Author: Admin

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual with “more personal touch” can increase milk production, so says a scientific research published in the online “Anthrozoos,” which is described as a “multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people and animals”.

The Newcastle University‘s School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development’s (of the Newcastle University Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering) researchers have found that farmers who named their dairy cattle Ermintrude, Daisy, La vache qui rit, Buttercup, Betsy, or Gertrude, improved their overall milk yield by almost 500 pints (284 liters) annually. It means therefore, an average-sized dairy farm’s production increases by an extra 6,800 gallons a year.

“Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention,” said Dr Catherine Douglas, lead researcher of the university’s School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. “By placing more importance on the individual, such as calling a cow by her name or interacting with the animal more as it grows up, we can not only improve the animal’s welfare and her perception of humans, but also increase milk production,” she added.

Drs Douglas and Peter Rowlinson have submitted the paper’s conclusion: “What our study shows is what many good, caring farmers have long since believed. Our data suggests that, on the whole, UK dairy farmers regard their cows as intelligent beings capable of experiencing a range of emotions.” The scientific paper also finds that “if cows are slightly fearful of humans, they could produce [the hormone] cortisol, which suppresses milk production,” Douglas noted. “Farmers who have named their cows, probably have a better relationship with them. They’re less fearful, more relaxed and less stressed, so that could have an effect on milk yield,” she added.

South Norfolk goldtop-milk producer Su Mahon, one of the country’s top breeder of Jersey dairy herds, agreed with Newcastle’s findings. “We treat all our cows like one of the family and maybe that’s why we produce more milk,” said Mrs Mahon. “The Jersey has got a mind of its own and is very intelligent. We had a cow called Florence who opened all the gates and we had to get the welder to put catches on to stop her. One of our customers asked me the other day: ‘Do your cows really know their names?’ I said: I really haven’t a clue. We always call them by their names – Florence or whatever. But whether they really do, goodness knows,” she added.

The researchers’ comparative study of production from the country’s National Milk Records reveals that “dairy farmers who reported calling their cows by name got 2,105 gallons (7,938 liters) out of their cows, compared with 2,029 gallons (7,680 liters) per 10-month lactation cycle, and regardless of the farm size or how much the cows were fed. (Some 46 percent of the farmers named their cows.)”

The Newcastle University team which has interviewed 516 UK dairy farmers, has discovered that almost half – 48% – called the cows by name, thereby cutting stress levels and reported a higher milk yield, than the 54% that did not give their cattle names and treated as just one of a herd. The study also reveals cows were made more docile while being milked.

“We love our cows here at Eachwick, and every one of them has a name,” said Dennis Gibb, with his brother Richard who co-owns Eachwick Red House Farm outside of Newcastle. “Collectively, we refer to them as ‘our ladies,’ but we know every one of them and each one has her own personality. They aren’t just our livelihood, they’re part of the family,” Gibb explained.

“My brother-in-law Bobby milks the cows and nearly all of them have their own name, which is quite something when there are about 200 of them. He would be quite happy to talk about every one of them. I think this research is great but I am not at all surprised by it. When you are working with cows on a daily basis you do get to know them individually and give then names.” Jackie Maxwell noted. Jackie and her husband Neill jointly operate the award-winning Doddington Dairy at Wooler, Doddington, Northumberland, which makes organic ice cream and cheeses with milk from its own Friesian cows.

But Marcia Endres, a University of Minnesota associate professor of dairy science, has criticized the Newcastle finding. “Individual care is important and could make a difference in health and productivity. But I would not necessarily say that just giving cows a name would be a foolproof indicator of better care,” she noted. According to a 2007 The Scientist article, named or otherwise, dairy cattle make six times more milk today than they did in the 1990s. “One reason is growth hormone that many U.S. farmers now inject their cows with to increase their milk output; another is milking practices that extend farther into cows’ pregnancies, according to the article; selective breeding also makes for lots of lactation,” it states.

