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A Crisis In Swimming - A lot has been said and written about drugs in sport. With each passing year, there are more and more of athletes caught taking banned drugs/chemicals that enhance sport performance. In the recent Tour de France cycling race, almost half of the urine samples yielded traces of banned substances. An underlying inference is that anyone who tests positive for drugs is a cheat.

A lot has been said and written about drugs in sport. With each passing year, there are more and more of athletes caught taking banned drugs/chemicals that enhance sport performance. In the recent Tour de France cycling race, almost half of the urine samples yielded traces of banned substances. An underlying inference is that anyone who tests positive for drugs is a cheat.

hletes using steroids or hormones to add muscle are playing an even more dangerous game with their health, Wojtys says. And concerns are growing. one alarming study reported that adolescent use of steroids is on the rise, according to The National Institute on Drug Abuse

well, almost. More often than not, the minimum age requirement for skydiving is 18 years old. However, there are some places that allow 16-year olds to participate in the sport.

First of all, if this is your first time sky diving, you will be given a lecture about the sport that would last for at least 4 hours.

Many scientists have specified various reasons for global warming effects on the environment and for human life. It is not easy to point one reason for global warming effects, but recently you might have saw many change in global climate. Global warming effects have various consequences such as glacier volume decreasing, rise in sea levels, shrinkage of Arctic and altered fashion of doing agriculture have been named as direct effects on global warming. Secondary global warming effects are extreme weather events, increase in tropical diseases, changes in the timing of seasonal patterns in ecosystems, and drastic economic impact.

Before many times back, many scientist and researchers were hopping that a positive effect of global warming would be increased agricultural yields(outputs), because of the role of carbon dioxide in photosynthesis which might behave in positive manner, but now it resulting in destructions of several crops. In the area of Iceland, due the rising temperatures which have made possible the widespread sowing of barley easily in an effective manner, which was not possible twenty years from now. The net result is expected to be that 33% less maize—the country's staple crop—will be grown. The reduction in rainfall has turned millions of land into deserts.

Insurance industry has been affected very badly with the risk of insurance; the number of major natural disasters has been increased to 300% since 1960s, and insured losses increased fifteenfold in real terms. According to Choi and Fisher (2003) each 1% increase in annual precipitation could enlarge catastrophe loss by as much as 2.8%.

I could easily have broken my neck.

latest findings on young gymnasts: Nearly 426,000 kids ages 6 to 17 were treated for gymnastics-related injuries in U.S. emergency rooms between 1990 and 2005,

fractures and dislocations were most common among the younger set

Hong Kong's population crisis is likely to worsen as a survey showed Thursday that nearly four in 10 women want only one child or no children at all.

world's lowest birth rates.

Twenty-six per cent of 1,500 women interviewed said they wanted only one child

?Eres lo que lees?. You are what you read. The sentence, written with dog food, was displayed on the white wall of an art gallery. Close to that wall, an abandoned and diseased street dog was left tied to a rope and a wire string. An incense burner was placed nearby where, allegedly, crack and cannabis was burnt during the inauguration. Without food and water, the animal died in the gallery during the next day.It happened in Nicaragua. It was an ?installation? by artist Guillermo Vargas, known as Habacuc.The situation, documented with several images, received a lot of attention on the web and originated an online petition against it?s author that gathers, as I write these words, close to 50.000 signatures.

Digital music was a $1.3 billion business in 2007, but it still only comprised 10 percent of consumer music spending

compete with Apple and the future of music CD sales.

“The challenge remains for the industry to find new ways to compete with Apple, who remains the dominant player for portable media devices,”

Chinese Democracy topping 1.5 million in CD sales and downloads

the American Music Industry has never been healthier.

“People don’t realize it,” said Stamphammer in a recent interview, “but we started planning for this back during the teen-pop era. In fact, remember when that N’Sync album sold 1.1 million copies in its first week? 50,000 of those were digital files.”

