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• Akeed: Toyotaunveils newbrand tagline

• Robots to the rescue at dangerous workplaces

• For three entrepreneurs, dreams of fashion success start at toes

• Thicker brain sectionstied to spirituality,claims study

• US cracksopen skies fortesting drones

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Iron Man led a record2013 as Hollywoodavoids box-office duels

African streets African streets jammed with jammed with luxury autosluxury autos

Porsches, Range Rovers and even Maseratis... luxury cars are no strange sight weaving through the old bangers that rumble along Abidjan’s chaotic streets, another indication of the emergence of a wealthy class in Africa.

2 COVER STORYPLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

By Joris Fioriti

Porsches, Range Rovers and even Maseratis... luxury cars are no strange sight weaving through the old bangers that rumble along Abidjan’s chaotic streets, another indi-cation of the emergence of a wealthy class in Africa. Each of the vehicles costs at least tens of thousands of euros, representing decades of work for an Ivorian earning the minimum wage, even after it was recently hiked 60

percent to 60,000 CFA francs (around €90, $125) a month.

Yet in wealthy Abidjan neighbour-hoods the streets are jammed with more luxury autos than in rich quar-ters of European capitals.

It’s the same story in Johannesburg, Lagos, or even Libreville. In the Gabonese capital it is common to see SUV after SUV snaking along the oceanside boulevard.

Wealthy Africans love the big, high,

four-wheel drive vehicles. Not only are they better adapted to the roads, regu-larly in a poor condition, they have also become something of a status symbol.

In Gabon, 70 percent of the 6,000 new vehicles sold each year are big 4x4s, mostly Japanese models, accord-ing to the Gabonese Federation of Car Importers.

“Here, its a 4x4 or nothing,” said one car importer who declined to give his name. For the Gabonese, the SUV has

become “the symbol of success, much more than a house”.

In Ivory Coast, luxury cars make up only 3 percent of the 8,000 new cars sold each year, said one indus-try expert who asked to remain anonymous.

“However certain customers are looking for the top of the line -- “bling-bling” cars -- there are people with money like that in the market,” he added.

Africa, the new Africa, the new El Dorado for El Dorado for luxury carsluxury cars

3PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

Despite the potholes that riddle Abidjan’s streets, there are importers offering low-slung sports cars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris. This brash display of luxury cars is an indication of the growing wealth in Africa despite increasing numbers living in extreme poverty.

But the high taxes slapped on new cars have given the second-hand car market a boost. A significant propor-tion of luxury cars enter the country this way from Europe, the United

States and even the Middle East. And it isn’t just SUVs.

Despite the potholes that riddle Abidjan’s streets, there are import-ers offering low-slung sports cars like Lamborghinis and Ferraris.

A former rebel military leader turned security official, Issiaka Ouattara, known as “Wattao”, was recently seen on national television driving a Maserati.

This brash display of luxury cars is an indication of the growing wealth in Africa despite increasing numbers living in extreme poverty.

The African Development Bank put the size of the African middle class at 300 million in 2011.

Ventures financial magazine recently put the number of African billionaires at 55 -- more than triple the previous count. That figure is likely an under-estimate, the Nigerian magazine said, as many are not comfortable disclosing the true extent of their wealth.

Expansion across the continentLuxury automakers are not letting

this bonanza pass them by.

Porsche boasts a brand new show-room in Victoria Island, one of Lagos’ most chic neighbourhoods.

The German carmaker’s sales have jumped by nearly 40 percent the past two years in South Africa, where it has been present for decades.

It has recently set up shop in Angola and Ghana as well as Nigeria, accord-ing to Christer Ekberg, Porsche’s man-aging director for the Middle East and Africa.

With 2,000 Porsche cars sold in sub-Saharan Africa in the first three quar-ters of this year, which the company described as a “promising” figure, the automaker is committed to expanding further across the continent.

Local partners are being sought for dealerships in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Namibia, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia.

Mercedes also views the potential of the African market as “enormous”, a spokeswoman said.

The German carmaker has an assembly line in South Africa, where it sells 20,000 vehicles per year.

BMW said it also intends to keep expanding across Africa, where it saw 15 percent sales growth in 2012 to 34,000 vehicles.

As for Audi, the company expects further growth in certain parts of Africa, where its sales have doubled in three years to 22,000 vehicles.

The carmakers are also being pulled in by the need to service their vehicles that have already found their way into African countries.

A lack of parts and diagnostic equip-ment has led to these high-perform-ance vehicles being kept off the road for months in Abidjan, according to an expert on the local car market.

“If Porsche comes to Ivory Coast, customers will be overjoyed to be able to repair their cars in a company garage,” said another expert on the African market.

“But they won’t necessarily buy there,” he added.

“Well-heeled clients are no different than others” and will likely plump for a second-hand vehicle in good condition that is much less expensive, he said.

AFP

PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 20144 CAMPUS / COMMUNITY

MES conductsorientation for facultyMES Indian School conducted ori-entation programme for its teach-ing faculty recently. As many as 600 teachers attended the orientation with vigour and vitality. On the first day Dr Rodney Sharkey and Dr Alan Weber, both Professors of English, Weill Cornell Medical College, Qatar, led the workshop on ‘Education-teaching and learning skills.’ On the second day, Sian Bezuidenhout, Head of knowledge Centre, Al Maha Academy, spoke on ‘Effective parenting – building up posi-tive relationship among students, par-ents and teachers’. “Teachers are the engineers of students’ mind so should be well equipped with strategies to face the challenges ahead,” remarked Principal A P Sasidharan while address-ing the gathering.

Paris Saint-Germain inspires ‘champions of tomorrow’ atOmar Ibn El Khatab School

The Paris Saint-Germain team paid a surprise visit to Omar Ibn El Khatab School in Doha, taking part in a specially arranged match for the students and astonishing parents and fans alike when they took to the pitch.

Marco Verratti, Edinson Cavani, Jérémy Ménez, Thiago Motta and Blaise Matuidi were among the special delegation visiting the school, a trip that was organised by Ooredoo.

Ooredoo is a sponsor of the 2012/2013 Ligue 1 Champions, Paris Saint-Germain, following an agreement signed earlier in 2013 that will run through to 2018.

A major focus of the agreement is the devel-opment of youth and community support pro-grammes, and the special school visit provided an early taste of the range of initiatives that are designed to “Inspire the Champions of Tomorrow”.

Parents and students were amazed to see the Paris Saint-Germain players during the special game, held two days before their showdown match with Real Madrid in Doha. In addition to playing for France’s leading club, the team also included players who have played for the national teams of France, Italy and Uruguay.

Following the match, the players and Paris Saint-Germain management met with the school’s teach-ers and faculty, and expressed the hope that Qatar

will also produce world-class footballers. Sheikh Saud bin Nasser Al Thani, CEO, Ooredoo

Qatar, said: “This was a wonderful day for the stu-dents, and we were very pleased to welcome our part-ners, Paris Saint-Germain, to Qatar. Our programme

with all our sporting partners is designed to raise the Ooredoo profile around the world, but also to reach young people and inspire them to get involved in sport and achieve their full potential.”

The Peninsula

Indian Islamic Association (IIA) Qatar has elected its new office-bearers for the 2014-15 term. K C Abdul Latheef has been elected as President while Faisal V T will be the new General Secretary. The new vice presidents are K T Abdurahman and Taj Aluva. R S Abdul Jaleel has been elected as the Finance Secretary.

The Consultative Council includes Mohammed Najeeb C H, Abdur Rahim P P, Abdur Rahim K C, Aboobacker P M, Abdul Razaq M S, Mohammed P H, Mohammed Ali M, Mohiyuddin M

M, Habeeburahman K, Abdul Wahid Nadvi, Abdul Jaleel R S, Meherban K C, and Saeeda K. Two female members have been elected to the consultative council for the first time.

The election process was supervised by the outgoing General Secretary Mohammed Najeeb C H in a meeting of the delegates held at the association premises recently which was attended by M K Mohammed Ali, Vice-president of Jamaate Islami, Kerala.

