Toyota Motorsport was on Wednesday mourning the death of founder Ove Andersson.Andersson, aged 70, was killed in an accident while competing in the Milligan Vintage Trial in South Africa when the classic car he was driving suffered a frontal collision around a blind corner.Toyota Motorsport chairman Tadashi Yamashina said: "Everyone at Toyota is extremely shocked and truly saddened at this terrible news."Ove was an inspiration to our team and to many in motorsport. His passion for motorsport was legendary and he is a great loss to our sport."Andersson was instrumental in the founding of Toyota Team Europe, which grew out of his own Andersson Motorsport squad.Toyota Team Europe later relocated to Cologne, and became Toyota Motorsport in 1993.Under his leadership, Toyota successfully competed in the World Rally Championship, winning four drivers' and three manufacturers' titles, also taking second place at the 1999 Le Mans 24 Hours.Andersson then led Panasonic Toyota Racing into Formula One in 2002 before retiring as team principal in 2003 to work as a consultant for the team.
Cristiano Ronaldo rode last-ditch tackles and off-pitch controversies to lift Portugal to their second win of Euro 2008.Ronaldo played a starring role in Portugal's 3-1 win over Czech Republic after scoring one and making another goal.Although Petr Cech's numerous world-class saves almost rivaled the Portuguese winger for the Man-of-the-match award, Ronaldo copped all players with a performance worthy of his tag as the English Premier League's best player.And looking at his current form, Ronaldo could be set to become this tournament's best player as well.The question now is can Ronaldo help erase the bitter memories of Euro 2004 when his country, as hosts, lost to Greece in the final?By Eugene Han (espnstar.com)
MOM Cristiano Ronaldo declared himself "very happy" after helping Portugal to a 3-1 win over the Czech Rep.The Portuguese overcame Czech Republic 3-1 at the Stade Geneve on Wednesday to move onto six points from two games in Group A.Ronaldo and substitute Ricardo Quaresma struck second-half goals - the latter in stoppage time - to earn the victory after Libor Sionko had cancelled out Deco's opener."Our main aim was to get to next phase. I'm very happy to have helped my team-mates to win," said the Manchester United star."I managed to score, and my goal is dedicated to the Red Cross. I'm thinking about the children and that makes me very proud."Ronaldo acknowledged his team had struggled to assert themselves in the first half but was pleased with how they worked together to clinch the win."We played very well, although Czech Republic played very well in the first half," said the 23-year-old."It was very difficult to penetrate their defence. Portugal have played well in the first match and well again in this match as a team."We know how to sacrifice everything for the good of the team. We have now got a big chance but must respect our opponents because they too have a mission - they want to win as we do."If we carry on playing like this, we have a good chance."Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari admitted he was surprised with the decision of opposite number Karel Bruckner to start with Milan Baros up front rather than Jan Koller."It was a surprise for me because we had planned to play against a starting XI that would include Koller," said the Brazilian tactician."The fact Baros was there didn't make life easy. We faced difficulties because they had four or five in midfield and we had two wingers so we didn't know what to do."The victory maintains Portugal's 100% start following their opening-day win over Turkey.The Czechs - who beat co-hosts Switzerland 1-0 in the curtain-raiser - now have to wait until Sunday to clinch a last-eight spot when they face Fatih Terim's Turks.
PCB official Nadeem Akram returned to Pakistan on Wednesday after failing to secure the release of Mohammad Asif.The fast bowler was detained by customs officials at the Dubai International Airport on June 1 on suspicion of carrying drugs on his person."Akram has indeed returned home," said PCB media manager Raza Rashid. "The attorney general in Dubai has not given us a time frame, so we are not sure when a decision would actually be made."A small quantity of a powder was found in Asif's wallet and was sent to a laboratory for testing. The bowler also gave blood and urine tests, with the results of those yet to be divulged.Akram, the director of human resources at the PCB, was immediately rushed to Dubai to oversee the case but has now left that responsibility to an official from the Pakistan embassy in the United Arab Emirates."An official from the Pakistan embassy in the United Arab Emirates will now oversee the case," Akram told reporters in Dubai prior to his departure."We are still hopeful that he would be released. No charges have been laid so far."Shafqat Naghmi, the PCB's chief operating officer, said Akram had to return to help Pakistan's preparations for the Asia Cup.Pakistan host the six-nation tournament, which starts on June 24.
For decades, scholars and scientists have argued that the exiled dictator, who died in 1821 on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic, was the victim of arsenic, whether by accident or design.The murder theory held that his British captors poisoned him; the accident theory said that colored wallpaper in his bedroom contained an arsenic-based dye that mold transformed into poisonous fumes.The evidence behind both theories was that scientists had found arsenic in hairs from Napoleon’s head, which diminished the idea that he had died of stomach cancer. Arsenic is highly toxic, and its poisoning symptoms include violent stomach pains.“There is nothing improbable about the hypothesis of arsenic poisoning,” wrote Frank McLynn in “Napoleon: A Biography” (Arcade, 2002). “Science gives it rather more than warranted assertibility.”But now, a team of scientists at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Milan-Bicocca and Pavia has uncovered strong evidence to the contrary. They conducted a detailed analysis of hairs taken from Napoleon’s head at four times in his life — as a boy in Corsica, during his exile on the island of Elba, the day he died on St. Helena, at age 51, and the day afterward — and discovered that the arsenic levels underwent no significant rises.Casting a wide net, the scientists also studied hairs from his son, Napoleon II, and his wife, Empress Josephine. Here, too, they found that the arsenic levels were similar and uniformly high.The big surprise was that the old levels were roughly 100 times the readings that the scientists obtained for comparison from the hairs of living people.“The concentrations of arsenic in the hair taken from Napoleon after his death were much higher,” the scientists wrote. But the levels were “quite comparable with that found not only in the hair of the emperor in other periods of his life, but also in those of his son and first wife.”The results, they added, “undoubtedly reveal a chronic exposure that we believe can be simply attributed to environmental factors, unfortunately no longer easily identifiable, or habits involving food and therapeutics.”A team of 10 scientists reported their results in a recent issue of the Italian journal Il Nuovo Saggiatore (The New Experimenter). The hair samples of Napoleon and his family came from the Glauco-Lombardi Museum in Parma, Italy, the Malmaison Museum in Paris and the Napoleonic Museum in Rome.
