ASHBURTON GUARDIAN, Tuesday, February 12, 2013
WORLD
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US digs out from deadly blizzard The north-east of the United States has crawled out from under a mammoth blizzard that caused 15 deaths and paralysed the region with high winds and heaps of snow. An estimated 350,000 customers were still without power in the wake of the storm that struck a slew of states and dumped up to a metre of snow across New England before battering three Canadian provinces. The majority of the service disruptions were in hard hit Massachusetts, where Governor Deval Patrick said outages were at 250,000 yesterday, down from 400,000 on Sunday. As crews worked to clear roads and footpaths, travel conditions in the area slowly began to pick up and return to normal. New York area airports LaGuardia, John F Kennedy and Newark, which halted all flights during the height of the storm, resumed service with some delays. Boston’s Logan International Airport, meanwhile, warned travellers it was still experiencing some weather-related delays and cancellations. FlightAware.com, which over the weekend listed almost 2000 cancellations around the area, said 87 flights were scrapped at Logan, compared to 13 at JFK, two at LaGuardia and 11 at Canada’s Halifax Stanfield International Airport. To facilitate the clean-up efforts, President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration for the state of Connecticut, where Governor Dan Malloy said it appeared that most, if not all counties, had been hit with record or near record snowfall. Some 25,000 people remained without power in the state, according to Connecticut Light and Power. The storm also took a human toll. A Massachusetts boy aged 11 died when he and his father were warming up in their car and inhaled carbon monoxide after an exhaust pipe had been blocked by snow. A car driven by a young woman went out of control in the snow on a highway in the town of Poughkeepsie, New York, striking and killing a 74-year-old man who was walking on the shoulder of the road. And in Auburn, New Hampshire, a man was killed after losing control of his car and
A four-week-old baby has been attacked by a fox in his home in London, police said yesterday. The baby boy was admitted to a hospital after the fox injured one of his hands, Scotland Yard said. It didn’t give details about how the fox entered the home or how serious the injury was, but British media said the fox bit one of the baby’s fingers. The boy was recovering after surgery, the reports said. – AP
An 82-year-old US man says he was a little sore but otherwise OK after tackling and helping police catch a felon one-third his age. When Terry Miracle was in his garden he heard a commotion. It was police chasing a burglary suspect identified as 27-yearold Morgan Perry Bluehorse. Miracle got in position, and as the suspect came around the house, he remembered his football training. He launched a “cross-body block” and his knee collided with the suspect’s knee, tripping him up and giving police time to catch him. – AP
• Largest croc dies The world’s largest saltwater crocodile (6.17 metres) in captivity died yesterday, sending villagers to tears in a backwater southern Philippine town that shot to international prominence and started to draw tourists, revenue and development because of the immense reptile. A veterinarian rushed to farflung Bunawan town in Agusan del Sur province to check the 1-ton crocodile after it flipped over with a bloated stomach yesterday in its cage in an ecotourism park. The reptile was declared dead a few hours later, Bunawan town Mayor Edwin Cox Elorde said. – AP photos ap
• Doctors slain
ABOVE: Leslie McVicker sits on the hood of her car to shovel out on an unploughed street in Boston yesterday.
Three doctors killed in a knife attack in north-eastern Nigeria were North Koreans, police and the state government say, after earlier confusion over the victims’ nationalities. “The three men were from North Korea and not South Korea,” Yobe state police commissioner Sanusi Rufa’i told AFP of the attack in the city of Potiskum. “They were doctors working in Potiskum on behalf of the state government.” Abdullahi Bego, spokesman for the Yobe state governor, also identified the victims as North Koreans. Men armed with knives slit the throats of the three doctors, police said, in the latest such killings in recent months. – AFP
RIGHT: Snow begins to melt on cars parked at a dealership after a winter storm in Hartford, Connecticut, yesterday. A howling storm across the north-east left much of the New York-to-Boston corridor covered with more than a metre of snow at the weekend.
hitting a tree, local officials said. Malloy was quoted by local media as saying there were five storm-related deaths in Connecticut and, according to reports, a fatal crash in Maine claimed another life. Minor injuries were reported in a 19-car pile-up on Interstate 295 in Falmouth, Maine, caused by poor visibility and slippery road conditions.
