An Indonesian woman has given birth to an 8.7-kilogramme (19.2-pound) baby boy, the heaviest newborn ever recorded in the country, a doctor said Wednesday.
The baby, who is still unnamed and is 62 centimetres (24.4 inches) long, was born by caesarean section Monday at a public hospital in North Sumatra province, a gynaecologist who took part in the operation told AFP.
“This heavy baby made the surgery really tough, especially the process of taking him out of his mum’s womb. His legs were so big,” Binsar Sitanggang said.
The boy is in a healthy condition despite having to initially be given oxygen to overcome breathing problems, the gynaecologist said.
“He’s got strong appetite, every minute, it’s almost non-stop feeding,” he said.
“This baby boy is extraordinary, the way he’s crying is not like a usual baby. It’s really loud.”
The boy’s massive size was likely the result of his mother, Ani, 41, having diabetes, Sitanggang said.
She had to be rushed to hospital due to complications with the pregnancy, which had reached nine months. The baby, her fourth, was the only child not delivered by a traditional midwife.
When a diabetic mother’s glucose level is high during pregnancy, the baby can receive too much glucose and grow too large, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
Indonesia’s previous heaviest baby, weighing in at 6.9 kilos, was born in 2007 on the outskirts of the capital Jakarta, according to the Indonesian Museum of Records website.
“VOLUME FIVE: REDEMPTION” MAKES A SPECIAL TWO-HOUR DEBUT WITH THE INTRODUCTION OF A MYSTERIOUS CARNIVAL CLAN WHOSE INTENTIONS ARE UNKNOWN, WHILE FAMILIAR FACES ADJUST TO NEW STAGES OF THEIR LIVES THAT WILL CHALLENGE THEIR PERCEPTIONS OF THE WORLD AND THEIR ABILITIES. ROBERT KNEPPER JOINS THE CAST. RAY PARK, ZELJKO IVANEK, MADELINE ZIMA, AND DAWN OLIVIERI GUEST STAR
Claire (Hayden Panettiere) struggles with adjusting to her new life in college when a mysterious death thrusts her into the spotlight once again. Elsewhere, Hiro (Masi Oka) and Ando (James Kyson Lee) continue their noble quest to help people by promoting their abilities. Angela (Cristine Rose) fears Nathan (Adrian Pasdar) will soon discover his true identity; while Matt (Greg Grunberg) is haunted by an unexpected visitor seeking something he has lost. Tracy Strauss (Ali Larter) and H.R.G. (Jack Coleman) join forces, looking for the key to unlock the motive behind a horrific crime. Meanwhile, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) uses his abilities for good, but he is soon called upon to aid an old friend. While the heroes adjust to their new surroundings, a mysterious carnival clan, led by ringleader Samuel (Robert Knepper), sets their sights on familiar faces. James Kyson Lee and Zachary Quinto also star. Rachel Melvin, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Ashley Crow, Lisa Lackey, Assaf Cohen, and Saemi Nakamura also guest star.
Show Cast: Milo Ventimiglia, Ali Larter, Hayden Panettiere, Greg Grunberg, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Masi Oka, Adrian Pasdar, Jack Coleman, James Kyson Lee, Dania Ramirez, Zachary Quinto, Cristine Rose.
LOS ANGELES – Patrick Swayze personified a particular kind of masculine grace both on and off screen, from his roles in films like “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost” to the way he carried himself in his long fight with pancreatic cancer. Swayze died from the illness on Monday in Los Angeles, his publicist said. He was 57.
“Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully yesterday with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” Annett Wolf said in a statement Monday evening. She declined to give details.
Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from an especially deadly form of cancer. He continued working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting “The Beast,” an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot.
Swayze said he chose not to use painkillers while making “The Beast” because they would have taken the edge off his performance. The show drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran this year, but A&E said it reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.
When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was “considerably more optimistic” than that. Swayze acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.
“I’d say five years is pretty wishful thinking,” Swayze told ABC’s Barbara Walters in early 2009. “Two years seems likely if you’re going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I’d better get a fire under it.”
And that’s exactly what he did. In February, Swayze wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post titled, “I’m Battling Cancer. How About Some Help, Congress?” in which he urged senators and representatives to vote for the maximum funding for the National Institutes of Health to fight cancer as part of the economic stimulus package.
He also appeared in the September 2008 live television event “Stand Up to Cancer,” where he pleaded: “I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, a life not lived in the shadow of cancer, but in the light. … I dream that the word `cure’ will no longer be followed by the words `is impossible.’”
Celebrities and fans inspired by Swayze’s struggle poured out their condolences, including C. Thomas Howell, who costarred with Swayze in “The Outsiders,” “Grandview U.S.A.” and “Red Dawn.”
“I have always had a special place in my heart for Patrick,” he said. “While I was fortunate enough to work with him in three films, it was our passion for horses that forged a friendship between us that I treasure to this day.”
