Bracelet news. Bracelet new , Bracelet weblog

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf took oath for a five-year term as a civilian president Thursday, one day after he relinquished the post of army chief, a post he kept for over nine years.

Musharraf came to power by the title of chief executive in a bloodless coup in Oct. 1999 that displaced the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and installed Musharraf, who has been chief of army staff since 1998.

Musharraf was known in Pakistan as President General Musharraf in recent years, a title showing the unseparable side of him as an army man.

He impressed the public as an intelligent man capable of an approach unique and ideal in solving difficult problems, keeping cool under all circumstances and mindful of long-term effects of contemplated actions.

“The attitude has been forthright and candid with the result that all actions have always met with success,” an author by the name of Masood Ahmad wrote recently in the local newspaper The Nation.

Musharraf was born on Aug. 11, 1943 in old Delhi of India. His family moved to live in Pakistan after the partition of India and Pakistan. He joined the Pakistan Military Academy in 1961 at the age of 18 and was commissioned an artillery officer in 1964.

He was awarded a medal for bravery in fighting against India in1965 and also participated in the 1971 war against India as a company commander.

He also trained at the British Royal College of Defense Studies. His performance report says: “a capable, articulate and extremely personable officer, who made a most valuable impact here. His country is fortunate to have the services of a man of his undeniable quality.”

The man has used his intelligence to overcome relatively humble roots and rise through military ranks to major general in 1991, to lieutenant general in 1995 and, later, to general on Oct. 7, 1998,when he was appointed chief of army staff, a post he kept for over nine years.

Musharraf first became president in 2001 and his presidency was confirmed in a referendum in 2002, giving him a five-year term.

He had recently been maneuvering for a transition in Pakistan from military to civilian presidency. Winning presidential polls with a majority on Oct. 6, Musharraf relinquished his post as army chief on Nov. 28.

The move was welcomed by the general public as well as opposition leaders and described as an “extraordinary development” by local media.

Musharraf took oath as a civilian president for a five-year term on Nov. 29. A move, he said, was a milestone in Pakistan’s transition to democracy.

A business man in the southern city of Karachi said, “now everything is clear. He is the genius that is required to control Pakistan.”

Musharraf is married, with two children Ayla and Bilal, each of whom has two children. He is fond of old songs and likes to swim and play tennis.

Amid criticism at home and abroad over alleged corruption in Afghanistan, president Hamid karzai on Saturday presented the much-awaited list of ministerial nominees to Wolesi Jirga or lower house of parliament for approval to form a new cabinet.

Of the 23 nominees, 16 are old faces, either sitting or former ministers. Some of them have been accused of involvement in corruption and some other problems, according to local media reports.

“If we have the same cabinet the future will not be different than today,” parliamentarian Ramazan Bashardost said while referring to the personalities of the new ministerial designates.

Meantime, some others believed that the list of nominees has been prepared under pressure. However, a spokesman of Presidential Palace, Siamak Heravi rejected the notion, saying the president giving priority to the national interest and has picked up the personalities in accordance with the interests and the will of Afghan people.

While presenting the list of the nominees, Vice President Mohammad Qasim Fahim told the parliament that those ministers with good reputation and good achievements. So that they should be remained.

In the new cabinet the serving Defense, Interior, Finance and few more ministers would remain in their offices.

The ministers’ name was supposed to be presented to parliament within two weeks after President Hamid karzai’s inauguration ceremony for the second five-year term on Nov. 19.

The international community, particularly the United States and Britain have been asking President karzai to bring reform and eradicate corruption in the new administration. Otherwise the donors would withhold their supports to Afghanistan.

Afghan administration’s popularity has been eroded mostly due to failure to improve security and crack down on the alleged corrupt officials.

Some western leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama in their congratulatory messages to President Karzai over his re-election urged him to eradicate corruption.

Common Afghans also said that the re-instating old faces in the new cabinet would not bring a great change to the life of the country’s ordinary people.

“These faces have failed to bring a change in our life over the past eight years; and so, their remaining in office would not change our life in the next five years particularly in the face of reduction to world community’s contribution,” an ordinary Afghan citizen Farooq Shah guessed.

A women right activist Ms. Saraya Parlika also expressed her pessimism and said that in the new cabinet only one lady represents women segment which makes half of the country’s population.

She opined that overlooking women would damage democracy and even slow down the process of democratization in the country.

“Unfortunately, little change is seen in the new cabinet and so, it is unnecessary to pine hope to those officials who have lost golden opportunities over the past eight years to rebuild the war-shuttered country,” parliamentarian Syed Mohammad Gulabzoi said.

The Lower House would review the profiles of the nominees and give vote of confidence to cabinet members within few days. However, eradicating corruption and showing ability in brining good governance would remain a challenge ahead of the new administration, analysts here said.

