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• Illness Knocks Serena Williams Out at Indian Wells

  Mar 11, 2019 by Admin / 466 Views

  

  INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — For the first three games, Serena Williams was in a deep, irresistible groove: pounding serves and ground strokes as Garbiñe Muguruza watched the winners zoom by.

   

  Who could have known, as Williams took a quick 3-0 lead, that she would not win another game on Sunday?

   

  With Williams visibly hampered, increasingly slow on her feet and unable to hit serves at full power, Muguruza reeled off seven straight games. Muguruza was up to a 6-3, 1-0 lead before Williams walked to her chair instead of changing ends, sitting down heavily and then retiring from this third-round match at the BNP Paribas Open.

   

  The WTA Tour announced that the reason for Williams’s retirement was a “viral illness.”

   

  “Before the match, I did not feel great, and then it just got worse with every second: extreme dizziness and extreme fatigue,” Williams said in a statement released by the tournament. “By the score, it might have looked like I started well, but I was not feeling at all well physically.”

   

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  Muguruza, a tall, powerful Spaniard who is seeded 20th, said, “We played many times, and it’s always supertough and superexciting, and it’s never good to see someone not feeling well on the court.”

   

  The retirement was the latest on-court setback for the 37-year-old Williams, who has had some remarkable results since returning to the tour last year after childbirth but has yet to win a title.

   

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  This was her second tournament of 2019 and only her third event in six months. Last September, she reached the United States Open final before losing her cool and the match to Naomi Osaka.

   

  In January, she quickly hit plenty of high notes again on her way to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, where she rolled her left ankle while holding a 5-1, 40-30 lead in the third set against Karolina Pliskova.

   

   

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• Bill Gates: If Africa Can Be Electrified, The Whole World Will Benefit Too

  Mar 11, 2019 by Admin / 592 Views

  

  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends half of its budget, or $2 billion a year, on the continent of Africa. The money is going to improve medical care and agribusiness, both of which are essential to enhance living standards. But it is also trying to electrify the continent — one that has 500,000 people with no access to power, which is the basic building block for prosperity.

   

  And now is the time: By 2050, Africa is expected to grow from 1.1 billion people to 2 billion. Those folks need medicine, food and electric power. According to the International Energy Agency, sub-Saharan Africa will require $400 billion by 2035 to modernize its energy foundation. The World Bank Group will invest $200 billion globally to 2025 to help get to a low-carbon future.

   

  
  “We need to do a much better job of informing people about the challenges,” says Bill Gates in his year-end 2018 blog. “But I worry that wealthy countries are turning inward … (and) they’ll decide these efforts aren’t worth the cost,” he adds, referring to investments in healthcare and infrastructure.

   

  It’s game on, though, for the Gates Foundation. And for the United Nations too, which has launched the Sustainable Energy for All that has a lofty goal of providing universal energy access by 2030. It also aims to double the use of both energy efficiency and renewable energy during the same time period.

   

  
  Most of those without electricity are in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where power generation is about a tenth of where it is in other developing areas. Other regions without power include swaths of Latin America and the Philippines. Despite the noble efforts and based on current population trends, 1.2 billion — or 15 percent of the world’s population — will still lack access to electric power in 2030.

   

  Separately, Gates has established the Breakthrough Energy Venture, which is a $1 billion fund with a long-term focus. It has a lofty goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a half-gigaton a year.

   

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• Ebola treatment center attacked again as Congo battles a deadly epidemic

  Mar 11, 2019 by Admin / 386 Views

  

  CNN) Militants attacked an Ebola treatment center in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing a police officer as the nation battles a growing epidemic that has killed hundreds.

   

  The World Health Organization said a staff member was injured in the Saturday attack by armed groups that targeted the center again last week. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was in the nation on a three-day visit and spoke to officials and staff at the center after the attack.

   

  "It breaks my heart to think of the health workers injured and police officer who died in today's attack, as we continue to mourn those who died in previous attacks, while defending the right to health," Tedros said. "But we have no choice except to continue serving the people here, who are among the most vulnerable in the world."

