Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Thailand’s anti-corruption body, the Assets Examination Committee (AEC) has instructed the country’s tax authorities to issue a tax bill to the company set up by ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The amount is US$616 million, or 20.89 billion baht.

The company Ample Rich is registered in the British Virgin Islands, however the AEC stated the company could not evade corporate tax due to their operations taking place within the Kingdom of Thailand.

With two of Thaksin’s children on the board of directors of the company, and earlier rulings on tax liability, the Bangkok Post reports that the total tax liability for the Shinawatra family has now risen to 27.44 billion baht.

The main reason given by the AEC for the tax bill is the underpriced selling of Shin corporation shares to the Thaksin children at 1 baht per share only days prior to the sale of the company to Temasek holdings. The actual sale of Shin Corp. sparked street protests in Bangkok as the then-Prime Minister was accused of profiting from selling a national asset after changing the law to allow the sale to be tax-free.

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

American film director John Hughes, noted for such movies as Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, died Thursday due to a heart attack.

A statement, released by his representative, said that he experienced the heart attack while on a morning stroll in Manhattan, New York. Hughes was born on February 18, 1950 in Michigan. He started his career as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. By the end of the 1970s he was a frequent contributor to the National Lampoon magazine.

In the 1990s, he made the Home Alone series, which became a box office sensation and turned Macaulay Culkin into a star.

In recent years, Hughes stepped back from the movie industry to spend more time with his family. He is survived by his wife of 39 years, Nancy, two sons and four grandchildren.

Sunday, May 1, 2005

A UCLA team, headed by Brian Naranjo, has observed the nuclear fusion of deuterium nuclei in a tabletop device. The device uses a lithium tantalate (LiTaO₃) pyroelectric crystal to ionize deuterium atoms and accelerate the ions towards a stationary erbium deuteride (ErD) target. Fusion of two deuterium nuclei results in the emission of helium nuclei (alpha particles), neutrons and gamma rays. The team anticipates applications of the device as a tabletop neutron generator, or in “microthrusters” for space propulsion. It is possible that there may be applications related to nuclear weapons, although this possibility is not discussed in the research paper.

This development is not related to earlier claims of tabletop fusion or “cold fusion” having been observed during sonoluminescence. In fact, the leader of the team behind this development was one of the main critics of earlier low-temperature fusion claims.

This device is not the first reliable tabletop fusion device; the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, developed in the early 1960s in the laboratory of Philo T. Farnsworth who was instrumental in developing television, is sold commercially as a neutron source. Research by Dr. Todd Rider of MIT suggests that the kind of non-equilibrium fusion produced in these sources will never be usable as an energy source (see his PhD thesis).

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

A cholera outbreak in the African country of Zimbabwe has killed almost 500 people since August, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO said that the outbreak affected most areas of the country, and that some remote areas had seen fatality rates increase by as much as 30%. Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health reported 484 deaths from 11,735 cases since the outbreak began.

Zimbabwe has had annual outbreaks of cholera for nearly a decade, but this one was the most far-reaching. A report by the WHO stated that the last large outbreak was in 1992, with 3,000 cases recorded.

Cholera is frequently spread by contaminated, untreated water. The spread of the disease was expedited by the collapse of Zimbabwe’s health and sanitation systems; state media reported that most of Harare has been left without water after the city ran out of chemicals for its treatment plant. A resident of Mabvuku, a suburb located east of Harare, told APTV that electricity is not available most of the time, so water is consumed without being boiled first.

The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) said that there have been cases of cholera reported in areas of Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa that border Zimbabwe, indicating the sub-regional threat of the outbreak. The South African ministry of health confirmed that they had 160 incidents of cholera reported, as well as three deaths.

The European Commission said that it was providing €9 million (US$11.4 million) in funds to assist Zimbabwe with the crisis. “I’m shocked at the deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe and call upon the authorities there to respond quickly to this cholera outbreak by allowing full assistance from international humanitarians and regional partners,” said the commissioner responsible for the European Union’s humanitarian aid, Louis Michel.

Other agencies providing aid to the country include the United Nations Children’s Fund, the WHO, and Doctors Without Borders.