FC Sporting Abeergut

Olympic weightlifter turns his elbow back to front

Going wrong: Baranyai loses control of the barbell twisting his left arm 

Impact: Baranyai's legs buckle as his arm bends around the barbell 

Agony: Baranyai screams in pain 

Pain: Baranyai crumbles to the ground 
Baranyai was carried off the platform on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to a local hospital for evaluation and treatment, said Benny Johansson, a technical controller at the event. 
It was not immediately clear how serious the injury was. 
'It looked really awful,' Johansson said. 'If the ligaments are damaged then it could take several months to heal.' 
He said elbow and knee injuries are the most common injuries in the sport, 'but the number of injuries are quite small in comparison with the number of athletes. You cannot even compare it with football for example.' 

Stricken: Baranyai grimaces on the platform after dislocating his right elbow 

Horror injury: Baranyai's elbow clearly faces the wrong way as he lies on the ground 

Help: the Hungarian is treated by doctors 
A former judo wrestler from Oroszlany, Hungary, Baranyai was competing with the so-called B-group of lifters in the 77kg division. 
Hungary 's lone lifter in the Olympics, he was ninth in both the snatch and clean and jerk in the European Championship earlier this year and placed 33rd in last year's world championship. He cleared his first snatch attempts at 140kg and 145kg before loading up the bar at 148kg - a relatively modest weight in top-level competition. The world record in the snatch is 173kg. 
In the snatch, the bar is pulled overhead in one continuous motion as the lifter settles into a squat, then rises with arms extended. 
Baranyai was in the squat position when his elbow popped.

Inevitability

Oscar Nominee

Motivational

Discrovery Launch

Bitch

How to Plant a Bomb

The attached video of thermal footage was recorded from an AC-130 gunship from a mile or more away.

No rounds were fired by the aircraft. The problem solved itself with no American intervention. Some Islamic jihadists were trying to bury a roadside bomb made from a 155 mm artillery round.

Bollard Test

Carrusel

Jagerbombs

Doctor warns of medical risk from Jagerbombs

Image: Leigh Harries via Flickr

ONE OF IRELAND’S leading emergency medical consultants has warned young people of the dangers of consuming the ‘Jagerbomb’ cocktail, after sales of the Jagermeister spirit rocketed at Christmas.

The Irish Sun today reports that sales of the German-made digestif spirit increased by 17 per cent last year – with a 33 per cent year-on-year increase in sales for the busy Christmas period.

But despite the price of the drink – which can reach up to €15 in some bars and nightclubs – the Jagerbomb cocktail, where a shot of the spirit is dropped into a half-glass of Red Bull and drank in one go.

Dr Chris Luke, a consultant in emergency medicine at the Mercy University Hospital in Cork, has warned that the drink poses a major risk to the health of revellers who order it regularly.

“If it fuels anything, it is the overcrowding on our emergency department corridors,” he told the Sun’s Michael Doyle.

The danger of the drink, he added, was that the addition of energy drinks diluted down the effects of the alcohol and meant people were begin to drink well past the limits their bodies could tolerate.

The overconsumption of the cocktail, he added, would result in massive calorie consumption given the quantities of energy drink being taken on board, as well as violent behaviour and unplanned sex.

Many bars in Australia have already begun refusing to serve the drink, after finding that regular drinkers were more likely to exhibit violent behaviour.

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The World's Most Liveable Cities

The Economist Intelligence Unit has announced the World's Most Liveable Cities List for 2011. Cities from Canada and Australia dominate the Top 10.

The Economist Intelligence Unit announced today (21st February 2011) it’s list of the World’s Most Liveable Cities. The highest score and number one ranking was achieved by Vancouver, Canada.

Vancouver: The World’s Most Liveable City

For the fifth year in a row Vancouver has been ranked as the number one world’s most liveable city by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Vancouver, Canada’s eighth largest city, received a major boost to its infrastructure when it hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics, adding to the services and facilities which have seen the city dominate the Economist's rankings for most of the past decade.
Vancouver received a 100/100 ranking for its health care services, education system and for its culture and environment rating. It also received an impressive 95/100 stability ranking. The report’s authors did note that Vancouver’s crime rate is on the rise. Vancouver’s murder rate of 2.6 per 100,000 is well above the Canadian 1.8 per 100,000 average

The World’s Most Liveable Cities Top 10 List 2011

1. Vancouver, Canada
2. Melbourne, Australia
3. Vienna, Austria
4. Toronto, Canada

Images

5. Calgary, Canada
6. Helsinki, Finland
7. Sydney, Australia
8. (equal) Perth, Australia
8. (equal) Adelaide, Australia
10. Auckland, New Zealand

How is the Most Liveable City in the World is Decided?