WASHINGTON — According to the Congressional Research Service, there are only about 30 scientists among the 535 senators and representatives in the 110th Congress, and that is counting the psychologist, the psychiatrist, a dozen other M.D.’s, three nurses, an engineer, two veterinarians, a pharmacist and an optometrist.Skip to next paragraphRSS Feed * Get Science News From The New York Times »But physics is on a roll.“Go back 15 years, and there weren’t any physicists,” said Vernon J. Ehlers, a Republican who taught the subject at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., until he was elected to Congress in 1993.His was a lone voice until 1998, when Rush Holt, assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics laboratory, won election from New Jersey as a Democrat. And today there are three, adding Bill Foster, a physicist at Fermilab and another Democrat, who won a special election in March in Illinois.“If we continue to reproduce in this manner,” Mr. Foster began, and Mr. Ehlers finished the thought, “the entire Congress would consist of physicists!”They were joking — probably. But a Congress full of physicists might solve some worrisome problems, the three-member physics caucus argued one afternoon when they met for a joint interview in the Capitol.There are 435 people in the House, Mr. Holt said, and “420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.” He recalled his exasperation when anthrax spores were discovered in the Capitol in 2001 and colleagues came to him and said, “You are a scientist, you must know about anthrax,” a subject ordinarily missing from the physics curriculum.“The difference,” he said, “is we would be perfectly happy to pick up a copy of The New England Journal of Medicine and read about the etiology of anthrax.”“In fact, we basically did that,” Mr. Ehlers said.“We know more than our colleagues,” Mr. Holt said, “but not more than they could know.”Unfortunately, Mr. Foster said, “unless things play to their advantage in the next election, they are not interested.”Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Sherwood L. Boehlert, the upstate New York Republican who until last year was chairman of the House Science Committee, said that what citizens should expect from their elected representatives is not knowledge of science per se, but rather “an ability to reach out to experts in any given field and then do what is oftentimes hard for elected officials to do, listen instead of talk.”(For his part, Mr. Boehlert said, his last exposure to science was in a high school physics class, “and I got a C.”)Problems arise not just in obviously science-related issues, but also, as Mr. Holt put it, in “those countless issues, and it really is countless, that have scientific and technological components but the issues are not seen as science issues.”He cited the debates over electronic voting machines that caused problems “that would be obvious to any computer scientist but went right past some people here in Congress.”Mr. Foster mentioned the debates over electronic border fences, which he said lacked “fundamental concepts of what radar can or cannot do.”What is needed is not more advanced degrees, the physicists said (they all have Ph.D.’s), but a capacity to take the long view, what Mr. Ehlers called the scientists’ ability to see from the pre-Cambrian era to the space age.But sometimes, he said, the problem is just old-fashioned ignorance. Several times he has found himself “rushing to the floor” to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.“ ‘The Two Cultures’ is not a myth,” Mr. Holt said, referring to a 1959 lecture by the British chemist and novelist C. P. Snow, who bemoaned a growing gulf between the sciences and the humanities.Mr. Ehlers agreed, saying he had as much right to expect that his colleagues would understand basic physics concepts as they had to expect that he would be familiar with Shakespeare. “It’s utterly stupid that we have to fight that,” he said.But there are barriers to drawing more scientists into politics. For one, Mr. Holt said, many researchers have the idea that “politics is somehow dirty.”
The Hollywood Gossip staff does our best to verify every rumor and story we publish.When we get it wrong, however, we aren’t above an apology and a retraction. (Turns out Miley Cyrus was never pregnant. Our bad!)The same can’t be said for Entertainment Tonight. The supposedly venerable celebrity gossip show still won’t face the facts when it comes to Angelina Jolie giving birth; or NOT giving birth, to be precise.So Pregnant“We still don’t know if she’s had those babies or not and until we do we won’t retract our story. I don’t know yet that we’ve made a mistake,” host Mary Hart recently said.Hart makes this statement despite the fact that Brad Pitt was in a different country from Jolie when she supposedly gave birth to twins; and that Brangelina’s publicist has denied the report.“I hope that the babies were born when we said they were and that we had our facts straight. I have never retracted a story in 26 years, but all I can do now is wait and see,” Hart said.It’s a genius move by Hart. She’ll wait, she’ll see that the babies are eventually born and - presto! - Entertainment Tonight’s report will be verified.This is the best plan since Linda Hogan decided to date 19-year Charlie Hill as vengeance for being cheated on.
