Vietnam lawmaker bans the officials from golf

Vietnam's roads are getting more jammed by the day, the traffic accident rate is one of the highest in Asia and infrastructure bottlenecks are crippling an economy that is already in crisis.

But investors and citizens need not fear. Dinh La Thang, Vietnam's swashbuckling new transport minister, has the solution: banning officials from playing golf, even at the weekend.

The transport ministry said on its website that some senior officials were spending too much time on the putting green and, as a result, were under-performing at work during a difficult period for the Vietnamese economy.

Since the Communist government started to open up the economy in the late 1980s, golf has become increasingly popular with senior officials and businessmen in Vietnam, as in neighboring China. Golf courses have sprung up across the country, raising concern about the rapid loss of agricultural land for developments that only benefit a handful of investors and well-heeled golfers.

In Vietnam's consensus-based political system, ministers used to prefer hiding in the shadows, operating as anonymous power brokers deferring to the all-powerful and highly secretive Politburo. But, as analysts like Carl Thayer at the Australian Defence Force Academy have noted, Vietnam's government has been slowly moving from collective responsibility to a form of ministerial responsibility, albeit with little public accountability.
Since he took over as transport minister in August, Thang, who used to head PetroVietnam, Vietnam's state-owned upstream oil and gas monopoly, has been trying to raise his profile with a number of headline-grabbing initiatives and sound-bites.

In a country obsessed with private transport -- whether it be the ubiquitous scooter or the rapidly-growing number of cars -- and increasingly afflicted by traffic jams, he ordered senior staff to use the bus once a week.

He also booted out the official in charge of building a new international airport terminal in the resort city of Danang, central Vietnam, because of the slow pace of construction.

While it may seem laughable to some, any officials considering flouting Thang's golf ban would be well advised to think again.

The head of the transport ministry's organization department, a key Communist party-controlled unit responsible for internal monitoring and promotions, warned that his spies will be out watching for bourgeois recidivist golfers.

"We will have many secret methods to supervise how staff will follow the minister's regulation," Pham Tang Loc told Tien Phong (Pioneer) newspaper. "In this very difficult time, senior officials should concentrate on completing important projects rather than spending time playing golf. It's a waste of money and time and they even use their government-provided cars for this."

Loc talks a tough game but, as with every regulation in Vietnam, there's always a way around. Officials may not be allowed to tee off any more but no-one said anything about other pastimes popular with male government officials, such as drinking, visiting karaoke parlors and brothels and tennis.

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Bangkok faces worst flooding yet

Bangkok faces the highest flood levels yet and is preparing for the worst, the governor of the Thai capital.

Residents are urged to flee the rising floodwaters, which have already forced the closure of Bangkok's Don Muang airport and the evacuation of flood victims who have taken refuge there.

Thailand's government has declared a five-day public holiday in flood-affected provinces to try to encourage people to seek safety elsewhere before high tides expected this weekend.

But Bangkok Gov. Sukhumbhand Paripatra told CNN the authorities could not evacuate a whole city and it was difficult to persuade the Thai people to leave their homes, despite the risk.

"Apparently there will be large volume of water run-off coming toward the city tonight onwards, and over the weekend," he said. "At the point of high tide, it will be very high, the highest this year. We are bracing for the worse."

Thongthong Chantharangsu, a spokesman for Thailand's Flood Relief Operations Center, appealed on TV for Bangkok residents to head to the countryside.

Floodwaters extend from Rangsit, north of Bangkok, to Don Muang airport and Yingcharoen Market, state-run news agency MCOT reported.

The water has reached 30cm (12 inches) in places and is overflowing on to sidewalks and some roads, causing problems for small vehicles and leading to traffic congestion, the agency said.

In a televised address Tuesday night, Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said the capital could be submerged by as much as 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of water.
Of particular concern were areas along the Chao Phraya River, which winds through the capital and is expected to overwhelm embankments this weekend.

The Airports of Thailand declared Don Muang airport, which primarily services domestic flights, closed Tuesday night, after floodwaters flowed on to runways and affected the lighting.

Nok Air, which usually operates from Don Muang, was forced to cancel flights but should be able to run an almost normal schedule by Friday after moving its operations to the main Suvarnabhumi Airport, the airline's chief executive Patee Sarasin said Wednesday. Some 3,000 Nok Air passengers were affected by flight cancellations Tuesday, he said.

The flood relief operation will continue to be based at the airport, the Thai government said Wednesday.

More than 600 prisoners held at Bang Kwang Central Prison have been evacuated, according to the Department of Corrections. The high-security prison has about 4,000 inmates, the chief of the prison said, some of them high-profile.

The floods have also forced the Dusit Zoo to evacuate some animals, including goat antelope and Sika deer, to a zoo in the countryside, according to Dusit Zoo's chief, Karnchai Saenwong.

The U.S. ambassador to Thailand, Kristie A. Kenny, said the crisis was slow moving and it was hard to know what would be hit next.

The United States has already provided civilian relief resources including water pumps, purifiers and life vests, she said, and two U.S. helicopters are helping the Thai military survey the extent of the flooding.

