Lightning kills 2 after graduation ball in Russia`s Far East

(STUDENTS, GRADUATION, LIGHTNING, POLICE, PRIMORYE, OFFICER)

VLADIVOSTOK, June 27 (RIA Novosti) - Two students celebrating their high school graduation died early on Saturday morning in Russia`s Far East when they were struck by lightning, local police said.
One boy and one girl were killed in the lightning strike in the village of Zarubino in the Primorye Territory`s Khasansky region, while another girl and a policeman suffered burns and were taken to a local hospital.
"The tragedy occurred on Saturday at 5 a.m. Vladivostok time [19:00 GMT on Friday]. After a graduation ball 15 students went to the beach to watch the sun rise. They were accompanied by a police officer, who was keeping order," a Primorye police source told RIA Novosti.
"A loud rumble of thunder was heard, and lightning flashed. Two students - a boy and a girl - died at the scene. Another girl and the police officer were hospitalized with burns," he added.
The source said the lightning struck as the group passed near overhead electric power lines.
He added that several other graduation balls in area passed without incident, and all had police officers present to ensure order.
 
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"One, two, three...": Queen orders count of swans

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Quiet please -- Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.
Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th century which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the queen`s official Swan Marker from July 20-24.
"With the assistance of the Queen`s Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease," Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.
The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.
It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the queen.
According to custom, Britain`s sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.
In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.
This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.
It is also an important year because the Queen has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.
She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.
"Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience," Buckingham Palace said.
(Reporting by Luke Baker)
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Just a Minute With: French actress Marion Cotillard

By Alex Dobuzinskis
LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - French actress Marion Cotillard has gone from playing singing legend Edith Piaf to portraying the girlfriend of another kind of popular hero, bank robber John Dillinger.
In the movie "Public Enemies" opening on July 1, Cotillard plays Billie Frechette, a woman who fell in love with Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp, during his ill-fated cops-and-robbers war with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1930s.
Cotillard won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Piaf in 2007 movie "La Vie en Rose." Her role in "Public Enemies" as the daughter of a Frenchman and an American Indian is her first since winning the Academy Award.
She spoke to Reuters in French from Chicago about her character Billie Frechette, her love of the Windy City and her upbringing in France in a family of actors.
Q: What did Billie Frechette see in John Dillinger that attracted her to him?
A: "At a young age, she was sent to a boarding school, and it was a very difficult place where they tried to erase everything that was Indian in her. And I think that she encountered there a great injustice, and she shared with Dillinger a suspicion of authority. I think the two of them saw that in each other and they fell in love immediately, and there was a very strong connection between them."
Q: Growing up in a household of actors, did you often practice scenes with your parents?
A: "Yes, because my parents were actors and theater directors. And my father was a director for children`s theater after having been a mime for a long time. So, seeing actors rehearse was something very familiar to me."
Q: Did that influence you as an actress?
A: "I was absolutely fascinated that you could make a living telling other people`s stories by imparting your emotion to them. And I always wanted to be an actress. My first work as an actress was when I was about five years-old."
Q: You played in a scene that young?
A: "I made two small movies for television. And before that I remember acting in a play with my mother, and it was very disorienting because I played the daughter of another actress. They were telling me that she was my mom, but I knew she wasn`t. In fact, my real mom was also on stage. I remember being very disoriented by that."
Q: How did you prepare for your English-speaking role in this movie?
A: "I worked with a speech coach for several months, and I had to relearn how to use my face and my body, because the way of saying certain letters is so different in French than in English, and it was very hard to train myself in that."
Q: What did you do for fun while you were shooting this movie in Chicago?  Continued...
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Health games become serious business

By John Gaudiosi
RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters Life!) - Videogames were once blamed for rising obesity rates but are now being championed by the medical industry and for use by government departments for their health benefits.
Games like Electronic Arts` "EA Sports Active" and Nintendo`s "Wii Fit" have got players of all ages moving -- and game developers and investors looking for hot new titles to cash in on this booming segment of the market.
Big John Games` upcoming "Butt Kicker" Nintendo DSi game will provide an action-based environment in which players fight against cigarettes and "Karate Bears" for Wii teaches players real karate routines using the Wii`s motion-sensor controllers.
With interest in health games rising, the fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston expanded to 390 people this year from 100, including developers, investors and medical experts, while numbers at many other conferences are down up to 40 percent.
"Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term," said Ben Sawyer, co-founder of The Games for Health Project.
"If you add up the 18 month sales of "Wii Fit" and the sales of "EA Sports Active," Konami`s "Dance Dance Revolution" and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion."
Dr. Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop which fosters innovation in children`s learning, has just released a report looking at how digital games can play a beneficial and educational role in health care.
"The White House should launch a national initiative to promote research and development of proven games," said Levine.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose mission is to improve the health and healthcare of all Americans, has also called for a public engagement campaign supported by the president, Congress and the federal agencies to teach parents, teachers and health providers about the healthy side of gaming.
"States` governors should direct their school technology officers to look at innovations like "Dance Dance Revolution" and "Wii Fit" as a way to extend the reach of physical education and comprehensive health education," said Dr. Debra Lieberman, director of Health Games Research for the foundation.
The Games for Health Conference also showcased how videogames are being used to help doctors and patients alike.
Serious games developer Virtual Heroes is working on a new first-person shooter sequel for Hope Lab`s popular "Re-Mission" game, which has been distributed to cancer patients in 81 countries since 2006.
"We`re taking their existing concept and trying to raise the fun bar and creating more lifelike and enjoyable environments within the human body," explained Jerry Heneghan, CEO of Virtual Heroes.
"Players will take control of Roxy, the protagonist, and have new weapons to battle cancer with thanks to input from cancer patients."
Virtual Heroes is also updating its HumanSim technology with a new human physiology engine, technology has been used by Duke Medical Center`s nursing school to train nurses virtually.  Continued...
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Monkey business hard to sustain in slump, Goodall says

