Leeds insist on £100,000 fee to let unsettled Eastwood head home

Leeds are demanding a £100,000 transfer fee before they release the homesick Greg Eastwood from the remaining two years of his deal. The Kiwi World Cup-winning forward wants to be closer to his family in Australia.

Eastwood made his name with Brisbane and played last season with the Canterbury Bulldogs while he waited for his paperwork to come to England. He has been plagued with injury during his time here, including the leg problem which will keep him out of tonight's match against Wigan, but has been highly effective when he has played and still hopes to figure in the play-offs at the end of this season.

"Unfortunately, Greg has failed to settle on the other side of the world, away from his family," said Rhinos' chief executive, Gary Hetherington.

"He has two years left on his contract, so we will not be releasing him from his obligation and value him at £100,000."

Wigan's assistant coach, Shaun Wane, remains in charge for tonight's game, in the continuing absence of Michael Maguire, who is in Australia following the death of his father. Wane makes one change, with the 19-year-old prop, Ben Davies, replacing Paul Prescott, who has a facial injury.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Lindsay Lohan heads for jail with Hollywood send-off

Lindsay Lohan chose to complete her journey from the stars to the gutter in a manner that felt grimly appropriate, given the nature of her downfall: she arrived in court fashionably late, expensively attired, and trailed, as ever, by a vast army of paparazzi.

The actress, who was once a rising Hollywood talent but is perhaps now America's most prominent fallen celebrity, was taken into custody at Beverly Hills courthouse yesterday to begin a jail sentence for repeatedly violating the terms of her probation.

After a brief hearing, Lohan rose and was handcuffed, before being taken to a women's prison in Lynwood, an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. Despite the humiliation there was a sliver of good news – overcrowding at the jail means she is likely to serve just two weeks of her 90-day term, which she will spend in isolation due to her celebrity.

The 24-year-old did not comment during the hearing, but posted an update on her Twitter feed late on Monday in which she noted: "Never thought that I'd be 'booking' into jail." Her last minutes of freedom were witnessed by her tearful mother, Dina, and sister Ali, together with her estranged father Michael, who yelled "We love you Lindsay!" as she was led away.

driver from www.independent.co.uk

Glee Guys to Co-Host Teen Choice Awards

Make room, Katy Perry, because the guys of Glee are joining you as co-hosts of the Teen Choice Awards.

Chord Overstreet joins Glee

Chris Colfer, Kevin McHale, Cory Monteith and Mark Salling will join the pop star for the 12th annual award show honoring the hottest in film, television, music, sports and fashion, as voted by teens.

Glee has received 13 Teen Choice Awards nominations.

Taylor Lautner, Jane Lynch, Channing Tatum, Ellen DeGeneres, Josh Hutcherson, Cat Deeley, Keke Palmer and the cast of Big Time Rush will also appear on the show. Previously announced participants include Zachary Levi, Zac Efron, Ashley Greene, Jim Parsons, Robert Pattinson and the Kardashian sisters.

driver from www.tvguide.com

Mock Trial

Yesterday, in Cambodia, a perpetrator of one of the twentieth century’s great crimes was sentenced. Kang Kek Lew, also known as Comrade Deuch, was the head of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and was at least partly responsible for the murder of more than 12,000 people. Now he will serve 19 years in jail.

But, after the West spent nearly a hundred million dollars to create a tribunal in Cambodia, this is all we have to show for it, at least so far: a solitary conviction of a man who was involved in less than one percent of the 1.5 to 2 million murders that took place in the country from 1975 to 1978. No one knows for sure if the next phase of the tribunal—the trial of the four highest ranking Khmer Rouge leaders still alive—will occur in 2011, 2012, or even at all. Some of the accused are elderly and frail, and may die before their trial begins, as another arrested leader, Ta Mok, did in 2006.

Even if the other trials do go forward, it will be difficult to argue that justice has been served. Authority at the tribunal is divided between international and Cambodian officials, and the two sides cannot agree on how many people to prosecute. International prosecutors want to charge at least five more individuals for their role in the mass killings. But Cambodia’s current leader, Hun Sen, has said that he does not want any more trials, and the Cambodian team has argued against further indictments. Moreover, even if those additional trials were to take place, it would still leave the vast majority of the guilty unpunished. It took more than ten people to murder up to 2 million Cambodians. It is now certain that none of the thousands of lower-level murderers will ever stand trial.

