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Publication Date : 31-12-2013
How can Japan untangle the row with China over the Senkaku Islands?
Ever since some of the islands were brought under state ownership last year, some Japanese politicians and intellectuals have asserted support for filing a case with the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Toru Hashimoto, coleader of Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party) is one such advocate. Hashimoto, who also is a lawyer, wrote on Twitter, "The most effective method is to use the ICJ. If the Senkaku issue is brought to the ICJ, all we have to do is to defeat China completely. But remember, this fight must be conducted verbally at the court."
Arguments in favour of turning to the ICJ were based on the assumption that Japan's assertions would be endorsed by the court. This approach also has the advantage of demonstrating Japan's policy of attaching great importance to the rule of law to the international community.
But going to the ICJ could be a double-edged sword.
The official government position is that the Senkaku Islands are clearly an inherent part of Japanese territory "in light of historical facts and based on international law". If Japan takes the case to the ICJ, despite the fact Japan wields effective control of the islands and there is no territorial dispute requiring legal resolution, there is a risk that the international community might assume the Japanese government has admitted the "the right of possession of the Senkaku Islands remains undecided".
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From the National Geographic book The 10 Best of Everything
Leslie Thomas is a successful writer in England who's been in the business for more than 40 years. He has written more than 30 novels and several travel books, such as Some Lovely Islands, My World of Islands, and The Hidden Places of Britain. Given his interest in islands, we thought he was the natural source for naming the ten best islands.
Nantucket was once one of the richest places in America, built on the profits of the whale oil industry. Even today in the delectable old town there are fine brick houses with silver mailboxes.
Old-time sailors used to call Nantucket The Little Grey Lady of the Sea. On the misty morning I first arrived there, I could understand why. A woman was riding a horse along the beach to the utter delight of her family aboard my ferry, and she bore a banner that said Crazy Aunt Rides Again. It is a unique place.
These are the outriders of England, a clutch of tiny islands off Land's End, Cornwall, awash in the Atlantic and in a world of their own. Five are sparsely inhabited, and hundreds more islets, skerries, and rocks stretch out to the Bishop Rock Lighthouse. The next stop is America.
Balmy Atlantic air supports the spring flower industry. Part of the Duchy of Cornwall, the isles are owned by Prince Charles.
During my years of island finding, I have been to most places in the Caribbean Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, and many islands much smaller. But the most unusual is Saba, east of the U.S. Virgin Islands, rising almost 873 meters (2,864 feet) above the sea. It is home to 1,500 inhabitants, many of whom have the same family name: Hassell.
Europeans flock to the Canary Islands in winter in search of a little sun. Temperatures range between 70F and 75F through January and February.
On Tenerife stands one of Europes loftiest peaks, Mount Teide, snowcapped in winter against a deep blue sky. You can watch whales or sail over to Gomera, which was the final stop Columbus made before he set out and discovered America.
Fair Isle is the most isolated inhabited island in Britain. It is home to only about 70 people, but hundreds of thousands of birds reside here as well. Most of the visitors to this wild and wonderful place are bird-watchers. Sheep placidly graze on the steeply angled meadows.
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The weather looks as changeable as atoddler's tantrums. Thank god we're not in a helicopter, Ithink to myself as the plane banks on its final approach and a cluster of snow-covered island-mountains erupting from the sea loomthrough the storm clouds.
This Nordic Hawaii is the Faroe Islands. Forget Copenhagen, or even Reykjavik, I'd heard this cluster of 18rocky islands in the middle of the north Atlantic, inhabited by 50,000 descendants of Norse renegades, is the new frontier in the new Nordic food movement. A place where a tiny band of determined pioneers, led by one visionary chef, is developing aradical, contemporary cuisine from the most meager culinary heritage.
An hour or so after landing, it seems I spoke too soon about the helicopter: it is the only way to reach the island of Stra Dmun, home to a couple of hundred sheep and the Petersen family's farm, my first destination in a three-day tour of the islands' nascent food scene. First challenge is to reach the helicopter which is idling on what is, essentially, an ice rink. With my arms occupied by luggage and a woolly hat, I am at the mercy of both natural and man-made gales. For every step forward I slide two back. In the end, afellow passenger comes to my rescue and drags me backwards on my heels like a shop dummy.