By Candida Ng
SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - Chimpanzees, long under threat from humans encroaching on their habitat, are now facing another risk caused by that same member of the Great Ape family: the global economic crisis, says primatologist Jane Goodall.
Funding to the Jane Goodall Institute, a nonprofit organization that aims to conserve primate habitats and increase awareness of animal welfare activities, has declined by about 10 percent since the financial crisis hit.
"Money that came in last year was less than we had expected," Goodall told Reuters in Singapore while visiting for events related to World Environment Day. "The private donors and some of the foundations pulled back."
The institute, which has an annual budget of $10-11 million which funds its activities in Africa, has had to dig into its endowment fund to keep some of its programs running. Some projects were cut and staff laid off.
Goodall, who rose to fame in the 1960s through her ground-breaking study of chimpanzees in East Africa, said the root cause of most problems was overpopulation and the materialism of most human societies.
"Underlying everything is the sheer number of people on the planet," said 75-year-old Goodall. "We take far, far, far, far more than our fair share of these precious natural resources."
"We have to help people understand that enough is enough. We have so much more than we need, we have a throwaway society."
Such strident demands on the environment have seen previously forested areas being taken over by humans for housing, agriculture and business, leading to a dwindling population of chimpanzees and other animals in the wild.
Goodall estimates there are currently there are about 300,000 chimpanzees spread across 21 nations in Africa, down from the 1-2 million in 1960.
The animal rights activist, who fulfilled her childhood dream to live in the wild and write books, spends 300 days a year on the road using her personal story and fame to inspire youth to become more environmentally responsible.
"Root & Shoots," a youth organization she started with 12 high-school students in Tanzania in 1991, now involves people from pre-schoolers to university students and prisoners across 111 countries. It aims to raise awareness about the planet.
"People understand a lot more, but it doesn't mean they always change their behavior though," Goodall said. "The last hurdle is to get people not only to understand, but take action. The bigger problem is that again, again and again that people honestly cannot believe that what they do makes a difference."
(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

Source: Reuters

Just a few on Twitter do all the tweeting: study

By Erin Kutz
BOSTON (Reuters) - A tiny fraction of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows.
That makes it hard for companies to use the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion, the Harvard Business School study showed.
Twitter Inc is a social networking website in which users post messages of 140 characters or less -- known as "tweets" -- that can be viewed by other users who elect to follow them.
The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.
It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.
The median number of lifetime "tweets" per user is just one, according the research.
Companies are increasingly turning to Twitter to improve their understanding of how consumers view them, he said.
But some users are far more active and vocal than others, limiting information gleaned from messages on the site, said Piskorski, an assistant professor of strategy at Harvard Business School.
"If you're trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you're probably better off staying away from Twitter," he said in an interview.
Piskorski said Twitter could still be useful in responding to specific customer concerns. It can also be effective marketing, as companies with Twitter accounts can advertise sales and deals to users who follow them on the site.
JetBlue Airways Corp, Comcast Corp and Dell Inc are among companies with Twitter accounts.
JetBlue provides information on Twitter such as announcements of terminal changes at airports and tips on how to pack and directly answers customers' questions. Dell uses Twitter to point customers to discounts. Comcast's account largely responds to customer gripes.
"Enough of our customers are talking about their interactions with us that we get a decent sample of what's going on a daily basis that we wouldn't necessarily get from other long-term studies," JetBlue spokesman Morgan Johnston said in a telephone interview.
Unlike other social networking sites like Facebook.com, men are almost twice as likely to follow other men on Twitter than they were to follow women, according to the study.
Women were also more likely to follow men than they were to follow other female users. Continued...
Source: Reuters