A petition has been filed against Pakistan’s Supreme Court’s decision of reopening the cases filed against President Asif Ali Zardari in Swiss courts, local TV channels reported Saturday.

Barrister Zafarullah, a lawyer who filed the petition in Lahore registry of Supreme Court, stated that Supreme Court has no right to order reopening of cases within or outside the country against President Zardari because article 248 of Constitution provided indemnity to President of Pakistan like other countries, the private TV Dawn News reported.

Barrister Zafarullah said Supreme Court’s decision of reopening foreign cases is unconstitutional and beyond jurisdiction. Therefore, Supreme Court should review its decision of reopening cases and declare the orders issued in this connection as void.

Pakistan’s Supreme Court nullified on Wednesday the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that had given Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision that could reopen charges against Zardari.

The Supreme Court also ordered the Pakistani government to inform Swiss authorities that a case against Zardari there may be reopened. Swiss judicial authorities said in Aug. 2008 that they had closed a money-laundering case against Zardari and had released 60 million U.S. dollars frozen in Swiss accounts for a decade.

According to local channel reports, Swiss justice ministry said that there is no case against Zardari in Switzerland unless the Pakistani government initiate inquiry.

The NRO, which was issued by the former President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf on Oct. 5, 2007 as part of a political deal to allow Benazir Bhutto to return from years of exile to Pakistan, was challenged in the Supreme Court and a 17-member bench of the apex court in a unanimous short verdict cancelled the NRO and described as contrary to the constitution.

Meanwhile, a petition has been filed in the Supreme Court against the article 248 of the Constitution regarding the immunity given to the President in cases, local channel Geo News reported Saturday.

The petitioner Khalid Khawja, an officer of Defense of Human Rights Commission, said in his plea that the article stands in contradiction with the human rights and the Islamic injunctions, accordingly, it should be quashed.

The Supreme Court has constituted a three-member bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry to hear appeals in NRO cases from Dec. 21.

THE housing price in 70 major Chinese cities jumped an average of 10.5 percent in December from a year earlier, equaling the two-year-high growth rate in November, the National Development and Reform Commission said today.

Average prices of new homes rose 11.4 percent on a yearly basis after gaining 10.6 percent in November, led by Urumqi, capital city of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where prices jumped 25.3 percent in the period, the commission said on its Website this morning

Beihai City in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region ranked second with 19.3 percent growth and Huizhou City in Guangdong Province was the third fastest with 19 percent growth, the commission said.

Shanghai’s new home prices jumped 9.3 percent in the period from a year earlier.

The average price of second-hand homes jumped 11.4 percent in the 70 cities year on year.

Urumqi again grew the fastest at 24.2 percent, followed by Ningbo in Zhejiang Province at 16.5 percent and Wuxi in Jiangsu Province at 15.2 percent.

Shanghai grew 10.8 percent in December year on year, according to the commission.

Last year, credit to developers was tightened, supervision over land use was increased and the enforcement of tax policies was improved to cool down a real estate boom.

However, these moves have not been as effective as the central government would have liked since major cities all reported rapid growth last year.

Former Chinese Dang Ye Seo fought hard to help South Korea take down France 3-0 in the women’s section of the World Team Table Tennis Championships here on Sunday.

Despite a slow start, South Korea’s Lee Eun Hee, ranked No. 31,shrugged off the threat from France’s Carole Grundisch, winning the first match 8-11, 11-8, 11-8, 11-9.

The second match between two former Chinese women turned out to be a thrilling seesaw battle. South Korea’s Dang Ye Seo, doubles runner-up in the 2005 Chinese National Games, was made to sweat for her victory over a determined Xian Yi Fang who fought to the very end.

With the game tied at 2-2, Dang kept cool to clinch the winning point for South Korea and finally beat Xian 11-8, 11-9, 10-12, 7-11, 11-5.

Dang, formerly named Tang Na, was born in northeastern Chinese city of Changchun and was said to have gained South Korean citizenship last year.

In the third match, Moon Hyun Jung, ranked 61, extinguished any faint hopes France had of winning, beating Aurore Dessaint 11-7, 11-9, 11-8.

Also in Group D, the Japanese squad hardly broke sweat in demolishing much lower ranked challengers from Italy 3-0.

Two recently discovered star systems share one characteristic: two stars that orbit each other so closely they share material, which makes them look like peanuts in space.

The systems were announced Monday and are the first and second of a new class of objects. The observations were made with the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona

The first system found is 13 million light-years away inside a small galaxy named Holmberg IX. Both stars are very bright, yellow stars about 15 times the mass of our sun. In the pair’s orbital cycle, one star moves in front of the other, blocking its light from our vantage point, so astronomers see one star, then two, then one.