   

   

   

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• No drama Obama' shared his tricks for staying cool under pressure

  Mar 10, 2019 by Admin / 442 Views

  

  Barack Obama was famous during his presidency for always appearing cool and calm. The press sometimes called him "no drama Obama" and didn't always mean it kindly.

   

  He said there was some truth to the nickname when he repeated it on stage this week at a tech conference in Salt Lake City, Utah hosted by software company Qualtrics. But he said, just because he appeared calm, when he was younger he would still sometimes agonize with fear of making a mistake.

   

  "I have an even temperament and I don't get too high and I don't get too low, but that doesn't mean that throughout the presidency and throughout my professional career that there weren't times when I was constrained by, 'Man I don't want to screw this up. I don't want ot let people down. I don't want to be seen as having made made a mistake or having failed'," he said.

   

  It was during his second term that he experienced a "shedding of fear" as he described it and that helped him perform better.

   

  "There's no doubt by the time I was in my second term I was a better president than I was in my first term and it did not have to do with analysis or policy," he said. "It had to do with what comes with any career - whether it's sports or teaching or you name it - you get enough reps, enough repetition and familiarity with the nature of the problems that you start being focused on the task and not how-are-you-doing-on-the-task and the self-consciousness that comes with that."

   

  He says that's the attitude that he carried into working on the Iran nuclear deal, which sought to squash Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Paris Climate accords, a landmark agreement between governments worldwide to jointly address climate change. (President Trump has since vowed the US would abandon participation in the Paris agreement which called for each country to make its own emissions-reduction pledge. )

   

  By learning how to get comfortable with tackling large, complex problems, Obama says he stopped worrying about making mistakes. Instead he realized, "You know, I got this. And if I make a mistake we'll figure out how to make up for it, we'll learn from it."

   

  He didn't focus on poll numbers or pundits but focused on "advancing this vision that I have and I hope the country will share, that we create a better country," he said.

   

  But it was more than just self-confidence that comes from experience. He also took deliberate steps to keep himself focused. This included "not reading my own press."

   

  He didn't (and doesn't) look at comments on social media, or watch the cable news pundits. That included the people berating him, but it also included avoiding people praising him. " If people were complementary, people assume you know more than you did," he joked, and that can lead to an inflated ego, which is just as detrimental.

   

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• Trump call for budget cuts sparks new shutdown fears

  Mar 10, 2019 by Admin / 718 Views

  

   

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  Trump call for budget cuts sparks new shutdown fears

  President Donald Trump will make a cost-cutting opening budget offer Monday that will dismiss hopes for a grand budget deal and likely stoke fresh fears of another government shutdown.

  Trump will put on paper what the White House has already prepared lawmakers to receive — an audacious plan for sucking 5 percent from the budgets of non-military arms of the federal government, while using an accounting trick to bust beyond set spending limits for defense programs. The 5 percent would be below the fiscal 2019 budget limits for domestic agencies.

  Trump in his budget request also is expected to rekindle partisan feuds over the border wall, project robust economic growth above 3 percent, take longer to balance the books than Republicans have advocated in the past and pay for a new Space Force within the Air Force.

  Although the request is merely a messaging document, the president’s posture will contribute to apprehension about a government shutdown, some seven months before federal funding runs out again on Sept. 30.

  On Capitol Hill, even Republicans are saying the president will need to come to the realization that the GOP must give some ground this year to Democrats, who hold the House majority and 47 seats in the Senate. But the Trump administration wants to hold fast to its mission to slash spending.

  “Congress wants an automatic big-spending deal, and now they’re upset because they lost their favorite talking point that the president’s budget assumes a caps increase,” a senior administration official speaking on background said Saturday, referring to an increase in budget limits set eight years ago. “Congress hasn’t grappled with their spending addiction since 2011, and the administration is forcing the conversation before the debt crisis worsens.”

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