Wednesday 19 December 2012

Miss USA wins Miss Universe 2012

 Miss USA Olivia Culpo (R) reacts with Miss Philippines Janine Tugonon after winning the Miss Universe pageant at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada December 19, 2012. Tugonon is the runner-up. REUTERS/Steve Marcus (UNITED STATES - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS
Miss Universe 2012 is the 61st Miss Universe pageant, and was held on December 19, 2012, at the Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. Leila Lopes from Angola crowned her successor Olivia Culpo from USA.
Miss Philippines Janine Tugonon came in as first runner up in the Miss Universe pageant 2012, placing second to Miss USA.
Making up the Top 5 in the pageant held in Las Vegas, Nevada, were Venezuela, Brazil, Philippines, USA, Australia.
Fourth runner up was Ms. Brazil. Third and second runner up were Australia and Venezuela respectively.This is the seventh time in the history of the pageant that the home candidate won Miss Universe - and the sixth time for the USA to accomplish the feat.
Ms. China won the award for Best in National Costume, Miss Congeniality was Guatemala and Miss Photogenic winner was Kosovo.
89 countries and territories participated in this year's pageant and it will be broadcasted live in participant countries and territories by NBC, Telemundo & the international broadcasters.
What were the historical significance of this year's Miss Universe Pageant? Here are the list from en.wikepidea.org:
  • USA won its eighth crown as Miss Universe.
  • Australia placed for the fifth consecutive year.
  • France placed for the fourth consecutive year.
  • Kosovo placed for the second consecutive year.
  • Brazil and Philippines placed in the Top 5 last year, the latter being the Top 5 for the third consecutive year.
  • Poland last placed in 1989.
  • Turkey last placed in 1990.
  • Peru last placed in 2005.
  • India last placed in 2007.
  • Hungary last placed in 2008.
  • Croatia last placed in 2009.
  • This is the highest Venezuela has placed since Stefania Fernandez won in 2009.
  • Russia and South Africa last placed in 2010.
  • This is the first time since 2008 that the Top 5 finalists were composed of countries that had won Miss Universe before.
  • At 5'5", Olivia Culpo is one of the shortest Miss Universes in the history of the pageant.

Monday 17 December 2012

Newtown buries school massacre dead

NEWTOWN, Connecticut - Heart-rending funerals were held Monday for two six-year-old boys, as America began to say farewell to the 20 children slain in a school shooting that sparked calls for new gun laws.
The first burials, held under raw, wet skies, were of a pair of boys among those shot in Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. On Tuesday, the first of the girls, also aged six, is to be laid to rest.
In all, on Friday, the gunman slaughtered 20 children aged between six and seven, six adults working at the school and his own mother, before turning one of his arsenal of high-powered firearms on himself.
The family of one boy, Jack Pinto, gathered at a funeral home in a century-old building in the center of the Connecticut town. Some 20 children of different ages came, along with about two dozen adults.
Jack Wellman, an eighth-grader who helped coach wrestling at the school, said fellow school wrestlers placed their sports medals in the coffin of Jack, a keen wrestler.
"He was an excellent kid," Wellman said at a nearby deli afterwards.
Another participant came out in shock. "I just cannot describe it, it was sad. The message was just comforting," she said. "Our hearts are heavy."
All the schools in this prosperous and picturesque dormitory town were shut until at least Tuesday and the blood-spattered elementary school itself was to remain a closed crime scene indefinitely, authorities said.
"Healing is still going on," Newtown police Lieutenant George Sinko said.
In the nearby town of Ridgefield, reports of a suspicious person prompted the brief lockdown and deployment of police Monday at all schools, indicating the jitters in the United States in the wake of the killings.
For Newtown, a quiet suburban community where the 20-year-old killer lived with his well-off mother, the start of funerals was hardly likely to settle the nightmare of what happened last Friday.
But the crime, in which the murderer carried a high-powered, military style rifle and two handguns, may have spurred change in the political landscape regarding rules on weapons ownership.
In an indication of how widely the shock has been felt, the Senate held a moment's silence in Washington.
Late Sunday, President Barack Obama joined a vigil in Newtown and pledged to work for an end to mass shootings, which have now become a regular event in the United States -- with half-a-dozen massacres since Obama took office.
"These tragedies must end," Obama said, appearing to commit himself to a push for reform in his second White House term, possibly by urging the restoration of a federal ban on assault weapons like the one used in Newtown.
Earlier, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California promised to introduce a bill to ban assault weapons on the very first day of the next Congress, January 3.
And on Monday, Senator Joe Lieberman called for a broad commission that could bring opponents on the issue together to discuss curbing gun deaths.
Each year, more than 31,000 Americans die from gunshots, most of them self-inflicted, but more than 11,000 in homicides -- five times as many as the death toll for US troops during an entire decade of conflict in Afghanistan.
"We've got to bring everybody to the table, including the gun manufacturers and the gun rights groups and the entertainment industry and just regular people," Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent, told Fox News.
But with gun ownership protected by the US constitution and firearms deeply ingrained in American culture, attempts to restrict access have long been seen as a vote-losing proposition.
Bit by bit, the full picture of the horror and heroism in the school, where the deranged shooter, Adam Lanza, sprayed bullets into two rooms, was starting to emerge.
The husband of Dawn Hochsprung, the slain school principal, said she had told others around her to hide. Then she "and at least one other teacher went out and actually tried to subdue the killer."
"I don't know where that comes from. Dawn was 5'2," he said.
"Dawn put herself in jeopardy and I have been angry about that, angry -- until just now, when I met two women that she told to go under shelter while she actually confronted the gunman."
One of the teachers, Janet Balmer, told CNN how the moment she heard gunshots she followed the lockdown routine that they'd recently practiced, then tried to act in front of her five-year-old charges as if all was well.
"We sat in the cubby away from the door so no one could see us, read them a story and talked to them," she said.
After agonizing minutes, police knocked at the door and told the children to leave -- and "cover their eyes" to avoid being exposed to the gore.
"At five, covering your eyes and walking isn't so easy. I just had them, you know, look towards the wall," Balmer said.
No information about a possible motive, or whether Lanza had any diagnosed mental condition, has emerged. He is believed to have first shot his mother in their house before going to the school.
Police remained tight-lipped, but said they are making progress. "We definitely are peeling that onion back, layer by layer," the state police spokesman said.
Newtown was the second deadliest school shooting in US history after the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, in which South Korean student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life.
In the previously most notorious recent incident, a 24-year-old, James Holmes, allegedly killed 12 people and wounded 58 others when he opened fire at a midnight screening of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, in July.

