarily meet the formal exercise guidelines. But, first, the researchers needed to establish a baseline of how many deaths might be related to too-little movement.
So, they began gathering data from the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which periodically asks a representative sample of the population about their lives and health. It also provides some of them with activity trackers, to objectively measure how much they move.
The researchers now pulled information from 4,840 participants of different ethnicities, male and female, who ranged in age from 40 to 85. All had joined the survey between 2003 and 2006 and worn an activity monitor for a week. Based on that data, the researchers grouped people according to how many minutes they walked or otherwise moved most days. They also checked people’s names against a national death registry to establish mortality risks for the various activity levels.
Then, the researchers ran the same statistical scenario with everyone working out for an extra 20 minutes a day and, finally, for an extra 30 minutes a day and checked the mortality outcomes.
Quite a few people would live longer in any of those scenarios, they found. According to the modelling, if every capable adult walked briskly or otherwise exercised for an additional 10 minutes a day, 111,174 deaths annually across the country – or about seven per cent of all deaths in a typical year – might be avoided.
When they doubled the imagined exercise time to an extra 20 minutes a day, the number of potentially averted deaths rose to 209,459. Tripling the exercise to 30 extra minutes a day averted 272,297 deaths, or almost 17 per cent of typical annual totals. (The data was gathered before the pandemic, which has skewed mortality numbers).
Those figures might seem abstract, but, in practice, those hundreds of thousands of deaths forestalled could turn out to be deeply personal.
“They could mean avoiding the early death of a spouse, parent, friend, grown child, co-worker or, of course, us,” said an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute who led the new study Dr Pedro Saint-Maurice. “There is a message in this data for public health entities” about the importance of promoting physical activity to reduce premature deaths, he said. And the message applies equally to each of us.
So get up and walk or engage in some kind of moderate physical activity for an extra 10 minutes today. Invite your friends, colleagues and ageing parents to do the same. “In this context, a little additional physical activity can have a huge impact,” Dr Saint-Maurice said.
Laksamana College of Business (LCB) welcomed the new intake and returning students for the college’s February and March intake at its Open Day featuring games, showcased live cooking demonstrations and activities highlighting the courses on offer.
Parents and students obtained more details on the courses, while some parents spoke with lecturers before deciding on which course to follow.
The event aimed to let the public view the college’s facilities and to provide an opportunity for aspiring young entrepreneurs to be part of the college’s incubation centre.
It also allowed parents to meet tutors and programme leaders to discuss and chart the learning path for the student, while inspiring students to achieve academic as well as personal development skills for the working environment.
Activities included Mindstorms Robot Inventor where visitors tried out the STEM-friendly LEGO prepared by LCB’s Training and Development Team, which sets where they can construct their own robots and learn computer coding.
At the Explore Robotics, visitors were able to get up close on the college’s Line Follower Robot, MeArm WiFi and more ITech showcases.
In the showcase at the Hospitality Management Department, visitors showed off their serving skills and had a napkin folding duel against a hospitality student and test their memory skills by setting up a table.
The Business Know-How (Incubation Centre) of the LCB Business Department together with LCB Incuvation, Training and Development held a mini exhibition of small business start-ups covering different aspects on Finance Management and Law.
Storyboards were illustrated with scheduled time for talks presented by business owners. There will be a session with Noice Café owner Firdaus Omar on February 14.
The Culinary School provided an experience of cooking with students and chefs.
Visitors were also treated to live demonstrations of pasta making, drying and blanching as well as pastry rolling, blind baking and filling as well as coffee demonstrations in the morning and piping and cake decorating in the afternoon.
Lucky draw tickets were handed out to visitors, with the prize presentation was just before the Open Day concluded.
It was live-streamed on the college’s Instagram account.
A lecturer talks to a student and a parent during the Open Day. PHOTO: LYNA MOHAMAD
VARISEIA, CYPRUS (AFP) – In a long-abandoned village in the United Nations (UN) buffer zone that divides Cyprus, an endangered curly-horned wild sheep offers hope not only for wildlife but that bitter ethnic divisions might slowly be healed.
The mouflon, a majestic breed endemic to the Mediterranean island, is one of many species flourishing in the no-man’s-land created when inter-communal strife sliced Cyprus in two in the 1960s.
“Without human influence, the wildlife and plant life have flourished,” said Director of the Institute of Environmental Sciences Salih Gucel at Near East University in the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north.
“It is like stepping back in time to what our grandparents would have seen 100 years ago,” Gucel said, after spotting an orchid growing amid the tumbled ruins of a farmhouse in the village of Varisha, some 55 kilometres west of the capital Nicosia.
Cyprus has been split since 1974 when Turkish forces occupied the northern part of the island in response to a Greek-sponsored military coup. The buffer zone covers some three per cent of the island, is 180 kilometres long and up to eight kilometres wide.
Many call it the “dead zone”, a tragic reminder of a frozen conflict where bullet-riddled buildings crumble back into the dust. Yet it is far from empty. Farmers with permits can enter, while UN peacekeepers patrol the line, monitoring soldiers, watching for smugglers or for refugees hoping to cross.
