Evanescence 'Thrilled' By #1 Billboard Debut

On Wednesday (October 19), Evanescence officially completed their comeback when it was announced that their self-titled third album would top next week's Billboard albums chart, with sales of more than 127,000 copies.

It's the band's second-consecutive #1 debut: As any Ev fan surely knows, their last was five years ago, when The Open Door bowed atop the charts in 2006.

And in the time since, they've shed members, gone on a hiatus and, as frontwoman Amy Lee told news, very nearly called it quits entirely. So you can certainly understand why Lee and her bandmates are feeling so happy today.

"What can I say, we're thrilled about it!" she said. "We made an album that we're really proud of and now we get to watch it fly. We weren't expecting this and we're just so grateful to our fans."

Somali students fight famine, forgetfulness

-Yasin Muhamud, mndaily.com

Students from the University of Minnesota’s Somali Student Association are frustrated with the media’s declining interest in the African famine.

A drought throughout the Horn of Africa brought on a famine that has killed more than 29,000 children in Somalia alone.

Students like junior Fadumo Abdul .have perceived a loss of media interest in what the United NStations has called the worst humanitarian crisis of this generation, so they have decided to take action.

“I remember in the summer there was this whole momentum with the media and every channel was covering it but now, it’s like they got bored and it’s pretty disappointing,” Abdul said.

Inspired by local relief efforts, the SSA has teamed up with the American Refugee Committee of Minnesota on a “do-it-yourself” campaign called “I am a Star” that aims to use individual ideas and social networking to spread famine-relief efforts locally and worldwide.

“People think the famine has declined and that everything is fine in the region, but it’s not and this campaign will hopefully remind people that our work is not done,” Abdul said.

Nearly 750,000 Somalis are still at risk of death from famine in the next four months.

Conditions in Somalia are additionally exacerbated by warfare between the African Union and the militant group al-Shabab, which has prompted many residents to flee different parts of the nation’s capital, Mogadishu.

U.S. humanitarian efforts in the area have provided more than $600 million to the famine-stricken countries of Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. Food assistance has already reached an estimated 1.87 million Somalis, according to the U.N.

Abdul said she was looking for a way to get involved in the relief efforts and that she had heard about the campaign through a friend late last summer.

“I have a close friend who works for ARC and I’ve been doing volunteer work with them also over the summer, so naturally I heard about the campaign when it was first starting and did not hesitate to join,” she said.

The campaign includes an interactive website that allows people from all over the world to share ideas on relief efforts and offers suggestions on how individuals can “Be a Star for Somalia” — from blogging to organizing car washes and other fundraisers.

The SSA, along with other Somali students from the University, has organized walks for the relief and promoted door-to-door fundraising. Members have donned t-shirts with the “I am a Star” campaign logo to get more people involved.

SSA President Mohamed Dirie said he was honored to be asked to be a part of the campaign and that he loved its new-age approach.

“The campaign really uses new ways of getting out the word on the famine and I love the T-shirts and the bumper stickers ideas,” Dirie said. “I think it’s a great way to keep the momentum of relief efforts going and SSA is proud to be involved.”

Shukri Abdinur, a program assistant with ARC and a recent graduate of the University, said she’s impressed with the work SSA is doing and of “how quickly they took action to join and do their part.”

Abdinur said SSA’s promotion and involvement with the campaign has propelled the main effort, which is to keep the famine on people’s minds and to inspire young people to contribute.

Therese Gales, public affairs and outreach manager for ARC, said the campaign has been a success so far and that it has done much more than just bring awareness about the famine.

“The campaign has done a wonderful job of keeping the issue alive and at the same time, it has built a community of not just Somalis, but all kinds of people,” Gales said. “They have come together around the issue of the famine.”

The SSA plans on working with the ARC on the campaign as long as it runs and is excited to see its future.

“The campaign is really important to me and the other students of SSA and all over Minnesota because we all have been affected by the famine in one way or another or know of someone who has been directly affected,” Dirie said.