Critics claimed the research was flawed and confused a correlation with causation. “Basically they asked farmers how to get more milk and whatever half the farmers said was the conclusion,” said Hank Campbell, author of Scientific Blogging. In 1996, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs provided for a complex new cattle passport system where farmers were issued with passport identities. The first calf born under the new regime were given names like “UK121216100001.”

Dr Douglas, however, counters that England doesn’t permit dairy cattle to be injected hormones. The European Union and Canada have banned recombinant bovine growth hormone (rGBH), which increases mastitis infection, requiring antibiotics treatment of infected animals. According to the Center for Food Safety, rGBH-treated cows also have higher levels of the hormone insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1), which may be associated with cancer.

In August 2008, Live Science published a study which revealed that cows have strange sixth sense of magnetic direction and are not as prone to cow-tipping. It cited a study of Google Earth satellite images which shows that “herds of cattle tend to face in the north-south direction of Earth’s magnetic lines while grazing or resting.”

Newcastle University is a research intensive university in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England. It was established as a School of Medicine and Surgery in 1834 and became the “University of Newcastle upon Tyne” by an Act of Parliament in August 1963.

The School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development is a school of the Newcastle University Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, a faculty of Newcastle University. It was established in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne as the College of Physical Science in 1871 for the teaching of physical sciences, and was part of Durham University. It existed until 1937 when it joined the College of Medicine to form King’s College, Durham.

Friday, April 9, 2010

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev have signed a treaty to reduce their countries’ nuclear stockpiles by 25 to 30 percent over seven years.

In the Spanish Hall, an ornate chamber within the Czech capital’s Prague Castle, the two countries, which own more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, agreed to downsize their arsenals.

Presidents Obama and Medvedev sat in front of U.S. and Russian flags and signed their countries’ first major nuclear arms reduction accord in almost two decades.

The new ten-year pact, which is called the “New START Treaty”, requires the U.S. and Russia to cut their inventory of nuclear warheads to about 1,500 each in the next seven years. Both countries are estimated to have well over 2,000 warheads now.

The agreement also slashes by more than half the number of missiles, submarines and bombers that carry the weapons.

The pact replaces the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which was signed by U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in the final days of the Soviet Union. START I expired in December of last year. The treaty complements the other two nuclear arms reduction treaties signed by the United States and Russia, which where the 1993 Russia, which where the 1993 START II treaty and the 2002 Moscow Treaty also known as SORT.

Obama said the treaty is a big step forward for world security. “Today is an important milestone for nuclear security and nonproliferation and for U.S.-Russia relations,” he said.

Medvedev said because of this treaty, the entire world community has won. The Russian leader said the year-long negotiations were tough, but hard work on both sides brought success.

“That enabled us to do something that just a couple of months ago looked like ‘mission impossible.’ Within a short span of time we prepared a full-fledged treaty and signed it,” he said.

Obama says, in addition, that the treaty paves the way for future arms reduction talks with Russia, mainly on short-range nuclear weapons. “This treaty will set the stage for further cuts, and going forward, we hope to pursue further discussions with Russia on reducing both our strategic and tactical weapons, including non-deployed weapons,” he said.

Tom Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, says the new treaty is significant in reducing the threat from U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons, but more significant because it could lead to further cuts.

“We think we can even go to deeper reductions, and we hope they sign a new treaty after this one relatively soon. But this treaty is a great step forward, it is very important, and it puts U.S. and Russian arms control back on a firm footing, and, again, sets us up for deeper cuts,” he said.

The signing of the “New START” treaty is one of several arms control developments taking place in several weeks.

Earlier in the week, President Obama announced a major shift in U.S. nuclear policy. He said for the first time that preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is at the top of the U.S. nuclear agenda. The threat of destruction by Russian warheads is now considered a secondary menace.

Under Obama’s nuclear posture review, the U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons on non-nuclear countries that abide by their nonproliferation obligations.