In order to decide the world’s most liveable city, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranks 140 cites from around the world. There are 30 indicators which each city is judges against from five broad categories:

• Stability
• Healthcare
• Culture and environment
• Education
• Infrastructure

Each city receives an overall rating of our 100; 100 in considered to be ideal and 1 is intolerable. The health care facilities and education standards offered by Australia and Canada were are a major factor in these countries’ cities continued dominance of the World’s Most Liveable Cities Top 10 list. All cities in the World’s Most Liveable Cities Top 10 list, except for Helsinki, received a 100/100 ranking for their education facilities systems.
In 2011 rankings, just 2.3 percentage points separated the number 1 ranked Vancouver, and the number 10 ranked Auckland, New Zealand.

Mid-Sized Cities Dominated World’s Most Liveable Cities 2011 Top 10

In a statement accompanying the release of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability survey, the report’s author Jon Copestake explained that ‘Mid-sized cities in developed countries with relatively low population densities tend to score well by having all the cultural and infrastructural benefits on offer with fewer problems related to crime or congestion.’
Vancouver’s population sits at just below 600,000 with just over 2.1 million people living within its metropolitan area. Sydney, Australia is the largest city in the Top 10 with a population of over 4.5 million.

Europe’s Most Liveable City 2011

Vienna was the only city from the 2010 World’s Most Liveable Cities List to move down in rankings. Vienna slipped from second to third place. According to Mercer’s 2010 Quality of Living Report, Vienna is the World’s Most Liveable City. Mercer’s slightly different ranking system, which uses categories including housing, consumer goods, socio-cultural environment (censorship, limitations on personal freedom, etc) placed Vienna in first place, followed by the Swiss cities of Zurich and Geneva.
The Mercer Quality of Living Report’s ranking system is primarily prepared to assist government agencies and multi-national corporations when transferring employees from one country to another. It’s rankings are dominated by European cities, with Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich and Bern all making the Top 10.

The World’s Least Liveable City for 2011

Harare, Zimbabwe ranked 140th out of 140 cities survey by the World’s Most Liveable Cities report. It’s total score out of one hundred was just 37.5. The report noted that despite the hopes which are held for elections in 2011, scores of just 25 per cent for stability and 20.8 per cent for health care paint a bleak picture and Harare’s and Zimbabwe’s future.
The report also deemed as intolerable Harare’s prevalence of petty crime, its threat of civil unrest or conflict, and its quality of public transport. Harare is home to almost 3 million people, many who live in extreme poverty.

The World’s Most Liveable Cities Bottom 10 Ranked Cities

131. Colombo, Sri Lanka
132. Dakar, Senegal
133. Tehran, Iran
134. Douala, Cameroon
135. Karachi, Pakistan
136. Algiers, Algeria
137. Lagos, Nigeria
138. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
139. Dhaka, Bangladesh
140. Harare, Zimbabwe

About the Economist’s World’s Most Liveable Cities List

The Economist’s World’s Most Liveable Cities list is drawn from the The Economist Intelligence Unit’s liveability survey. Founded in 1946, the Economist Intelligence Unit in the in-house research unit for the Economist magazine, and employs over 120 full time staff. The liveability survey is prepared with a number of intended uses including benchmarking perceptions of development levels to assigning a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages.

Valentine's Day Solar Flare

Fair Shoulder

Emigration

Postcard from an accidental emigrant

By Gary Finnegan

 

Image: Photo by DamienHR on Flickr

LEHMAN BROTHERS COLLAPSED the week we landed in Brussels.
Two weeks later the Irish government signed a blank  cheque guaranteeing the debts of Irish banks. It seemed interesting but  incidental to our plans. Bad news for bankers, we thought. Tough times for politicians  too.
Good job we’re neither wealthy nor important. “Two coffees, a scone and a brownie please.”
We sat sharing a British  broadsheet in a Belgian café staffed by mustachioed middle-aged waiters. The papers  spoke of an economic earthquake but we observed it like an audience watching a grand  drama unfold in high definition without realizing we were part of the play.
We were Irish expats. We  were abroad by choice, having left a booming Dublin in 2007. Lap up a bit of foreign  culture and head home when we’d had our fill. That was the plan. Little did we  realise that the door leading back to Ireland was closing behind us.
Much has changed in the 30  months that have passed since then. A temporary spell abroad which could be wound up  at a time of our choosing has morphed into an enforced economic exile,  open-ended if not permanent.
We have emigrated. Accidentally.

