Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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No moves to shift Ananda College primary section
The Education Ministry today dismissed reports that Ananda College (Colombo) primary section was being shifted away from the present location.
The assurance came as parents paniked about reports of the school premises being shifted away.
Source: http://www.sundaytimes.lk/index.php/latest/8485-no-moves-to-shift-ananda-college-primary-section
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Celebrity Hair Affair: Evan Rachel Wood
Evan Rachel Wood likes both men and women.
The actress has also now made it clear: she likes her hair both long and short.
Wood, who portrays Queen Sophie-Ann on True Blood, walked the red carpet at that show's season four premiere event last night with a monumental makeover. What do you make of her new look? Which length do you prefer?
All other True Blood cast members also posed at the party. Click on each photo below for a closer look at the smiling stars:
[Photos: WENN.com]
Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2011/06/celebrity-hair-affair-evan-rachel-wood/
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UK bathing places mapped
Europe has ranked every bathing place, beach and swimming area across the EU. How do the UK's beaches and lakes compare? Find which are great - and which are banned
? Get the data
? Get the mapDo you like swimming outside? But how clean is your beach?
Since 1990, the European Union has been monitoring over 21,000 beaches, lakes and rivers across Europe - anywhere where swimmers go al fresco, in fact. So that huge dataset covers Brighton Beach, the Hamsptead swimming ponds and the classic Mediterranean beaches of the South of France, Spain and Greece.
So, what does the data, out today from the European Environment Agency, show for the UK? The overall figures are good - 96.8% of our swimming areas meet the legal standards, if not the full guidelines. This is down slightly on last year - but more swimming areas are now being surveyed.
But three beaches had to be closed because standards were not high enough, including Blackpool North, Newhaven in Sussex and Tywyn in Wales.
The rankings only include outside swimming places - not man-made lidos or pools.
This is how the data looks on a Google Fusion map:
Most British bathing areas do comply - but a significant number only meet the mandatory rules, not the wider-ranging guidelines.
What is happening across Europe? According to the report:
In 2010, 92.1% of Europe's coastal bathing waters and 90.2% of inland bathing waters met the minimum quality standards. Only 1.2% of coastal bathing water and 2.8% of inland sites were non-compliant. The remainder are unclassified due to insufficient data.
In general, coastal bathing water quality deteriorated between 2009 and 2010 ? the number of bathing water bodies meeting the mandatory values fell by 3.5%, while those meeting guide values fell by 9.5%.
Inland water quality has also dropped. The number of rivers and lakes achieving the guide values fell by 10.2%, although compliance with the mandatory values was almost stationary. Rivers were particularly problematic, with only 25% of river bathing waters achieving guide values.
If you want to, you can find out what variables from the Directive they use to rank each beach here.
The EEA use six, slightly confusing, categories. In plain language they mean:
? CG - The best beaches, complying with the law and the guidelines
? CI - complies with the mandatory requirements - but not the guidelines
? B - banned or closed (temporarily or throughout the season)
? NF - insufficiently sampled
? NC - Does not comply with the legal requirements
? NS - not sampledEventually we will try to map all of Europe's 21,000 beaches - and you can download every country's data here. The full UK data is below. What can you do with it?
Data summary
Download the data
? DATA: download the full spreadsheet
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/datablog/2011/jun/16/uk-swimming-beaches-bathing
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Central Committee wraps up debate on budget amendment
PHILIPSBURG--Members of Parliament (MPs) wrapped up their handling of the amendments to the 2011 budget on Friday afternoon with answers to questions posed in the second round of debate promised to them in writing by June 22, a week ahead of the plenary session of Parliament to approve the amendments now set for June 29.
Deputy President of Parliament MP Leroy de Weever got the cooperation of the faction leaders for the meeting to close off and the answers to be provided by Finance Minister Hiro Shigemoto in just about two weeks.
National Alliance MP George Pantophlet asked the minister to give clarity on the Crime Fund of the former Netherlands Antilles as a recent Foundation Government Accountants Bureau SOAB referred to the funds as being in a mess. He wanted to know what St. Maarten was entitled to from the fund.
