■ Zambia
British writer to be deported
Zambia intends to deport a British writer for allegedly "insulting" President Levy Mwanawasa in his popular weekly column in a private newspaper, an official said yesterday. Home affairs permanent secretary Peter Mumba said he had recommended the interior minister to issue a deportation order for Zambia-based Roy Clarke, who writes a column in the Post newspaper. The article, modelled along the lines of George Orwell's Animal Farm, referred to the person in charge of the farm as "Mawelewele," or fool in the local Nyanja dialect. The article, published last Thursday, also referred to ministers as "long-legged giraffes, red-lipped, long-figured baboons."
■ New Zealand
All air travellers in danger
About 1 percent of long-distance air travellers are likely to suffer symptoms caused by "economy-class syndrome," research done in New Zealand suggests, and first-class passengers are just as affected. Scientists said the findings indicated that blood clots in the legs or lungs were a potential danger for many passengers, not just those with previous health problems or those in constricted seats. "The term `economy-class syndrome' should be avoided," said the scientists in a article in Britain's Lancet. They recommended "air-traveller's thrombosis" as a better term.
■ Sri Lanka
Clarke applauds landing
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke applauded the landing of NASA's Spirit rover on Mars over the weekend, and said yesterday that he believed that there was life on the Red Planet. "It is a jolly good show," Clarke said from his home in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. "If we can find some form of life there, it will change everything," he said, adding "I believe there existed vegetation and this means some forms of life [on Mars]."
■ United States
Scientists freeze light
Scientists have stopped and frozen light in an experiment which could help the development of futuristic super-powerful computers. The light pulse was brought to a standstill and held for a mere few hundredths of a millisecond. The new research is the first to trap light while keeping its electromagnetic energy intact. It opens up the possibility of harnessing packets, or "quanta," of light to store and process data. This could be an important step towards the far-off goal of building quantum computers. Such machines, which are still only a dream, would manipulate the strange properties of sub-atomic particles to carry out mind-boggling calculations.
RSS