Bats often make people think of vampires, creatures of the night, and Halloween. Beyond the myth and folklore, bats are one of the most important groups of animals.

Bats are mammals that belong to the order Chiroptera (ky-rop-tera), which means, "winged hand". The wings or hands of a bat have very long finger bones covered by a strong skin. Bats are the only mammals that can fly. Like all mammals, they are "warm-blooded", have bodies covered with fur, and nurse their young (pups) with milk.

Nearly all bats are helpful animals. In fact, tropical rainforests could not survive without bats. Bats are responsible for controlling pest insect populations, pollinating flowers, and dispersing seeds.

It is usually said that in the year of 1621, in the colony of Plymouth, the English colonists and the Wampanoag Indians got together and shared a fantastic fall harvest banquet to celebrate the bounteousness from the fertile earth. Today this celebratory banquet is considered as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the early days of the colonies. While this ancient celebration is regarded as the first Thanksgiving feast; it is simply one of the numerous celebrations of the harvest season and human thankfulness for the bounties of Mother nature. Indeed, many Native American groups such as Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, etc. celebrated the end of the harvest season many centuries before the coming of the Europeans. These festivities included ceremonial dances, races, games and other celebrations of thankfulness.Long before the discovery of the American continent and the colonization by the Europeans, Native Americans, like Apache, Navajo, Huron, Iroquois, Sioux and many others, organized festivals at the end of the harvest

In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast which is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. This harvest meal has become a symbol of cooperation and interaction between English colonists and Native Americans. Although this feast is considered by many to the very first Thanksgiving celebration, it was actually in keeping with a long tradition of celebrating the harvest and giving thanks for a successful bounty of crops. Native American groups throughout the Americas, including the Pueblo, Cherokee, Creek and many others organized harvest festivals, ceremonial dances, and other celebrations of thanks for centuries before the arrival of Europeans in North America. Historians have also recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America, including British colonists in Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. At this site near the Charles River in December of 1619, a group of British settlers led by Captain John Woodlief knelt in prayer and pledged "Thanksgiving" to God for their healthy arrival after a long voyage across the Atlantic. This event has been acknowledged by some scholars and writers as the official first Thanksgiving among European settlers on record. Whether at Plymouth, Berkeley Plantation, or throughout the Americas, celebrations of thanks have held great meaning and importance over time. The legacy of thanks, and particularly of the feast, have survived the centuries as people throughout the United States gather family, friends, and enormous amounts of food for their yearly Thanksgiving meal.

he Pilgrims, fleeing religious persecution, sailed from England to the New World aboard the Mayflower. They stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock and began a new colony. In unfamiliar territory, they came near starvation, but the Indian Squanto appeared and taught them to plant corn and make their living from the land. Led by William Bradford and Miles Standish, they survived these difficult early days, and when they brought in the first rich harvest, they set aside a day to give thanks to God for their good fortune. The chief Massasoit and their other Native American neighbors came bringing deer and wild turkeys, and together the Indians and the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving. The vague history (more myth, really) of the first Thanksgiving presents a scenario of the encounter of New World and Old World people that existed for only a moment, if it existed at all. It involves one of the least typical, and least successful, groups of European colonizers of the North American continent. Yet Thanksgiving is an important celebration throughout the United States, and like most things central to American culture, it is complicated and multilayered.

Modern Japanese literature used to be divided into two broad genres: the "pure" - art for art's sake; and the "popular" - easily accessible works with an emphasis on entertainment.

This trend is also discernible in novelistic techniques, as pure literature adopts devices such as fantasy, fable and science fiction that would once have been lmost inconceivable in this genre.

These developments suggest that Japanese literature has for the first time taken on a global flavour.

For more than two centuries this policy enabled Japan to enjoy stability and a flowering of its indigenous culture.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan became a regional power that was able to defeat the forces of both China and Russia.

The economy experienced a major slowdown starting in the 1990s following three decades of unprecedented growth, but Japan still remains a major economic power, both in Asia and globally.