Health Care For The Poor

Umm Al Quwain: A 51- year-old Egyptian man was seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident on Monday morning on Al Maqta’a road in Umm Al Quwain, Major Sultan Abdullah,Director of control traffic Department at Umm Al Quwain police said

The man identified as R.M was walking to his office when the accident took place at around 5:30 am. The vehicle driven by Emirati youth knocked him from behind, said Abdullah. Police patrol and ambulance rushed immediately to the scene of the incident.

The motorist ignored the safety regulations as he was talking on his mobile while driving, causing the man serious head injuries and fractures in his hand, Abdullah said. The Egyptian man was transferred to hospital for treatment.

The driver has been arrested and referred to public prosecution to complete the rest of the legal proceeding.
 

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One of the cleverest bits of a smartphone is not designed by whizzkids in California, Tokyo or Shenzhen.

It is estimated that 300 million chips that incorporate Imagination's technology are shipped each year, and the British firm makes about 19p ($0.30) on each chip.

The market is growing fast.

Hossein Yassaie, the chief executive of Imagination Technologies, told the BBC: "We have stated our goal of a billion units by 2016.

"It is really not difficult to see the volume increase is going to continue (and) penetration in the new markets is going to continue."

As well as graphics for smartphones, Mr Yassaie is confident that his company's other areas of expertise will be in high demand.

That includes connecting devices to the internet and to broadcast systems like radio, and delivering high-definition television to mobile phones.

But, if it is such a profitable, high-growth market, then what has stopped giant chipmakers like Intel and Samsung moving in?

Well, designing graphics chips requires hundreds of extremely skilled engineers with years of experience.

According to analysts, even a giant computer chip firms like Intel would struggle to build a rival team.

The nature of the industry also favours an independent firm that designs the product and then sells it on to everyone else – even to rival firms in the computer chip business.

"The economics of this industry vastly favour the third-party licensing model," says Lee Simpson, a technology analyst at Jefferies International.

"The time to market is a constraint for chipmakers. These guys work on nine-month product cycle, so design lead time is becoming crucial."

Companies that need computer chips, like Apple and Samsung, want new or upgraded products every year, so there's little time to experiment with new designs.

Customers also appreciate the independence of Imagination.

In fact, so keen are they to stop its technology falling into rival hands that Apple and Intel are the firm's two biggest shareholders.

So how did a relatively tiny British firm take the lead in such a valuable industry?

When Mr Yassaie joined the firm in 1992, he was convinced that computer graphics was the business to be in.

So the firm developed its technology, and in 1997 landed a high-profile deal to supply the Japanese computer games firm Sega.

But shortly after that came his second strategic masterstroke.

Mr Yassaie decided that people would want to do everything they could do on their personal computers, on their mobile phones.

At the time many considered that impossible, as phones have a feeble power supply and, back then, screens were unsophisticated.

"I was being told by chief executives of other firms that there was no point in targeting the mobile phone market because the screens did not have have enough pixels," said Mister Yassaie.

Fortunately, Imagination's technology was well suited to this task as it required much less power than graphics processors in personal computers.

It quickly found customers for its designs and as demand for smartphones took off, so did Imagination's business.

Imagination also branched out into the radio business. In 2001 it launched the world's first portable digital radio and has been expanding the Pure range ever since.

It has given the Imagination an outlet for its broadcast technology and some valuable experience in dealing with a consumer market – rather than selling to companies.

So what could upset Imagination?

Some analysts are concerned that the company is being distracted from its most profitable market, designing computer chips.

Ian Robertson, a technology analyst at Seymour Pierce, said: "They are taking money out of graphics and investing it into other areas like networking technologies, but it is far from clear if real returns will emerge from those investments."

"I don't see another big breakthrough win like the graphics technology happening again."

Mr Yassaie is confident that is not the case. He thinks his chips are only going to be more important.

He says that in mobile devices, the graphics processing unit (GPU) is doing more and more of the work.

For example, Apple's popular voice command system, Siri, is driven by the GPU.

As for the new areas of business, Mr Yassaie says one should just look at the results.

"Recently we announced a deal with Qualcomm for our Ensigma technology. To get that calibre of a customer surely must suggest we know what we are doing."

SEOUL (Reuters) – Shares in Samsung Electronics Co slumped more than 6 percent on Wednesday, wiping $10 billion off the electronics giant’s market value, on a report that Apple placed huge chip orders with troubled Japanese chip rival Elpida.