Frank Gaffney, a former arms control adviser to President Ronald Reagan, says the president’s nuclear posture review is based on a false and dangerous premise. “The idea that he can, by reducing America’s nuclear arsenal, contribute to the universal abandonment of nuclear weaponry. It will not happen. It will not happen on his watch. It will not happen ever,” he said.

Obama also plans to hold a conference on nuclear security next week in Washington, D.C..

In their hour-and-a-half meeting before the ceremony, President Obama urged Medvedev to support new U.N. sanctions against Iran for its refusal to stop enriching uranium. The Russian leader said the issue is not whether to impose sanctions, but what kind of sanctions.

“Smart sanctions should be able to motivate certain parties to behave properly, and I am confident that our teams that will be engaged in consultations will continue discussing this issue,” he said.

Obama said, “We are working together at the United Nations Security Council to pass strong sanctions on Iran and we will not tolerate actions that flout the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).” He added, “My expectation is that we are going to be able to secure strong, tough sanctions on Iran this spring.”

The nuclear treaty is almost certain to be approved in the Russian Duma. However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said Russia reserves the right to drop out of the pact if it believes U.S. missile defense plans for Europe threaten its security.

Many experts agree passage in the U.S. Senate is not as certain, but that its prospects are good. To ratify the treaty, it will require 67 votes, to pass it will require Republican votes. Republicans in the Senate have expressed concerns that too many restrictions have been placed on America’s nuclear arsenal.

However, Obama is confident the treaty will be ratified when asked during a press conference following the signing. Obama stated, “And so I’m actually quite confident that Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate, having reviewed this, will see that the United States has preserved its core national security interests, that it is maintaining a safe and secure and effective nuclear deterrent, but that we are beginning to once again move forward, leaving the Cold War behind, to address new challenges in new ways.”

Obama also noted, “[T]hat both in Russia and the United States, it’s going to be posed on the Internet, appropriate to a 21st century treaty. And so people not only within government but also the general public will be able to review, in an open and transparent fashion, what it is that we’ve agreed to.” Copies of the treaty and it’s protocol have been posted on the State Department’s website.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White. His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism. It is not for the faint. He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother’s amorous pursuit.

The fact is, Edmund White exists. His life exists. To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950’s America and that White’s work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White’s enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

New filmmaker Solomon Rothman has released a trailer for his upcoming full length open source film called ‘Boy Who Never Slept.’ Both the movie and the trailer are offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. The movie is set to be released at the end of May.

The film centers on the life of an insomniac writer who meets a teenage girl online, and a friendship that grows into an unlikely love story wrapped in harsh reality. The movie deals with various issues, including the romanticization of love, age-related issues in relationships, like statuatory rape (he’s 23, and she’s 16), and the idea of love in the online realm.

Rothman, a writer, amateur filmmaker and web designer, lives in the Los Angeles Area. He wrote, directed and produced the movie with Aurora Mae, his girlfriend and partner. Producing the movie for $200 while they were in college, they used friends as actors and later sold the camera on eBay to recoup the expense.

Rothman has spoken about the power of the internet as a distribution source for movies and has said “I believe it’s possible that this movie I shot with no budget and released online for free could potentially reach as many viewers as a major theatrical release.”

Rothman and Mae started out with the idea of creating a full-length movie that could be shared totally for free online. The film includes a custom soundtrack and script, both of which will be released open source as well.

The trailer is available on the official movie website[1] and can also be found on Google video, YouTube.com, Ifilm.com, AddictedClips.com, and the Internet Movie Archives.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Baghdad yesterday to meet Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister of the new Iraqi government. The visit came as Kerry toured seeking support in the region — military, political, and financial — against the Islamic State.File:Haidar Al-Abadi.jpg

Kerry and al-Abadi were to discuss international efforts to build a coalition, in a regional approach to the security issue posed by Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. The meeting came ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama’s televised address, to air later in the day in the U.S. and set to announce expanded military efforts to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the organisation.