I assume he is a birdwatcher, like so many visitors to the Faroes, but the duffle-coated samaritan turns out to be John Gynther from the experimental cheese division (really) of a Danish dairy products company, on his way to check on the progress of some cheeses.
The humidity here is perfect for maturing cheeses, but nobody has tried it before, he tells me. If it's successful, I hope some of the best restaurants in the world will give it to their guests. It'll be the true taste of the north Atlantic, expressed in a cheese.
Arriving safely at the Petersen's farm, I hear a little about their lives. Their forefathers have farmed sheep here for over 200years. That little black tar cottage over there is the children's schoolhouse; a teacher arrives every Monday and stays in the attic. And those chocolate dots inching across the sheer hillside are their sheep, whose coats have evolved a yeti-like shagginess over the centuries.
Jgva Jn Petersen shows us into the hjallur, a wooden shed with vented walls where the sheep carcasses are hung by their feet to dry in the wind, flayed like some macabre art installation. This is the Faroe's famous rst mutton, he explains, semi-dried and fermented in the sea air. Dangling alongside is Gynther's cheese, which we taste in Jgva's low-ceilinged kitchen as his kids bring to the table their treasured toys and, at one point, a pet rabbit. The cheese is good, resembling a bitter manchego. The rst is chewy like thick-cut pata negra ham, with a strong flavor only just the right side of sheepy for me.
That evening, in the islands' capital, Trshavn, we eat in what appears to be a Hobbit dwelling but is actually a cosy, turf-roofed cottage housing a restaurant, arstova (dinner from about 55). We dip our heads to enter and are confronted with another dried sheep carcass flayed on a fancy, turned-wood stand. They're not squeamish, the Faroese as evidenced by the annual summer pilot whale slaughter, the grindadrp, which apparently has something of a family festival air (though obviously not for the whales, which are slaughtered despite being so riddled with mercurythat since 2008 the island's medical officers have recommended they are no longer considered fit for human consumption).
We are presented with a dr schnapps. This is my new favorite Faroese tradition: when arriving at a party or, sometimes, a restaurant, guests are presented with a glass of schnapps, refilled communion wine-style for new arrivals. We sit alongside a man called Mortan, who is one of life's enthusiasts. He insists we try some rst mutton paired with amontillado sherry, and there is an unexpected repartee between the wine's oaky notes and the rich mutton. The geographical connection is not all that tenuous either, Mortan points out, given that for centuries the Faroese exported salt cod to Spain.
The talk turns to the islands' long-mooted independence from Denmark and the oil that many believe lurks offshore and could lift the Faroes' economy which as far as I can make out is kept afloat by the SarahLund sweaters, made here by Gudrun and Gudrun, a company founded and run by two Faroese women, and sold in a shop on the waterfront. As the schnapps bottles are drained, the tables are cleared for traditional dancing ... national dress optional.
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STABBY KNIFE (The Hidden)
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The Rt Hon Kevin Barron, MP. Member of Parliament for Rother Valley. For political and public service. (Rotherham, South Yorkshire)
Professor Adrian Peter Bird, CBE, FRS, FRSE. Buchanan Professor of Genetics, University of Edinburgh. For services to Science. (Edinburgh)
Professor Richard William Blundell, CBE, FBA. Professor of Economics, UCL and director, ESRC Centre for the Micro-Economic Analysis of Public Policy IFS. For services to Economics and Social Science. (London)
Ian Michael Cheshire. Chief executive, Kingfisher plc. For services to Business, Sustainability and the Environment. (London)
Michael Victor Codron, CBE. For services to the Theatre. (London)
Paul Collier, CBE. For services to promoting research and policy change in Africa. (Oxford, Oxfordshire)
David Nigel Dalton. Chief executive, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust. For services to Healthcare. (Willaston, Cheshire)
Roger Michael De Haan, CBE, DL. Philanthropist. For services to Education and to charity in Kent and Overseas. (Ashford, Kent)
Michael Roger Gifford. Formerly Lord Mayor of London. For services to International Business, Culture and the City of London. (London)
Antony Mark David Gormley, OBE. Sculptor. For services to the Arts. (London)
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Salt is absolutely essential to health. It is one of the five basic tastes we have receptors for in our mouth (along with sweetness, bitterness, sourness and...
