Category: news

Sian Massey was the assistant referee officiating at the Wolves and Liverpool Premier League clash

Sky Sports has said off-air remarks made by two football presenters about female assistant referee Sian Massey were “not acceptable”.

Host Richard Keys and pundit Andy Gray commented on Ms Massey’s appointment for the game between Wolves and Liverpool on Saturday.

The pair agreed female officials “don’t know the offside rule” when they believed their microphones were off.

In a statement, Sky said the two men had apologised for the comments.

The Football Association has given its support to Ms Massey, who made a correct borderline call in the build-up to Liverpool’s first goal at the Molineux stadium in Wolverhampton.

After Mr Keys said: “Somebody better get down there and explain offside to her”, Mr Gray remarked “women don’t know the offside rule”.

Mr Keys then said “of course they don’t”, before adding: “I can guarantee you there’ll be a big one today. [Liverpool manager] Kenny [Dalglish] will go potty.”

He then went on to remark on comments made by West Ham vice-chairman Karren Brady in the Sun newspaper on Saturday morning about the level of sexism in football.

“See charming Karren Brady this morning complaining about sexism? Yeah. Do me a favour, love,” he said.

Sky said: “The comments are not acceptable. They were not made on air but we have spoken to Richard and Andy and told them our views and they have apologised and expressed their regret.”

An FA statement said it had made “real strides in encouraging both male and female match officials to enter the game at every level, and will continue to offer every encouragement to all officials within the football family to progress to the highest levels possible”.

“We are proud to have some of the world’s best match officials, both male and female.

“Overall the number of female referees in England (Levels 1-8) stands at 853 and climbing, and all of our female match officials act as fantastic ambassadors for the game.

“They have our wholehearted and continuing support,” it said.

Referees body Professional Game Match Officials issued a statement from their general manager Mike Riley.

It said: “All PGMO referees and assistant referees are appointed on merit and ability. They are assessed on their performances only.”

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Andy Murray takes on Jurgen Melzer for a place in the quarter-finals on day eight of the Australian Open, while Rafael Nadal, Kim Clijsters and Robin Soderling are also in action on Monday.

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Portugal’s president has a largely ceremonial role but is able to dissolve parliament without justification

Voters head to the polls in Portugal for presidential elections, as the country faces a mounting debt crisis.

Incumbent President Anibal Cavaco Silva of the centre-right Social Democrats faces a challenge from the Socialists’ Manuel Alegre.

Latest opinion polls suggest Mr Cavaco Silva will be re-elected.

Although the president’s role is largely ceremonial, Mr Cavaco Silva has backed the austerity plan put forward by the Socialist government.

The plan aims to cut Portugal’s deficit and avoid it having to take a bailout like Ireland and Greece.

In his last campaign rally on Friday, Mr Cavaco Silva repeated an appeal for voters to turn out, citing the grave financial crisis Portugal was facing.

The tone of the campaign sharpened in the last few days of campaigning, in part because of fears many voters might abstain.

Socialist Manuel Alegre has accused the president of blackmailing voters and undermining democracy

Two recent polls showed Mr Cavaco Silva was backed by more than half of those who expressed a preference, but as having lost support in recent days.

Earlier this week, the former prime minister said “serious damage” would result if no candidate cleared the 50% hurdle on Sunday, triggering a second round of voting.

The uncertainty would push up interest rates and thus also mortgage payments, he said.

His main rival in the polls, veteran Socialist Manuel Alegre, accused him of blackmailing voters and undermining democracy.

Portugal’s president is a mainly ceremonial figure but has one key power: to dissolve parliament without having to justify the decision.

With the Socialist government lacking an outright majority, there is speculation that a right-of-centre president with a renewed mandate might be likely to use this weapon, says the BBC’s Alison Roberts in Lisbon.

Early on in the campaign Mr Cavaco Silva stressed its importance, but he later said he would be reluctant to wield it.

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Leaked documents released by Al Jazeera TV suggest Palestinian leaders made private offers on previously non-negotiable issues in the peace process.

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Ann Pettway is listed as being on probation until 2012

The US woman who brought up high-profile child-kidnap victim Carlina White, who went on to solve her own abduction, has been taken into custody.

Ann Pettway, 44, surrendered to FBI agents in Connecticut.