Taiwan’s DigiTimes, an online trade news site, reported that Apple recently placed large mobile dynamic random access memory (DRAM) orders with Elpida’s 12-inch plant in Hiroshima, Japan, securing around half the facilities total chip production. It cited unnamed industry sources in its report, which hit shares of major chip suppliers to Apple.

SK hynix shares closed almost 9 percent lower at a 20-week low – the biggest one-day drop in nine months. Samsung, the world’s biggest DRAM maker, tumbled 6.2 percent to a 9-week low of 1.23 million won ($1,100) – the stock’s biggest daily fall in nearly four years.

“It looks like Apple doesn’t want to see Samsung and hynix dominate the chip market. Apple wants to maintain its bargaining power by keeping Elpida running,” said Choi Do-yeon, an analyst at LIG Investment & Securities.

U.S.-based Micron Technology Corp is in talks to acquire Elpida’s business as the Japanese firm tries to restructure after tough market conditions and global competition drove it into bankruptcy protection.

“A merged Micron-Elpida could pose a significant threat to South Korean memory chipmakers, and Elpida’s huge order from Apple was the spark that triggered these worries,” said Lim Dol-yi, an analyst at Solomon Investment & Securities.

Samsung declined to comment, as did the Japanese court-appointed trustee handling Elpida’s rehabilitation.

A spokeswoman for SK hynix said: “We are receiving more orders for mobile DRAM chips from our customers.” She declined to comment on whether Apple had reduced orders from the firm.

Technology shares were also impacted by a broader sell-off after talks to form a new Greek government failed, stoking concerns the country may exit the euro zone and increase financial market uncertainty. Shares in flat-screen maker LG Display slid 4.5 percent. Hyundai Motor lost 4 percent..

“Samsung shares were already facing pressure since offshore investors began cutting back on risk during the latest streak of sell-offs, but the news surrounding Elpida was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Rhoo Yong-suk, an analyst at Hyundai Securities. “It was just unfortunate timing that coincided with jitters surrounding Greece.”

(Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Additional reporting by Joonhee Yu and Hyunjoo Jin in SEOUL and Mari Saito in TOKYO; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner and Ian Geoghegan)

A poor country even by West African standards, landlocked Burkina Faso has suffered from recurring droughts and, until the 1980s, military coups.

A major challenge to the status quo came in 1983, when Capt Thomas Sankara seized power and adopted radical left-wing policies. He renamed the country, previously Upper Volta. Its present name which translates as "land of honest men".

In 1987 Mr Sankara was overthrown and killed in a coup by his erstwhile colleague Blaise Compaore, who went on to re-introduce a multi-party system.

Burkina Faso has faced domestic and external concern over the state of its economy and human rights, and allegations that it was involved in the smuggling of diamonds by rebels in Sierra Leone.

Troubles in neighbouring Ivory Coast have raised tensions, with Ivory Coast accusing its northern neighbour of backing rebels in the north and Burkina Faso accusing Ivory Coast of mistreating expatriate Burkinabes.

Editor’s note: Rose Arce is a senior producer at CNN and a contributor to Mamiverse, a website for Latinas and their families.

“President Barack Obama is speaking at Barnard College today,” the news reader said. Our eyes widened, and we shot each other a smile. The president was speaking at Mama’s school.

I had arrived at Barnard in 1983, fresh from a school run by Jesuit priests, where gay groups were banned from the premises. A boy I’d known had been severely harassed for being gay. Barnard was a long step better, but on the first day of college, my dorm mates fell into silence when one young woman delivered this news: “I have two mothers,” she said.

I remember asking whether one was her stepmother. “No. My mothers are gay,” she said. “They had me together.” She looked so uncomfortable, and no one was stepping up to make her feel any better.

Back then, Barnard had openly gay and lesbian professors and a group for students who were gay. But in 1983, it was still not cool to be a lesbian; AIDS was beginning to surface on campus, and discussions over sexuality and condom use quickly became explosive.

Barnard, a Seven Sisters women’s college, had been embroiled in a battle over whether to merge with Columbia University’s men’s college, Columbia College, where Barack Obama was graduating that year. The buzz at Barnard was that nobody wanted it to be known as a college for “dykes.” It was just another political debate to me. I was happily dating a wonderful guy, and it didn’t affect me. Sexuality is a complicated thing.