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IRS Could Face Blame For New Health Care Law #39;s Unexpected Tax - Obamacare
IRS Could Face Blame For New Health Care Law #39;s Unexpected Tax.
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Lake Cowichan residents provide feedback on the future of their health care during a July community meeting.
image credit: Tyson Jones/file
Cowichan Lake is about to get a whole lot healthier.
Island Health confirmed last week that the roughly 6,500 residents of Lake Cowichan and surrounding area are just a few weeks away from their promised primary health care team.
Enhanced primary health services through a primary health care team will begin providing programs and services in early 2014, the provincial health authority (formerly VIHA) announced in a press release.
The team will be located at the Kaatza Health Centre, 58 Cowichan Ave. West and will begin delivering services early in the new year.
A nurse practitioner has also been hired for the Cowichan Lake area. The nurse practitioner will begin practising at the Brookside Medical Clinic in the New Year.
This year we went from three doctors to zero, and in the New Year well have two full time doctors and however many doctors work out of the walk-in clinic and then the nurse practioner, Lake Cowichan Mayor Ross Forrest said.
The two new docs will have an international background, said the mayor.
Were also getting the two doctors through a return of service program, where international doctors do a course through (Vancouvers) St. Pauls Hospital and two year course at the U of Victoria that allows them to practise in Canada, he said.
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Small-cap analysts at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch have a bias toward cyclical stocks in 2014.
Health care, technology and industrials are all rated overweight by BofAML heading into the new year. Health care and technology small caps in particular have an advantage because their valuations are considerably cheaper than industrials.
As we leave 2013, we are sticking with overweights to these groups, with both sectors attractive on a valuation basis, have very strong balance sheets and have been redeploying capital back to shareholders, the analysts said in a report. In addition, if M&A picks up next year, we think these two sectors will benefit.
But BofML reserved its favourite overweight for industrials, which it believes will especially benefit as economies around the world begin to register stronger economic growth.
The group does well when interest rates rise, will benefit from better economies outside of the U.S., and with the resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S., will also thrive, the analysts said.
But they add there are some downsides. As mentioned, valuations for industrial small-cap stocks are relatively high compared to the rest of the space, while many managers have overweight ratings on the group even though earnings revision trends have yet to show improvement.
The BofAML analysts also raise concerns about the health-care space, where they see a lot of lower-quality stocks.
Our biggest issue with health care is that it does make up a big portion of our low quality bucket and we think these stocks will lag behind in 2014, the analysts said.
As for the rest of the small-cap space, BofML rates energy, financial and material stocks as market weight, while they rate consumer stocks andutilitiesas underweight for next year.
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HONOLULU A December surge propelled health care sign-ups through the governments rehabilitated website past the 1 million mark, the Obama administration said Sunday, reflecting new vigor for the problem-plagued federal insuranceexchange.
Of the more than 1.1 million people now enrolled, nearly 1 million signed up in December, with the majority coming days before a pre-Christmas deadline for coverage to start in January. Compare that with a paltry 27,000 in October, the federal websites first, error-prone month or 137,000 inNovember.
We experienced a welcome surge in enrollment as millions of Americans seek access to
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HONOLULU A December surge propelled health care sign-ups through the governments rehabilitated website past the 1 million mark, the Obama administration said Sunday, reflecting new vigor for the problem-plagued federal insuranceexchange.
Of the more than 1.1 million people now enrolled, nearly 1 million signed up in December, with the majority coming days before a pre-Christmas deadline for coverage to start in January. Compare that with a paltry 27,000 in October, the federal websites first, error-prone month or 137,000 inNovember.
We experienced a welcome surge in enrollment as millions of Americans seek access to affordable health care coverage, Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a blogpost.
The figures dont represent a full accounting for the country. They dont include December results from the 14 states running their own websites. Overall, states have been signing up more people than the federal government has. But most of that has come from high performers such as California, New York, Washington, Kentucky and Connecticut. Some states continue tostruggle.
