Newborn found abandoned in rubbish bin

Newborn found abandoned in rubbish bin

Newborn found abandoned in rubbish bin

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 06:05 PM PST

by Siti Hajar. Posted on December 12, 2013, Thursday

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN: A newborn was found in an empty rubbish bin near a house in Kg Lumapas yesterday morning, Borneo Bulletin reported.

The family residing at the house reported the matter to the Royal Brunei Police Force (RBPF) at 8.50am. It was the first such case that the RBPF has received this year.

It is believed that the baby girl had been indiscriminately placed in the rubbish bin in the wee hours.

Fortunately, the newborn is currently in good condition, weighing 2.42kg. She is currently being monitored at the Special Care Baby Unit of RIPAS Hospital in the capital.

No arrests have been made in connection to the case.

It was explained that a 19-year-old living at the house in Kg Lumapas was about to dispose of household rubbish when she heard what she thought sounded like the cries of a cat.

As she was afraid to investigate it on her own, she called out her father who then instructed her 15-year-old brother to take a closer look.

It was during this time that they found the newborn who was not covered with any form of protection against the elements. The lid of the bin had been detached.

The newborn with her umbilical cord still intact was relatively clean when she was found, indicating that her mother had taken the time to clean her up.

According to the family who discovered the newborn, the baby girl was lucky that she was found early, as strays would often frequent the trash bin to scour for food.

The last reported case of an abandoned baby in Brunei was in November 2012.

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Fragile comeback among Kutai Orangutan population

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 06:01 PM PST

A prime habitat for the endangered orangutan in East Kalimantan's Kutai National Park has only just recovered from a series of major fires that tore through the area in the 1980s, a conservationist says.

Anne. R. Russon, the director of the Kutai Orangutan Project, told Antaranews.com on Monday that following the fires of 1982-1983 and 1987-1988, "the conservation area is already in recovery."

She said one indicator of the recovery was the increase in the local orangutan population.

Russon, a researcher from York University in Toronto who has been researching orangutans in Kalimantan for 25 years, four of them in Kutai, cautioned that the national park still faced a lot of dangers that could also threaten the orangutan population.

"We're grateful that the source of food for orangutans in Kutai National Park is improving, but I'm still worried about the hunting and the conflict with coal and palm oil companies, which can disturb the endangered species," she said.

"I am very concerned that orangutan hunting and torture still happens because the population of orangutans in the wild has been reduced to only 40,000 to 45,000 individuals."

Russon said there were between 1,000 and 2,000 orangutan in the 198,629-hectare national park that straddles the three districts of East Kutai, Kutai Kartanegara and Bontang, but that the number of cases of people killing orangutans had stoked international concern, Jakarta Globe reported news.

She said that during her research, she found indigenous groups still hunting orangutans for their meat. Reports of the apes being killed for food are much rarer than reports of deaths at the hands of farmers or plantation workers who consider them pests.

The latest recorded orangutan killing occurred on Nov. 3, Antaranews.com reported, when two residents of Pontianak, West Kalimantan, were charged by police for allegedly killing and eating an orangutan.

They were released last week after initially facing the possibility of up to five years in prison for violating the 1990 Natural Resources Conservation Law.

Authorities have recorded at least four cases of people killing endangered orangutans in and around the Pontianak within the past four years.

In 2010, a female orangutan died in Pontianak's Sungai Pinyuh subdistrict after being captured by villagers with her baby.

In 2012, another orangutan was killed near Pontianak's Parit Wak Dongkak subdistrict after sustaining serious burns when locals set a tree near the orangutan's location on fire. The animal died while being treated for its injuries.

In October this year, an orangutan was found dead in Pontianak's Peniraman village, with its skull reportedly bashed in.

Orangutans are faced with extinction from poaching and the rapid destruction of their forest habitat, driven largely by land clearance for palm oil and paper plantations.

Wildlife experts warn that shrinking habitats have increased contact between the forest-dwelling orangutan and villagers and is the primary cause of an upswing in human-on-animal violence in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

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One in three kids have no birth certificate – Penan

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 05:53 PM PST

One in three children worldwide cannot have their existence legally verified with a birth certificate since their birth was not registered, UNICEF warned Wednesday.

Almost 230 million youngsters under the age of five have no birth certificate, which puts them at a disadvantage for procedural matters and leaves them more vulnerable to abuse.

"Birth registration is more than just a right. It?s how societies first recognize and acknowledge a child?s identity and existence," said deputy UNICEF executive director Geeta Rao Gupta.

"Birth registration is also key to guaranteeing that children are not forgotten, denied their rights or hidden from the progress of their nations," she said.

So "we recommend a registration system that is free, universal in coverage and confidential."