K C Abdul Latheef, is assuming the office of IIA’s President for the second

time, after serving as the associa-tion’s president in 2004-05 term. He is a graduate in Islamic Studies from Qatar University.

Indian Islamic Association is a

socio-cultural organisation, function-ing under the aegis of Fanar (Sheikh Abdulla Bin Zaid Al Mahmoud Islamic Cultural Centre).

The Peninsula

K C Abdul Latheef Faisal V T Abdurahman K T Taj Aluva

IIA elects new office-bearers

5BOOK PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014By John Mehaffey

Fifty years ago Martin Luther King departed from a prepared speech to electrify and exalt a quarter of a mil-lion people packed into Washington by inviting them to share his dream of a

nation in which all men and women would finally be equal regardless of colour.

During the same year, Nelson Mandela faced the gallows when he went on trial for sabotage waged during an underground campaign to force the South African authorities to abandon their vicious racial separation laws.

And in England, West Indian migrants queued for hours in the hope of watching a cricket team captained by a black man conquer their colonial masters five years after the Notting Hill riots had highlighted growing racial tensions throughout the country.

As if to underscore a tumultuous year, an extraor-dinary book, subsequently acclaimed by the English poet, cricket writer and broadcaster John Arlott as the finest ever written about the game of cricket, was also published.

Like all sporting classics and, as its title explic-itly promises, Beyond a Boundary by C L R James is about far more than a ball game. It is instead based on the “clash of race, caste and class” on and off the field in Britain’s former slave colonies.

The final chapter of James’s masterpiece describes the triumph of the 1960-61 West Indies team in Australia led by Frank Worrell, the black Barbadian who went on to captain the wonderful 1963 side in England.

Before the team was selected James had carried out an unsparing newspaper campaign in his native Trinidad to get Worrell installed as captain in place of the incumbent white man Gerry Alexander.

“I would have been able to keep it up for 50 weeks, for there was 50 years’ knowledge of discrimination behind it and corresponding anger,” wrote James.

George Headley, the Jamaican maestro who car-ried the hopes and aspirations of black English-speaking West Indians on his shoulders during the 1930s when he systematically subdued the best bowl-ers fielded by either England or Australia, led West Indies in a home test after World War Two.

But neither he nor any other black man was given the honour of leading a West Indies side overseas until Worrell was finally chosen as captain for the Australia series.

Alexander, a fine wicketkeeper-batsman and a dignified man who excelled under Worrell, remains the last white man to captain West Indies.

After a succession of stumbling performances in the state matches, Worrell’s men went on to play a full part in the first tied test match and were unlucky to lose the series to the unofficial world champions.

More importantly, their exuberance, skills and total commitment to attacking cricket revived a moribund game and a crowd equivalent in size to the one which listened to King poured on to the streets of Melbourne to bid them farewell.

“Clearing their way with bat and ball, West Indians at that moment had made a public entry into the comity of nations,” James concluded.

Trotsky and TruemanA glance at the index to Beyond a Boundary, indi-

cates the breadth and scope of the interests and life of a Marxist intellectual who was born in Trinidad in 1901 and died in the London suburb of Brixton in 1989.

Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who James knew, precedes England fast bowler Fred Trueman. Black American boxer Joe Louis, victor over German Max Schmeling in a world title fight which gripped the world’s imagination as it hurtled towards a glo-bal war, is followed by Toussaint L’Ouverture.

L’Ouverture, the slave who became the architect of the Haitian revolution, the only successful slave revolt in history, is the protagonist of James’s epic 1938 book The Black Jacobins.

In a play based on the book, American singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson played the part of L’Ouverture.

To the bewilderment of some otherwise admiring American reviewers, James, who was expelled from the United States because of his communist beliefs during the McCarthy era, cites his three primary influences as English literature, cricket and the fierce moral code of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School, which demanded strict adherence to the laws of games and the officials’ decisions. Before he was 10, wrote James, he was a British intellectual.

James’s widow Selma, who typed the manuscript of Beyond a Boundary, grew up in Brooklyn where the summer game was baseball, chronicled evoca-tively in another sports classic The Boys of Summer.

Coincidentally, Roger Kahn’s account of the 1950s’ Brooklyn Dodgers and their post-baseball lives con-tains at its heart the struggles and ultimate triumph of Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play in the major leagues in the modern era.

Selma accompanied James to England after his expulsion from the United States and was intrigued by cricket, the summer game spread by England to its various colonies where it was further shaped by native climes and characters.

A feminist and anti-racist activist, writer and lecturer she took time out from her busy schedule at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London’s Kentish Town recently to share her memories of James and Beyond a Boundary.

“It (cricket) gives deep insight into human per-sonality,” Selma James said. “It’s exciting. I found it really exciting. It tells me about human beings and that’s what interested me. I’m not a sportswoman, and I never was, but the important thing was that cricket gave you important insights into human personality.”

One of the personalities was Yorkshire opening batsman Len Hutton, who stoically defied the might of the Australian fast bowlers in the immediate post-war year before becoming the first professional cricketer to captain England.

“Revolting Contrast”While West Indies cricket, as James describes

with a dispassionate but forensic clarity in the open-ing chapters of Beyond a Boundary, was blighted by racism, caste and class. English cricket for much of its existence was divided by class. Amateurs (called gentleman) occupied one dressing room, profession-als (known as players), the other.

Only amateurs had the honour of captaining their country, until the authorities bowed to the inevitable and appointed Hutton, who promptly led England to home and away Ashes victories.

“Len Hutton was the framework of CLR’s cam-paign to make Frank Worrell captain,” Selma James continued. “It was really the common man who comes from below who is the superior. He makes his way up to the officer class. That’s what hap-pened to Len Hutton and that’s what happened to Frank Worrell.”

The breadth of Beyond a Boundary, and its maxim which has entered the English language “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” is staggering.

James gives exquisite pen portraits of Headley, fast bowler George John, opening batsman Wilton St Hill and his close friend Learie Constantine.

Constantine, a great all-rounder whose test fig-ures do not do justice to his prowess, was unable to get a job in Trinidad. Consequently, James wrote, he “revolted against the revolting contrast between his first-class status as a cricketer and his third-class status as a man”, and emigrated to England where he made his name in the Lancashire Leagues and eventually became the first black peer to sit in the House of Lords.

Beyond a Boundary also visits classical Greece, berates English historians for ignoring the impact of the Victorian cricket colossus W G Grace and argues that cricket is an art form as well as a game comparable to “the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance”.

“There is a chapter on Wilton St Hills, that’s a chapter of a novelist,” said Selma. “There’s a chap-ter on W G Grace, that’s a chapter of a historian. There’s a chapter on ‘What is Art?’, that’s a chapter of an art historian. I knew that he had studied each of the subjects. He had his own view and it was an original view.

“As an historian he not only knew English history, he knew French history. CLR was the sort of person who would read a book and read it many times.”

Beyond a Boundary and C L R James’ unifying vision formed part of a movement which in sport was to lead to a boycott of South African sports teams until Mandela was released after 27 years in prison and black power salutes on an Olympic podium in 1968.

“Beyond a Boundary did a very good job for the West Indies, not merely for cricket but for the West Indies,” said Selma James. “It really was a deeply anti-racist book in the sense that it helped people who loved cricket to be less racist. It helped them and I think that was crucial.” Reuters

Extraordinary anti-racist book celebrates 50th

anniversary

PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014 ROBOTS66

As a squat, red-and-black robot nicknamed CHIMP gingerly pushed open a spring-loaded door a gust of

wind swooped down onto the track at the Homestead-Miami Speedway and slammed the door shut, eliciting a col-lective sigh of disappointment from the audience.

The robot, developed by the Tartan Rescue team from the National Robotics Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, was one of 17 competing in the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge.

The agency, which funded basic sci-ence research for now commonplace technologies like the Internet and global positioning satellites, hopes the competition will spur the development of robots that can work in places too dangerous for humans.