RUSSIA: LACROSSE TEAMS GET SET TO CLASH

By Jack Stubbs

The St. Petersburg Times

A group of St. Petersburg students will make sporting history Saturday when they compete against Moscow in Russia’s first ever lacrosse match.

Although lacrosse has been played in Russia since 2007, only recently have significant steps forward been made in the game’s development. The St. Petersburg White Knights have played the Moscow Rebels on two previous occasions, but this will be the first time both teams have fielded a full side of ten men.

As the only two lacrosse clubs in the country, a lot is at stake for both teams. Both have previously won one of the previous two encounters and the series is drawn at 1 – 1. The 2011 Capitals Cup, to be held in Moscow this Saturday, will be the deciding factor in who claims the title of National Champion.

“Saturday’s match will break the tie and determine the current ruler of Russian lacrosse,” said David Diamonon, founder of the Moscow Rebels lacrosse club. “The Moscow Rebels’ and St. Petersburg White Knights’ contributions will be etched into the annals of lacrosse history.”

Originating from Native American war games, lacrosse is traditionally played in North America, with small but dedicated followings in the U.K., Australia and central Europe. The sport requires two teams of ten men to pass, catch and shoot a rubber ball with netted sticks in order to score in the opposition’s six-by-six-foot (1.8-square-meter) goal.

Dmitry Petrov, 21, a physics student and captain of the St. Petersburg White Knights, founded the local club in 2008. While at first the team consisted only of Russian students, Petrov said they soon found foreign students who wanted to play and make the most of their time in Russia. The team is currently a mixture of Russian, American and British students.

Petrov said Saturday’s match would be about a lot more than just winning.

TYLER LAYMAN The team is currently a mixture of Russian, American and British students.

“This is really about the development of lacrosse in Russia,” he said. “We need more teams and more people playing.

“Students in particular really want to get involved, we just need to get the word out there.”

Last month, Russia was granted membership to the Federation of International Lacrosse. There are plans to form a national team with hopes of playing in the 2014 World Championship.

“I want to play in Europe and show them what we can do here,” Petrov said. “We can make something out of nothing and the world needs to know that.”

Speaking about the development of Russian lacrosse, Diamonon said, “As a nation full of sports fans, Russia is ripe for introducing new games. Compared to sports long since entrenched in Russia such as soccer, ice hockey and basketball, to name only a few, lacrosse offers opportunities for athletes interested in exploring something new, something different, something cooler.”

The Russian Internet Week held for the fourth time

-Peter Lekarev, The Voice of Russia

The Russian Internet Week, or RIW-2011 kicks off Wednesday, October 19th. This week will take only 3 days though, but it's promising to be the Internet-event of 2011 in Russia. The expo will cover pretty much every Internet-related activity, including online advertisement, web development, search engine optimization, social networks, online security, intellectual property rights and much, much more.

This annual conference was first held in 2008, so it's a relatively young player on the worldwide IT arena. To be fair, Internet in Russia is also quite young, and despite being with us since the 90s, it's only recently started to be an indivisible part of our lives, hence the sparking interest in all things online.

Anyway, the expo actually opened Tuesday, October 18th with the 'day zero' - I guess that's a nod to all the programmers out there that start counting with 0, not 1. Actually, the organizers suggested this was not initially planned - simply, there was not enough time to fit everything they wanted to in three short days. Day zero was solely dedicated to the burning issue of copyrights. It was not all recording company lobby, too - the conference was called 'Internet and Law: seeking a balance'. It was opened by a Microsoft lawyer Jule Sigall, who shared his company's experience in working with digital content and tools that Microsoft uses to protect intellectual property. Other participants were members of Mail.Ru Group, Google and Kaspersky Lab. The main initiator of this day zero event was The Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC), specifically, their legal department. IT and law-related governmental bodies also participated in the event, aimed at making Russian Internet a little more, you know, orderly and codified, if you will.