How did the matter of justice in Cambodia go so badly awry? The answer begins with the fact that the current Cambodian regime is riddled with former members of the Khmer Rouge. But part of the fault also lies with the United States.

In December 1978, Vietnam, reacting to unprovoked attacks on its own territory and civilians, invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot. The invaders installed a puppet regime that was staffed at the highest levels by former mid-level Khmer Rouge political and military cadres. The cadres had fled Cambodia to Vietnam not out of revulsion at the holocaust, but out of fear of Pol Pot’s executioners who were conducting purges. The new regime was led first by Heng Samrin and later by Hun Sen.

The Heng Samrin-Hun Sen government was obviously a substantial improvement over the Khmer Rouge, but it was still a brutal authoritarian regime. For the next 30 years, it would murder its political opponents and preside over a politicized and corrupt judiciary. It would open Cambodia to various criminal syndicates, including drug traffickers, human traffickers, and illegal loggers. And even after the Vietnamese ended their occupation of Cambodia in 1989, and Soviet aid dried up, the government would find ways to cling to power.

In 1991, Hun Sen reluctantly accepted a U.N. plan to occupy the country and pave the way for elections. Unfortunately, the United Nations was not prepared to use its 22,000-strong military and police contingents to enforce its written mandate. Discerning this, Hun Sen’s army and Pol Pot’s guerrillas refused to disarm. The non-communists won the May 1993 elections, despite the campaign of terror waged by both Hun Sen and Pol Pot. But the heavily armed Hun Sen was able to bully his way into an ostensible coalition government with the unarmed election winners—the non-communists, led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Four years later, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh in a bloody coup, in which more than 100 non-communist political leaders and military officials were murdered.

Meanwhile, the Clinton State Department, at least at first, pursued a policy of engagement with Hun Sen, whose son was invited to attend West Point. Stability was the watchword of this policy. Following the 1997 coup, Clinton did impose a ten-year ban on U.S. government aid to Cambodia. But the Bush administration allowed the aid ban to lapse in 2007, and, more broadly, revived the policy of engagement. At one point, the administration invited then-Chief of National Police Hok Lundy—a known torturer, murderer, and human trafficker—to Washington to become a partner in the war on terror.

Hovering over Cambodian politics during all this time was the question of whether, and how, to prosecute the leaders of the Khmer Rouge holocaust. For two decades after taking power, the government did call for prosecution of Pol Pot’s circle. Yet it was noteworthy that the proposed targets of these prosecutions never included members of the new regime. For Hun Sen, the purpose of the tribunals was not justice; it was to delegitimize his armed opponents who were still holding out in remote rural areas.

In June 1997, Hun Sen and Ranariddh had signed a letter requesting U.N. assistance to establish a tribunal. And, even after ousting Ranariddh in a coup, Hun Sen continued to agree to a dominant role for the United Nations in the proposed tribunal. Meanwhile, a committee appointed by the U.N. Secretary General, noting Cambodia’s lack of a technically competent and politically independent judiciary, recommended that the tribunal be held in a foreign country and staffed by international judges and prosecutors.

By late 1998, however, Hun Sen had flipped his position. What had changed was Cambodian politics. During the mid-’90s, many of Pol Pot’s political and military commanders had defected with their units to the government side, where they were given a chance to share in the spoils of power. By 1997, the Pol Pot-led rump had begun to disintegrate in internal disputes. “Brother Number One,” Pol Pot, died in July 1998. When “Brother Number Two,” Nuon Chea, as well as the nominal president of the former regime, Khieu Samphan, defected in December 1998, the armed opposition to Hun Sen’s regime was finished. Suddenly, Hun Sen announced that it was time to “dig a hole and bury the past.” Within a matter of weeks, he told the United Nations that he no longer needed its help, and that any tribunal would be held in Cambodia under the country’s judicial processes.