Others used Twitter to express their sadness, and “Dirty Dancing” was a top trending topic Monday night, trailed by other Swayze films.
Demi Moore, who played Swayze’s fiancee in “Ghost,” wrote: “Patrick you are loved by so many and your light will forever shine in all of our lives.” Moore’s husband, Ashton Kutcher, tweeted: “RIP P Swayze” and linked to a YouTube clip of the actor poking fun at himself in a classic “Saturday Night Live” sketch, in which he played a wannabe Chippendales dancer alongside the corpulent — and frighteningly shirtless — Chris Farley.
Larry King wrote: “Patrick Swayze was a wonderful actor & a terrific guy. He put his heart in everything. He was an extraordinary fighter in his battle w Cancer.” King added that he’d do a tribute to Swayze on his CNN program Tuesday night.
A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad boy Johnny Castle in “Dirty Dancing.” As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role.
A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort’s sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique.
It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” stage productions and a sequel, 2004’s “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” in which he made a cameo.
Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad “She’s Like the Wind,” inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”
Swayze followed up with the 1989 action flick “Road House,” in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990’s “Ghost” that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee, with great frustration and longing, through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg.
“Ghost” provided yet another indelible musical moment: Swayze and Moore sensually molding pottery together to the strains of the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” It also earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Goldberg, who said she wouldn’t have won if it weren’t for Swayze.
“When I won my Academy Award, the only person I really thanked was Patrick,” Goldberg said in March 2008 on the ABC daytime talk show “The View.”
Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for “Dirty Dancing,” “Ghost” and 1995’s “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar,” which allowed him to toy with his masculine image. The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo.
His heartthrob status almost kept him from being considered for the role of Vida Boheme.
“I couldn’t get seen on it because everyone viewed me as terminally heterosexually masculine-macho,” he told The Associated Press then. But he transformed himself so completely that when his screen test was sent to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin pictures produced “To Wong Foo,” the director didn’t recognize him.
Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s novel “The Outsiders,” alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane. Other ’80s films included “Red Dawn,” “Grandview U.S.A.” and “Youngblood,” once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates.
In the ’90s, he made such eclectic films as “Point Break” (1991) in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western “Tall Tale” (1995) in which he starred as Pecos Bill. He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he went to rehab for alcohol abuse. In 2001, he appeared in the cult favorite “Donnie Darko,” and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with “Chicago”; 2006 found him in the musical “Guys and Dolls” in London.
Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include “Urban Cowboy.”
He played football but also was drawn to dance and theater, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in “Grease.” He turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries.
Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie “Skatetown, U.S.A.” The eclectic cast included Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormack and Billy Barty.
Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on “man’s greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature’s laws,” he told the AP in 2004.
Swayze was married since 1975 to Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center.
Memorial services are being held across the US to mark eighth anniversary of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.
Nearly 3,000 people died when the four planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Ceremonies are to be held at these sites and all Americans have been encouraged to contribute to a national day of service.
President Barack Obama and defence secretary Robert Gates will speak at the Pentagon, where 184 people died, and meet members of the victims’ family and lay a wreath.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said Mr Obama would “speak about what the day means and the sacrifices of thousands, not just at the Pentagon, but in Pennsylvania and certainly and most obviously in New York”.
Vice-President Joe Biden will attend a ceremony at the site of the World Trade Center towers in New York. There will be four moments of silence there – one for each of the times a plane crashed into the towers and also for the collapse of the towers. The names of more than 2,700 victims from the site will be read out by family members and volunteers who helped in the aftermath of the attacks. Ground Zero still remains a building site eight years on despite plans to build a permanent memorial, a museum and five new skyscrapers.
Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State, will speak at the site of the United Airlines Flight 93 crash where the names of the 40 people on board will be read out.
For the first time, the anniversary has been designated as a national day of service. Americans have been encouraged to contribute their labour and time in the memory of the victims.
Conservation projects, aid packages for soldiers and other volunteer work are some of the activities members of the public are taking part in. Some have expressed concern that this may divert the focus away from the act of remembrance.
Debra Burlingame, whose brother died at the Pentagon, told the Associated Press news agency, “I greatly fear at some point we’ll transition to turning it into Earth Day where we go and plant trees and the remembrance part will become smaller.”
About 1,000 US troops in Afghanistan marked the occasion with a 9.11km (5.5 mile) run at their Bagram base in Kabul. Two other bases also took part.
Here is footage of 9/11 when the second tower is hit:
Walt Disney said on Monday it plans to buy Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion (2.45 billion pounds) in a deal that would add characters like Iron Man, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four to its entertainment empire. Skip related content
Disney is striking the biggest media deal of the year so far — one that will unite the Incredible Hulk and Mickey Mouse — at a time when the media business is struggling to cope with spending cutbacks by both consumers and advertisers.