The main event starts October 19th, as I've said - actually, it's kind of like two events in one: there's the largest Russian conference for Internet professionals 'RIW-2011' and a more general IT-related expo 'Internet-2011'. The actual RIW conference has a traditional common section, open for all registered members, and a number of sub-sections, aimed at specific field professionals, six sections per day, from 11am to 6pm.

The whole ‘Start-ups’ thing is a pretty trendy concept these last few years, and usually they mean digital start-ups. RIW does reflect that as not one, but two formats will be dedicated to young aspiring companies – there’s the ‘Innovation Alley’ with booths of companies that won the ‘UpStart Conf’. And, of course, by the end of the expo new best start-ups will be chosen and awarded. Awards will include not just pride and sense of achievement – but real funds to get the projects off the ground and into our computers and mobile devices. Rising popularity of online devices used as a portal to the world wide web has been also addressed by the organizers – there’s a special section dedicated to web services for these small gadgets.

Oh, and if you don’t know yet, online advertisement is a rapidly growing business – at least in Russia, Internet ad market has been steadily growing throughout the recession, unlike the traditional TV and print markets. TV still gets the largest share of the pie, financially speaking, but in terms of growth the online medium beats every other one. So this year, instead of creating a section for online ads, it’s basically discussed non-stop. Oh, and somewhat related issues of e-trade and e-money have special sections along with workshops hosted by representatives of the major players, such as WebMoney, QIWI and Yandex.Money. Online superstores like Amazon are still not in the scope of either the conference or the Russian market – it’s just not the way people shop online in Russia.

Now, of course online services are not just for regular users. Hence, expert sections will not only cover B2C, but also B2B and B2G, with roundtables discussing the all the intricacies of cooperation between internet and cellphone service providers, end users, online corporations and related government bodies.

This last part is pretty important, as Sergey Plugotarenko from the Russian Association for Electronic Communications admitted such an open and ‘to the point’ discussion on the interconnection of law and IT has never before happened. The issue of intellectual property rights is actually no less important than advertisement it seems – after all, just like in advertisement, there’s big money in there. In the framework of the Russian Internet Week 2011 a special manifesto, no less, will be presented. It’s called ‘Russian Internet in the 21st century: Copyrights’. This manifesto reflects the official standpoint of Russian copyright owners and other organizations on the issues of intellectual property rights. All existing problem spots are identified, and the manifesto will supposedly even propose 15 suggestions to improve the existing Russian legislation, or, rather, lack thereof.

But anyway, the 3-day week has just begun, so there’s not much to talk about in this regard – I will dedicate a special program to it next week. For now, let’s return to the here and now. And now, it seems, property rights and personal information protection is a big deal everywhere, even in countries with established legislation dealing with the digital medium.

Computer scientists at Stanford University recently released the results of an interesting research. Apparently there’s information leaks everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Oh, you’re thinking, just don’t go to seedy websites and don’t give out personal information to untrustworthy websites. Well, sure, this might work, but only in a perfect world. For instance, if you type a wrong password into the login section at the The Wall Street Journal website, it turns out that your e-mail address is sent out to seven unrelated Web sites that you didn’t sign up for or even knew about. Or, say, sign on to NBC. Likewise, seven other companies will know your e-mail address and at least partial online interests. So you’re browsing HomeDepot.com while logged in and happen to click on an ad? Well, congratulations! Your first name and user ID are instantly revealed to 13 other companies. Click on a link from Reuters to confirm your registration – boom, you’ve given away your address and the fact that you’ve signed up to Reuters to five strangers. See, that’s not an exception – it’s a tendency! Overall, the research uncovered such leaks in 185 popular websites across the web. A lot of popular websites seem to give away your personal information to a number of third parties, usually advertisements that can then monitor your activity of affiliated websites and bombard you with special offers designed specifically for you. “It’s a fact of life on the Web. Identity will leak to a third party,” said the study’s principal author, Jonathan Robert Mayer, a law and computer science student. What he didn’t say is what people can do about it. I guess, nothing. Well, at least someone is concerned about the leaks. Not to specific third parties from specific websites, but a massive leak that happened in the Russian cyberspace a few weeks ago. See, there’s this website, called Rusleaks, that boasted an immense collection of data on Russian citizens in searchable format.

