RUSSIA---SECOND LARGEST 'SMOKERSLAND' OF THE WORLD

RUSSIA--SECOND LARGEST 'SMOKERSLAND' OF THE WORLD

 

* Russia is the second largest tobacco market in the world.
* Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in a video blog on Tuesday that 44 million   Russians, nearly one in three, were hooked on smoking.
* According to Medvedev’s message, Russia has the highest percentage of smokers in the world.
* From 1992, the percentage of female smokers tripled from 7 to 22 per cent.
 

* The average age that Russian children begin smoking decreased from age 15 to age 11, Medvedev said.
* Almost 400,000 die every year of smoking-related causes.
* "Every year (the equivalent of) a large city disappears," Medvedev said.
* The habit of lighting up in Russia, where the air in bars, coffee shops and stairwells is thick with smoke, is encouraged by the cheap price of cigarettes. A pack typically costs around 50-60 roubles (less than $2).
* While President Vladimir Putin is a non-smoker and has reprimanded ministers for smoking, some other top officials, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, are heavy smokers.
* The government hopes the legislation will help improve life expectancy, which at 62 for men and 74 for women in 2009, remains low by the standards of other middle-income countries.
* The Russian cigarette market, estimated to be worth around $22 billion in 2011 by Euromonitor International, is a significant part of overseas tobacco companies' businesses.
* Four foreign tobacco companies - Japan Tobacco International, Phillip Morris, British American Tobacco, and Imperial Tobacco - control more than 90 percent of Russian sales and have been lobbying to soften the proposed legislation.
* Russia's Finance Ministry has previously announced plans to increase the excise duty on tobacco by around 40 percent for 2013 and 2014 and said on Tuesday it plans to hike taxes by 10 percent a year after 2015. The Health Ministry supports a greater increase in duty.
* The bill would probably become law next spring if submitted to parliament by November 1, Nikolai Gerasimenko, deputy chairman of the State Duma's health committee, was quoted by the state-run Itar-Tass news agency as saying.
* The proposed legislation follows in the footsteps of other countries, mostly in the West, who have imposed strict controls on the advertising and sales of cigarettes and banned smoking in public places.
* In an article following Medvedev’s announcement, Russian daily Vedomosti noted that just a year ago then-president Medvedev awarded a state decoration to Pierre de Labouchere, the chief executive of Japan Tobacco, lauding him as a foreign citizen who had helped build “friendship and cooperation with Russia”.

 LINK:
http://devilsmoke.blogspot.in/2012/10/russia-second-largest-tobacco-market.html

THE COST OF OXYGEN INTAKE

 

* In one day a human being breathes oxygen equivalent to 3 cylinders.

* Each oxygen cylinder on an average costs Rs.700/-, without subsidy.

* So, in a day one uses oxygen worth Rs. 2100/- and for a full year it is Rs.7,66,500/-

.

* If we consider an average life span of 65 years,the cost of oxygen we use become a staggering  sum of Rs.500,00,000/- i.e. equal to Rs. 50 millions.

* All this oxygen is derived free of cost from the surrounding trees and vegetation.

* Very few people look at trees as a RESOURCE and rampant tree-cutting is going on everywhere across the globe.

* Stop tree-felling before, lest we ourselves fall.

DATA GENERATED PER MINUTE

* Each and every minute of the day, vast amounts of data is generated from ordinary activities: from online shopping to phone calls, bog-standard Web browsing and accessing social media outlets.

* When you perform a Google search, you are one in about two-million users who are doing the very same thing at that same moment. Google handles this every second of the day, as does Facebook with more than four billion things shared daily and Twitter with its 340 million tweets per day .

*: we spend more than $1 million in online stores every five minutes. Who said we were in back a recession?

* In that same amount of time, brands are propped up by close to a quarter-million 'likes' on Facebook, and more than a billion emails are exchanged.

Here are some more per minute baffling stats, and downright crazy too: 

*Email users send more than 204 million messages; 

* Mobile Web receives 217 new users; 

* Google receives over 2 million search queries; 

* YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video; 

* Facebook users share 684,000 bits of content; 

* Twitter users send more than 100,000 tweets; 

* Consumers spend $272,000 on Web shopping;

* Apple receives around 47,000 application downloads; 

* Brands receive more than 34,000 Facebook 'likes'; 

* Tumblr blog owners publish 27,000 new posts; 

* Instagram users share 3,600 new photos; 

* Flickr users, on the other hand, add 3,125 new photos.

* Foursquare users perform 2,000 check-ins; 

* WordPress users publish close to 350 new blog posts.

MOON FACTS

Moon Facts

There are many interesting facts about the moon and trivia that may or may not be important to you. Some interesting facts include:

• We all know there was a man on the moon, but did you know that there is one who stayed there? Dr. Eugene Shoemaker, a Geological Surveyor, who educated the Apollo mission astronauts about craters, never made it into space himself, but it had always been one of his dreams. He was rejected as an astronaut because of medical problems. After he died, his ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft on January 6, 1999, which was crashed into a crater on the moon on July 31, 1999. The mission was to discover if there was water on the moon at the time, but it also served to fulfill Dr Shoemaker's last wish.
• When Neil Armstrong took that historical step of "one small step for man one giant step for mankind" it would not have occurred to anyone that the step he took in the dust of the moon was there to stay. It will be there for at least 10 million years.
• When Alan Sheppard was on the moon, he hit a golf ball and drove it 2,400 feet, nearly one half a mile.
• In a survey conducted in 1988, 13% of those surveyed believed that the moon is made of cheese.
• The multi layer space suits worn by the astronauts to the moon weighed 180 pounds on earth, but thirty pounds on the moon due to the lower gravity.
• How close can you get without completely running out of gas? Apollo 11 had only 20 seconds of fuel left when they landed on the moon.
• Apollo 15 was the first mission to use a lunar rover. The top speed that was ever recorded in this 4-wheeled land vehicle was 10.56 miles per hour.
• It is possible to have a month without a full moon. This occurs in February, but either January or March will have two moons.
• In China, the dark shadows that are on the moon are called "the toad in the moon".
• The Apollo missions brought back 2196 rock samples weighing 382 kg in total

More Facts About The Moon

• The moon is not a planet, but a satellite of the Earth.
• The surface area of the moon is 14,658,000 square miles or 9.4 billion acres
• Only 59% of the moon's surface is visible from earth.
• The moon rotates at 10 miles per hour compared to the earth's rotation of 1000 miles per hour.
• When a month has two full moons, the second full moon is called a blue moon. Another definition of a blue moon is the third full moon in any season (quarter of year) containing 4 total full moons.
• From Earth, we always see the same side of the moon; the other side is always hidden.
• The dark spots we see on the moon that create the image of the man in the moon are actually craters filled with basalt, which is a very dense material.
• The moon is the only extraterrestrial body that has ever been visited by humans. It is also the only body that has had samples taken from it.
• The first space craft to send back pictures from the moon was Luna 3 (built by the Soviet Union) in October 1959.
• The moon has no global magnetic field.
• The moon is about 1/4 the size of the Earth.
• On the moon, there is no wind or water.

CREECE IS GREEK TO THE QUEEN

 WHY GREECE IS A FORBIDDEN LAND FOR BRITISH MONARCH?

* Queen Elizabeth-II is probably the most well traveled monarch ever. 

* She has been to 116 countries on official state visits as Queen. * But she has not gone to Greece. Why?

* The Queen has traveled from the tiny island nation of Tuvalu in the Pacific, to Russia, China, Chile, Ghana, Australia and almost everywhere in between.

* So it may seem surprising that she has never made the relatively short hop over to the birthplace of her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

* Prince Philip is a "Greek prince," according to  royal historian Hugo Vickers, so it is an "interesting" omission.

* The reason he believes, is because Prince Philip doesn't like Greece, because they put his father [Prince Andrew] on trial, and he might have been executed.

 * In 1922, they all had to flee. Prince Philip was a baby at the time and rarely returned.

* It is not completely true that the Queen has never been to Greece - she did go there at the invitation of King Paul, Prince Philip's cousin, in 1950, but that was before she became Queen.

* In 1963 King Paul also came to Britain on a state visit but it was hugely controversial because Greece held a number of political prisoners at the time.

* Soon after that visit, King Paul died. His successor, King Constantine - Prince Philip's first cousin once removed - was ousted when the monarchy was abolished in 1973. 

Former Greek King Constantine attended the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton

He lives in London, still considers himself king, and has a close personal relationship with the Queen.

* All of this has made things difficult. Perhaps the Queen has never been invited by the Greek president to make a state visit.

* Prince Philip did go to Athens to visit his mother before she moved to London in the 1960s - but he would travel on his own, not as a state representative.

* Israel is another notable omission from the Queen's list of state visits.

* Security is a major factor in this case due to diplomatic sensitivity over visiting Jerusalem. Israel regards Jerusalem as the capital, but it is not recognized as such by Western nations, who base their embassies in Tel Aviv instead.

* Egypt is a surprise omission from the Queen's travel itinerary, he adds, given its influence in the region, and its potential for business with Britain.

* The Queen has made it to every single nation in the Commonwealth, except two of the more recent entrants, Rwanda and Cameroon. 

WORLD'S MOST NET-WORKED PERSON

  Western Union reveals the world’s most networked person

* A 26-year old Portuguese charity worker has today been named as the world’s most networked person. Hugo Pereira from Lisbon, Portugal, has topped the Network Challenge, a global search for the most globally connected individual on Facebook.

* The Network Challenge was launched by a leading money transfer provider, Western Union, in July 2011 to mark its 160^th Anniversary and celebrate its status as one of the world’s most globally connected companies, with more than 4,70,000 Agent locations in over 200 countries and territories.

* The global search was fuelled by a new interactive, online Application called Your World. It visualises Facebook users’ global connections and awards a score for how globally connected they are. Users can compare their ranking against their Facebook Friends; others in their country and others in the world.

* With 4,932 friends in 124 different locations across the globe, and a Network Score of 4,76,133, Portuguese national, Hugo Pereira, beat more than 2,50,000 Your World users worldwide to claim the title of the world’s most globally connected person. 

* By comparison, the average person in India has a Network Score of 1124 with 102 friends in 11 different locations.

Mr. Pereira attributes his feat to years of networking in his role as global president of charity AIESEC, the world’s largest youth-led organisation, which has 60,000 active members in more than 1,800 universities in 110 countries and territories.

* To celebrate Mr Pereira’s status, Western Union invited him to use his impressive global network as a force for good one month. He was given the opportunity to invite his Facebook Friends to participate in Western Union’s launch of a major new initiative.
                                                                                             [1st Nov, 2011]