Since he retired at age 60, he’s using his new freedom to turn back the family clock and trace the paths of his ancestors, from a 17th century royalist to grandparents who resisted the Nazis in World War II.

He discovered things.

After working since the age of 18, he retired with a sense of great joy and liberation.

He wants his son and daughter to share in the bounty by retiring at 60, too.

Ted Williams recounted his days working as a radio DJ in the 80s before battling drugs and alcohol, drinking as much as a full bottle of liquor a day.

By 1993, he found himself in homeless shelters and even served time in prison. The now 53-year-old former radio announcer became homeless after battling drugs and alcohol.

The Columbus Dispatch newspaper posted a YouTube video that attracted millions   video of Williams begging for money on the side of a road in Columbus, Ohio, using his radio emcee imitations.

He’s no Susan Boyle or Justin Bieber, yet one of America’s first viral videos of 2011 has propelled a homeless man with a baritone-rich radio voice, to national attention and job offers.

Three days later, Williams was astounded by the attention. He appeared on morning news programmes including The Today Show to talk about new voice-over job offers with the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team and foodmaker Kraft and his stunning instant rise from begging on the streets.

“Outrageous, it’s just phenomenal. There is no way in the world that I could ever have imagined … all of this.”

The simple lesson on treating the homeless: “Don’t judge a book by its cover, everybody has their own little story.” He said.

With job offers pouring in, he hoped of becoming a radio programme director five years on and support his daughters and sons in Columbus.

He was tearfully reunited with his elderly mother in New York in front of several news crews.

The International Barcode of Life Project (iBOL) says the world’s first reference library of DNA barcodes and the world’s largest biodiversity genomics project is being built.

They are trying to create global library of DNA barcodes – snippets, little chunks of DNA – that permit to identify species.

DNA barcoding has helped identify the type of birds that forced last year’s emergency landing of a flight on the Hudson River in New York and mislabelled fish fillets after referring to the library which has 7,000 species of fish DNA barcodes even after it had been stripped of scales, skins and heads.

The researchers discovered nearly one in four fish fillets are mislabeled in North America.

To get the barcodes, scientists use a short section of DNA extracted from a standardised region of tissue. Once the barcode is created, it’s filed in the iBOL library.

Researchers hope handheld mobile devices will be able to one day read these digital strips of rainbow-colored barcodes – much like supermarket scanners – to identify different species by testing tissue samples on site and comparing them with a digital database because every species, from extinct to thriving, is set to get its own DNA barcode in an attempt to better track the ones that are endangered, as well as those being shipped across international borders as food or consumer products.

AFP Photo

OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, was launched at 12 noon EST on Saturday, is available in 80% of American homes with cable.

During the three-hour block beginning at 8pm EST on Saturday 8pm and 9pm EST hours, the network ranked third, after ESPN and USA Network, among all ad-supported cable networks in the 25-to-54-year-old audience demo.

Sunday in prime time, the network averaged 822,000 viewers.

On its debut weekends, Oprah Winfrey’s cable network, according to preliminary Nielsen Co figures released on Monday got some healthy sampling from viewers averaged 1 million viewers.

The Singapore drama serial ‘The Little Nonya’ was shown since January in various Chinese provinces. Strong reviews and interest about Peranakans has been piqued and Peranakan fever has gripped China and curious Chinese netizens posted queries on Baidu asking for facts and history of the Straits Chinese.

Fast-food chain KFC in China rode on the latest wave by launching curry and coconut flavoured dish, ‘Nonya chicken wings’ earlier this month.

But businessmen, visitors and workers alike at Pasona Group, an employment and staffing company, plant rice in the autumn as well. They hope to be able to transform agriculture from something that allows one to only plant once a year into something that can be done two or three times a year.

They teamed up to plant rice by hand in the traditional way, stalk by stalk, in the lobby of the company’s office just minutes from busy Tokyo Station.
About a hundred 1,000-watt lights, a mix of high-pressure sodium and metal halide lights, stud the ceiling of the broad room, where low walls hold in the shin-deep mud and water of the “paddy,” to simulate the sun throughout Japan’s gloomy winter.

Businessmen, who are used to meeting clients in boardrooms, are seen putting on wellies with their suits to slosh through an indoor rice paddy at the heart of Tokyo’s business district.
They are planting their second crop this year at the lobby field and are optimistic of harvesting their crops three times a year. The previous September harvest yielded more than 50kg, and was served in the staff canteen.

Having paddy inside an office building is “quite strange”, a great contrast to the busy Marunouchi district. The sound of running water is at odd to the sound of cars.
“The feel was very different from a normal office, a lot more natural.”

Although Japan produced about eight million tonnes of rice last year, enough for its population, but government statistics show that it is dependent on imports for much of its other food.
If this sort of environment can be produced, it would be nice to have in more places.

Serangoon’s 122,000 residents will have access to 1,580 square metres Serangoon Public Library (SRPL), scheduled to open in March next year.
Situated on the fourth level of a mega family-friendly retail mall Nex, it links directly to the Serangoon MRT Station of the North East Line and Circle Line, and the Serangoon Bus Interchange.
The ‘People, Places and Recollections’ Photo Contest have been launched to engage the communities with aims to build up a collection of photographs that best captures the essence of the Serangoon community.

The 1,900 square metres Clementi branch, scheduled to open in May, is located at the six-storey Clementi Mall, links directly to the Clementi MRT Station and the bus interchange.
Clementi residents are welcome to contribute photographs for the ‘Faces of Clementi’ exhibition which seeks to showcase the then and now of Clementi.