Jos?���rieto, Ohio State University graduate student and lead author on the journal paper, found another one much closer, less than 230,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits our own Milky Way. The star system had been discovered in the 1980s, but was misidentified.

When Prieto re-examined the data that astronomers had recorded at the time, he saw the pattern of light was very similar to the one they had detected in the first pair. The stars were even the same size ?w 15 to 20 times the mass of the sun ?w and melded together in the same kind of peanut shape. The system was clearly a yellow supergiant eclipsing binary, the new name given to this class of objects.

“We didn’t expect to find one of these things, much less two,” said Kris Stanek, associate professor of astronomy at Ohio State and a colleague in the study. “We needed the 8.4-meter LBT to spot the first binary, but the second one is so bright that you could see it with binoculars in your back yard. Yet, if we hadn’t found the first one, we may never have found the second one.”

The finds may help solve another mystery. Of all the supernovas that have been studied over the years, two have been linked to yellow supergiants, but theory doesn’t predict any should be yellow supergiants.

Over millions of years, Prieto explained, a star will burn hotter or cooler as it consumes different chemical elements in its core. The most massive stars swing back and forth between being cool red supergiants or hot blue ones. They spend most of their lives at one end of the temperature scale or the other, but spend only a short time in-between, where they are classified as yellow. Most stars end their life in a supernova at the red end of the cycle; a few do at the blue end. But none do it during the short yellow transitional phase in between.

Prieto, Stanek and their colleagues suspect that yellow binary systems like the ones they found could be the progenitors of these odd yellow supernovas.

“When two stars orbit each other very closely, they share material, and the evolution of one affects the other,” Prieto said. “It’s possible two supergiants in such a system would evolve more slowly and spend more time in the yellow phase ?w long enough that one of them could explode as a yellow supergiant.”

Researchers from Cornell University has looked “closely” at the soil for the first time — at a scale of 50 nanometers, revealing an incredible variety of organic compounds in it, reported the April issue of Nature Geoscience which is available Monday.

“There is this incredible nanoscale heterogeneity of organic matter in terms of soil,” said Johannes Lehmann, lead author of the study, in a statement on Monday. “None of these compounds that you can see on a nanoscale level looks anything close to the sum of the entire organic matter.”

The authors of the article said that knowing the structure and detailed composition of soil carbon could provide a better understanding of the chemical processes that cycle organic matter in soil.

For example, the research may help scientists understand what happens when materials in the soil get wet, warm or cool and how soils sequester carbon, which has implications for climate change.

The nanoscale soil images were made at Brookhaven National Laboratory using an X-ray spectromicroscopy method, which allowed the researchers to identify forms of organic carbon in the samples.

While the composition of organic carbon in soils from North America, Panama, Brazil, Kenya or New Zealand proved remarkably similar within each sample, the researchers found that within spaces separated by mere micrometers, soils from any of these locations showed striking variation in their compositions. For example, the compounds that “hang on the right and left of a clay mineral may be completely different,” said Lehmann.

The researchers were also able to identify the origins of some of the nano-sized compounds, determining that some of them, for example, were microbe excretions and decomposed leaves. The researchers also recognized patterns of where types of compounds are likely to be found at the nanoscale.

The method now allows researchers to break soil down, separate compounds, conduct experiments on individual compounds and better understand the interactions, Lehmann said.

Mischa Barton left Los Angeles because it “stopped being fun.” The former “O.C.” star, who was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) in West Hollywood last year, admits she stopped enjoying living the city so decided to move to Paris, France.

She said: “It simply stopped being fun in Los Angeles.” Mischa has also spoke about the photographs that appeared last month of her in a bikini with cellulite on her thighs.

The 22-year-old actress admits she was upset by the snaps but insists it is normal to have body imperfections.

She exclaimed: “Those pictures were retarded. Obviously it’s embarrassing and it’s un-cool but I just suck it up and live with it.” Mischa - who made her film debut in “Notting Hill” aged just 12 - recently said her movie career has been an emotional roller coaster.

She said: “I’ve grown up so much as an actress. There’s been times when I’ve thought, ‘I don’t want to be an actress forever,’ and there are times when I feel I can’t live without it because I love it so much. It’s a wild ride.”

The third “Mummy” installment dutifully sends its characters to China where they participate in international competitions of mummy fencing, yeti vaulting and synchronized senselessness.

“The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” finds Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and wife Evelyn (Maria Bello taking over for Rachel Weisz) heading East in hopes of recapturing the adrenaline of adventure.

They’re retired following World War II, apparently living richly off of the $800 million worldwide box office of the first two “Mummy” films. The O’Connells are British aristocrat-adventurers who have retired too young and are begging to get back in the mummy-slaying game.