Roskomnadzor – the watchdog organization in all things telecommunications was not too happy with this ‘leaky’ website. According to an investigation performed by the organization, information provided on the website Rusleaks.org and its mirrors indeed came from open sources. Well, parts of it. Other parts were taken from illegally-distributed databases with personal information of millions of Russian citizens. These databases can by procured with relatively little effort, but that doesn’t make them any more legal. Although, thankfully, these databases are available for sale or download only after they’ve been inactive for a few years – in other words, the ones made available through RusLeaks website were last updated in 1999-2007. Still, even so, extensive data available for each citizen – First and Last name, date and place of birth, passport number could get into the wrong hands and cause severe damage to regular law abiding citizens if used by unsavory digital criminals.

Iranian students barred for beliefs, say campaigners

-Catriona Davies, CNN

Iranian student Puyan Mahmudian scored the sixth highest marks in his year group in his entrance exam, but was rejected for a Masters degree in chemical engineering at Amirkabir University in Tehran.

The problem was not his academic record, but his political background, according to human rights groups, which note that Mahmudian had previously been jailed for being editor of a student magazine that was critical of the government.

Mahmudian, now 25, believes he is one of hundreds of so-called "starred students," whom campaigners claim are denied access to university or expelled because of their religious or political beliefs.

A report called "Punishing Stars" by the non-governmental organization International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran names 217 students who it says have been deprived of education because of their religion or political activism in the last five years. It says the real number is much higher as many did not want to be named.

Many of those listed are members of the Baha'i Faith, the largest religious minority in Iran, with around 300,000 members, according to the official website of the faith in the United States. It says Baha'is have been persecuted in Iran since the faith started there in the mid-19th century. The conservative clergy considers followers of the Baha'i faith to be part of a wayward sect and apostates.

Other "starred students" are human rights activists, supporters of women's rights, members of the political opposition and student journalists, campaigners claim.

Now, a grassroots campaign, which began in Germany and has spread to other countries around the world, is drawing attention to alleged denial of education in Iran.

The campaign, called "Can You Solve This?" publicizes a QR code which, when scanned by smart phones, directs people to a website with an animated video.

The QR code has been printed on flyers, banners, pavements and t-shirts in coffee shops, streets and university campuses. In Germany, the QR code was used without any other information to build up mystery around the campaign.

Ruha Reyani, a second generation Iranian living in Germany and one of the architects of the campaign, said: "We are at the start of the university year and there's a big push from the Iranian government to use denial of education as a tool of persecution.

"We want people to come to take action by sending letters to their political leaders." Events to support the campaign have already been held in Germany, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India and the Netherlands, and are planned for Canada, the United States, France, Italy and other countries.

Esra'a Al Shafei, founder of Mideast Youth, one of the organizations supporting the campaign, said: "It's a creative and dynamic campaign that appeals to young people everywhere. The video has had more than 70,000 views and more than 5,000 letters have been sent through the website."

Mahmudian, now living in Germany, was arrested and jailed in 2007 while editor of a student magazine at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran.

In a case highlighted at the time by Human Rights Watch,Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mahmudian and seven other students were arrested, accused of defaming Islam in their publications.

Mahmudian said the members of the information ministry had circulated forged editions of their publications containing offensive articles.

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a press release at the time: "The Iranian authorities are using the flimsiest of pretexts to arrests student journalists and activists.

"Even the Judiciary has admitted that these students had nothing to do with the forged publications."

Mahmudian said: "I spent more than 50 days in solitary confinement. They used physical and mental torture. I went on hunger strike for 11 days to be allowed to make one phone call to my mother to tell her I was okay.

"After 80 days of extreme pressure they got a videotaped confession from us inside prison. We apologized to the president and were released and allowed to go back to university."

It was after his undergraduate studies finished and he applied to do his Masters that the incident caused him more trouble.