Marvel has a stable of wildly popular characters that it has brought to the big screen in home-run films like “Iron Man.”
A sequel, “Iron Man 2″ is due to hit the theatres next year, while “Thor,” “Spider-Man 4″ and the first “Avengers” movie are slated for a 2011 release.
For Disney, movies like those should help address a key area of concern among investors: How it can better reach more young males.
“This helps give Disney more important exposure to the young male demographic that they have sort of lost some ground with in recent years,” said David Joyce, an analyst with Miller Tabak & Co.
Disney Chief Financial Officer Tom Staggs told Reuters on Monday, “(Marvel’s) audience is surprisingly broad. It transcends gender and age and has real potential worldwide. They skew a little more towards boys than many of our properties.”
Indeed, Disney has long been a blockbuster brand with girls thanks to characters like “Hannah Montana,” “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” but has struggled to achieve the same kind of success with boys.
To do so, Disney agreed to pay $50 per share in cash and stock for Marvel, a premium of 29 percent to Marvel’s closing stock price of $38.65 on Friday. The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies.
Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.
Marvel’s shares shot up to $48.75 in early trade.
Disney approached Marvel a few months ago “to get to know them,” Staggs said. The overture began with a meeting between Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger and Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter and evolved into merger discussions over a series of meetings, Staggs said.
“We at Disney had admired them because of their position and asset base,” Staggs said. “With conversations over time we came to believe in the value of a combination.”
Shares of Disney, which will acquire ownership more than 5,000 Marvel characters, dropped about 2.3 percent in early trade. The deal is expected to close by year-end, and is expected to add to Disney earnings in two years.
The acquisition came as a surprise, even though Iger had mentioned recently that the company would consider acquisitions that bolstered Disney brands across international markets and on new technology platforms.
Citigroup analyst Jason Bazinet said that in addition to bolstering their standing among young males, the deal could help Disney throughout its television, movies, and amusement park properties.
WASHINGTON — The measure of what humanity can accomplish is a size 9 1/2 bootprint.
It belongs to Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. It will stay on the moon for millions of years with nothing to wipe it away, serving as an almost eternal testament to a can-do mankind.
Apollo 11 is the glimmering success that failures of society are contrasted against: “If we can send a man to the moon, why can’t we …”
What put man on the moon 40 years ago was an audacious and public effort that the world hasn’t seen before or since. It required rocketry that hadn’t been built, or even designed, in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy declared the challenge. It needed an advance in computerization that had not happened yet. NASA would have to learn how to dock separate spaceships, how to teach astronauts to walk in space, even how to keep them alive in space — all tasks so difficult experts weren’t sure they were possible.
Forty years later, the moon landing is talked about as a generic human achievement, not an American one. But Apollo at the time was more about U.S. commitment and ingenuity.
Historian Douglas Brinkley called the Apollo program “the exemplary moment of America’s we-can-do-anything attitude.” After the moon landing, America got soft, he said, looking for the quick payoff of a lottery ticket instead of the sweat-equity of buckling down and doing something hard.
In years since, when America faces a challenge, leaders often look to the Apollo program for inspiration. In 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer, his staffers called it “a moon shot for cancer.” Last year, then-candidate Barack Obama and former Vice President Al Gore proposed a massive effort to fight global warming, comparing it to Apollo 11. An environmentalists’ project to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy took the name “Apollo Alliance.”
Those still-unfinished efforts recall May 25, 1961, when President Kennedy, fresh from a disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, announced that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely home.
“I thought he was crazy,” said Chris Kraft, when he heard Kennedy’s speech about landing on the moon.
Kraft was head of Mission Control. He was the man responsible for guiding astronauts to orbit (which hadn’t been done yet) and eventually to the moon. Kraft first heard about a mission to the moon when Kennedy made the speech.
“We saw that as Buck Rogers stuff, rather than reality that would be carried out in any time period that we were dealing with,” Kraft recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Houston.
Less than three months later, Kraft was in the White House explaining to the president just how landing on the moon would be done. Kraft still didn’t believe it would work.
“Too many unknowns,” he said.
It was the Cold War and Russian Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space. Kennedy chose landing a man on the moon because experts told him it was the one space goal that was so distant and complicated at the time that the United States could catch up and pass the Soviet Union, Kennedy adviser Ted Sorensen said.
The idea in a world where American capitalism was pitted against Soviet communism on a daily basis was “to prove to the world which system was best, which one was the future,” Sorensen said.
“It’s not just the fact that the president wanted it done,” Sorensen recalled. “It was the fact that we had a specific goal and a specific timetable.”
In another speech, Kennedy famously said America would go to the moon and try other tasks “not because they were easy, but because they were hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
They weren’t just skills with rockets and slide rules. Bringing together countless aerospace companies, engineers, scientists, technicians, politicians and several NASA centers around the nation was a management challenge even more impressive than building the right type of rockets, said Smithsonian Institution space scholar Roger Launius.