The film, directed by Rob Cohen (”The Fast and the Furious”) who takes the franchise’s reins from Stephen Sommers, opens with our historical backdrop: a ludicrously extravagant tale of “a mythic battle between good and evil played out in ancient China,” as a narrator informs.

Egypt, it appears, no longer has the trademark on mummies.

Jet Li plays the Dragon Emperor, an emphatically bad dude who in 200 B.C. — as this film tells it — built the Great Wall of China on top of thousands of servants worked to death. In his search for immortality, he’s tricked and he and his army are mummified in a giant tomb.

A few thousands years later, enter the O’Connell’s grown son Alex (Luke Ford).

It’s been seven years since “The Mummy Returns” and fans will surely be surprised that their hero (Fraser, who’s 39 in real life) has already seeded ground to a younger actor. (Harrison Ford’s archaeologist action star has yet to cede to this progeny.)

Alex is just as intrepid as his parents. He uncovers the tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which has been styled on a real archaeological find: China’s Teracotta Army, the thousands of clay soldiers found in 1974. They’ve here been reimagined as mummies frozen in time, complete with mummy horses.

If this sounds absurd, it is. Like recent films such as “300″ or the new “Indiana Jones,” “Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” uses history like a prop — a loose costume for ludicrous plot lines.

These movies revel in telling “ancient” tales, but dodgy history doesn’t lead to anything but myths. Younger generations are going to have some funky ideas about the past.

Alex’s big find, as you might imagine, leads to considerable trouble that eventually unlocks further mysteries, such as a trio of yetis (they’re actually kind of cool) and Shangri-La. There’s an impressive chase scene through nighttime Shanghai and a giant battle sequence between thousands who have been raised from dead. (It looks a lot like the climax of the 1992 cult fave “Army of Darkness” without the comedy.)

The action is so relentless that Fraser has little room for any real comic work, which is a shame. He has to utter at one point: “Here we go again!”

With the jawline of a matinee idol but the geeky clumsiness to make him interesting, Fraser seemed poised for a more mature career after his performances in 1998’s “Gods and Monsters” and 2002’s “The Quiet American.”

But this summer, he’s packed the double whammy of the 3-D “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and this third “Mummy” — a combination that deserves a penance of at least a dozen indie films.

Ford may have the bangs to be Fraser’s heir apparent, but he has nothing else to supply. Isabella Leong is relatively forgettable as his love interest.

Ultimately, there’s something fitting to today’s Hollywood about a 9-year-old franchise devoted to raising grotesques from the dead. One of Fraser’s upcoming projects, after all, reunites him with Sommers for “G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.”

Sequel- and remake-crazy Hollywood could learn from the “Mummy” series: better to leave it buried.

China is seeing more and more coal piles up at major transport harbors due to a weakening demand for the fossil fuel.

An official with the Qinhuangdao harbor bureau said Friday, on condition of anonymity, that Qinhuangdao harbor in northern China recorded a coal pileup of 8.44 million tons as of September 16. That is at least 3 million tons more than regular levels. He added, every day for the past two weeks, the surplus of coal has increased by 100,000 tons.

Qinhuangdao harbor is the largest coal transport site in China. Its coal storage acts as a barometer of the coal market across the country.

The official said the harbor was only able to accommodate a coal pileup of 10 million tons.

A surplus of coal at major consumption areas is also increasing. The Guangzhou harbor in southern China had about 2.2 million excess tons of coal as of September 17. That’s compared to a storage of 1.7 million tons at the beginning of June.

According to Guangzhou Port Group, trading volume has decreased since July, with a monthly turnover of only 3 million tons. In May and June the group was turning over 4-million-tons.

Coal is also piling up for major coal consumers.

According to Xie Juchen, head of the fuel section of China Electricity Council, coal pileup was 19.62 million tons in July. That’s enough to meet a 10-day demand. At the beginning of September, the figure went up to 29.3 million tons, or enough for 15 days, Xie said.

Official data showed nationwide coal supplies in August were at 70.76 million tons. However, coal consumption was at 62.25 million tons, leaving 8.51 million tons to pile up.

Industry observers credited the mounting pileup to less demand.

For one, electricity enterprises used less coal during the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics because production was restricted, said Xie.

In the long term, however, global economic slowdown received the majority of the blame for the country’s excess coal.

According to Wang Ling, a coal analyst with the United Metal Web, the slide of the economy squeezed demand for electricity, that from thermal power enterprises in particular.

Besides, Wang said, a relatively cool climate reduced demand for power this summer. He added, abundant rainfalls also ensured easier access to electricity generated by hydro power plants.

According to data provided by the National Bureau of Statistics, China generated 2.323 trillion kw of electricity in the first eight months of this year, a growth of 10.9 percent on the same period of last year.