Source: abs-cbnnews.com

Thursday 13 December 2012

U.S. Refuses To Sign Treaty On Net Regulation; Fears Legally-Binding Rules In Future

 
The United States has said it will refuse to sign an updated communications treaty set to be ratified by the United Nations, because it veers too far into agreements to regulate the Internet.
For the last two weeks, delegates from more than 190 countries have been discussing the UN treaty at a conference for the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai. Countries such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia have pushed for proposals that include allowing nations to regulate global Internet companies and online content that is perceived as being “spam.”
The treaty is not legally binding, and does not come into effect until January 2015, but Ambassador Terry Kramer, who headed the U.S. delegation Dubai, said it was important to make sure that countries did not eventually agree to a more binding set of global agreements that they could use to justify acts of censorship online.
“What we don’t want over time is a set of global agreements that people can point to and say this treaty gave us right to impose these rules on global operators,” Kramer said on a conference call Thursday. “It’s not binding, but you don’t want to allow something to happen that people can think is a binding term on a global environment.”
He added that it was also “too early to tell” if countries that eventually signed the treaty would treat global Internet companies like Google and Facebook any differently.
Click here for the latest draft of the treaty, which is still evolving and has yet to be ratified. The U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and several other nations disagree with several aspects of the draft, but most at issue is Article 3, which states: “Member States shall endeavour to ensure that authorized operating agencies cooperate in the establishment, operation and maintenance of the international network to provide a satisfactory quality of service.”
An older version of the treaty had said “recognized operating agencies” in the text, which referred to large, public providers of telecommunications services like AT&T. Changing that to “authorized” operating agencies opens the door for governments to say the treaty also refers to Internet companies like Google and private networks.
Represented governments are set to vote on the treaty on Friday.
“Lots of countries will abstain,” said Kramer. “But a lot of countries that are expressing points of view that are different, are newer and less experienced with the Internet, and penetration rates are low. Many are dealing with political issues. There are different mindsets to what the benefits of the Internet bring.”

Source: www.forbes.com

Thursday 6 December 2012

Obama tops Forbes 2012 power list

 
NEW YORK - When it comes to power, politics trumps business, according to a new Forbes ranking on Wednesday that found heads of state occupying six of the top 10 spots among the world's most powerful people, led by President Barack Obama.
The annual list selected what Forbes said were the world's 71 most-powerful people from among the roughly 7.1 billion global populace, based on factors ranging from wealth to global influence.
Obama was joined in the top 10 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
The list's highest-ranked businessman was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at No. 4. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, both public officials, also made the top 10.
"This year's list reflects the changing of the guard in the world's two most powerful countries: the United States and China," Michael Noer, Forbes' executive editor, told Reuters in an email.
Noer noted that China's President Hu Jintao, last year's third most-powerful person, fell off the list as he is leaving power, and his successor, Xi Jinping, ranked ninth instead.
Both U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have stated they will not be serving in Obama's second term, were not in this year's rankings.
While elected and appointed officials and business people made up the vast majority of Forbes' most powerful, Pope Benedict XVI placed fifth in the rankings.
Among the oddities was Joaquin Guzman Loera at No. 63.
Loera, far from a household name, is a billionaire nicknamed "El Chapo" who as head of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel is the world's most powerful drug trafficker, according to Forbes.
Age was also not a barrier, with two of the youngest and oldest of this year's most powerful -- 28-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 81-year-old News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch -- back-to-back at numbers 25 and 26, respectively.
Forbes noted that Zuckerberg fell out of last year's top 10 after Facebook's IPO disappointed. A gainer, meanwhile, was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who moved up four spots to No. 18 despite being only halfway into her first term of office.
To create the rankings, which Forbes readily concedes bore a measure of subjectivity, editors graded candidates on four criteria for power and averaged the four grades:

-- Power over many people

-- Control over financial and other valuable resources

-- Power in multiple spheres or arenas

-- Active use of power

Some measures, such as power over many people, favored leaders such as the Pope, while the world's richest man -- Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim Hula, worth a reported $72 billion -- placed 11th on the strength of his wealth.
Others, such as New York's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, scored high in all areas, placing him at No. 16.
Noer said that Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of Paypal and Tesla Motors, was "one of the more interesting newcomers" on the list due to his SpaceX company, a private space exploration venture.
"With NASA retiring the space shuttle fleet, private companies like SpaceX have been awarded huge contracts to do things like resupply the International Space Station. The commercialization of space is just beginning, but we expect it to be big business," Noer said.
Former President Bill Clinton placed 50th, with editors noting that by hitting the campaign trail for Obama, Clinton "cemented his status as a kingmaker", along with his nonpartisan Global Initiative raising more than $71 billion in commitments to fund charitable action worldwide.
Other high-ranking heads of state included French President Francois Hollande at No. 14, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at No. 19 and Iran's Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei at No. 21.
Among businessmen in the top 20 were Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett at No. 15, Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke at No. 17 and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at No. 20.
The entire list can be found at www.forbes.com/power as well as the December 24 issue of the magazine.

Source: abs-cbnnews.com

Latest Local and World News: Beijing to allow visa-free transit trips

Latest Local and World News: Beijing to allow visa-free transit trips:   BEIJING - China will allow transit passengers from 45 countries including the US, Canada and all members of the EU to spend up...

Beijing to allow visa-free transit trips

 
BEIJING - China will allow transit passengers from 45 countries including the US, Canada and all members of the EU to spend up to 72 hours in Beijing without a visa from next month, city authorities said.
The move would "strongly spur the development of the tourism industry, speed up building of an international city (and) expand contacts with the rest of the world," the Beijing Tourism Administration said on its website.
The policy only applies to travellers in transit to a third country, and not for return flights to the capital, whose attractions include the vast Forbidden City.
Eligible nationalities include the United States, Canada, European Union countries, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, South Korea, Japan and the United Arab Emirates.
The city will "starting on January 1, 2013, implement a policy allowing foreigners from 45 countries with visas and plane tickets to a third country to transit through Beijing for 72 hours without a visa", the tourism body said.
But travellers would "face punishment" if they left the capital and lawbreakers would be banned for life, Gao Huada, deputy director of the city's exit-entry bureau, was quoted in the China Daily as saying on Thursday.
China's financial hub Shanghai already allows some foreigners in transit to visit the city for 48 hours, its government says on its website, including those from the US, some European countries, Japan, South Korea and Singapore.
Other travelers passing through the country are required to remain in the airport.
Beijing's airport is the second busiest in the world, having handled 47 million passengers in the first seven months of this year, according to the industry body Airports Council International.
Shanghai airport ranks 20th busiest with 26 million travellers during the same period.

Source: abs-cbnnews.com

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Security Bank named PH bank of the year

MANILA, Philippines - Security Bank was named the 2012 Bank of the Year for the Philippines by The Banker magazine.
In giving the award, The Banker noted that Security Bank has become a competitive player in the local banking industry, after it acquired Premiere Development Bank. It also cited the bank's loan growth of 24%, as it focused on corporate and small-medium enterprise customers.
The magazine,  published by The Financial Times of London, also cited Security Bank's lead in the equity and debt capital markets, as it was involved in big-ticket deals such as the government's P323 billion bond swap and San Miguel Corp.'s P16 billion secondary offering.
"We are honored to have been bestowed this prestigious award as it now places us among the world’s most elite financial institutions. The Bank has always focused on
its core strengths that have allowed us to sustain a track record of strong financial and business performance," said Alberto Villarosa, President and CEO of Security Bank, in a statement.
In the third quarter of 2012, the bank posted a net income of P6.2 billion, a 55% increase from the same period last year. It had a return on equity (ROE) at 25%, outpacing the industry average of 12.14%
The Bank of the Year Awards is an annual event that promotes excellence in the global banking community by recognizing the top financial institutions in the world. Judges select only one bank from each country, making it the most sought-after award across the globe.

Source: abs-cbnnews.com