He said he was called in to the information ministry for three interrogation sessions.

"They asked me to sign a guarantee that I wouldn't continue any political, social and cultural activities and that I would cooperate with the information ministry," he said. "I accepted to end my political activities but refused to collaborate with them," he said.

Mahmudian was told he had not passed the "general" qualification for the Masters course. He tried to make a legal appeal against the decision but was told there were no avenues.

He later moved to Berlin, Germany, to do his masters degree and has no immediate plans to return to Iran.

Repeated efforts to reach Iranian officials for comment were unsuccessful. Messages left with the Iranian consulate in London were not returned.

The report "Punishing Stars" released in December last year claims that the Ministry of Intelligence has used a system of three stars as a method of discrimination against students since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president in 2005.

It said that in 2007, in response to pressure from starred students and the media, the government announced that it would no longer use the star system. However, the report claims, the discrimination has continued as a de facto policy.

Bureaucratic hurdles make life hard for foreign students in Germany

Foreign students face a rough ride in Germany

Half of the foreign students in Germany fail to complete their studies and more and more graduates are leaving the country. Experts are calling for change to the education system and visa regulations.

As German universities prepare themselves for the start of the new academic year, foreign students can expect an especially rough ride.

Free language courses have been phased out of the majority of universities in the last few years. And now the state-run preparatory schools which help foreign students to prepare for the mandatory entrance exam have been closed in Germany's largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), as a cost-cutting measure.

The seven free-of-charge preparatory schools have been replaced by two private colleges - the Cologne Prep Class, which charges fees of 5,000 euros ($6,900) per academic year, and the Freshman Institute at Aachen University of Applied Sciences, which charges 16,000 euros including accommodation.

Brandenburg's only preparatory school has also closed. The fear is that all state-run preparatory schools in Germany will eventually be closed in favor of fee-charging colleges, blocking access to German universities for all but the wealthiest foreign students.

Internationalization drive

German universties are seeking to internationalize

German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared last year that the country's integration policy had failed, but German universities have long been seeking to internationalize themselves in order to attract the best foreign students. 11.5 percent of all students enrolled in German universities come from abroad and Germany is the fourth most popular country for foreign students after the US, Great Britain and Australia.

The quality of teaching, security and the low tuition costs continue to be the most important factors for foreign students when deciding to study in Germany - alongside the attractiveness of European culture and history.

According to recent statistics from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the number of foreign students enrolled in German universities increased by 5,600 to 244,775 in 2010.

But figures from the Higher Education Information System in Germany show that a shocking 50 percent of foreign students fail to successfully complete their studies in Germany - throwing into doubt the credibility of the university entrance exam and the effectiveness of preparatory schools, which many see as an unfair hurdle for foreign students.

'Discriminatory' system

The President of the National Association of Foreign Students Johannes Glembeck believes that the current system is discriminatory - the result of an arrogant world view that a German education is the best. He said he would like the preparatory schools to be closed and the teachers working there transferred to run integration programs at German universities.

"We do not want to see foreign students ghettoized in preparatory schools," he told Deutsche Welle. "Integration is a two-way street. There should be free prep classes offered at every German university so that foreign students have as much contact as possible with their German counterparts."

Only 50 percent of foreign students complete their studies

Glembeck predicts that the future of the preparatory schools will be decided by finance ministers looking to save money, but the Chairman of the German Association of Preparatory Schools Michael Aulbach is more positive.

"Politically, nobody is striving to close preparatory schools. There is no support for such a move," explained Aulbach. "In NRW it was a decision taken at the administrative level with no democratic foundation," he said.

Failed integration

Aulbach stressed the importance of the preparatory schools in enabling foreign students to adapt to the German educational system, a view shared by the general secretary of the German National Association for Student Affairs, Achim Meyer auf der Heyde. He said that foreign students struggle to integrate into the German educational system, citing the German culture of learning and the language barrier as two major issues.