Nationwide, the floods have killed 373 people and affected more than 9.5 million people, authorities said.

The public holiday announced Tuesday will be from Thursday to next Monday and will be effective in 21 provinces, including Bangkok, that are still under water, a government spokeswoman said.

The government has called the flooding the worst to afflict the nation in half a century and said it might take more than a month before the waters recede in some areas.

The government has set up more than 1,700 shelters nationwide, and more than 113,000 people have taken refuge.

Overall damage from the floods has risen and could top $6 billion, with the worst yet to come as the waters destroy shops and paralyze factories nationwide, the Thai Finance Ministry said.

Thailand derives a significant portion of its revenue from tourism, which has been diminished by the flooding.

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Yemeni women burn veils to protest

Yemeni women defiantly burned their traditional veils Wednesday in protest of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's brutal crackdown on anti-government demonstrations.

Thousands of women gathered in the capital, Sanaa, said witnesses. They carried banners that read: "Saleh the butcher is killing women and is proud of it" and "Women have no value in the eyes in Ali Saleh."

They collected their veils and scarves in a huge pile and set it ablaze -- an act that is highly symbolic in the conservative Islamic nation, where women use their veils to cover their faces and bodies. It's the first time in the nine months of Yemen's uprising that such an event has occurred.

Inspired by Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman's Nobel Peace Prize this month, more and more Yemeni women have taken to the streets and escalated their campaign for help from the international community.

More than 60 women were attacked in October alone by the government, said protester Ruqaiah Nasser. Government forces are raiding homes and also killing children, she said.
She said silence from tribal leaders on the matter is a "disgrace."

"We will not stay quiet and will defend ourselves if our men can't defend us," Nasser said. "Tribes must understand they will not be respected by Yemeni women if they stay quiet while their women are being attacked by the Saleh regime. Tribes who ignore our calls are cowards and have no dignity."

"Saleh is killing women and children and this is against tribal culture," she said. "Where are their voices when we need them? It's a disgrace if they stay quiet."

The women's protests came after the Yemeni government announced a cease-fire Tuesday. But that did not appear to be holding.

At least 10 people died and dozens were injured earlier Tuesday in clashes between Yemeni government security forces in the country's capital and the province of Taiz, medical officials reported.

Yemen's government has said that opposition-supported militants are responsible for the violence.

Saleh summoned the U.S. ambassador and reiterated a promise to sign an agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council in which he would step aside in exchange for immunity from prosecution, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

However, Saleh has repeatedly promised to sign the council-backed deal and not done so. The embattled leader has clung to power through the protracted protests.

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Turkish rescuers pull 2 more survivors from quake rubble

Nearly three days after a massive earthquake shook eastern Turkey, rescuers pulled two more survivors from collapsed buildings Wednesday.

The quake and its aftermath killed at least 471 people and injured at least 1,650 others, the Turkish Disaster and Emergency Relief Agency said in a statement on its website.

In the latest rescue, emergency crews pulled a 27-year-old teacher from debris 67 hours after the quake hit, the Turkish state news agency Anadolu reported.

The teacher, Gozde Bahar, had difficulty breathing and was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Eyup Erdem, 18, was pulled from a collapsed building where he had been trapped for almost 61 hours and was taken to a field hospital, the semi-official Anatolian news agency reported.

No more information was immediately available on either of the rescues, which occurred in the town of Ercis in the province of Van.

They came a day after crews pulled a baby, her mother and her grandmother alive from the rubble.

The father of 2-week-old Azra Karaduman remained trapped beneath the rubble, officials said. Crews pulled four bodies from the debris after her rescue, but did not say whether they included the infant's father.

Working in temperatures in the 40s (single digits Celsius), teams of rescuers have scoured the ruins for survivors since Sunday's 7.2-magnitude earthquake.

In the town of Guvecli near the Syrian border, the last of the funerals were held Wednesday for the 15 people who died in the town of approximately 2,000 residents. Eighty percent of the 200 buildings were destroyed in the quake and the others were rendered uninhabitable, officials said. Residents were spending the nights crowded into tents, which were in short supply. Residents said aid was arriving sporadically.

In Ankara, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that the eastern province would be rebuilt. He said 16 planes carrying search-and-rescue teams arrived in the region during the first two days after the earthquake and that 3,755 public personnel, 422 nongovernmental organization workers, 595 search-and-rescue vehicles and 860 health teams had been sent to the affected area.

Turkey said Tuesday that it would accept international aid, citing a need for tents and prefabricated houses for "the reconstruction phase" that will begin after the search-and-rescue efforts, Anadolu said.

Japan's embassy was the first to respond, promising to send about $400,000, Anadolu said. Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami in March that killed thousands and triggered a nuclear crisis. Britain, France, Jordan, Qatar, Switzerland, Israel, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and the United States have also said they could help with reconstruction, the news agency said.

Israel's Ministry of Defense said a plane carrying seven prefabricated buildings and other aid was to depart Wednesday for the stricken region. At least 2,262 buildings were demolished in Van and surrounding villages and towns, the news agency said.