The challenge was launched in 2011 in response to the meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant after it was hit by a massive earthquake-spawned tsunami. Nearly 160,000 people were forced to flee the area.

The backup power systems needed to cool the plant’s reactors failed and an emergency team from Tokyo Electric Power Company was unable to enter the damaged reactor building due to the intense radiation.

DARPA sent robots designed to dis-arm improvised explosive devices in Iraq to Japan, yet by the time workers were trained to use them it was too late to prevent a nuclear meltdown.

“What we realised was ... these robots couldn’t do anything other than observe,” said Gill Pratt, program manager for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. “What they needed was a robot to go into that reactor building and shut off the valves.”

Hydrogen continued building in the days that followed, fuelling a massive explosion.

During the two-day trials at a south Florida professional race car track, the platoon of robots faced obstacles designed to mimic the challenges fol-lowing a disaster. Robots had to cut through a reinforced concrete wall, navigate debris-strewn terrain and locate and turn off leaking valves. Officials from DARPA also disrupted the link between robots and their oper-ators, further simulating a disaster.

The eight teams with the highest scores will be awarded $1m in funding to prepare for the final round in late 2014, where a winner will take $2m.

While Carnegie-Mellon’s CHIMP eventually opened the door, leading the field was a two-legged robot from Japan’s team SCHAFT, which fin-ished first in the test, according to the DARPA Challenge website.

The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, based in Pensacola, Florida, took second place. Third went to Carnegie Mellon and CHIMP.

Successes in the challenges are about as common as failures. Many robots tumbled off an industrial lad-der designed to test sight and balance.

“Murphy’s law is very big in robot-ics,” said Daniel Lee, a robotics profes-sor at the University of Pennsylvania and program director for Team THOR, an agile, human-form robot, whose acronym stands for Tactical Hazardous Operations Robot. “It’s very difficult to account for all of the uncertainties that you’re going to face,” he said.

A handful of teams, including ones from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lockheed Martin, used a six-foot-two-inch, 330-pound human-oid robot named Atlas that DARPA contracted from Boston Dynamics, a company that was spun out of MIT in 1992 and recently acquired by Google.

A team from NASA’s Johnson Space Center competed with a robot called Valkyrie covered in white plastic and vinyl, looking like a human wearing a robot suit.

Some robots looked highly mecha-nised, while others had four legs and resembled a dog.

“The goal is to make it comfort-able for people to work with and to touch,” said Christopher McQuin, NASA’s chief engineer for hardware development.

After the final round next year Pratt said there are plans for another

robotics challenge, possibly to be hosted in Japan.

For the next advance in robotics, he said, “the amount of intelligence inside the robots needs to be able to handle small tasks.”

“We don’t want to burden human operators with saying put your foot here, put your other foot here, put your hand there,” he added. Reuters

Robots to the rescue at dangerous workplaces

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, a high-mobility, humanoid robot.

An LS 3 (Legged Squad Support System) robot.

The winner S-One robot by team SCHAFT from Japan.

FASHION 7PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

By Dan Zak

The socks are arranged on the table like thin cuts of tender-loin. “These are over a year’s worth of effort,” says one sock

guy.There are eight pairs, each a dif-

ferent color, vivid and rich and juicy-looking.

“This is $10,000 in socks,” says another sock guy, holding up a bright-red sock with thin white stripes.

A third sock guy has donned a pair. Despite his satisfied smile, he has one final criticism. “These are knee socks,” he says, pulling one up past the upper reaches of his calf, then planting his foot on the table, “and if we sell these, people will go, ‘Those are for old peo-ple.’ “

The sock guys have old-people names.

Joshua Steinman.Jay Gaul IV.D Turner Swicegood.They are actually 30, 30 and 26 years

old, respectively — not quite old enough to be squeezed of vitality and adven-ture by a lifetime of civil servitude. Once upon a time, three young men in search of safe nonconformity might have started a band. Now three young men, especially three young men in Washington, might launch a start-up to make a statement about dress socks.

“You can see more lines, a lot more negative space,” says Jay, pointing at the stripes in this latest batch that have been narrowed to one-sixteenth of an inch. “So it’s more pleasing.”

Josh and Jay are lieutenants in the Navy and met in officer candidate school. Josh met Turner, a civilian staff officer at the Pentagon who focuses on Middle East policy, through mutual

friends. Together, when they clock out of the Defense Department, they are Penance Hall, an infant company that’s investing against the stodginess and cheapness of the traditional, mass-market cotton dress sock, with its gold-toed foot soldiers, by creating a wool alternative that is high-end, vibrant, calf-high and made in the United States. Because the socks would be made in America, the company would employ American businesses and, therefore, American people, the part-ners say. So the project isn’t just van-ity or boredom or a whimsical sideline, although it could be that, too.

“A very patriotic product,” Jay says. He picks up a pair that is somewhere between royal blue and dark blue. “You wouldn’t mistake it for a gray or a navy,” he says. “It’s elegant.”

Turner is pacing a couple of feet away in his bedroom, talking into his cellphone.

“Oh, come on, you don’t have mas-culine hands,” Turner says to a friend on the other end.

Penance Hall needs a woman to paint her nails red and tie a man’s dress shoe for one of its promotional photos.

“Well, why don’t you send me a picture of your hands and I’ll be the judge.”

There’s a dapper energy earlier this month here in Turner’s Washington apartment. In a matter of hours, they’ll take a middle-of-the-night train to New York to blow their last $2,500 to film a promotional video on Pier 59 for their Kickstarter campaign, through which they hope to raise enough money ($36,000) to finance a first order of three kinds of socks. The small batch they ordered just for video and promo-tional purposes cost them thousands.

For the video, “we’ll have 15 seconds each to talk about wool,” as Josh puts it.

Turner is as animated as Jay is reserved, and Josh is the centred strat-egist in between. Jay can monologue about Edward VIII as a fashion icon, while Turner’s tastes tend toward the modern and relaxed. Washington’s business fashion falls somewhere in between these sensibilities — between riverfront preppy and boardroom pin-stripes, between military sharp and lobby-shop smart — but the choices are nearly always too typical, the sock guys believe, and too often dismissive of the details.

“I think, in general, the professional man’s look in Washington, is fairly staid and uniform, and there is a particular configuration of dark suit, white shirt, red or blue tie, and dark shoes that you see as sort of a trope everywhere,” Jay says. “And it’s a shame, really, because I think — particularly in a place where people do try to project value in their various professions — too little thought, time and energy gets dedicated to the way they present themselves.”

So they figured they’d start at the literal bottom of the wardrobe, with its most basic, underseen element. If guys are paying $1,000 or more for their suits, they argue, why wouldn’t they pay $25 or $30 for a pair of premium homegrown socks that are designed to impress and endure?

Since they incorporated Penance Hall in June 2012, their lives have been measured in microns and needle counts. They’ve road-tripped their way up and down the Mid-Atlantic supply chain and studied the make and design of such top-drawer overseas brands as Pantherella and Marcoliani.

Now they’ve got the right breed of sheep (an American variant on the

Merino), the right wool supplier in South Carolina, the right dyer and weaver and suppliers of nylon and spandex (all in North Carolina), the right needle count (200) and micron count (19.5), the right colours (crim-son, blue and black, to start), the right spacing between stripes (three-quar-ters of an inch), the right height (above the calf muscle but below the knee).

Josh, while serving a rotation in Baghdad several years ago, decided to wear loud argyle and bright stripes that clashed discreetly with the matte finish of the US Embassy and its dusty, colourless surroundings. He became known as the sock guy. Those kinds of socks were colour-coded conversa-tion starters, like the academic scarves worn by British collegians that Josh had admired in his travels. Quiet eve-nings in the Green Zone were fertile territory for entrepreneurial thoughts, so Penance Hall, you might say, was one of a million small things to come out of the war. And now Josh and his friends are trying to create a small business the hard way, the expensive way. The entirely American way. And if the socks sell, and the business proves viable, they’ll start to work their way toward a full line of clothing, for men and women.