In the end, the United States and the United Nations mostly backed down. They accepted Hun Sen’s demand that the tribunal be held in Cambodia. And John Kerry—whose interest in southeast Asian issues dated to his days as an antiwar activist—proposed a compromise under which a majority of judges would be Cambodian (though the international judges would have veto power should the Cambodians try to block indictments).

In theory, it might have worked, but in practice it has turned out to be disastrous. Hun Sen, whose government contains many former Khmer Rouge functionaries, remains reluctant to see many people put on trial. And because the trials are being conducted in Cambodia, with such heavy involvement by people who are appointed by Hun Sen’s government, it appears that he might just get his way.

No U.S. security interest is at stake in the events in Cambodia. The question of justice for this poor and ravaged nation remains significant only as a moral issue. Yet, perhaps because engagement, even with nasty regimes, has long been the default operating principle of the State Department, both the Clinton and Bush administrations were frequently content to cater to Hun Sen. Given that Barack Obama is preoccupied with so many other pressing issues, it seems unlikely that the United States—which is still helping to fund the tribunal—will reverse course anytime soon. And so, more than three decades after the end of the Cambodian killings, it is possible that yesterday’s sentencing of a sole murderer is all that the Khmer Rouge’s victims are going to get in the way of justice.

driver from www.tnr.com

Noise enters our ears as powerful waves of mechanical energy

Scien¬tists measure sound intensity in decibels (db) , with each doubling of en¬ergy adding ten decibels. Ordinary conversation measures about 60 db; a child's scream hits around 90 db. On this logarithmic scale, the scream is potentially 1000 times more powerful.

Each day, over five million Americans are exposed on the job to at least 90 db , the maximum safe level for an eight-hour period , according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "This standard isn ' t ideal , because noise affects individuals differently , " says William Clark of Washington University's Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis. "In theory, the standard should protect the lifetime hearing of 90 percent of workers. However, it assumes that a worker's ears will have 16 hours of quiet each day during which to recover an unlikely assumption for most peo¬ple."

Sound causes thousands of tiny hairs in the inner ear to vibrate. These vibrations trigger nerve impulses to the brain, which are perceived as sound. Prolonged exposure to 85 db or more , or far shorter exposure to very intense levels such as the 140-db shock waves from a shotgun blast can ir-revocably damage some of these delicate inner-ear hairs. Ronald Reagan suffered permanent injury during his acting days when a 38-caliber pistol loaded with blanks was fired near his right ear. As a result , he now wears a hearing aid. Audiologists predict that by the year 2010, as many people could be wearing hearing aids as now wear contact lenses.

Many people believe that weaker hearing is an inevitable part of aging. But studies show that those who live in low-noise environments tend to have very little hearing loss in old age.

In noisy industrial nations, however, even young people suffer dam¬aged hearing. David Lipscomb , a former professor of audiology at the Uni¬versity of Tennessee at Knoxville, tested over a thousand incoming fresh¬men and discovered that six of every ten had hearing loss typical of the el¬derly. Rock music is one cause. The noise in a rock-concert hall can easily

exceed 120 db, roughly the level of an air-raid siren. High-tech gadgets (i$rtt) such as powerful portable stereos also threaten to put our hearing into a downward spiral.

Engineering students are supposed to be examples of practicality and rationality, but when it comes to my college education I am an idealist and a fool

In high school I wanted tc be an electrical engineer and, of course, any sensible student with my aims would have chosen a college with a large engineering department, famous reputation and lots of good labs and research equipment. But that's not what I did.

I chose to study engineering at a small liberal-arts ( A=£|-) university that doesn't even offer a major in electrical engineering. Obviously, this was not a practical choice; I came here for more noble reasons. I wanted a broad education that would provide me with flexibility and a value system to guide me in my career. I wanted to open my eyes and expand my vision by interacting with people who weren't studying science or engineering. My parents, teachers and other adults praised me for such a sensible choice. They told me I was wise and mature beyond my 18 years, and I believed them.

I headed off to college sure I was going to have an advantage over those students who went to big engineering "factories" where they didn't care if you had values or were flexible. I was going to be a complete engineer: technical genius and sensitive humanist all in one.