Relations between the two countries have been tense since last year's Israeli commando raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla laden with humanitarian aid. Nine Turkish activists were killed.

Turkey has suffered other major earthquakes in recent years.

A magnitude-7.6 earthquake in Izmit killed more than 17,000 people in 1999, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A magnitude-7.2 tremor in Duzce the same year killed 894 people, the agency reported.

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Israel approves prisoners swaping with Egypt

Israel's security cabinet Tuesday approved a prisoner exchange with Egypt that will result in freedom for an Israeli-American man accused of spying.

Ilan Grapel has been held in Egypt since June on suspicion of espionage and incitement to burn government buildings. He should be back in Israel by Thursday, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said.

The 25 Egyptian prisoners to be freed include three minors. They are not considered security prisoners, the prime minister's office said.

The exchange comes a week after an agreement between Israel and Hamas to ultimately free about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners resulted in the release of Israeli soldier held by Hamas for nearly five years.

Grapel, 28, is a former Israeli paratrooper. At the time of his arrest, he was studying law in the United States at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a school official said.

Egyptian officials said Israel sent him to Egypt to recruit informants in the chaos that followed the January 25 revolution that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as leader, but Israeli officials have denied that he was a spy.

His mother told CNN that Grapel had traveled to Cairo for volunteer work.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the government saw "no basis for any legal action against him."

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How Flickr can help to save the whales

Want to help save the humpback whale? Pick up a camera and start taking pictures, says Gale McCullough, a "fluke matcher" at Allied Whale, a research group.

McCullough is a citizen scientist -- a do-goodery term for volunteers who help collect data about the natural world -- who uses the photo-sharing site Flickr to catalog photos of whales. Not just any photos, though. She's specifically interested in the humpback's fluke, or the tail. On humpbacks, the underside of the fluke carries unique identifying information in the form of a splotchy black and white pattern. This can be used to tell one whale from another, much the way fingerprints work for humans.

McCullough spends time looking through these whale-tail photos and matching them to each other. Combining that data with dates, she and other scientists can track a particular whale's movement over time, giving each of these enormous marine mammals a story that otherwise would be unknown.

To learn more about the whales, however, more photos are needed.

"If you go whale watching, take a camera," she said in an interview on a boat off the coast of Maine, where she was speaking to a group of people attending the annual PopTech conference. "And then put it on Flickr. I'll find it."

The conclusions scientists draw from these amateur photos are not insignificant.

Last year, for example, McCullough -- a spry, gray-haired woman who wears tinted glasses that nearly cover her face and an orange jacket bright enough to make onlookers wish they had tinted lenses of their own -- did a casual Flickr search and noticed that a particular humpback whale, No. 1363 in the official whale catalog, had been spotted by a man who was on vacation in Madagascar. Two years before that photo was taken, the same whale was seen off the coast of Brazil, some 6,000 miles away.

That migration route was longer than any that had been recorded for a single humpback, according to a journal article that cited the finding.

"This observation is altogether unprecedented," Peter Stevick, a marine biologist at College of the Atlantic, and author of that article, told Wired Science. "There are only a few humpback whales that have been seen in more than one breeding ground before this, and they moved to relatively nearby areas -- eastern to western Australia, eastern to western Africa, for example."

"We have to rearrange the way we feel about the ocean now," McCullough said in 2010.

With more photos to comb through, more discoveries could be made, she said.

She encouraged anyone who goes on a whale-watching trip to try to take photographs of the whale's fluke. Wait much longer than you think you should to click the shutter, though, because the fluke becomes visible just before the whale dives back down into the ocean, she said.

If you upload the photos to a public photo-sharing website -- Flickr is just one of many -- and tag them with a date and location, then scientists may be able to use that photo to track the whale on its journeys through the ocean.

McCullough said photos of whales in South Africa and Madagascar are particularly needed.

Taking a photo of a whale can be the start of a lifelong learning experience, she said.

"Whales are a great way to take people down into the ocean."

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Google's Ice Cream Sandwich, Siri talks back

On this week's Tech Check podcast, Doug Gross, Stephanie Goldberg and Mark Milian discuss the roll-out of "Ice Cream Sandwich," Google's delicious new version of its Android mobile operating software.

Google debuted Android 4.0 this week in Hong Kong, along with the new Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which will be the first gadget to run it.

The crew discusses its features, including Face Unlock, which is designed to recognize the user's face instead of a password.

Mark has spent a week testing Siri, the new voice-activated "digital assistant" on the iPhone 4S. We discuss her strengths and weaknesses, as well has giving in to the irresistible urge to ask her questions from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Our Reader Comments of the Week come from a story about WireDoo, the new search engine being developed by a team working with MC Hammer. Yes ... that MC Hammer. (As if there could be two).

And we present to you a Tech Fail of the Week that was 14 years in the making.

Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc., was asked in 1997 what he would do if he were the CEO of Apple. This week he got a long-awaited opportunity to revisit his fateful words.

To listen to Tech Check, click on the audio box to the left. To subscribe, you can add Tech Check to your RSS feed here. You can also listen, or subscribe, on iTunes.

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