Sudden pressure to get ‘gay married’

That was the same year Evan Wolfson started a thesis at Harvard Law School on why gay people should have the freedom to marry. He had read an award-winning book by John Boswell, a prominent Yale professor, who argued that Christianity, particularly Catholicism, had once been OK with homosexuality. Wolfson believed that if things had once been different, there was an opening for society to reconsider. He made this argument: “You can’t say you’re for equality if you acquiesce to exclusion from the central social and legal institution of society, which is marriage.”

I’m her mom, not the nanny!

He spent a career saying marriage rights could be the agent for social change around attitudes toward homosexuality, which prompted some folks to tell him he was flat-out nuts. In 1991, he served as co-counsel in a lawsuit by a group of Hawaiian gay couples against the state, alleging that it was unconstitutional for the state to forbid two people of the same sex to marry. In 1996, their Supreme Court agreed.

Wolfson has launched a national movement toward allowing gays the freedom to marry. By 2001, 10 countries allowed gays to marry. By 2005, our neighbors in Canada granted marriage licenses to gays, and my partner and I attended our first wedding of a couple who had traveled there from the U.S. to wed. I remember the voice of this heterosexual justice of the peace cracking as he called himself a participant in history in the making.

What a distance we have traveled as a society, even as our country debates whether allowing gay couples to marry is the right thing to do. There are six U.S. states that now allow gay couples to marry and an additional 12 that offer domestic partnerships or civil unions that are similar to marriage. There are 30 states that ban them. The federal government recognizes none of these unions, thus denying the couples hundreds of significant federal marriage rights.

Obama spoke at Barnard on Monday about how we arrived here and how much further we have to go: “Young folks who marched and mobilized, who stood up and sat in from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, didn’t just didn’t do it for themselves. That’s how we achieved voting rights. That’s how we achieved workers’ rights; that’s how we achieved gay rights; that’s how we’ve made this union more perfect.”

‘Mama, would you please speak English?’

A year after that wedding in Canada, my partner and I had our daughter, Luna, and were legally bound to her through a second parent adoption, even as we could not marry each other.

Luna is now 6, an age when kids really can’t conceive of the future but seem to find comfort in recounting the past. “What was it like when I was a baby” quickly reaches back to “What was it like when you were a baby?” So she had a broad smile the day I enrolled her at Bank Street Summer Camp and they told her she would be taking swim class at Barnard College. “That’s your college, Mama! Let’s go see!” she said and pulled me and my partner, Mafe, onto campus.

I showed her the pool I barely touched as a student and bought her an electric blue sweatshirt with BARNARD emblazoned on the front. She could sense the emotion in my voice when I told her what a life-changing experience it had been for a first-generation American to go to an Ivy League school. Barnard used to say it “makes women,” and the confidence and smarts it instilled were something I want for her, too. I told her one too many times that she would have to study very hard to get in.

She ran along the patio in front of buildings named for women who’d accomplished incredible things. I walked around with my partner, wondering whether we would ever be able to afford to send her to a place so great, where I once met a girl raised by two mommies who struggled to explain herself and find support.

Monday afternoon, 594 young women, in their light blue caps and gowns, graduate from Barnard College of Columbia University. They will honor Rosa Alonzo, a former trustee and an out lesbian Latina, for her contributions to the university. Wolfson received the same medal of distinction Barnard gave to the president of the United States, days after Obama declared his personal support for marriage rights for gays.

Obama called upon the women at Barnard to change society for the better as the women who raised him had taught him, to persevere — that in this country, “no matter who you love or what God you worship, you can still purse your own happiness.” This is my alma mater, the same college our little girl talks of attending some day because it’s “Mama’s school,” where it will be of absolutely no consequence that her mothers are gay.

Pat Robertson: Romney isn’t Jesus, but he’ll doCatalina Camia ("USA Today," May 13, 2012)

USA – If Jesus isn’t on the ballot and the choice is between President Obama and Mitt Romney, televangelist Pat Robertson knows which way he’ll vote.

The televangelist told 700 Club viewers today that he’s basically siding with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, in what is being viewed as a tepid Romney endorsement.

“It looks like the people who were worried about his Mormonism … at least that crowd is diminishing somewhat. The question is, if you have two candidates, you don’t have Jesus running against someone else. You have Obama running against Romney,” Robertson said.

Romney this weekend made an appeal to evangelical voters with his commencement address at Liberty University. The Lynchburg, Va. school bills itself as the “largest Christian university in the world.”

Romney didn’t specifically mention his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but he told graduates that they share with him the same beliefs and values.

“People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology,” Romney said. “Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.”