Now I'm not so sure. Somewhere along the way my noble ideals crashed into reality, as II noble ideals eventually do. After three years of struggling to balance math, physics and ngineering courses with liberal-arts courses, I have learned there are reasons why few ngineering students try to reconcile (-tfj-iM) engineering with liberal-arts courses in college.

The reality that has blocked my path to become the typical successful student is that ngineering and the liberal arts simply don't mix as easily as I assumed in high school. idividually they shape a person in very different ways; together they threaten to confuse. he struggle to reconcile the two fields of study is difficult.

No Speak English

Mamacita is the big mama of the man across the street, third-floor front. Rachel says her name ought to be Mamasota, but I think that's mean.

The man saved his money to bring her here. He saved and saved because she was alone with the baby boy in that coun-try. He worked two jobs. He came home late and he left early. Every day.

Then one day Mamacita and the baby boy arrived in a yellow taxi. The taxi door opened like a waiter's arm. Out stepped a tiny pink shoe, a foot soft as a rabbit's ear, then the thick ankle, a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume. The man had to pull her, the taxicab driver had to push. Push, pull. Push, pull.Poof!

All at once she bloomed. Huge, enormous, beautiful to look at, from the salmon-pink feather on the tip of her hat down to the little rosebuds of her toes. I couldn't take my eyes off her tiny shoes.

Up, up, up the stairs she went with the baby boy in a blue blanket, the man carrying her suitcases, her lavender hatboxes, a dozen boxes of satin high heels. Then we didn't see her.

Somebody said because she's too fat, somebody because of the three flights of stairs, but I believe she doesn't come out because she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words. She knows to say: He not here for when the landlord comes, No speak English if anybody else comes, and Holy smokes. I don't know where she learned this, but I heard her say it one time and it surprised me.

My father says when he came to this country he ate hamandeggs for three months. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hamandeggs. That was the only word he knew.

It is, everyone agrees, a huge task that the child performs when he learns to |peak, and the fact that he does so in so short a period of time challenges explanation

Language learning begins with listening. Individual children vary greatly in the amount of listening they do before they start speaking, and late starters are often long listeners. Most children will "obey" spoken instructions some time before they can speak, though the word obey is hardly accurate as a description of the eager and delighted cooperation usually shown by the child. Before they can speak, many children will ask questions by gesture and by making questioning noises.

Any attempt to trace the development from the noises babies make to their first spoken words leads to considerable difficulties. It is agreed that they enjoy making noises, and that during the first few months one or two noises sort themselves out as particularly indicative of delight, distress, sociability, and so on. But since these cannot be said to show the baby's intention to communicate, they can hardly be regarded as early forms of language. It is agreed, too, that from about three months they play with sounds for enjoyment, and that by six months they are able to add new sounds to their repertoire (tb£ tB Eft^^^H). This self-imitation leads on to deliberate^ '3tvREft) imitation of sounds made or words spoken to them by other people. The problem then arises as to the point at which one can say that these imitations can be considered as speech.

Student Use of Computers

Students tend to use computers more and more nowadays. Reading this chart, we can find that the average number of hours a student spends on the computer per week has increased sharply. In 1990, it was less than 2 hours; and in 1995, it increased to almost 4 hours; and in 2000, the number soared to 20 hours.

Obviously computers are becoming more and more popular. There are several reasons for this. First, computers facilitate us in more aspects of life. Also, the fast development of the Internet enlarges our demands for using computers. We can easily contact with friends in remote places through the Internet. Besides, the prices of computers are getting lower and lower, which enables more students to purchase them.

However, there still exist some problems, such as, poor quality, out-of-date designs and so on. And how to balance the time between using computers and studying is also a serious problem.

Anyhow, we will benefit a lot from computers as long as we use them properly.

The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation

All high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become "better" people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don't go.

But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don't fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students interfere with each other's experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no stimulation in their studies, and drop out—often encouraged by college administrators.

Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves—they are spoiled and they are expecting too much. But that's a condemnation of the students as a whole, and doesn't explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We've been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can't absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army, of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.

Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics up-side down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it's just the other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy(^JS?Pift)to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.