“All my polo shirts are made in Turkey and China, but the advertise-ments are very much all-American,” Josh says. “It feels like a little bit of a betrayal. We’ve been working on this for a year and a half, and we could’ve gone to Korea and had a product in 4 1/2 weeks. I told the guys when we first started: ‘Look, we all have day jobs, roofs over our heads. It’s not a company; it’s an experiment.’ I want to see if we can do it.”

WP-Bloomberg

For three entrepreneurs, dreams For three entrepreneurs, dreams of fashion success start at toesof fashion success start at toes

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he

launch

of

the

firs

t pos

ter

of t

he

film

. The

lead

act

ors

are

acti

vely

par

tici

pat

ing

in t

he

cam

pai

gn f

or t

he

firs

t pos

ter

launch

.

Arsh

ad s

ets

goal

for

2014

Act

or A

rshad

War

si, w

hos

e film

s M

r Jo

e B

. Ca

rva

lho

and D

edh

Ish

qiya

ar

e re

ady

for

rele

ase,

has

set

som

e “d

ifficu

lt y

et a

chie

vabl

e” g

oals

for

him

self

for

201

4. T

he

acto

r to

ok t

o T

wit

ter

to s

har

e his

thou

ghts

on 2

013,

an

d a

lso

his

aim

s fo

r 20

14.

“Than

k y

ou, f

or m

akin

g m

y 20

13 a

fab

ulo

us

year

. I h

ave

set

som

e go

als

for

mys

elf

for

2014

, dif

ficu

lt b

ut

achie

vabl

e. N

eed y

our

pra

yers

,” A

rshad

pos

ted o

n t

he

mic

robl

oggi

ng

site

.M

r Jo

e B

. Ca

rva

lho,

dir

ecte

d b

y S

amir

Tiw

ari,

will se

e A

rshad

in t

he

role

of

a d

etec

tive

. The

com

edy

will re

leas

e to

mor

row

.In

Abi

shek

Chau

bey’

s D

edh

Ish

qiya

, whic

h w

ill re

leas

e on

Jan

uar

y 10

, he

will be

see

n in a

rust

ic loo

k a

longs

ide

actr

ess

Hum

a Q

ure

shi.

SRK,

Big

B d

efea

ted

by k

ids

at g

ames

Meg

asta

r A

mit

abh B

achch

an a

nd s

uper

star

Shah

Rukh K

han

are

on

top o

f th

e B

olly

woo

d s

cene,

but

they

are

n’t

as

com

pet

ent

when

it

com

es t

o co

mpet

ing

wit

h t

hei

r gr

andch

ildre

n a

nd c

hildre

n a

t vi

deo

gam

es

and a

dven

ture

spor

ts.

Am

itab

h, w

ho

is b

usy

spen

din

g th

e N

ew Y

ear

wit

h h

is fam

ily,

shar

ed h

is

exper

ience

of

a Je

t S

ki ad

ventu

re w

ith h

is g

randch

ildre

n. T

he

71-y

ear-

old

has

thre

e gr

andch

ildre

n —

Aga

stya

, Nav

ya N

avel

i an

d A

arad

hya

.“T

he

Pan

am

a...

the

sea.

..and a

fter

ge

ttin

g be

at o

n J

et

Ski

by g

ran

dch

il-

dre

n,”

A

mit

abh

post

ed

on

th

e m

icro

blog

ging

site

.S

hah

R

uk

h

Khan

, w

ho

enjo

ys

pla

yin

g

a

vid

eo

gam

e

vers

ion

of

Fif

a

invit

ed

Am

itabh

fo

r a

frie

nd

ly

gam

e as

h

e is

ti

red of

bei

ng

“bea

ten

at

al

l ga

mes

” by

his

kid

s. “

Sir

, tak

e ou

t ti

me

tom

orr

ow

(W

edn

esday

)...l

et’s

do

a litt

le F

ifa.

..I a

m a

lso

tire

d o

f be

ing

beat

en a

t al

l ga

mes

by

kid

s si

nce

la

st f

ew d

ays,

” S

RK

pos

ted o

n T

wit

ter.

SR

K,

who

is m

arri

ed t

o G

auri

Khan

, has

dau

ghte

r S

uhan

a an

d s

ons

Ary

an, A

bram

.

PLU

S |

THU

RS

DAY

2 J

AN

UA

RY

201

4

By

An

dy

Fix

mer

Ton

y S

tark

did

mor

e th

an s

ave

the

wor

ld in I

ron

Ma

n 3

. He

hel

ped

del

iver

a

reco

rd s

um

mer

in t

hea

tres

and c

arry

H

olly

woo

d t

o a

new

hig

h for

all o

f 20

13.

Wit

h t

wo

days

left

, US

and

Can

adia

n

cinem

as a

re c

erta

in t

o pas

s la

st y

ear’s

reco

rd $

10.8

bn in t

icket

sal

es b

y ab

out

1 per

cen

t, r

esea

rcher

Ren

trak

Cor

p

said

in

a s

tate

men

t. S

tudio

s sp

aced

ou

t th

eir

bigg

est

film

s to

avo

id h

ead-

to-h

ead c

ompet

itio

n,

and p

roduce

d

mor

e re

leas

es w

ith d

omes

tic

reve

nue

of $

200m

-plu

s, o

ften

wit

h e

xhib

itor

s ch

argi

ng

extr

a fo

r la

rger

scr

eens,

plu

sh

seat

s an

d b

ette

r so

und.

“To

get

peop

le t

o co

me

out

and

spen

d th

e ex

tra

mon

ey, th

e m

ovie

has

to

be

over

the

top,” s

aid M

arti

n P

yykkon

en,

an a

nal

yst

wit

h W

edge

Par

tner

s in

G

reen

woo

d V

illa

ge,

Col

orad

o. “

That

’s

one

reas

on s

tudio

s h

ave

bec

ome

so

good

, and s

o fo

cuse

d, a

t pro

duci

ng

big-

ger

bloc

kbu

ster

mov

ies.

”W

alt

Dis

ney

Co’

s Ir

on M

an

3,

top-

pin

g th

e U

S b

ox o

ffice

wit

h $

409m

in

sale

s, u

nder

scor

ed H

olly

woo

d’s

succ

ess

revi

siti

ng

hit

s, lea

din

g th

e in

dust

ry t

o a

seco

nd-

stra

ight

annual

rec

ord a

fter

dro

ps

the

pri

or t

wo

year

s. E

ight

of t

he

top 1

0 film

s w

ere

sequ

els

or r

eviv

als

of a

ctio

n,

fan

tasy

, an

imat

ion

or

sci-

fi h

its,

acc

ordin

g to

Box

Offi

ce M

ojo.

T

wo

of t

hos

e, T

he

Hun

ger

Ga

mes

and

Th

e H

obbi

t, r

eturn

wit

h n

ew e

pis

odes

in

201

4.T

he

Hob

bit:

Th

e D

esol

ati

on o

f Sm

aug

, th

e se

cond o

f th

ree

new

film

s fr

om t

he

wor

k o

f J

R R

Tol

kie

n,

led U

S s

ales

fo

r a

thir

d-s

trai

ght

wee

ken

d,

even

w

ith f

resh

com

pet

itio

n f

rom

Mar

tin

S

cors

ese’

s T

he

Wol

f of

Wa

ll S

tree

t.

Th

e H

obbi

t h

as

taken

in

$19

0.3

m

dom

esti

cally

sin

ce i

ts D

ecem

ber

13

deb

ut

and $

614.

1m w

orld

wid

e fo

r T

ime

War

ner

In

c’s

War

ner

Bro

s, t

he

2013

box

-offi

ce l

eader

, ac

cord

ing

to B

ox

Offi

ce M

ojo.

The

year

’s w

inner

s w

ere

acco

mpa-

nie

d b

y a

few

duds.

Th

e L

one

Ra

nge

rfr

om D

isn

ey,

lost

$16

0m

to

$19

0m

, ac

cord

ing

to a

n A

ugu

st c

onfe

rence

cal

l tr

ansc

ript.