An arrest warrant had been issued in North Carolina, where Ms Pettway lives, as officials believed she had violated a probation requirement.

Ms White was taken from hospital in New York in 1987 at just 19 days old and has been reunited with her true mother.

Ms White said she had always had a sense she did not belong to the family that raised her and began her own inquiries.

DNA tests this week confirmed Carlina as the daughter of Joy White and Carl Tyson in a case that has made headline news in the US and internationally.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent William Reiner said Ms Pettway was required not to leave North Carolina as part of her probation following a conviction for attempted embezzlement. She is on parole until 2012.

North Carolina officials believed Ms Pettway, who lives in Raleigh, was on the run.

Investigators in the Carlina White case had been unable to contact Ms Pettway to discuss the abduction.

Because the statute of limitations on the case has expired in New York, it may be transferred to federal officials, as there is no statute on missing children in federal law.

Carlina’s grandmother, Elizabeth White, said: “The FBI is trying to get to the bottom of this. They’re wondering who in the Pettway family is involved and who is not involved.”

Carlina White’s biological father, Carl Tyson, told People magazine the arrest of Ms Pettway was “emotional”.

He said: “However they prosecute her, that’s up to them. I would just like to ask her, ‘Why?'”

Carlina White was abducted from hospital after being taken there with a fever by her mother.

There were reports of a woman wearing nurse’s clothing who had consoled the mother but who later picked up the baby and walked out of the building.

Although the abduction made headlines, investigators could not find a breakthrough and the case went cold.

Carlina was then raised as Nejdra Nance in Connecticut and later moved to Georgia.

But Carlina had long held misgivings as she did not resemble any of her family and suspected the woman who raised her used fake social security ID.

After starting her own investigations, Carlina finally contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and discovered a photo of a baby on its website she believed to be her.

The centre helped Ms White, who called her biological mother on 4 January.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The Republic of Ireland’s Green Party is pulling out of the ruling coalition, a move expected to bring forward the general election from 11 March.

The party’s announcement, after a meeting in Dublin, follows a decision on Saturday by PM Brian Cowen to quit as leader of his Fianna Fail party.

Mr Cowen had said he would stay on as PM until the election, a move opponents had described as “farcical”.

The Greens’ decision removes the ruling coalition’s two-seat majority.

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Buildings were swept away by the force of the water and mud coming down sodden hillsides

Officials in Brazil say more than 800 people are now known to have died in floods and landslides in the south-east of the country this month.

More than 400 people are still missing after torrential rain caused whole hillsides to collapse.

The Brazilian government has said it will set up an early warning system to alert communities of impending danger.

The flooding is considered the worst natural disaster Brazil has ever experienced.

According to figures compiled by the newspaper O Globo, a third of all victims were under age.

The youngest fatality was a five-day-old baby buried in a mudslide in Nova Friburgo, the worst affected town with 324 dead.

Continuing danger

The number of missing has been declining as forensic experts identify more bodies, but rescue workers fear the full extent of the disaster is not yet known, with some remote communities still only reachable by helicopter.

Funeral workers said some dogs were guarding their owners’ graves for days

Emergency workers say their priority is to make sure no new deaths occur.

They are warning of the risks of contaminated water.

Three people are known to have contracted leptospirosis, an infectious bacterial disease, which is caused by exposure to water contaminated with rats’ urine.

In Teresopolis, doctors have been administering thousands of tetanus vaccines.

In Sao Jose do Vale, workers were erecting more than a hundred tents sent from the UK to house those whose homes were swept away or flooded.

Volunteers in Rio de Janeiro held an adoption fair in the hope of re-homing some of the 5,000 animals left without owners as a result of the disaster.

The government has allocated $240m (£150m) in emergency reconstruction money for the area.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

TB causes symptoms such as coughing, chest pains and weight loss

A new vaccine that can fight tuberculosis (TB) before and after infection has been developed by Danish scientists.

It could offer protection for many years more than is now possible.

TB is a huge global problem, particularly in developing countries, where access to antibiotics to treat the disease is limited.

The latest vaccine, so far tested in animals, is featured in the journal Nature Medicine.

TB is a disease of the lungs, causing symptoms such as coughing, chest pains and weight loss. Untreated, it can be deadly.

