United States teenager Tianna Madison stunned her more experienced rivals by taking the women’s long-jump title at the world athletics championships in Finland on Wednesday. The 19-year-old jumped 6,89m in her first major championships to beat Olympic bronze medallist Tatyana Kotova of Russia (6,79m) while defending champion Eunice Barber of France took the bronze (6,76m).
The rain was everybody’s enemy but Justin Gatlin’s. A torrential storm delayed the 200m quarterfinals until Wednesday and gave the 100m champion some much-needed extra rest for his pursuit of three gold medals at the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki. For the Finns, however, the javelin is the main attraction.
The pole-vaulting competition at the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki was disrupted on Tuesday when a Finnish vaulter’s crash damaged the measuring equipment. When the event restarted, using a second pit where the equipment was intact, gusty winds hampered the vaulters’ efforts.
Kenenisa Bekele and Lauryn Williams, two athletes who have confronted personal tragedies in their lives, raced to world title glory at the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki on Monday. Bekele’s fiancée died earlier this year and Williams won despite her father’s long-running battle with leukaemia.
Justin Gatlin swept away opposition to win the 100m sprint on Sunday and added the world championship title to his Olympic gold medal. The overwhelming favourite didn’t even have to dip for the line to clock 9,88s and hold a massive .17 second margin over silver medalist Michael Frater of Jamaica.
Ethiopian teen Tirunesh Dibaba is confident of sewing up a historic double after running a breathtaking final lap to win the women’s 10Â 000m world title here at the World Athletics Championships. The 19-year-old, who was the youngest ever world champion over the 5 000m in Paris 2003, will attempt to become the first woman to win the two races when she competes in the 5km event later this week.
Three-time world champion John Godina of the United States failed to make the final of the shot put at the World Athletics Championships on Saturday, and Justin Gatlin confidently started his quest to add the world title to his 100m Olympic gold. The Americans had been hoping for a sweep of medals later on Saturday.
About 300 grannies pulled up their rocking chairs in a small Finnish town square on Wednesday to tell stories to small children in a bid to bring the generations together, organisers said. They came from across Finland — and five of them even travelled from as far away as Spain — to take part in the hour-long event.
Olympic champion Justin Gatlin goes into this weekend’s 100m at the world championships in Helsinki as firm favourite after the withdrawal of injured world record holder Asafa Powell. The 23-year-old American said he was disappointed by the absence of his Jamaican rival, who has been beset by groin injuries since setting his record 9,77second time in Athens in June.
Security in Helsinki is being tightened to never-before seen levels ahead of the World Athletics Championships starting on Saturday, but police say they are more worried about hooligans and thugs than about terrorism. Athletes from more than 200 countries will participate in the games set to take place amid record security levels.
Olympic champion Yelena Isinbayeva is the undisputed queen of women’s pole vault and this season became the first female to go over five metres. The 23-year-old from Volgograd has set her targets even higher and now plans on jumping 5,50m.
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/ 18 October 2004
Computer viruses and so-called spam e-mail may cause the internet to collapse in the near future, a Finnish researcher warned on Monday. Based on current trends, the internet will collapse in 2006, Hannu H Kari, professor at the Helsinki University of Technology, told the Finnish news agency STT.
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/ 13 September 2004
Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker, said on Monday it had received a 98-milllion-euro order from Libya’s General Post and Telecommunications Company for a cellphone network. Nokia will deliver second-generation GSM and next-generation, or 3G, WCDMA equipment for a nationwide cellphone service covering Tripoli and the western parts of the country, the Finnish firm said.
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/ 10 September 2004
Finish mobile phone giant Nokia is to experiment with a cellphone that shows television programmes, the company said on Friday. The test, which involves Nokia, the British television broadcaster ntl, Sony and mobile phone operator O2, will see television programmes beamed to 500 mobile users in and around Oxford in Britain.
A burst of meteors over Finnish coastal waters early on Tuesday prompted hundreds of Finns to mistakenly report the natural phenomenon as emergency flares from distressed vessels, officials said. A caller described the phenomenon as a red fireball moving swiftly through the night sky, spewing sparks and leaving a trail of vapor.
Up to six million computers worldwide may have been infected by the Sasser worm first detected last week, including those of some large multinational corporations, Finnish internet security firm F-Secure said on Monday. "That number is growing," said Mikko Hyppoenen, who heads anti-virus research at F-Secure.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=65702">’Problem seems to be getting worse'</a>
Internet security experts on Monday warned that the creators of some of the latest computer viruses were using computers infected by the bugs to run online scams to get credit-card information from unsuspecting buyers. Many of the recent bugs open a so-called back door on infected computers.
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/ 25 February 2004
A new variant of the Mydoom internet worm spreading quickly by e-mail on Wednesday has proved less virulent than previous members of the virus family but far more destructive if encountered, internet security experts said. ”We’re a little worried, because this one actually deletes files,” said one expert.
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/ 18 February 2004
The Bagle.B Internet worm on Wednesday continued to propagate itself throughout the world, with experts ranking the virus as the third most dangerous computer bug to date after the notorious Sobig.F and Mydoom.A. ”It will probably not reach the same catastrophic proportions as Mydoom.A and Sobig.F,” an expert said.
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/ 17 February 2004
A new variant of the Bagle internet worm, dubbed Bagle.B, was on Tuesday spreading quickly by e-mail throughout the world, internet security experts said. ”It was initially spread through spamming, which gave it a good start,” said Mikael Albrecht, with the Finnish Security firm F-Secure.
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/ 10 February 2004
Finnish computer security experts warned on Tuesday of a new worm, known as Doomjuice, that is expected to attack computers infected by Mydoom. The virus, first detected by Helsinki-based company F-Secure on Monday night, has so far infected at least 30Â 000 computers worldwide since it was activated on Sunday.
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/ 19 January 2004
They say only two things are sure in life, death and taxes, but rarely do they come together as in the case of the Finnish taxman who last week died at his desk and went unnoticed for two days. The 60-year-old auditor died last Tuesday, but it took his colleagues until Thursday to notice his demise.
As South Africa defended its policy of denying Aids drugs to its population at a conference on the disease in Durban on Tuesday, the head of the UN’s World Health Organisation said the government’s strategy was wrong.
Nearly 1 500 people wore nothing but their birthday suits on Sunday at two Helsinki landmarks, as the Finnish capital played host to a US photographer and his project to bare all in the name of art.
The wilds of the Finnish forests this fall will ring with the sounds of rifles as well as strange crackles when hunters give commands to their dogs by mobile phone.
WHILE sons are more coveted than daughters in a number of cultures around the world, pregnant women hoping for a son might want to reconsider.