Son

y C

orp’s

film

stu

dio

stu

mble

d

in t

he

sum

mer

box

-offi

ce s

easo

n t

hat

ru

ns

from

May

to

earl

y S

epte

mber

. B

ig-b

udge

t te

ntp

oles

Aft

er E

art

h, w

ith

Will

Sm

ith,

and W

hit

e H

ouse

Dow

n,

wit

h C

han

nin

g T

atum

and J

amie

Fox

x,

failed

to

connec

t w

ith a

udie

nce

s.S

tudio

s av

oided

blo

ody

box

-offi

ce

batt

les

by p

utt

ing

som

e ti

me

betw

een

thei

r bi

gges

t pic

ture

s, P

yykkon

en s

aid.

Iron

Man

3, r

elea

sed

on M

ay 3

, rac

ked

up

85 p

erce

nt

of it

s to

tal d

omes

tic

sale

s in

thre

e w

eeks.

The

late

st i

nst

alm

ent

in t

he

stor

y of

billion

aire

inve

nto

r T

ony

Sta

rk fac

ed s

erio

us

com

peti

tion

only

by

its

thir

d w

eeken

d, w

hen

Via

com

Inc’

s P

aram

ount

Pic

ture

s op

ened

Sta

r T

rek

Into

Da

rkn

ess.

Wit

h

few

er

rele

ase

s bu

nch

ed

toge

ther

, at

lea

st 1

2 fi

lms

exce

eded

$20

0m

in

US

tic

ket

sal

es t

his

yea

r,

com

par

ed w

ith 1

1 in

201

2 an

d s

even

in

201

1, a

ccor

din

g to

Box

Offi

ce M

ojo.

T

hat

hel

ped

th

e in

dust

ry b

eat

last

ye

ar’s

tot

al e

ven t

hou

gh o

nly

Iro

n M

an

3

topped

$40

0 dom

esti

cally

this

yea

r,

com

par

ed w

ith t

hre

e in

the

pre

viou

s 12

mon

ths.

The

less

com

pet

itiv

e ca

len

dar

als

o al

low

ed s

ome

slee

per

hit

s to

em

erge

. G

ravi

ty, th

e 3-

D s

pac

e ad

ventu

re f

ea-

turi

ng

San

dra

Bull

ock

an

d G

eorg

e C

loon

ey, op

ened

in e

arly

Oct

ober

and

gener

ated

$25

4.6m

in d

omes

tic

reve

nue

for

War

ner

Bro

s.G

ravi

ty w

as t

he

No

2 film

of th

e ye

ar

for

the

studio

, beh

ind M

an

of S

teel

, and

hel

ped

cem

ent

War

ner

Bro

s’ indust

ry

lead

ing

$1.8

1bn in d

omes

tic

sale

s as

of

Dec

embe

r 26

, ac

cord

ing

to B

ox O

ffice

M

ojo.

“The

pro

duct

this

yea

r w

as a

ppea

l-in

g to

a w

ide

range

of

audie

nce

s, a

nd

ther

e w

asn’t

a c

once

ntr

atio

n t

hat

we

som

etim

es s

ee w

her

e th

e m

ovie

s ca

n-

nib

aliz

e ea

ch o

ther

,” s

aid B

ud M

ayo,

ch

airm

an a

nd c

hie

f ex

ecuti

ve o

ffice

r of

D

igit

al C

inem

a D

esti

nat

ions

Cor

p, t

he

Wes

tfiel

d, N

ew J

erse

y-ba

sed o

per

ator

of

abo

ut

200

Dig

iple

x sc

reen

s.T

hat

tre

nd c

onti

nues

on J

anuar

y 17

w

hen

Par

amou

nt

rele

ases

Ja

ck R

yan

: S

ha

dow

Rec

ruit

, a

reboo

t of

auth

or

Tom

Cla

ncy

’s s

py-

thri

ller

ser

ies,

wit

h

Chri

s P

ine

from

Sta

r T

rek

takin

g th

e ti

tle

role

. T

hre

e w

eek

s la

ter

Son

y an

d 2

1st

Cen

tury

Fox

Inc

rele

ase

Th

e M

onum

ents

Men

, w

ith a

n a

ll-s

tar

cast

in

cludin

g M

att

Dam

on a

nd C

loon

ey“E

ach

of

th

ose

could

h

ave

bee

n

rele

ased

in D

ecem

ber,

eas

ily

chip

pin

g aw

ay b

ox-o

ffice

sal

es,” M

ayo

said

. “B

ut

that

won

’t h

appen

in J

anuar

y, w

her

e th

ose

mov

ies

wil

l h

ave

thei

r ow

n

plat

form

.”S

ales

wer

e al

so b

oost

ed b

y a

year

-end

spri

nt,

wit

h r

even

ue

risi

ng

25 p

erce

nt

over

the

five

-wee

k U

S h

olid

ay p

erio

d

from

a y

ear

ago,

acc

ordin

g to

Ren

trak

. D

isney

’s F

roze

n d

omin

ated

anim

atio

n

this

h

olid

ay se

ason

, w

ith

$24

8.4

m

dom

esti

cally

and $

491.

9m w

orld

wid

e,

acco

rdin

g to

Box

Offi

ce M

ojo.

Th

e dom

esti

c re

cord

com

es e

ven

wit

h a

tten

dan

ce a

nd a

vera

ge t

icket

pri

ces

litt

le

chan

ged

from

2012

, acc

ord

ing

to

an

aly

st

Pyyk

kon

en.

Mult

iple

x op

erat

ors

are

bec

omin

g

more

so

ph

isti

cate

d,

pri

cin

g

pea

k

show

tim

es o

n F

riday

an

d S

aturd

ay

nig

hts

hig

her

th

an w

eekday

s, h

e sa

id.

“Th

at’s

beg

inn

ing

to s

kew

th

e m

ix

of w

hen

peo

ple

go

to t

he

mov

ies,

” P

yykkon

en s

aid. “

The

thea

tres

are

full

on F

riday

nig

hts

but

over

the

cours

e of

a y

ear

peo

ple

are

sta

rtin

g to

pic

k

tim

es w

hen

it’s

chea

per

.”A

t th

e M

arc

us

Th

eatr

es m

ult

i-ple

x i

n A

ddis

on,

Illi

noi

s, a

bou

t 25

mil

es w

est

of C

hic

ago

, ti

cket

s fo

r th

e S

aturd

ay,

Dec

embe

r 28

sh

owin

g of

Th

e S

ecre

t L

ife

of W

alt

er M

itty

at

8pm

cos

t $13

.50

each

. Th

at in

cludes

a

Dre

am L

oun

ger

seat

in

the

com

pan

y’s

Ult

raS

cree

n D

LX

audit

oriu

m.

Pri

ces

for

adult

tic

ket

s at

th

e lo

ca-

tion

ran

ge f

rom

as

litt

le a

s $8

for

a m

atin

ee t

o $14

.50 f

or a

n a

dva

nce

d

scre

enin

g.A

t a

Cin

emark

in

F

rem

on

t,

Cal

ifor

nia

, a 9

:45p

m s

how

ing

of W

alt

er

Mit

ty w

as p

rice

d a

t $14

.25,

wh

ile

at

the

Reg

al C

inem

as i

n d

own

tow

n L

os

An

gele

s, 3-

D ti

cket

s fo

r 47

Ron

in

tota

lled

$18

.75

each

.S

ome

of t

he

cred

it f

or 2

013

sal

es

goes

to

so

cial

med

ia,

said

P

aul

Der

gara

bedia

n,

sen

ior

med

ia a

nal

yst

for

Ren

trak

, as

Fac

eboo

k T

wit

ter

pro

-vi

ded

a v

irtu

al w

ater

cool

er f

or f

ans

to c

hat

. S

till, he

said

, th

e m

ovie

s had

to

del

iver

.“I

t ult

imat

ely

com

es d

own

to

the

pro

du

ct,

the

movie

s th

emse

lves

m

ore

than

any

oth

er s

ingl

e fa

ctor

,”

Der

gara

bed

ian

sai

d.