And it cost money. The United States spent $25.4 billion on the Apollo program, which translates to nearly $150 billion in current dollars — less than the U.S. spent in both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.
Yet, in the view of those heavily involved in the challenge, what made Apollo work was two tragedies: the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967.
The assassination of Kennedy made the Apollo program and its budget politically nearly untouchable. The moon-landing goal — which Kennedy later talked about modifying and even including the Soviets on — became a symbol of the martyred president. NASA’s launch center was renamed from Cape Canaveral to Kennedy.
The Apollo fire, which occurred during ground testing, killed three astronauts, including Armstrong’s neighbor. The main problem was that there was 100 percent oxygen in the capsule, which made fire spread rapidly.
Kraft, in a July interview said he is convinced that NASA couldn’t have reached Kennedy’s target were it not for the Apollo 1 fire and the way it made the space agency rethink everything: “We were building inferior hardware at that point in time.
“The whole program turned around, both from a hardware and management point of view,” Kraft said. “You really learn from failure.”
So NASA drilled astronauts and flight controllers ceaselessly with simulations. Failures kept being thrown at the astronauts and the controllers, some just plain unsolvable.
One of the last failures simulated before Apollo 11’s launch was an alarm on the lunar lander that signaled the computer was overloaded. During the simulation, Mission Control in Houston aborted the landing. But controllers were later told it was just an “indication” signal and that if they had thought about it, the computer really was working fine. Controllers thought the test was unfair, according to an account in the new book, “Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon” by Craig Nelson.
But during the real mission, as the Eagle lunar lander approached the moon, that test-run computer signal appeared. This time controllers knew everything was OK. They didn’t abort the moon landing.
Still, there were more hurdles to come. In another example, experience and nerves paid off. As Eagle neared the landing area in the spot called Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong saw too many boulders and craters to come down safely. So he kept flying horizontally, 100 feet off the ground, scouring the moonscape for a smooth place.
Eagle’s fuel tank neared empty. Alarms went off. Mission controllers in Houston fretted.
“We still needed to get down,” recalled Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. “I’m not telling Neil, ‘Hey Neil, hurry up, get on the ground.’ I’m sort of conveying this with body English.”
There were only 17 seconds worth of fuel left.
Finally, the radio at Mission Control crackled with Armstrong’s voice: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
Two hours later, humans walked on a place other than Earth, a place truly foreign.
“This is a very desolate place,” recalled Aldrin, second to step on the moon. “It’s just boring. It’s all one color that varies depending on the sun angle. But the sky is black, it’s all black except the one object there, the Earth, and the object behind us, the sun.”
The world watched on television as the first two men walked on the moon. But one person close to the action couldn’t. He was the third crew member of Apollo 11, command module pilot Michael Collins, who was orbiting the moon alone. He didn’t get to see what was happening. But he could hear Neil Armstrong say his famous first words.
Decades later, Armstrong called his first words on the moon “a pretty simple statement, talking about stepping off something.”
But Armstrong wasn’t merely talking about that small step of his. What came next was the big deal. It was, as he said on the moon 40 years ago, “a giant leap for mankind.”
It still is.
Multimedia journalist Kevin Vineys in Washington and television producer Sara Gillesby in New York contributed to this report.
On the Net:
NASA’s Apollo anniversary site: www.nasa.gov/mission(underscore)pages/apollo/40th/index.html
NASA interactive site showing Apollo high points by state:
Mr Allingham served with the Royal Naval Air Service during the Great War, later transferring to the Royal Air Force and serving at Ypres.
Robert Leader, chief executive of St Dunstan’s care home in Ovingdean, near Brighton, East Sussex, said: “Everybody at St Dunstan’s is saddened by Henry’s loss and our sympathy goes out to his family.”
Less than a month ago, Mr Allingham was declared the world’s oldest man by Guinness World Records.
Tomoji Tanabe, the previous world’s oldest man, died in his sleep at his home in southern Japan earlier. He was also 113 years old.
Mr Allingham celebrated his 113th birthday on June 6.
In March, he received an upgraded Legion d’Honneur from the French ambassador in London and was made the first honorary lifetime member of the Royal Naval Association.
He was also presented with a doctorate in engineering from Southampton Solent University and was made an honorary freeman of his home city of Brighton and Hove in April.
Mr Allingham, whose life spanned three centuries and six monarchs, has five grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, 14 great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great grandchild.
This is week 1 of www.HG1399.wordpress.com questions of the world.
Every week a questions will be posted on yahoo answers(http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/) to answer. A well done post will be posted the day question 2 is posted (21/7/09). Enjoy!
Question 1:
Is a Zebra Black with White Stripes or White with Black Stripes
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090714074223AA1O6nC