Pantophlet also asked about the refinancing of pre-financed projects to the tune of some NAf. 26 million at an interest rate of three per cent.
Referring to his suggestion that the lottery and casino fees should be increased, the MP said his point was further reinforced by Shigemoto's explanation earlier in the meeting that the ordinances were amended more than 10 years ago. He also called on government to put the Casino Gaming Board "as soon as possible" to get a better view on the way casinos operate.
MP William Marlin (NA) said government needs to give an explanation on its exact position with the Central Bank of Curaçao and St. Maarten and its view for the joint currency as the coalition parties have said that they want to move to the US dollar. The viability of the joint bank is now in question because of a recent motion adopted by the Curaçao Parliament to establish their own central bank.
Marlin also wanted to know if government was aware of any recent study carried out in the performance of the University of St. Martin (USM) Education Programme. This question was based on Education Minister Rhoda Arrindell's refusal to sign the diploma of programme graduates because an evaluation is needed.
On plans to house prisoners in "The Box" in Cay Hill, Marlin wants to know whether Justice Minister Roland Duncan has already signed a contract with the building owner and if the fact that the top floor of the building has to be demolished was taken into consideration. The top floor was constructed without a building permit.
He also asked for what posts of Parliament's budget had been depleted and how government intends to cover Parliament's shortfall for the remainder of the year as money for additional staff had been depleted. Parliament, although an independent body, has no control over its budget as payments are administrated by the Finance Department.
Marlin criticised government on its dealing with the Corporate Governance Council, saying that based on correspondences government has been ignoring the council's advice on "certain appointments." Government has in essence been given "a bad report" by the council and has "failed" when it comes to good corporate governance.
Princess Juliana International Airport Holding Company is "not in line with good corporate governance" and the council wants this to change by the end of the fiscal year.
There is also a lack of clarity about funding for the council and warrants an explanation from government, Marlin said.
Copies of the reports on the Plans of Approach for Justice were requested by Marlin. De Weever promised that a hard copy would be provided to all MPs in the coming days. Marlin disagreed with the fact that MPs were told that they had to visit Parliament Secretariat to see the reports.
Dr. Ruth Douglass urged government to put more emphasis on preventive care as too much attention has been placed on curative care. This would be a way to curb expenses and the number of people who are getting chronically ill, she added.
Questions were also posed on government's finances and other matters by MPs Roy Marlin (DP) and Patrick Illidge (independent).
The 2011 budget was approved by Parliament in December 2010 and when it was sent to CFT it received a negative advice setting in motion another lengthy process to trim the budget for it to receive CFT's approval. This resulted in the budget being cut from NAf. 444,442,925 to NAf. 420,916,597, a difference of NAf. 23,526,328.
That difference was made up of cuts across all ministries except Justice where funds had to be added to aid the execution of the Plans of Approach of NAf. 6.2 million.
Meanwhile, the meeting was interrupted by a fuse blow out in Parliament House that lasted more than an hour. Technicians from utilities company GEBE had to be called in to rectify the situation for the meeting to proceed. The building on Wilhelminastraat is still operating on the small metre that was used when it housed Caribbean Palm department store.
There is some controversy with the upgrading of the power and fuses to the building because the Ministry of Infrastructure has informed the owner that a building permit was required for the interior renovations because the usage had changed from a store to office spaces. The situation is being worked on.
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Shifting order leaves the women's game in search of a scriptwriter
After the demise of the Williams sisters and the world No1, there was an anonymous feel to the women's quarter-final line-up at Wimbledon
Just as the BBC are increasingly obsessed with showing sport through the prism of celebrity (endless shots of rugby's Brian Moore applauding on Centre Court were a fine example), so women's tennis endeavours to convince us that anonymity is no bar to entertainment.
Or, as France's Marion Bartoli puts it: "[Just] because we are not named Serena or Venus Williams doesn't mean we don't know how to play tennis." It took only the gentlest inquiry about the shortage of household names in the women's half of the All England Club cabaret to confirm that some very fine female players resent being told this is the age of the no-names: a fallow time in which only Maria Sharapova can excite the non-cognoscenti.