“Th

e li

neu

p o

f m

ovie

s st

ill co

nsi

sted

of

the

usu

al m

ix,

but

ther

e w

as s

omet

hin

g ab

out

the

2013

sla

te t

hat

cre

ated

a s

omet

hin

g-fo

r-ev

erybod

y en

vir

onm

ent

at th

e m

ult

iple

x.”

WP

-Blo

om

ber

g

HO

LLY

WO

OD

NE

WS

Win

slet

is R

eitm

an’s

favo

urite

Dir

ecto

r Ja

son

Rei

tman

, w

ho

wor

ked

wit

h K

ate

Win

slet

in

his

film

L

abo

r D

ay,

is

in a

we

of t

he

Tit

an

ic a

ctre

ss. T

he

dir

ecto

r sa

id h

e is

so

fond o

f th

e ac

tres

s th

at h

e w

ould

pre

fer

wai

ting

for

her

dat

es r

ather

than

ca

st s

omeb

ody

else

in a

rol

e th

at s

uit

s on

ly h

er, r

epor

ts c

onta

ctm

usi

c.co

m.

“Kat

e W

insl

et is

one

of t

he

grea

test

act

ress

es li

ving

today

, and t

hat

ther

e w

ill e

ver

be. I

f I’ve

got

a s

crip

t th

at K

ate

Win

slet

is w

illing

to s

ay y

es t

o, I

will

wai

t a

year

, I w

ill w

ait

five

yea

rs,” B

ang

Show

biz

quot

ed R

eitm

an a

s sa

ying.

“Lab

or D

ay w

as a

dra

ma

film

bas

ed o

n a

n e

ponym

ous

nov

el J

oyce

May

nar

d.

It a

lso

feat

ure

d J

osh B

rolin.

Char

lize

Ther

on to

ado

pt a

gain

Act

ress

Char

lize

Ther

on is

gett

ing

read

y to

adop

t a

seco

nd c

hild.

The

38-y

ear-

old i

s kee

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PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014610 SOCHI 2014 BIATHLON

SO

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Sources: sochi.ru, olympic.org

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

FE

B

Biathlon Laura Cross-country Ski & Biathlon Centre

EmilHegleSvendsen(NOR)Two goldmedalsand onesilver at2010Games

Rifle:Carriedon back

RIFLE (.22 calibre):Athletes must shootfrom standingand pronepositions attargets 50maway

20km15km

Individual

15km12.5km

Mass Start

10km7.5km

Sprint

12.5km10km

Pursuit

7.5km6km

Relays

ShootingRange:Athletesstop oneach lapof circuitto fire fiveshots attarget

Target: Hit makesblack plate fall awayand white plate riseto cover hole

Penaltyloop

FinishAll events

Start: Allevents

Cheekpiece

Frontsight

Four magazines(five roundseach) Snow

capExtracartridgespender

Norway

France

RussiaVancouver 2010

Biathlonmedal table

2

1

1

2

1

0

0

1

1

Germany

Russia

Slovakia

2

1

1

1

1

1

2

0

0

Mixed relay – comprisingteams of two men and twowomen – makes Olympicdebut in Sochi

© GRAPHIC NEWSSources: sochi.ru, olympic.org

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

FE

B

Laura Cross-country Ski & Biathlon Centre

EmilHegleSvendsen(NOR)Two goldmedalsand onesilver at2010Games

Rifle:Carriedon back

RIFLE (.22 calibre):Athletes must shootfrom standingand pronepositions attargets 50maway

20km15km

Individual

15km12.5km

Mass Start

10km7.5km

Sprint

12.5km10km

Pursuit

7.5km6km

Relays

ShootingRange:Athletesstop oneach lapof circuitto fire fiveshots attarget

Target: Hit makesblack plate fall awayand white plate riseto cover hole

Penaltyloop

FinishAll events

Start: Allevents

Cheekpiece

Frontsight

Four magazines(five roundseach) Snow

capExtracartridgespender

Norway

France

RussiaVancouver 2010

Biathlonmedal table

2

1

1

2

1

0

0

1

1

Germany

Russia

Slovakia

2

1

1

1

1

1

2

0

0

Mixed relay – comprisingteams of two men and twowomen – makes Olympicdebut in Sochi

11HEALTH PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

By Andrew M Seaman

For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain, a new study hints.

Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said reli-gion or spirituality was “important” to them versus those who cared less about religion.

“Our beliefs and our moods are reflected in our brain and with new imaging techniques we can begin to see this,” Myrna Weissman told said. “The brain is an extraordinary organ. It not only controls, but is controlled by our moods.”

Weissman, who worked on the new study, is a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University and chief of the Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology department at New York State Psychiatric institute.

While the new study suggests a link between brain thickness and religiosity or spirituality, it cannot say that thicker brain regions cause people to be religious or spiritual, Weissman and her colleagues note in JAMA Psychiatry.

It might hint, however, that religiosity can enhance the brain’s resilience against depression in a very physical way, they write.

Previously, the researchers had found that people who said they were religious or spiritual were at lower risk of depression. They also found that people at higher risk for depression had thinning cortices, compared to those with lower depression risk.

The cerebral cortex is the brain’s outermost layer made of gray matter that forms the organ’s charac-teristic folds. Certain areas of the cortex are impor-tant hubs of neural activity for processes such as sensory perception, language and emotion.

For the new study, the researchers twice asked 103 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 how impor-tant religion or spirituality was to them and how often they attended religious services over a five-year period.

In addition to being asked about spirituality, the participants’ brains were imaged once to see how thick their cortices were.

All the participants were the children or grand-children of people who participated in an earlier study about depression. Some had a family history of depression, so they were considered to be at high risk for the disorder. Others with no history served as a comparison group.

Overall, the researchers found that the importance of religion or spirituality to an individual was tied to having a thicker cortex. The link was strongest among those at high risk of depression.

“What we’re doing now is looking at the stability of it,” Weissman said.

Her team is taking more images of the partici-pants’ brains to see whether the size of the cortex changes with their religiosity or spirituality.

“This is a way of replicating and validating the findings,” she said. “That work is in process now.”

Dr Dan Blazer, the J P Gibbons Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, said the study is very inter-esting but is still exploratory.

“I think this tells us it’s an area to look at,” Blazer, who was not involved in the new study, said. “It’s an area of interest but we have to be careful.”

For example, he said there could be other areas of the brain linked to religion and spirituality. Also, spirituality may be a marker of something else, such as socioeconomic status.

Blazer added that it’s an exciting time, because researchers are actively looking at links between the brain, religion and risk of depression.

“We’ve seen this field move from a time when there were virtually no studies done at all,” he said.

Weissman said the mind and body are intimately connected.

“What this means therapeutically is hard to say,” she added.

SOURCE: bit.ly/1jYo6ro JAMA Psychiatry, online December 25, 2013.

Reuters

Bacteria dodging antibiotics? Not any more

Not many know that there are few stub-born bacteria that become dormant when exposed to antibiotics, only to awaken later to begin their dreadful task. In a breakthrough research, the mechanism by which some bacte-ria are able to survive antibacterial treatment has been revealed — paving the way to control such ‘persistent’ bacteria in near future.

The researchers found that when antibiotics attack these bacteria, the HipA toxin — natu-rally occurring toxin triggering dormancy of the bacteria — disrupts the chemical “messaging” process necessary for nutrients to build proteins.

Bacteria treat this condition as ‘hunger sig-nal’, go into an inactive state in which they are able to survive until the antibacterial treatment is over and they can resume their harmful activ-ity, said the research published in the journal Nature Communications.

“When you treat using antibiotics, there will always be some bacteria that survive. If we man-age in the future to introduce a substance that deals with the biological mechanism that the study uncovered, antibiotics will be more effec-tive,” said Gadi Glaser of faculty of medicine. He was assisted by Nathalie Balaban of Racah Institute of Physics.