They were to “discuss how the United States can increase its support to Iraq’s new government in our common effort to defeat Isil [Islamic State] and the threat it poses to Iraq, the region, and the world”, said State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki. The Shia Iraqi prime minister has, according to U.S. officials, promised to create regional national guards, avoiding security enforcement by the mostly Shia Iraqi army in Sunni regions. The policy, if enacted, would provide valuable employment in areas where Islamic State has recruited successfully following economic neglect during the eight years of Nouri al-Maliki’s government.

Following the Iraq visit Kerry is to visit Saudi Arabia as part of the broad U.S. strategy of regional resistance against the militants. President Obama has said the U.S. would not use ground combat troops, but some senior military figures have suggested Islamic State may not be stopped by air strikes alone — of which the U.S. have used 150 over the past month. The regional strategy to address the security crisis does not rely on the support of Congress. The U.S. administration has been urging representatives to approve $500m to support rebels in Syrian opposing Islamic State, but the legislation has been immobile since it was first proposed in May.

Monday, August 17, 2015

A woman in Spain has been fined €800 after posting a photograph to her Facebook account of a police vehicle parked in space reserved for disabled/handicapped drivers. She was located and fined within two days of posting the photograph. The incident has now gained international attention.

The woman, who has not been named, saw the police vehicle parked in a reserved spot in Petrer and snapped a photo. She posted the photo with the caption: “Park where you bloody well please and you won’t even be fined.” ^{((es))Spanish Language: ?Aparcas donde te sale de los cojones y encima no te multan…}

Fernando Portillo, a local police spokesperson, told local media the vehicle was parked there because police were responding to an emergency. After the story was reported on a local news website, it began to be reported internationally.

On July 1, the “Citizens’ Security law” went into effect. The law was written in response to violent protests. Even before its enactment it saw widespread criticism. It was dubbed the “gag law” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?ley mordaza} or the “gagging law”. The law prohibits “the unauthorized use of images of police officers that might jeopardize their or their family’s safety or that of protected facilities or police operations” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?El uso no autorizado de imágenes o datos personales o profesionales de autoridades o miembros de las Fuerzas y Cuerpos de Seguridad que pueda poner en peligro la seguridad personal o familiar de los agentes, de las instalaciones protegidas o en riesgo el éxito de una operación}.

Judge Joaquim Bosch, Judges for Democracy spokesperson, said: “It is not a law for citizens’ security, but a law for the government to avoid citizens’ protests. All opinion polls indicate that the Spanish society is not at all preoccupied by security but by the economic situation and political corruption.”

Amnesty International condemned the law in a report: “With threats of fines or threats of being beaten, the government is trying to stigmatize and criminalize people who are just practicing their rights.” Virginia Álvarez, who wrote the report, noted, “instead of listening to their demands, instead of starting a dialogue, authorities are doing everything they can to impede people from protesting”.

The part of the law which prohibits “the unauthorized use of images of police officers that might jeopardize their or their family’s safety” is cited as the reason for the fine, however, police spokesperson Fernando Portillo said it was up to police officers involved and under the new law they could do this. “We would have preferred a different solution but they have the legal right to impose the fine,” Portillo said, but the public posting of the photo impugned the officers’ sense of honor.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

A suspect has been arrested in the case of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated yesterday. Dink was known for writing about the controversial issue of Armenian genocide, the mass killings of Armenians by Turks under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.

Ogün Samast, a 17-year-old unemployed, high-school drop out from the city of Trabzon, was taken into custody by the Turkish police as the suspected assassin of Hrant Dink. The police also confiscated his gun, suspecting that it was used to kill Dink. Ahmet Samast, father of the suspected assassin, informed the authorities regarding the whereabouts of his son after seeing the assassin’s images on TV.

The Republic attorney general of Samsun stated that the suspect has confessed to committing his crime.