Still, the end-of-year spike suggests that the federal exchange serving 36 states is starting to pull its weight. The windfall comes at a critical moment for President Barack Obamas sweeping health care law, which becomes real for many Americans on Jan. 1 as coverage through the exchanges and key patient protections kickin.
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The government's rehabilitated health insurance website has seen a December surge in customer sign-ups, pushing enrollment past the 1 million mark, the Obama administration says.
Combined with numbers for state-run markets, that should put total enrollment in the new private insurance plans under President Barack Obama's health law at about 2 million people through the end of the year, independent experts said.
That would be about two-thirds of the administration's original goal of signing up 3.3 million by Dec. 31, a significant improvement given the technical problems that crippled the federal market during much of the fall. The overall goal remains to enroll 7 million people by March 31.
"It looks like current enrollment is around 2 million despite all the issues," said Dan Mendelson, CEO of Avalere Health, a market analysis firm. "It was a very impressive showing for December."
The administration said that of the more than 1.1 million people now enrolled in the federal insurance exchange, nearly 1 million signed up in December. The majority came days before a pre-Christmas deadline for coverage to start in January. Compare that with a paltry 27,000 in October, the federal website's first, error-prone month.
"We experienced a welcome surge in enrollment as millions of Americans seek access to affordable health care coverage," Marilyn Tavenner, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said in a blog post announcing the figures.
The numbers don't represent a full accounting for the country.
The federal website serves 36 states. Yet to be reported are December results from the 14 states running their own sites. Overall, states have been signing up more people than the federal government. But most of that has come from high performers such as California, New York, Washington state, Kentucky and Connecticut. Some states continue to struggle.
Still, the end-of-year spike suggests that the federal insurance marketplace is starting to pull its weight. The windfall comes at a critical moment for Obama's sweeping health care law, which becomes "real" for many Americans on Jan. 1 as coverage through the insurance exchanges and key patient protections kick in.
The administration's concern now shifts to keeping the momentum going for sign-ups, and heading off problems that could arise when people who've already enrolled try to use their new insurance.
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Washington After three months of turmoil surrounding the rollout of President Obamas health care plan, the country faces a historic turning point on Jan. 1.
From emergency rooms to pharmacies to company human resources departments, changes will unfold within the U.S. health-care system as the nation guarantees insurance coverage to all Americans for the first time, a goal that has eluded presidents and lawmakers since the end of World War II.
Beginning with the New Year, insurance companies can no longer refuse to cover people because of sickness, charge them more than healthy customers or drop them when they fall ill. In return, most Americans are required to have a health plan. Some of the 19 million Americans who buy insurance on their own will find their new plans are more expensive with fewer treatment options than before as insurers seek to contain costs.
Millions of people will now be covered for the first time. Benefits will be expanded, Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for Americas Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industrys Washington lobby group, said in a phone interview. But these new benefits bring new costs.
About 1.1 million people selected health plans in time to have coverage in January using the federal enrollment system, which covers 36 states including Texas, Florida and Illinois, the Obama administration said Sunday. The government didnt say how many people paid for their plans, the final step to complete their enrollment.
Hospitals and doctors have been preparing for the insurance expansion promised by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act since its passage in 2010 by merging into larger institutions and redesigning the way they deliver care to take advantage of incentives in the law. The government has designated about 360 medical systems as accountable care organizations, entitling them to a share of any savings they can produce by streamlining care for patients in Medicare, the U.S. health program for the elderly.
Better coordination for elderly patients, the government hopes, will translate to a more efficient health system for all Americans as insurance coverage expands. That proposition is about to be put to the test.
Beginning Jan. 1, the law bars insurers from rejecting consumers who are sick or charging them more. In fact, companies will no longer ask about prospective customers health beyond the question of whether they smoke. It will be illegal for insurers to impose annual dollar limits on care, and they must cover a standard set of benefits nationwide.
People who are entering the market for the first time also will gain benefits required since 2010, including access to many preventive services without any out-of-pocket expense and full coverage of costly procedures such as colonoscopies and mammograms.
While the number of people initially affected by the expansion will be small, the law promises that Americans no longer need to fear losing health coverage should they leave their jobs.
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How the Mind Works, Secrets, Intelligence, Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (2012)
Andrews is an internationally-recognized expert on biotechnologies. Her path-breaking litigation about reproductive and genetic technologies and the disposit...