Until now, it had been known that there is a connection between these kind of bacteria and the naturally occurring toxin HipA in the bac-teria, but scientists did not know the cellular target of this toxin and how its activity triggers dormancy of the bacteria, added the research.

The research on persistent bacteria, being conducted in Balaban’s lab for several years, would be combined with the work being done in Glaser’s lab focusing on combating persistent bacteria - leading to more effective treatment for bacterial infections.

Maths to rescue patients with organ transplantThose who hate maths should know this — a mathematical model is here to improve the success rate of organ transplants.

The researchers are now working towards designing a tool capable of preventing rejection rate in organ transplants.

They created a mathematical algorithm that would indicate for each person — using their genetics, size, age, current medication and time since the transplant — what should be their immuno-suppressive drug dosage.

The process works towards understanding type of proteins in charge of metabolising the drugs (enzymes) for each patient who under-went organ transplant, thus establishing the exact dose of the immuno-suppressive drugs.

“This method is not only capable of giving an effective certainty at the moment of estab-lishing the treatment but also save time and decrease rejection — increasing the quality of life, allowing the survival of more patients and optimising the health system,” said Gilberto Castañeda Hernández from the department of Pharmacology at the Centre of Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (Cinvestav) in Mexico.

Currently, the quantity of drug to be adminis-tered is determined by trial and error. However, this process takes long and gives rise to compli-cations that are translated into an acute rejec-tion, said the study. Agencies

Thicker brain sections Thicker brain sections tied to spirituality, tied to spirituality,

claims studyclaims study

By Alwyn Scott

The US government took a step toward opening the skies to aerial drones, author-izing six sites where unmanned aircraft can be tested for a variety of uses.

The Federal Aviation Administration already had approved limited use of drones in the United States for law enforcement, surveillance, atmospheric research and other applications.

The decision will give companies, universities and others place to test much broader uses, such as crop spraying, catching exotic-animal poachers or deliver-ing packages, as Amazon.com Inc recently suggested.

“It provides the platform for this research to be carried out on a very large scale across the country,” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta told reporters.

While the test sites were hailed by governments and industry as a major milestone that would bring broad economic benefits to the winning regions, they also renewed privacy and safety concerns about the aircraft, which can hover over cities and record peo-ple’s movements with sophisticated video cameras.

Drones are popular with law enforcement in part because they are smaller and less costly alternatives to manned aircraft. They also are a growing business for companies such as Boeing Co, Northrop Grumman Corp, Lockheed Martin Corp and AeroVironment Inc.

Global spending on unmanned aircraft is expected to nearly double to $11.6bn a year by 2023, according to aviation and aerospace industry research firm Teal Group.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), estimates the industry could contribute more than $80bn to the US economy over a decade and create more than 100,000 jobs.

Privacy ConcernsBut since 2012, when congress required the FAA to

establish a roadmap for the broader use of drones, 42 states have considered restrictions based on privacy or safety concerns, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Eight states have passed such laws, and most require probable cause warrants before the surveillance can be used in criminal cases.

The FAA already has approved more than 300 requests for unmanned aircraft use, and many have raised safety issues more than privacy. But as technol-ogy improves in the absence of a privacy policy, fears of “Big Brother” in the sky have grown.

“You can imagine a world in which it is impossible to walk out of your house without being subjected to persistent monitoring and recording by drones,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. “Things that might have seemed like science fiction will be here before we know it.”

Operators of the new FAA test sites are required to develop a written privacy policy, and to address safety concerns, but it is not clear whether the policies will protect privacy.

“Online privacy policies don’t require that websites protect privacy,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a dig-ital rights organisation. “We still don’t know what data the drones are going to be gathering at the test sites.”

The FAA chose the six sites, in Alaska, New York, North Dakota, Texas, North Carolina and Virginia, from the 25 applications it received from 24 states. The agency is required to write initial rules governing the commercial operation of drones by 2015.

Huerta said the FAA would first address the use of drones in small civil applications and expected to

propose a rule in early 2014.

Already TestingTwo of the states that passed drone laws, Texas and

Virginia, were among those awarded test sites, but both had exemptions for research-related drone use.

The Texas law, for example, excludes flights or test-ing at sites approved by the FAA, said Gloria Gallardo, director of media relations at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, which was among the six sites selected.

Texas landowners must approve any test flights over their property, but since much of the 6,000 square miles in the Texas test area is state-owned, the owner is “almost certain to grant permission,” she said.

The other five sites will be developed by the University of Alaska, the state of Nevada, Griffiss International Airport in New York state, the North Dakota Department of Commerce, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which includes locations in New Jersey.

The first test site is expected to be open in six months and the sites will operate at least until February 2017.

But some locations already have other tests going on, and research money available.

One of several tests in North Dakota, for example, looks at how to train pilots to fly unmanned vehicles for the US Air Force, said Al Palmer, director of the Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research at the University of North Dakota.

“We’re flying unmanned vehicles right now,” he said.North Dakota’s FAA test site will study, among

other things, human factors that can affect pilots, from the design and layout of the remote controls to dealing with long flights that can last 36 hours, he said.

The state also has created a 19-member committee to review all tests, much like an ethics review board for human drug trials, said Bob Becklund, director of the Northern Plains Unmanned Aircraft Systems Authority, an organisation set up by the state to guide its drone programmes.

And the state has set aside taxpayer money, even for private companies, and will match their investment dollar for dollar. The state contacted Amazon this month after the company unveiled plans for drone-delivered packages.

“We said: ‘We’d love to help you bring your vision to fruition,’” Becklund said. They said: “We’ll keep your number on file.” Reuters

TECHNOLOGYPLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 201412

US cracks open skies for testing drones

Never worked with NSA on iPhone hacks: AppleApple Inc has never worked with the US National Security Agency and is unaware of efforts to target

its smartphones, the company said in response to reports that the spy agency had developed a system to hack into and monitor iPhones. Germany’s Der Spiegel reported this week that a secretive unit of the NSA, which is under fire for the extent and depth of its spying programs around the world, makes specialized gear and software to infiltrate and monitor a plethora of computing devices, including mobile phones.

The report included an NSA graphic dated 2008 that outlined a system in development called DROPOUTJEEP, described as a “software implant” that allows infiltrators to push and pull and retrieve data from iPhones such as contact lists. Der Spiegel referred to it as a “trojan,” or malware that helps hackers get into protected systems. The report did not suggest that Apple had cooperated with the US spying agency on so-called backdoors.

In a statement, the NSA did not comment on any specific allegations but said that its interest “in any given technology is driven by the use of that technology by foreign intelligence targets.”

“The United States pursues its intelligence mission with care to ensure that innocent users of those same technologies are not affected,” the agency added.

The iPhone was a relatively innovative gadget in 2008. It hit the market in 2007 and proceeded to help revolutionize the mobile phone industry. “Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products,” the company said in a statement.

“We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who’s behind them.” Reuters

COMICS & MORE 13

Hoy en la HistoriaJanuary 2, 2002

1839: Pioneering French photographer Louis Daguerre took the first picture of the moon1989: It was reported that cattle ranchers in Brazil had cut down an area of rainforest as big as Belgium1992: Russians were shocked as state controls were lifted and food prices soared in the new market economy1994: Astronomers found a new galaxy at the edge of the universe, around 13 billion light years away

Scientists said that transplants using animal organs had moved a step closer after cloning pigs without a gene that would cause the human body to reject them

Picture: Getty Images © GRAPHIC NEWS

ALL IN THE MIND Can you find the hidden words? They may be horizontal,vertical, diagonal, forwards or backwards.

BALL, BIRDIE, BOGEY, BUNKER, CADDIE, CLUB, CLUBHOUSE,COURSE, DRIVER, EAGLE, FAIRWAY, FLAG, FORE, GOLF CART,GREEN, HANDICAP, HAZARD, HOLE, HOLE-IN-ONE, IRON, LINKS, PAR, PIN, PITCH, PUTTER, ROUGH, ROUND, SAND TRAP, SCORE, STROKE, SWING, TEE, WEDGE, WOOD.