"Voter participation is a religious obligation – the Grand Mufti of Libya," says one recent text message sent to Libyans ahead of the landmark elections for a new parliament.

Nevertheless, many people still find the concept somewhat confusing.

Khalifa Shakrin, a political science professor at the University of Tripoli, insists he will not vote because Libya needs more time to prepare.

"I'm dissatisfied with the process," he says. "People are underestimating the implication of the assembly's job on the whole system and future of Libya," he says.

"People are mostly unaware of the seriousness of the task entrusted to the assembly."

The 200 members of the National Public Conference will appoint a new prime minister and cabinet. It will then form a 60-member panel to draft a new constitution, which will be put to a referendum.

Meanwhile, the Council for Cyrenaica – an oil-rich eastern region which stretches from the central coastal city of Sirte to the Egyptian border – has called for a boycott of the elections, saying regional representation in the National Public Conference should be split equally.

Security may ultimately prove to be an obstacle, though officials are hesitant to admit to it.

Al-Ameen Belhaj, a member of the NTC and of the preparation committee for the election, says some parts of the country are unstable and that they need to have a security plan for them ahead of the elections.

Earlier this week, some 200 disgruntled ex-rebels attacked the headquarters of Prime Minister Abdurrahim al-Keib in Tripoli with heavy weapons, killing a security guard, over demands for compensation and the treatment of those wounded in last year's uprising.

The weakness of the transitional government is consequently seen both as a threat to the elections and a reason for holding them as soon as possible.

In Tripoli, potential voters seem more excited with the idea of taking to the polls and are less bothered with whether the country will get it right.

It is perhaps understandable in a post-revolution environment where many are hungry to cast a vote they have been starved of for more than four decades.

Published May 14th, 2012 – 19:09 GMT

Iran should engage in substantive negotiations on its nuclear program and allow access to its sites, personnel and information related to this program, said Monday the deputy director of the International Agency for the Energy Agency (IAEA). These comments were made as the UN agency began two days of talks with the Islamic Republic at the headquarters of the Iranian diplomatic mission in Vienna. These discussions should test the will of Tehran to respond to suspicions raised by UN inspectors ahead of the scheduled meeting May 23 in Baghdad with the group of “Six” powers (U.S., Russia, China, France and Britain, plus Germany).

“The purpose of these two days is to reach an agreement on an approach (that would) resolve all outstanding issues with Iran, clarification about possible military dimensions remain our top priority,” said Herman Nackaerts , IAEA Deputy Director, upon his arrival to the talks.

“It is important now to engage in substance on these issues and that Iran gives us access to people, documents, information and sites” related to nuclear activities, said the head of the IAEA delegation .

The representatives of the IAEA have left the premises of the Iran’s diplomatic mission on 1300 GMT, after five hours of discussion, without comment. The spokesman for the agency announced that the talks would resume Tuesday.

In Brussels, where EU ministers met for to discuss foreign affairs, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned Iran of new sanctions by the EU if no concrete measures are takes to allay the fears of the international community vis-à-vis its nuclear program. “We are now waiting for concrete proposals and actions by Iran,” he told reporters. “Otherwise we have of course the sanctions we have imposed. They will not only be applied, but gradually strengthened.” 

I would like to highlight an issue which I have been facing with du telecommunications company. In April 2010, I bought a new iPhone and along with it, I got a post-paid du connection with a monthly plan of Dh500, which allows me to use the internet for free for one year. In April 2011, I went back to the du office on Hamdan Street, Abu Dhabi, and changed the connection to their Elite 250 Plan.

I didn’t find any issue with their billing for April, May and June. By the end of June, I went on annual leave to India for a month. I was not using the connection in India and when I returned to Abu Dhabi at the end of July, my connection had been cut on the ground that I had exceeded the credit limit. I was confused and paid Dh500 at a du counter in the Abu Dhabi Airport. However, even after paying the amount, the service was not restored. Once I reached home, I paid more and the service was then restored.

In August, I paid a large amount again and by the first of September, I decided to monitor my bill. On September 10, I paid the entire bill, including the unbilled amount, and started monitoring via my balance rewards. I did not exceed any of my rewards, which I can use free as per the Elite 250 plan.

On September 27, I received a message from du stating that I had reached 90 per cent of my credit limit and was requested to pay Dh1,849.22 immediately. I called du’s customer service and they ordered me to pay the amount immediately. After a few minutes, my service was disconnected and in the evening, I visited their office on Hamdan Street.

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