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How the Mind Works, Secrets, Intelligence, Social Networks and the Death of Privacy (2012) - Video
Genetic Engineering
Genetic engineering, also known as recombinant DNA technology, means altering the genes in a living organism to produce a Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) with a new genotype. Various kinds of genetic modification are possible: inserting a foreign gene from one species into another, forming a transgenic organism; altering an existing gene so that its product is changed; or changing gene expression so that it is translated more often or not at all.
Genetic engineering is a very young discipline, and is only possible due to the development of techniques from the 1960s onwards. Watson and Crick have made these techniques possible from our greater understanding of DNA and how it functions following the discovery of its structure in 1953. Although the final goal of genetic engineering is usually the expression of a gene in a host, in fact most of the techniques and time in genetic engineering are spent isolating a gene and then cloning it. This table lists the techniques that we shall look at in detail.
1
cDNA
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genetic engineering,the artificial manipulation, modification, and recombination of DNA or other nucleic acid molecules in order to modify an organism or population of organisms.
The term genetic engineering initially meant any of a wide range of techniques for the modification or manipulation of organisms through the processes of heredity and reproduction. As such, the term embraced both artificial selection and all the interventions of biomedical techniques, among them artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization (e.g., test-tube babies), sperm banks, cloning, and gene manipulation. But the term now denotes the narrower field of recombinant DNA technology, or gene cloning (see Figure), in which DNA molecules from two or more sources are combined either within cells or in vitro and are then inserted into host organisms in which they are able to propagate. Gene cloning is used to produce new genetic combinations that are of value to science, medicine, agriculture, or industry.
DNA is the carrier of genetic information; it achieves its effects by directing the synthesis of proteins. Most recombinant DNA technology involves the insertion of foreign genes into the plasmids of common laboratory strains of bacteria. Plasmids are small rings of DNA; they are not part of the bacteriums chromosome (the main repository of the organisms genetic information). Nonetheless, they are capable of directing protein synthesis, and, like chromosomal DNA, they are reproduced and passed on to the bacteriums progeny. Thus, by incorporating foreign DNA (for example, a mammalian gene) into a bacterium, researchers can obtain an almost limitless number of copies of the inserted gene. Furthermore, if the inserted gene is operative (i.e., if it directs protein synthesis), the modified bacterium will produce the protein specified by the foreign DNA.
A key step in the development of genetic engineering was the discovery of restriction enzymes in 1968 by the Swiss microbiologist Werner Arber. However, type II restriction enzymes, which are essential to genetic engineering for their ability to cleave a specific site within the DNA (as opposed to type I restriction enzymes, which cleave DNA at random sites), were not identified until 1969, when the American molecular biologist Hamilton O. Smith purified this enzyme. Drawing on Smiths work, the American molecular biologist Daniel Nathans helped advance the technique of DNA recombination in 197071 and demonstrated that type II enzymes could be useful in genetic studies. Genetic engineering itself was pioneered in 1973 by the American biochemists Stanley N. Cohen and Herbert W. Boyer, who were among the first to cut DNA into fragments, rejoin different fragments, and insert the new genes into E. coli bacteria, which then reproduced.
Genetic engineering has advanced the understanding of many theoretical and practical aspects of gene function and organization. Through recombinant DNA techniques, bacteria have been created that are capable of synthesizing human insulin, human growth hormone, alpha interferon, a hepatitis B vaccine, and other medically useful substances. Plants may be genetically adjusted to enable them to fix nitrogen, and genetic diseases can possibly be corrected by replacing bad genes with normal ones. Nevertheless, special concern has been focused on such achievements for fear that they might result in the introduction of unfavourable and possibly dangerous traits into microorganisms that were previously free of theme.g., resistance to antibiotics, production of toxins, or a tendency to cause disease.
The new microorganisms created by recombinant DNA research were deemed patentable in 1980, and in 1986 the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the sale of the first living genetically altered organisma virus, used as a pseudorabies vaccine, from which a single gene had been cut. Since then several hundred patents have been awarded for genetically altered bacteria and plants.