When natural disasters separate parents and children, reuniting families is much tougher when birth certificates are lacking, the UN agency stressed.-AFP

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Facebook stock added to Dow Jones S&P 500 index

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 05:51 PM PST

Facebook shares will be added to the Dow Jones S&P 500 Index, a portfolio of stocks considered a barometer of the market and even the overall US economy.

The world's leading online social network will replace chip testing equipment company Teradyne after the close of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on December 20, S&P Down Jones Indices said Wednesday in a release.

Facebook shares rose nearly four percent to top $51 in after-market trades on Wednesday.

Being added to the S&P 500 comes at the end of a year in which Facebook climbed out from the wreckage of its much-hyped but quickly panned stock market debut early in 2012.

Facebook has been on an upward cycle since earnings showed a jump in mobile advertising revenue.

Facebook shares plummeted after the highly anticipated IPO last year and languished, primarily due to doubts about the California-based company's ability to make money from members using mobile devices to get online.

Facebook, based in the northern California city of Menlo Park, will be added to an S&P software and services category in the index.-AFP

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‘Goldilocks’ clue to habitable planets

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 04:03 PM PST

The bad news: Earth's oceans will evaporate away.

The good news: It won't happen for another billion years or so.

Those are the conclusions of a new study into the so-called Goldilocks zone — the distance from a star at which water on a rocky planet can exist as a liquid rather than as permanent ice or vapour.

As in the fairy tale, a planet's temperature has to be not too hot and not too cold, but just right for sustaining the stuff for life as we know it.

Jeremy Leconte of the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in Paris investigated a well-known phenomenon in astrophysics: as a star ages, it increases in brightness.

In their simulation of Earth, the Sun's rising luminosity will eventually cause a runaway greenhouse effect, they found.

Water vapour is a greenhouse gas. This means that beyond a certain point, increasing vapour from the warming oceans will stoke Earth's surface temperature — which in turn causes more sea water to evaporate, and thus adds to the warming, and so on.

In around a billion years, liquid water on the surface of the planet will have completely disappeared, leaving an utterly desiccated surface, according to their model.

The time estimate for ocean loss is "several hundred million years later" than previously thought, France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said in a press statement.

The high-tech modelling includes a 3-D simulation that factors in solar heat per square metre, the seasons and the vapour cycle.

Previous models have tended to simulate the Earth as having a simple and uniform climate system. They usually place the start of the evaporation as soon as 150 million years from now, which is relatively brief in geological terms.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, concludes that the Goldilocks zone may be somewhat bigger than thought.

The precious zone starts at 0.95 Astronomical Units (AU) for a star that is the size and present age of the Sun, it says.

One AU is 149.6 million kilometres (92.95 million miles), being the average distance between the Earth and the Sun — the orbit of our planet is slightly elliptical.

By comparison, Venus, Earth's sister planet in size, lies at 0.75 AU: it is just a bit too close to the Sun.

In its infancy, it may have had oceans, when solar luminosity was less than today, some astrobiologists believe.

Today, scorched, bone-dry and barren, it is shrouded with thick, roiling clouds of carbon dioxide.

The findings could be useful for understanding exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars outside our Solar System, say the authors.

The hope is to locate a rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone, so if the zone is wider than thought, this boosts the statistical chances.

So far, astronomers have only discerned uninhabitable planets made of gas, or rocky planets that are so close to the Sun that any atmosphere they had will have probably been stripped away.-AFP

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‘Wake up’ competition for Europe’s sleepy comet-chaser

Posted: 11 Dec 2013 04:00 PM PST

Citizens of Planet Earth are being invited to make a "video shout-out" to wake up a deep-space probe, Rosetta, that has been in hibernation since June 2011.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is offering prizes for the best video clip of people shouting "Wake up, Rosetta!" to help end its scout's long sleep next month.

Launched back in March 2004, Rosetta is designed to rendezvous with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko next year at 673 million kilometres (420 million miles) from the Sun.

It will then send down a refrigerator-sized lander called Philae, which will hook onto the comet's surface and carry out scientific tests.

Scientists are fascinated by comets, which are believed to be primitive clusters of dust and ice dating back to the building of the Solar System, billions of years ago.

Rosetta, one of Europe's most ambitious and costliest space missions, is programmed to move out of slumber mode at 1000 GMT on January 20. After warming up, it will hopefully contact Earth a few hours later, for the first time in 31 months.

The probe gets its name from the famous stone that led to the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics almost 200 years ago.

The top 10 "wake up" videos will be blasted into the Universe with 20,000 watts of power by ESA's Deep Space network.

The best two will earn tickets to mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, to watch Philae's touchdown in November.

Details and rules on https://www.facebook.com/RosettaMission. -AFP

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