LEARN ARABIC

Baby Blues by Jerry Scott and Rick Kirkman

Zits by Dennis Young and Denis Lebrun

Hagar The Horrible by Chris Browne

Verbs often used

Allow Yasma�

Answer Youjawib

Appear Ya�har

Approach Yaqtarib

Arrange Yourattib

Arrive Ya�il

Ask Yas'al

Astonish Yandahi�

Attract Yaj�oub

Believe You�addiq

ç = ‘a’ in ‘agh’ when surprised

PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

HYPER SUDOKU

CROSSWORD

CROSSWORDS

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER

How to play Hyper Sudoku:A Hyper Sudoku

Puzzle is solved

by filling the

numbers from 1

to 9 into the blank

cells. A Hyper

Sudoku has

unlike Sudoku

13 regions

(four regions

overlap with the

nine standard

regions). In all

regions the numbers from 1 to 9 can appear

only once. Otherwise, a Hyper Sudoku is

solved like a normal Sudoku.

ACROSS 1 Terminal cases 8 Something to do

experiments in15 One of the Big Three in

credit reports16 Eradicate17 Baking session18 Old West German

moniker19 Goal of a 17-Across20 Off the rack22 Jewish rite24 Tramp25 ___ Hawkins Day26 Bald Mountain’s range28 Often-affected outburst30 Time to go31 Navigator who named

Natal33 Nice things to be

massaged35 Adoption option36 “The Whiffenpoof Song”

ending39 Slush-pile pile: Abbr.

42 ___ cellar43 Imitated a wound-up toy47 Schlemiel’s cry49 Providers of football

game coverage?51 Title woman in a J. P.

Donleavy novel52 Big name in water

filtration54 Charge56 Shot after a break?57 Bar glasses?60 Goal61 Recreating, maybe62 It smells on a bug64 More dear65 Sponge66 Advanced photocopier

features67 Synchronized

DOWN 1 One of a tight pair 2 Some zoo attractions

3 Really going after, with “for”

4 It was ceded to Brit. in the Treaty of Utrecht

5 Way off 6 Racetrack array 7 Don’t hold your breath 8 Star of 2009’s Fame

Ball Tour 9 Assist with a job10 Parts of the Big Apple11 Try to scratch12 Greasy, perhaps13 Subject of the 2009

biography “Puttin’ on the Ritz”

14 What “they say our love won’t pay,” in “I Got You Babe”

21 Ruthless23 Try27 Latin trio member29 Behave with respect to32 Small cells34 Take the junk out?37 Post masters?

38 There’s nothing above it39 Icing supervisor?40 Kia model41 One going over

telemarketing lines44 Ruthless sort45 Eatery seen in a

“Manhattan” scene46 Light fright?48 Part of many a grid

50 Torpedo layer53 Yawning55 Construction piece with

a mate58 See 59-Down59 With 58-Down, drop by63 Command level: Abbr.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64 65

66 67

P O T A T O P E P P E RO P E N E R A D E C A R L OC H A T T E L U P T R E N DK E R E C A S H E N I DE L I S K I L T I R A N ET I N O I G E R M O RS A G S A A V E R A G E S

H O T C O R N E RT E A L E A V E S E L A M

T A L A N T I S U L UI T I S S O T H A T N U SC I T I E Z I N E G M TK A I S E R S S T A M I N AE N S T E E L S E M I N A RT A M A L E D O G G E D

How to play Kakuro:The kakuro grid, unlike in sudoku, can be of any size. It has rows and columns, and dark cells like in a crossword. And, just like in a crossword, some of the dark cells will contain numbers. Some cells will contain two numbers.However, in a crossword the numbers reference clues. In a kakuro, the numbers are all you get! They denote the total of the digits in the row or column referenced by the number.Within each collection of cells - called a run

- any of the numbers 1 to 9 may be used but, like sudoku, each number may only be used once.

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER

14

EASY SUDOKUCartoon Arts International / The New York Times Syndicate

Easy Sudoku PuzzlesPlace a digit from 1 to 9 in each empty cell so everyrow, every column and every 3x3 box contains allthe digits 1 to 9.

PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

CINEMA / TV LISTINGS 15

TEL: 444933989 444517001SHOWING AT VILLAGGIO & CITY CENTER

08:30 World Of Gymnastics

09:00 Ski Magazine10:00 English

Championship, Yeovil V Watford

12:00 Scottish League, Inverness V Celtic

14:00 Omni Sport14:30 Scottish League

Highlights15:00 Tennis, Atp 250,

Qatar Open23:00 Transworld

Sport24:00 Football’s

Greatest Teams; Real Madrid

00:30 Roma Channel01:30 Ski Magazine02:00 World Of

Gymnastics

08:00 News09:00 Muslims of

France10:30 Inside Story11:00 News11:30 The Stream12:30 People &

Power13:00 NEWSHOUR14:30 Inside Story15:00 Witness16:00 NEWSHOUR17:00 News17:30 The Stream18:00 NEWSHOUR19:00 News19:30 Soapbox

Mexico20:30 Inside Story21:00 NEWSHOUR22:00 News22:30 The Stream23:00 Muslims of

France

15:00 Who Is Zatalan?

16:00 Golzap16:30 Football’s

Greatest Teams; Real Madrid

17:00 Bein Sports Match, Psg V Real Madrid

20:15 English Premier League Midweek Review

23:00 English Premier League, Sunderland V Aston Villa

13:00 Do Dil Bandhe Ek Dori Se

14:00 Doli Armaano Ki 14:30 Jodha Akbar15:00 Snack Attack19:00 Do Dil Bandhe

Ek Dori Se19:30 Jodha Akbar20:00 Pavitra Rishta20:30 Sapne Suhane

Ladakpan Ke22:30 Silver Screen

(Kai Po Che)

13:00 Shake It Up13:25 That's So

Raven13:45 Jessie15:00 Wolfblood18:30 Good Luck

Charlie20:05 Jessie22:00 Austin And Ally22:25 A.N.T. Farm23:10 Wizards Of

Waverly Place

14:00 This Means War16:00 The Brothers

Solomon18:00 Stop! Or My

Mom Will Shoot20:00 The Five Year

Engagement22:15 The Angel's

Share

13:15 Mythbusters14:05 Border Security14:30 Storage Hunters14:55 American

Digger17:00 Ultimate

Survival17:50 Dirty Jobs19:30 Sons Of Guns20:20 Storage Hunters20:45 American Digger21:10 How Do They

Do It?21:35 How It's Made22:00 Sons Of Guns22:50 Street Outlaws23:40 Hellriders

13:00 Animal Autopsy14:00 Wild Russia15:00 Mystery Files16:00 Mega

Breakdown17:00 Is It Real?18:00 Is It Real?19:00 Rescue Ink20:00 Evacuate Earth21:00 Evolutions22:00 Rescue Ink23:00 World's

Toughest Fixes

13:20 Swamp Brothers

15:40 Predator's Playground

16:30 My Cat From Hell

17:30 Wild France20:15 North America22:05 Saving Rhino

Phila23:00 Glory Hounds23:55 Gator Boys

14:30 Tommy & Oscar16:00 Ugly Duckling

And Me17:30 Camp Nowhere19:15 Oz The Great

And Powerful21:30 Tommy & Oscar23:00 Ugly Duckling

And Me

PLUS | THURSDAY 2 JANUARY 2014

QF RADIO 91.7 FM ENGLISH PROGRAMME BRIEF

LIVE SHOWS Airing Time Programme Briefs

SPIRITUAL HOUR

6:00 - 7:00 AM A time of reflection, a deeper understanding of the teachings of Islam.

RISE 7:00 – 9:00 AM Today on Rise, Laura and Scott speak with Shabina Khatri from Doha News. Shabina will fill us in on everything that's happening locally here in Qatar.

INTERNATIO-NAL NEWS