The storm came a little over three months after Hurricane Sandy devastated swaths of New York and New Jersey, killing 132 people and causing damage worth some $US71.4 billion ($A69.8 billion). As the east coast slowly breathed a sigh of relief, the National Weather Service warned of a new blizzard taking aim at the US northern plains. – AFP
The four-week trial with the vaccine Pexa-Vec or JX-594, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, may hold promise for the treatment of advanced solid tumours. “Despite advances in cancer treatment over the past 30 years with chemotherapy and biologics, the majority of solid tumours remain incurable once they are metastatic (have spread to other organs),” the authors wrote. There was a need for the development of “more potent active immunotherapies”, they noted. Pexa-Vec “is designed to multiply in and subsequently destroy
cancer cells, while at the same time making the patients’ own immune defence system attack cancer cells also”, said Kirn from California-based biotherapy company Jennerex. “The results demonstrated that Pexa-Vec treatment at both doses resulted in a reduction of tumour size and decreased blood flow to tumours,” said a Jennerex statement. “The data further demonstrates that Pexa-Vec treatment induced an immune response against the tumour.” Pexa-Vec has been engineered
from the vaccinia virus, which has been used as a vaccine for decades, including in the eradication of smallpox. The trial showed Pexa-Vec to be well tolerated both at high and low doses, with flu-like symptoms lasting a day or two in all patients and severe nausea and vomiting in one. The authors said a larger trial has to confirm the results. A follow-up phase with about 120 patients is already under way. Pexa-Vec is also being tested in other types of cancer tumours. – AFP
Iran hostage drama named best film Iran-hostage drama Argo continued its journey from awardsseason outsider to favourite yesterday, winning three prizes, including best-picture, at the British Academy Film Awards. Ben Affleck was named best director for the based-on-reality story of a longshot plan to rescue a group of American diplomats from Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the film also took the editing trophy. Affleck, who has made a remarkable journey from little-regarded actor to award-winning director, dedicated his directing prize for “anyone out there who’s trying to get their second act”. George Clooney, a producer of Argo, quipped: “I don’t know what you’re going to do for a third act.” Daniel Day-Lewis won his universally expected best-actor trophy for Lincoln – the only prize out of 10 nominations for Steven Spielberg’s historical biopic. Emmanuelle Riva, the 85-yearold French film legend, was named best actress for Michael Haneke’s poignant old-age portrait Amour. It also was named best foreignlanguage film. Made-in-Britain French revolutionary musical Les Miserables won four prizes, including best supporting actress for Anne Hathaway. James Bond adventure Skyfall spied some elusive awards recognition, winning trophies for music and best British film. The British awards, known as
• Fox attacks newborn
• Elderly to the rescue
GE-virus kills tumours, scientists claim A genetically engineered virus tested in 30 terminally ill liver cancer patients significantly prolonged their lives, killing tumours and inhibiting the growth of new ones, scientists report. Sixteen patients given a high dose of the therapy survived for 14.1 months on average, compared to 6.7 months for the 14 who got the low dose. “For the first time in medical history we have shown that a genetically engineered virus can improve survival of cancer patients,” study co-author David Kirn told AFP.
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American actors George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Ben Affleck pose with the award for Best Film, for Argo, backstage at the BAFTA Film Awards at the Royal Opera House in London. BAFTAs, are increasingly glamorous – despite a well-earned reputation for dismal weather – and evermore scrutinised as an indicator of likely success at the Hollywood Oscars. In recent years they have prefigured Academy Awards triumph for word-of-mouth hits such as Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s
Speech and The Artist. This year they spread their honours widely, with multiple trophies for Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Amour and Django Unchained, as well as Argo. Kathryn Bigelow’s Osama bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty was shut out of the prizes, despite five
nominations. This season’s movie with momentum is crowd-pleaser Argo, which has been building steam with big prizes at ceremonies such as the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild and the Directors Guild of America Awards. It is now considered a frontrunner for the best picture award at the Oscars on February 24, even though Affleck was not nominated for best director. Argo marks a change for Affleck, whose first two features as director – Gone Baby Gone and The Town – were set in his native Boston. In Argo he stars as Tony Mendez, a CIA agent who poses as a sci-fi filmmaker in a risky plot to rescue Americans in Tehran. “I wanted to get as far away from Boston as I could,” Affleck said. “I ended up in Iran.” Skyfall, the highest-grossing film in the Bond series’ 50-year history, was named best British film – rare awards-season recognition for an action movie. Thomas Newman’s score also won the best-music prize. Director Sam Mendes said he was accepting the trophy on behalf of the “1292 people” who worked on Skyfall. Quentin Tarantino picked up the original screenplay award for Django Unchained, and Christoph Waltz was named best supporting actor for playing a loquacious bounty hunter in Tarantino’s slaverevenge thriller. – AP
HOW SAFE SHOULD OUR BUILDINGS BE? - AND AT WHAT COST? Since the Canterbury earthquakes, building safety has been in the spotlight. A consultation document published by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment proposes the following actions for all non-residential and multi-unit, multi-storey residential buildings in New Zealand: • Assessing all these buildings over five years to identify those that are earthquake-prone (less than one-third of the requirement for a new building), followed by • Strengthening or demolishing all earthquake-prone buildings within ten years of being assessed. This is estimated to affect 15,000 – 25,000 buildings throughout the country – so the real costs are likely to be significant.
RISKS VS COST - IT’S A BALANCING ACT. WHAT DO YOU THINK? • Is the current earthquake-prone level (one-third of new building requirement) about right? • The cost of dealing with earthquake-prone buildings will be felt by ratepayers, taxpayers, tenants and property owners alike. What do you think about this? • Is 15 years the right length of time to identify and strengthen or demolish these buildings? • How do we deal with older, heritage buildings? • What is acceptable in terms of safety? The fatality risk from earthquakes is much lower than other causes, such as road accidents – but major earthquakes have a huge impact on communities.
HAVE YOUR SAY ■ No decisions have been made yet – tell us what you think by completing the online questionnaire by 8 March.
■ Consultation document, video and questionnaire now at www.dbh.govt.nz or Google “earthquake-prone buildings”
EPB CANT
RE GI ON AL FO RU M : bruary 6.00pm Tuesday 19 Fe Templin Hall, ral Centre, Canterbury Horticultu , Christchurch 57 Riccarton Avenue