Archive for April 8th, 2010

He was the third murder victim of 2010 and was killed on the same evening that a teenager was wounded in a shooting in the Birch Tree Hill area. Police have not yet confirmed if this murder was gang related. Police said at the time that Duran cold have been the victim of a robbery gone wrong.

This latest study was conducted by Regina Guthold and a team from the WHO, who found that, overall, most kids aren’t getting enough exercise. Published in The Journal of Pediatrics, it looked at 13- to 15-year-old school children from North and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East between 2003 and 2007.

The researchers defined adequate physical activity as at least an hour of exercise on top of gym class at least five days a week. Children who spent three or more hours watching TV, playing computer games, or chatting with friends outside of school time were classified as sedentary.

Across the 34 countries involved just one-quarter of the boys and 15 percent of the girls were getting enough exercise by their definition, the researchers found. And a quarter of boys and nearly 30 percent of girls were sedentary and didn’t get enough exercise. In every country aside from Zambia, girls were less active than boys. In more than half of the countries in the study, less than a quarter of the boys were getting enough exercise.

Uruguay had the highest percentage of active boys at 42 percent, while Zambia had the lowest at 8 percent. Girls from India were the most active with 37 percent meeting exercise recommendations, while girls from Egypt were the least active with just 4 percent getting adequate exercise. Kids in Myanmar were the least sedentary with 13 percent of boys and 8 percent of girls classified as sedentary. The most sedentary nations were St. Lucia and the Cayman Islands, with 58 percent of boys and 64 percent of girls spending at least three hours aday in sedentary activity.

While the study didn’t look at the reasons behind the lack of physical activity in various nations, Guthold speculated that urbanization could be a factor, as could the near-universal availability of cars and TVs.

Schools can help children become more active by having physical education classes and educating students about the importance of exercise, the researcher said. Adding lanes for bicycles, pedestrian crossings and other changes to promote walking and biking to and from school could help too, she added, as could giving kids space to be active wherever they live.

Studying physical activity in entire populations is difficult, Guthold noted, and any questionnaire used to measure physical activity will have limitations. However, "even with the limitations that questionnaire data (suffer) from, I guess it’s pretty safe to say that we have a huge problem with physical inactivity among schoolchildren around the globe and that we should take action," she told the international news agency Reuters.

The issue of clamping was raised in the Legislative Assembly last month when Ezzard Miller, the independent member for North Side, questioned the legality of clamping and suggested that the firms were breaking both the Planning Law and the Road Traffic Law. In a private member’s motion, he asked government to investigate and clarify the situation.

Miller argued that having sufficient parking spaces is often mandated as part of a business’s planning permission. Consequently, clampers were unlikely to have the legal right to impose fines on drivers who are parking in the spaces designated to the building they are visiting, no matter how long they are parked.

The MLA noted that the clampers may also be breaking the Traffic Law, which states that anyone who interferes with a vehicle or any of its controls and equipment without the owner’s permission, which the clamping certainly wasn’t, was guilty of an offence.

Miller then offered advice to the victims of clampers who were visiting and parking at premises legitimately to call the police and ask them to enforce the Traffic Law 2003. He said the high fines being imposed were causing hardship and resentment in the community and he was concerned that if the issue was not addressed, someone was going to get hurt through tempers fraying and frustrations running high. The veteran politician said he believed that the parking companies were taking more and more liberties with people on this subject because they were getting away with it and no one was challenging their rights to do this to the public.

Parking fines for clamping currently range from $50 to $85, and CNS has been informed of numerous cases where the clampers have immobilized vehicles of drivers who were legitimately parked but have refused to remove the clamp without payment. In one case a driver was clamped in his own allocated parking space outside his place of work.

During the parliamentary debate the premier said government was willing to consider the motion since the planning laws were currently under review as part of government’s goal to create a national development plan. He said that he would ask the committee to add this question to the entire issue of parking restrictions in the George Town area as it needed to be addressed. McKeeva Bush said he agreed that there needed to be clarity regarding the law and what exactly the landlords could and could not do when it came to people parking on the premises under the Planning Law.

Last year, David Guilfoyle took an unorthodox approach to paying a clamping fine when he gave the parking company 7500 pennies and brought the question of parking fines into the fore. He also noted that the clamping fine was greater than the fine he would have had to pay for parking illegally on the street and, moreover, the police would not clamp his car.