Suddenly we were at the mercy of bond markets and Frankfurt financiers

It’s becoming a familiar  story. Our friend, a research chemist, did post-doctoral work in the Netherlands and the US  but knows nothing of Ireland’s knowledge economy. There are no jobs in Irish universities. Another pal with expertise in the wind energy sector is  stranded 5,000 miles from the shores of our Innovation Island.
In 2007 we were twenty-somethings with a misplaced sense of control. Now, in 2011, we are in our thirties,  feeling at the mercy of foreign forces: bond markets, Brussels bureaucrats,  Frankfurt financiers.
We are not badly off, I appreciate that. I should be grateful to have strolled out the door ahead of the  stampede. And relieved to have dodged the debt trap. But if I devoted adequate time to counting my blessings it would leave too little time for complaining.
For my partner and me,  there was a quietly-spoken hope that if we spent a few years away we’d come back to Dublin to find property prices had returned to earth. That part of our wish came true.  What we didn’t fully appreciate was that this couldn’t be an isolated collapse.  House prices wouldn’t simply slide back towards a normal multiple of the  median income, they would drag everything and everyone down with them.
A modest house might soon  approach a reasonable price but nothing can be described as affordable when your employment prospects have nosedived.
The psychological shift from expat to emigrant coincided with an acceptance that our fearless attitude to  always being able to fend for ourselves was unfounded. It seemed, for a time,  that decisions like where to live, whether to have children, what to have for  lunch, were all higher on the list than where the next pay packet would come  from.
Such was our lack of concern with finding work – we had known only full employment – that we’d packed in  two perfectly good jobs in the summer of 2007 and indulged in a year of  travel. It’s a sure sign of unsustainable complacency when productive work can  be jettisoned in the name of adventure and ‘experience’.
For no good reason, we  headed to China. It seemed as unnecessary a place to visit as any, and thus fitted the  bill neatly: it was completely alien and its paths were not as well worn as  the backpacker trails of Thailand. It catered to our need for novelty as  well as our sense of snobbery about roads well travelled.
We earned €100 a week  teaching part-time at a university in the outer reaches of Beijing’s concrete  sprawl, giving me time to write a book about a rapidly changing China. One seasoned reviewer noted that the tradition  of Irish writers charting the hardship of emigrant life had been replaced  by whimsical travelogues penned by people traveling for the sake of travel.
“He’s right,”I said, “things have changed”, without realising how fleeting our generation’s illusory  freedom would prove to be.
Landing in Brussels,  jobless but still with a fading sense of Celtic Tiger confidence, we defied the global  recession to find work and carve out a life here until we felt like living in  Ireland again.

Will our daughter feel Irish or Belgian?

Every day since September 2008, reality has been seeping in remorselessly. The tide has gone out and shows no sign  of turning. In the meantime, we hit the unsettling age of 30 and temporary turbulence we read of in that Belgian café has become a permanent  background noise. And the prospect of returning to Ireland gets dimmer (which makes  it all the more desirable).
In an increasingly complex world, a simple choice was presenting: either get on with life in Brussels or  wake up aged 40 having waited for a wave of good fortune that never came. So we had a  baby. You know, to keep us busy.
This complicates things, in mostly wonderful ways. But the joy comes with anxieties in tow. Will our  daughter feel Irish or Belgian? Plenty of Belgians don’t feel Belgian so why should we inflict this on her?
But moving back to Dublin now would be too great a gamble to contemplate, which is why we have to stay away.  Our friends in the US, Germany and England feel the same way. Things will  stop getting worse in Ireland but I hope that happens before our roots here  are too deep to pull up.
Gary Finnegan is European Correspondent for Business & Finance and  author of Beijing for Beginners: An Irishman in the People’s Republic. Follow him on Twitter or email him at finnegag@gmail.com

Better Than Rooney

LeBron James Self Assist

Wade Lebron Alley Oop

Paddy Power All-Ireland Hurling

All Ireland SHC Outright 2011 Sunday 1st  May 2011, 15:00

Outright Betting

Killkenny 6/5	Limerick 33/1	Wexford 80/1
Tipperary 11/8	Clare 40/1	Antrim 250/1
Galway 8/1	Offaly 50/1	Laois 400/1
Cork 16/1	Dublin 80/1	Carlow 1000/1
Waterford 16/1
Each Way Odds 1/3 places 1,2

Leinster v Toulouse in Stadium Municipal 2006

John West