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Gene therapy introduces or alters genetic material to compensate for a genetic mistake that causes disease. It is hoped that gene therapy can treat or cure diseases for which no other effective treatments are available. However, many unique technical and ethical considerations have been raised by this new form of treatment, and several levels of regulatory committees have been established to review each gene therapy clinical trial prior to its initiation in human subjects. Ethical considerations include deciding which cells should be used, how gene therapy can be safely tested and evaluated in humans, what components are necessary for informed consent, and which diseases and/or traits are eligible for gene therapy research.
Germ Line Versus Somatic Cell Gene Therapy
Virtually all cells in the human body contain genes, making them potential targets for gene therapy. However, these cells can be divided into two major categories: germ line cells (which include sperm and eggs) and somatic cells. There are fundamental differences between these cell types, and these differences have profound ethical implications.
Gene therapy using germ line cells results in permanent changes that are passed down to subsequent generations. If done early in embryologic development, such as during preimplantation diagnosis and in vitro fertilization, the gene transfer could also occur in all cells of the developing embryo. The appeal of germ line gene therapy is its potential for offering a permanent therapeutic effect for all who inherit the target gene. Successful germ line therapies introduce the possibility of eliminating some diseases from a particular family, and ultimately from the population, forever. However, this also raises controversy. Some people view this type of therapy as unnatural, and liken it to "playing God." Others have concerns about the technical aspects. They worry that the genetic change propagated by germ line gene therapy may actually be deleterious and harmful, with the potential for unforeseen negative effects on future generations.
Somatic cells are nonreproductive. Somatic cell therapy is viewed as a more conservative, safer approach because it affects only the targeted cells in the patient, and is not passed on to future generations. In other words, the therapeutic effect ends with the individual who receives the therapy. However, this type of therapy presents unique problems of its own. Often the effects of somatic cell therapy are short-lived. Because the cells of most tissues ultimately die and are replaced by new cells, repeated treatments over the course of the individual's life span are required to maintain the therapeutic effect. Transporting the gene to the target cells or tissue is also problematic. Regardless of these difficulties, however, somatic cell gene therapy is appropriate and acceptable for many disorders, including cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, cancer, and certain infectious diseases. Clinicians can even perform this therapy in utero, potentially correcting or treating a life-threatening disorder that may significantly impair a baby's health or development if not treated before birth.
Research Issues
Scientific and ethical discussions about gene therapy began many years ago, but it was not until 1990 that the first approved human gene therapy clinical trial was initiated. This clinical trial was conducted on a rare autoimmune disorder called severe combined immune deficiency. This therapy was considered successful because it greatly improved the health and well-being of the few individuals who were treated during the trial. However, the success of the therapy was tentative, because along with the gene therapy the patients also continued receiving their traditional drug therapy. This made it difficult to determine the true effectiveness of the gene therapy on its own, as distinct from the effects of the more traditional therapy.
Measuring the success of treatment is just one challenge of gene therapy. Research is fraught with practical and ethical challenges. As with clinical trials for drugs, the purpose of human gene therapy clinical trials is to determine if the therapy is safe, what dose is effective, how the therapy should be administered, and if the therapy works. Diseases are chosen for research based on the severity of the disorder (the more severe the disorder, the more likely it is that it will be a good candidate for experimentation), the feasibility of treatment, and predicted success of treatment based on animal models. This sounds reasonable. However, imagine you or your child has a serious condition for which no other treatment is available. How objective would your decision be about participating in the research?
Informed Consent
A hallmark of ethical medical research is informed consent. The informed consent process educates potential research subjects about the purpose of the gene therapy clinical trial, its risks and benefits, and what is involved in participation. The process should provide enough information for the potential research subjects to decide if they want to participate. It is important both to consider the safety of the experimental treatment and to understand the risks and benefits to the subjects. In utero gene therapy has the added complexity of posing risks not only to the fetus, but also to the pregnant woman. Further, voluntary consent is imperative. Gene therapy may be the only possible treatment, or the treatment of last resort, for some individuals. In such cases, it becomes questionable whether the patient can truly be said to make a voluntary decision to participate in the trial.