ABOVE & BELOW: Cypriot mouflons (Ovis orientalis ophion) are seen inside the buffer zone that splits the Greek-Cypriot-controlled south from the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is only recognised by Turkey, near Variseia, some 70 kilometres west of the capital of Cyprus, Nicosia; and a member of the United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus inspects a dilapidated house in the abandoned village. PHOTOS: AFP
But it has also become a “haven” for rare plants and animals, a “wildlife corridor” linking otherwise fragmented environments right across the island, said ecologist Iris Charalambidou, from the University of Nicosia.
“It’s an area where species can escape intensive human activity,” Charalambidou said, noting that there were some 200-300 mouflon in the Variseia area alone, a 10th of the estimated 3,000 population.
“These are areas where biodiversity flourishes… core populations of species that, when populations become larger, disperse to other areas.”
Warily watching the rare human visitors, a pair of mouflon peer through an overgrown olive grove, turning tail long before wildlife experts – accompanied by Argentinian troops of the United Nations peacekeeping force – come close.
The mouflon, a national symbol once hunted to the brink of extinction, is not the only species thriving here.
Charalambidou said there were also threatened plants including orchids as well as rare reptiles and endangered mammals such as the Cyprus spiny mouse.
The experts said it shows how an embattled environment can recover if given a chance.
“When human activity is not so intense in a certain area, you see that nature recovers,” said Charalambidou, a Greek Cypriot from the government-controlled south of the island.
Gucel echoes her comments. “Outside the buffer zone, herbicides have been used… and orchids are picked or the bulbs dug up,” he said.
While the respective political leaders remain at loggerheads, the shared wildlife of the island has helped plant the seed of cooperation between the two sides.
“The political situation on the island remains really difficult,” said spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus Aleem Siddique.
“But there is still a lot of peace building work that can be done at the grassroots level.”
That has included a UN-backed project identifying “biodiversity hotspots” inside the buffer zone, bringing scientists from the two communities together.
“One of the aims of our project was to get people who are interested in the environment in both communities to collaborate with each other,” Gucel said.
“We have a common goal and a common interest,” said Charalambidou, peering at yellow flowers poking through coils of rusting barbed wire.
For many islanders, there is little contact with those from the other side, the two communities apparently increasingly set on different paths and separate futures.
MOSCOW (AP) – Russia is reporting a record daily count of new coronavirus infections of 180,071, a tenfold spike from a month ago as the highly contagious Omicron variant spreads through the country.
The figure released by the state coronavirus task force yesterday was about 2,800 cases more than recorded the previous day and continued a surge that began in mid-January, when daily new cases were around 17,000.
Although the number of infections has increased dramatically in recent weeks, the task force reported that daily deaths from COVID-19 are holding steady or marginally declining: 661 deaths were recorded over the past 24 hours, compared with 796 on January 6.
For the entire course of the pandemic, the task force has reported 12.8 million infections and 335,414 deaths.
Despite the soaring infections, President Vladimir Putin told Russia’s top business association last week that authorities are not planning any lockdowns or other additional restrictions because of the surge. Moreover, the government lifted the seven-day self-isolation restrictions for those who come into contact with COVID-19 patients.
Faced with the biggest virus surge yet, Russian authorities have generally resisted imposing any major restrictions and repeatedly rejected the idea of introducing a lockdown.
Russia had only one, six-week lockdown in 2020, and in October 2021 many people were also ordered to stay off work for about a week. But beside that, life in most of the country remained largely normal, with even mask mandates being loosely enforced.
Only about half of Russia’s 146-million population has been vaccinated so far, even though the country was among the first in the world to roll out COVID-19 shots.
THE JAPAN TIMES – Seibu Holdings Inc is considering selling about 30 properties in Japan, including Prince brand hotels, to Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC for about JPY150 billion (USD1.3 billion), sources familiar with the plan said on Saturday.
Of the total, about a dozen are believed to be hotels such as The Prince Park Tower Tokyo, Prince Hotel Sapporo and Grand Prince Hotel Hiroshima. The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the company’s main railway and hotel businesses.
A Seibu group company would operate the hotels and other facilities, such as a ski resort and a golf course, after the planned sale, according to the sources.
Initially, Seibu Holdings had studied the sale of around 40 assets as part of efforts to improve business efficiency and bolster its fiscal base, they said.
Commenting on the planned sale, the Tokyo-based company said nothing has been decided at this point.
The company’s core subsidiaries include Seibu Railway, which serves northwestern Tokyo and western Saitama Prefecture, as well as Prince Hotels, one of the largest hotel chain operators in Japan.
Seibu Holdings expects to post a net loss of JPY14 billion in the year to March for the second straight year of red ink due to the impact of the pandemic.
Seibu Holdings Inc is considering selling about 30 properties in Japan, including Prince brand hotels, to Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC for about JPY150 billion. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
