Chinese patient dies as doctors flee fire
Beijing: A man in China died on the operating table after doctors and nurses attending him fled to avoid a fire that broke out in the next room, leaving him to suffocate in thick smoke.
The 49-year-old patient was having an amputation in the Shanghai hospital when a fire broke out in one of the operating rooms. All patients were evacuated from the building, but when the staff returned the patient was already dead, Shanghai Daily reported.
Police said he died of smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire and the reason why the man was abandoned while undergoing serious surgery was still being investigated. (PTI)
Around 3,000 Britons hospitalised daily for drinking
London: Data available in Britain shows there were 1.1 million alcohol-related admissions in hospitals across the country last year — that means over 3,000 people were taken to health centres every day.
Authors of the report at the Liverpool John Moores University believe this was due to the increased availability of cheap alcohol, Sky News reported.
The report of 2009-10 showed a wide variation across the country in rates of hospitalisation, with 3,114 admissions per 100,000 people in Liverpool, dropping to 850 per 100,000 on the Isle of Wight.
Mark Bellis, a university official, said: “Cheap alcohol is no longer a commodity that this country can afford. The scale of damage revealed by these profiles shows that alcohol is a problem for everyone in Britain.”
“Even those families not directly affected by alcohol-related health problems, violence or abuse still pay towards the billions in taxes for the policing, health services and social support required to tackle this national problem.”
Other details, drawn from official crime statistics, shows there were 392,787 crimes attributable to alcohol in 2010-11 – equating to 7.6 crimes per 1,000 people.
The highest rates of crime linked to drinking by region occurred in London, with 11.7 crimes per 1,000 residents. (IANS)
Boys born on late Chechen prez’s birthday get cash
Grozny: The families of boys born on the 60th birthday of Chechnya’s late president Akhmat Kadyrov have received 50,000 rubles (around $1,700) each as a gift, a minister said.
Akhmat Kadryov was born Aug 23, 1951. He was killed in a bomb attack in Grozny in 2004.
Health Minister Shakhid Akhmadov said of the 71 boys born this Aug 23, over 40 were named Akhmat. Sixteen more were named Ramzan.
The Akhmat Kadyrov Charity allocated the funds for the gifts.
Kadyrov was the “chief mufti” of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s during and after the First Chechen War. At the outbreak of the Second Chechen War he switched sides, offering his service to the Russian government, and later became the president of the Chechen Republic from Oct 5, 2003.
He was assassinated by Islamists in Grozny May 9, 2004, during a World War II memorial victory parade. His son, Ramzan Kadyrov, who led his father’s militia, is now the president. (IANS)
A Chinese woman’s unique protest
Beijing: A Chinese woman resorted to a unique protest and asked her former boyfriend to marry her.
The woman held up a sign near a Beijing subway station.
The sign read: “Jiang Guo, I weigh 500 grams less than yesterday.”
“When are you going to marry me?,” it asked.
She said Jiang Guo was her ex-boyfriend who left her as he thought she was overweight, a Chinese media report said. “I don’t care if he can see me or not, it’s helpful to lose some weight,” the woman was quoted as saying. (IANS)
UK’s atomic clock ‘is world’s most accurate’
London: An atomic clock at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the world’s most accurate and it would lose or gain less than a second in some 138 million years, research has found.
Studies of the NPL’s CsF2 clock’s performance, to be published in the journal Metrologia, show it is nearly twice as accurate as previously thought.
The clock would lose or gain less than a second in some 138 million years, the BBC reported today.
The UK is among the handful of nations providing a “standard second” that keeps the world on time.
However, the international race for higher accuracy is always on, meaning the record may not stand for long.
The NPL’s clock is a “caesium fountain” atomic clock, in which the “ticking” is provided by the measurement of the energy required to change a property of caesium atoms known as “spin”.
The NPL-CsF2 clock provides an “atomic pendulum” against which the UK’s and the world’s clocks can be compared, ensuring they are all ticking at the same time.
That correction is done at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in France, which collates definitions of seconds from six “primary frequency standards” – CsF2 in the UK, two in France, and one each in the US, Germany and Japan.
For those six high-precision atomic pendulums, absolute accuracy is a tireless pursuit.
At the last count in 2010, the UK’s atomic clock was on a par with the best of them in terms of long-term accuracy: to about one part in 2,500,000,000,000,000, the report said. (PTI)