Women's quarter-finals day extended the modern trend of "Ova" versus "Ova". Four of the eight bore surnames with that eastern European ending and a fifth finished with "Enka" (Victoria Azarenka, from Belarus). Pretty quickly this type of analysis invites a charge of shallowness, especially from eastern Europe, where women players are entitled to resent being lumped together as a nondescript throng of baseline-shuffling wannabes.
But the panic comes not from once-a-year sofa-bound British hecklers but the women's game itself. Even before the first quarter-final commenced Wimbledon had waved goodbye to the world No 1 (Caroline Wozniacki), the French Open champion (Li Na) and both Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, which left eight Europeans in contention for the first time since 1913.
Astonishing statistic, this, even if American tennis can claim a share of Sharapova, the semi-finalist who conforms most obviously to male notions of lawn-borne elegance. Among Sharapova's awards from the WTA are Humanitarian of the Year (always a hotly contested title), Most Fashionable Player (On Court), Most Fashionable Player (Off Court) and Most Dramatic Expression. Don't even ask.
None of the other quarter-finalists could hope to match these sparkling decorations, so it was left to them to catch SW19's attention with the quality of their tennis. It was here that Bartoli ? who lost in three absorbing sets to Sabine Lisicki ? scored so highly. She argued the case for actually watching the tennis rather than checking out the recognition-ratings of the players.
She accused people of "just thinking about the names" and rightly lauded the entertainment quota in her tussle with Lisicki: "Woman's tennis just has to have more matches like that, so people will enjoy coming to watch us. Even though we don't have some big names, some big star names, we are still able to play some good matches. So I think it all depends on the level of intensity we show up on the court with."
Lisicki, 21, stepped off Centre Court to be subjected to inevitable (and probably grating) comparisons with Steffi Graf, the last German woman to reach a Wimbledon semi-final, in 1999. Graf was a force of nature: an amalgam of flow and balance and execution. Lisicki is a heavy-serving drop-shot addict whose victory over Li has brought her confidence level with her potential. To call her the New Graf, though, is pointlessly to burden her with a responsibility no player should have to bear on the flimsy basis of a common homeland.
In a sport where the box office is subdued, coincidences and contrivances are bound to be snatched at. With so many highly-seeded casualties, and the Williams sisters perhaps in decline, the Tamira Paszek-Azarenka and Petra Kvitova-Tsvetana Pironkova quarter-finals were guaranteed to produce a first-time grand slam finalist from one half of the draw.
From Austria, Belarus, Slovakia, Russia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria eight players sought to capitalise on the fluidity in the women's game. Sharapova, a three-times grand slam title winner, was the Dame Vera Lynn of this group: a positive veteran of the big moment, which leaves her nowhere to hide should she fail to add to the Wimbledon crown she won seven years ago.
As Wimbledon dawned women's tennis was in the anomalous position of having a world No1 ? Wozniacki ? who had yet to lay a finger on a grand slam title and had never reached even a quarter-final here. Upbraided for being "boring" in press conferences, she cooked up a tale about being bitten by a kangaroo, in Melbourne, and then brought a blow-up 'roo and boxing gloves to her next media appearance to help with her apology. Whoever does the comedy lessons on the WTA Tour is not about to be given their own series.
Ana Ivanovic and Svetlana Kuznetsova have held the torch and fumbled it, leaving Kim Clijsters's return from retirement and motherhood to win three grand slam titles as the best of the recent narratives, together with Li's breakthrough for Asian tennis. Venus and Serena Williams had won nine of the past 11 Wimbledon titles, so their joint demise allows a freshening of the final line-up on Saturday, 24 hours before a golden age for the men's game delivers another mighty confrontation.
Bartoli asks the audience to judge only the play and not the notoriety of the players, but for the tennis to leave deep imprints it needs an elite capable of establishing a pattern, as Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have on the men's side. The viewer is having to work hard to make sense of a world of intermittent challenges and much falling away. Who's in charge here?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/jun/28/wimbledon-2011-women-quarter-finals
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