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Latest NBR Member Subscriber winner John Monaghan from Eketahuna is NBR's latest winner of New Zealand's richest subscription prize, the all-new BMW 320i xDrive Touring valued at $83,800 Read More
Past Winner Stephen Tubbs is NBR's latest winner of New Zealand's richest subscription prize, a fabulous trip for two flying Business Class with Singapore Airlines and SilkAir to Cambodias newest ultimate "all-inclusive" luxury eco-resort Song Saa Private Island, valued at $59,000 Read More
Past Winner Matthew Horton (right) catching the keys to his new Peugeot 508 from NBR publisher Todd Scott (centre), with Sime Darby Automobiles divisional manager Simon Rose (left) Horton Media Chief Executive Matthew Horton is the lucky winner of NBRs latest subscription prize. Mr Horton won a Peugeot 508 worth $54,990, which brings the publications prize pool total to almost $500,000 since 1999.
Past Winner FMA chairman Simon Allen was the winner of NBR' s latest subscriber prize of a Luxury European Escape courtesy of Air NZ, flying Business Premier to London, with stopovers each way in either Hong Kong or Los Angeles, plus four weeks' accommodation staying at the Small Luxury Hotels of the World properties of his choice. So what did he do with this wonderful prize?
Past Winner Long-time NBR subscriber Peter Merton won a Mini Countryman Cooper S valued at $63,000 in NBR's latest subscriber competition, drawn on February 24, 2012.
Past Winner Congratulations to Justin and Janine Smith (owner-operators of the Oamaru New World) They won seven nights for two on board Seabourn Odyssey valued at $30,000 - Athens to Istanbul.
Past Winner Max and Christine Tarr of Max Tarr Electrical in Palmerston North, winners of the Ultimate NZ Experience valued at $40,000 Three nights for four people staying at each of these luxury NZ Lodges, Kauri Cliffs, The Farm at Cape Kidnappers and Matakauri Lodge in Queenstown. Max has been an NBR subscriber since Sept 1991
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Editor's Insight: Futurist delivers dozen predictions for 2014
From New World Encyclopedia
Futurism was a twentieth-century artistic movement. Although a nascent futurism can be seen surfacing throughout the very early years of the last century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen sthetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true beginning point for the movement. Futurism was a largely Italian and Russian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries.
The futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theater, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto declaming a new artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and later published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial town were legendary artistic subjects for the futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of man over nature.
Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese paintersUmberto Boccioni, Carr, and Russolo who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, introducing futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and their artistic creations represented futurism's first phase.
The Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910 in which he vowed:
We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.
Russian futurism may be said to have been born in December 1912, when the Saint Petersburg-based group Hylaea (Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksey Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk) issued a manifesto entitled A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Although the Hylaea is generally held to be the most influential group of Russian futurism, other centers were formed in Saint Petersburg (Igor Severyanin's "Ego-Futurists"), Moscow (Tsentrifuga with Boris Pasternak among its members), Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa.
Like their Italian counterparts, the Russian futurists were fascinated with dynamism, speed, and restlessness of modern urban life. They purposely sought to arouse controversy and to attract publicity by repudiating static art of the past. The likes of Alexander Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky, according to them, should have been "heaved overboard from the steamship of modernity." They acknowledged no authorities whatsoever; even Filippo Tommaso Marinettiwhen he arrived to Russia on a proselytizing visit in 1914was obstructed by most Russian futurists who did not profess to owe him anything.
In contrast to Marinetti's circle, Russian futurism was a literary rather than plastic movement. Although many leading poets (Mayakovsky, Burlyuk) dabbled in painting, their interests were primarily literary. On the other hand, such well-established artists as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the refreshing imagery of futurist poems and experimented with versification themselves. The poets and painters attempted to collaborate on such innovative productions as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with texts by Kruchenykh and sets contributed by Malevich.
Members of the Hylaea elaborated the doctrine of cubo-futurism and assumed the name of budetlyane (from the Russian word for "future"). They found significance in the shape of letters, in the arrangement of text around the page, in the details of typography. They held that there is no substantial difference between words and material things, hence the poet should arrange words in his poems like the sculptor arranges colors and lines on his canvas. Grammar, syntax and logic were discarded; many neologisms and profane words were introduced; onomatopoeia was declared a universal texture of the verse. Khlebnikov, in particular, developed "an incoherent and anarchic blend of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone," [1] known as zaum.
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