There is also the strongest evidence of what some experts call the ‘Hispanic paradox’ – longevity for a population with a large share of poor, undereducated members. Accounting for 15% of the population, they are the largest, fastest growing minority in the United States.

An estimated 40% of them are immigrants, who in some cases arrived after arduous journeys to do taxing manual labour. There is the theory that Hispanics who manage to immigrate to the US are among the healthiest from their countries. It takes a fit person to accomplish that, suggesting that the United States is gaining some of the healthiest people born in Mexico and other countries, said Dr Peter Muennig of Columbia University’s school of public health who has studied life expectancy in different countries, as reported by AP.

Until recently, the government didn’t calculate life expectancy for Hispanics as a separate group; they were included among the black and white populations.

But in a startling report, Elizabeth Arias of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the author said, by breaking out the longer-living Hispanics, the life expectancies for non-Hispanic whites and blacks both declined slightly. Researchers found that Hispanic life expectancy in the United States is longest – they can be expected to outlive whites by more than two years and blacks by more than seven.
The new report projecting future life spans is based on death certificates from 2006.

Government estimation is, life expectancy for a black is just a shy of 73 years, white is about 78, but for a Hispanic born in 2006, they could expect to live about 80 years and seven months.

 

Picture: AFP/GETTY

When voters the world over complain about having clowns for politicians, Brazilians embraced the idea by sending a real one to Congress.

The clown, whose stage name means “grumpy,” usually appears in public wearing a blond wig, a red hat and a garish outfit, received more than 1.3 million votes in Sao Paulo state in Brazil’s presidential and congressional elections. That was more than double the votes of the second-placed candidate in Brazil’s most populous state.

He survived a last-minute attempt by public prosecutors to bar him from running because of evidence that he is illiterate. The 45-year-old clown Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, known as “Tiririca”‘s humorous slogan: “Vote For Tiririca, It Can’t Be Worse Than It Is Now!” caught the attention of disillusioned voters by asking for their support. He promised to do nothing more in Congress than report back to them on how politicians spend their time.
“What does a congressman do? The truth is I don’t know, but vote for me and I’ll tell you,” said in his campaign advertisements.

His candidacy may not be as innocent as it might appear as his well-financed campaign can help elect other politicians because under Brazil’s election rules, he can pass his substantial excess votes on to other candidates in his coalition, which includes the ruling Workers’ Party despite being illiterate.

“Not one work here doesn’t bring you a special emotion or something that you are like ‘Wow, this person is so talented.’ That’s art, and that’s graffiti fine art,” Andrea Luis Carvalho, one of the exhibit’s organisers, told AFP.

The organisers of the Sao Paulo exhibit hope to take the Graffiti Fine Art show to other cities around the world. Graffiti’s long struggle to be seen  as valid urban expression, not vandalism, was being crowned last August with an exhibition in Brazil by international artists who not only sprayed official works but also spruced up abandoned corners of Sao Paulo. It was a triumphal declaration that, at last, they believe they have reached legitimacy as contemporary artists, a status enhanced by their provocative legacy.

A 32-year-old Brazilian industrial artist Rafael Calazans Pierre, whose sideline passion for painting walls with interwoven waves and swirls was on show at the museum, said he could not begin to count how many graffiti artists were active in Sao Paulo. There are a lot of people in Sao Paulo doing all kinds of things: some legal, some illegal, some commercial, some anarchist. Everything can be found in Sao Paulo.

A raid on a dilapidated factory by many of the 66 artists, around half of them Brazilian, half foreigners from the United States, Europe and Japan — had showcased more official works in the first Biennial of Graffiti Fine Art at Sao Paulo’s Brazilian Museum of Sculpture through to October 3. The designs, which range from a car decked with seductive eyes, though to a Manga-looking girl holding court in front of sinister dolls, a Frankenstein-like head pierced with oversized nails, or an abstract bird’s nest of strokes and words, reveal the derivations and reinventions of graffiti as it has spread around the world. The diversity and intricacy of many of the paintings reinforce the exhibition’s argument that graffiti is now a school of art to be reckoned with, perhaps even to be valued by aficionados and collectors.

Sao Paulo to the curators eyes, is set for a natural environment for the works because of the city’s boast that it is the New York City of South America, with its melting-pot population, ebullient underground art scene and dizzying, vast landscape of skyscrapers and industrial zones. Thanks to those factors that make Sao Paulo “the current worldwide mecca of graffiti”.

To the ‘blind eyes’, graffiti artists are whose “vandalism” is considered irrelevant alongside the rampant street crime that poses a much more serious threat to the public.

Graffiti’s paradox, as Rebentlovlarsenis said, “you’re destroying something but you’re actually creating something.” He regularly receives commissions for graffiti commercial projects in his native Copenhagen.

Unlike other art events where the same works seen here will not be packed up and put on display, in keeping with graffiti’s ephemeral nature, the invited artists will paint their works on site, and see them ultimately dismantled or painted over. These graffiti artists will not face risk of arrest by brandishing their talent on gallery walls instead of the street. They will no longer be seen as street cred or “urban rebels”, instead being seen as more mainstream creators of contemporary art.

“I think that’s why I find it interesting. Because why is it some people can’t see the quality in some non-grey wall for example?” Graffiti, which emerged four decades ago from New York’s subway system, still makes people happy, still makes people angry, makes people think and makes people talk.

Graffiti is everything. It’s an art form because there’s a lot of colours or a lot of people doing it, or it’s all around the world, making many people happy. But it’s also making a lot of people very angry and nervous.