However, only in a small number of cases – fewer than 5% – do the symptoms develop immediately after infection.

In more than 90% of cases, once Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium which causes the disease, has invaded the body it changes its chemical signature, and lives in a dormant – or “latent” – state.

Usually the bacterium never emerges from this latent state, but in around 10% of cases it reactivates – often years or even decades later – to trigger severe symptoms.

Current vaccines, such as the BCG vaccine, work only if given before exposure to the bacterium.

They do not prevent infection, but do prevent acute symptoms and disease from emerging.

But once the bacterium has changed into its latent form it is effectively immune to the vaccine, and can bide its time, reactivating after the vaccine has ceased to have a preventative effect.

If successful in human trials, the new vaccine would be able to tackle that problem.

‘Major breakthrough’

Developed by a team at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, it combines proteins that trigger an immune response to both the active and latent forms of Mycobacterium.

Researcher Professor Peter Lawætz Andersen said: “It might be possible to give a booster jab post-exposure to older children or even young adults which would protect them well into adulthood.”

Although TB can be treated with antibiotics, those drugs are often not easily accessible in the developing world, where the new vaccine could have the greatest benefit.

Professor Andersen said: “In these areas you cannot go in and treat more than half the local population. For instance, in Capetown 60% of people are thought to be infected.”

Professor Peter Davies, secretary of the group TB Alert, said: “A vaccine which can both protect against initial infection and protect from a breakdown of infection into disease is a major breakthrough.

“One of the main disadvantages of BCG was that it could only prevent infection going on to disease in the initially uninfected individual. It was therefore of no use in protecting infected adults who would become an infectious source of disease. Protecting children, though of value, does not protect against transmission, as children with active disease do not usually transmit disease.

“So far so good but we must remember that mice are not men (or women).”

Professor Francis Drobniewski, Director of the Health Protection Agency’s National Mycobacterium Reference Laboratory said: “This is an exciting and thoughtful piece of research. The existing BCG vaccine is cheap, safe, widely used but of limited efficacy.

“With over nine million new TB cases globally each year and increasing levels of drug resistance new diagnostics, drugs and especially effective vaccines are desperately needed.”

UK situation

The number of tuberculosis cases in the UK topped 9,000 in 2009 – the highest for nearly 30 years.

Diagnoses have been rising almost continuously since the 1980s, with many of the new cases thought to be among people who caught the disease abroad.

There has also been a sharp rise in drug-resistant TB cases.

The Health Protection Agency has warned more efforts must be made to curb the problem.

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Veteran flanker Martyn Williams is the shock omission from Wales’ 28-man Six Nations Championship squad.

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Hoffenheim manager Ernst Tanner says striker Demba Ba is set to join West Ham on loan until the end of the season.

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Mars’ Grenade is the follow-up single to Just The Way You Are

US singer Bruno Mars has scored a double chart success, with number ones in both the singles and album charts.

His single Grenade held on to the number one spot for a second week and his album Doo-Wops and Hooligans went straight into the top spot after selling 86,000 copies.

Grenade held off Adele’s new single Rolling In The Deep – from her new album 21 – which entered at two.

Grenade is Mars’s second number one single after Just The Way You Are.

The song is still in the top 20 at number at 18.

The trio behind the song were last week named by Music Week magazine as the most successful songwriters in the UK chart in 2010.

The Smeezingtons – Mars, Ari Levine and Philip Lawrence – also co-wrote Grenade.

BBC Sound of 2011 winner Jessie J’s Do It like A Dude dropped one place to number three in the singles chart.

Coming Home, the new release by US rapper Sean Combs’s group Diddy-Dirty Money featuring Skylar Grey, entered the singles chart at number four.

MC Wretch 32’s debut single Traktor, featuring vocals from L, entered at number five.

Britney Spears’s latest single Hold It Against Me was at number six. Aggro Santos and Girls Aloud’s Kimberley Walsh’s Like U Like entered at number eight.

In the album chart, Rihanna’s Loud dropped to second place. New release Ritual from White Lies debuted at number three while Plan B’s The Defamation of Strickland Banks dropped two places to number four.

The winner of the BBC’s Sound Of 2010, Ellie Goulding, saw her album Lights fall two places to number five.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.