Financial restraints are also a problem. The majority of foreign students in Germany come from China, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey - countries with a lower per capita income rate. Figures released by the German National Association for Student Affairs show that the average foreign, unmarried bachelor's degree student survives on 725 euros ($995) per month in comparison to 812 euros for German students. Foreign students are also restricted in the amount they are able to work, due to visa stipulations - a maximum of 90 days per year.

"Germany needs foreign students in order to enrich the intellectual culture at our universities," Meyer auf der Heyde said. He also called for measures to help those foreign students who successfully complete their studies stay in the country in order to address the current shortage of skilled labor.

Skills shortage

The head of the Federal Employment Agency, Frank-Jürgen Weise, said that Germany requires 200,000 specialists from abroad to cover the skills shortage in Germany. But strict visa regulations force many highly skilled foreign graduates to leave the country.

Non-EU citizens must find a job with a minimum salary of 60,000 euros ($82,600) within one year of graduating in order to qualify for a visa to live and work in Germany. The German Minister for Education, Annette Schavan wants to see this reduced to 40,000 euros.

German Education Minister Annette Schavan

Experts such as Christian Thimme, head of the group for the Internationalization of German Universities at the German Academic Exchange Service, have long been campaigning against the high levels of bureaucracy affecting non-EU students.

"It makes no economic sense for Germany to invest money in attracting and then educating foreign students who would otherwise stay if it weren't for the bureaucratic quagmire," he said.

Schavan was responsible for changes introduced last month to the German law assessing the validity of qualifications gained abroad. Those who have worked as qualified electricians, nurses and engineers in their home countries are often forced into low paid jobs as cleaners or taxi drivers or to sign on for unemployment benefits because their qualifications are not recognized in Germany. New changes will make it easier for foreigners to have their qualifications recognized.

Johannes Glembeck welcomed the move as a positive first step, but said it does not go far enough: "In Germany we say that a high school with 50 percent foreigners is a problem school, while a university with 50 percent foreign students is a success! We need to learn to have more respect for other cultures and develop a much better integration policy - German universities could be role models for that."

Author: Helen Whittle
Editor: Kate Bowen

-DW-WORLD.DE, DEUTSCHE WELLE

College Student Credited With Uncovering Possible Election Fraud in Indiana's 2008 Primary

By Eric Shawn, Fox News.com

Shocking election fraud allegations have stained a state's 2008 presidential primary - and it took a college student to uncover them.

"This fraud was obvious, far-reaching and appeared to be systemic," 22-year-old Ryan Nees told Fox News, referring to evidence he uncovered while researching electoral petitions from the 2008 Democratic Party primary in Indiana.

Nees’ investigation centered on the petitions that put then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the ballot. As many as 150 of the names and signatures, it is alleged, were faked. So many, in fact, that the numbers raise questions about whether Obama’s campaign had enough legitimate signatures to qualify for a spot on the ballot.

"What seems to have happened is that a variety of people in northern Indiana knew that this fraud occurred, and actively participated and perpetuated the fraud, and did so on behalf of two presidential campaigns," according to Nees.

Prosecutors are now investigating. The scandal has already led to the sudden resignation Monday night of Butch Morgan, chairman of the St. Joseph County Democratic Party. He denied any wrongdoing, saying he looks “forward to an investigation that will exonerate me."

Nees, a junior at Yale University, served as an intern in the Obama White House last year and supports the president’s re-election. But as an intern at the non-partisan political newsletter Howey Politics Indiana, he delved into the Byzantine and complicated world of petition signatures and found reams of signatures that he says appeared to be written in the same handwriting, some apparently copied from previous petitions.

The names were subsequently submitted to Indiana election authorities as the signatures of legitimate voters. Nees and Brian Howey, the newsletter's publisher, then teamed up with the South Bend Tribune to break the story.

St. Joseph County Prosecuting Attorney Michael Dvorak announced Tuesday that the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Indiana will not be investigating these allegations. So Dvorak is doing so and has requested the assistance of the Indiana State Police.

In a statement, Dvorak said the U.S. attorney “does not investigate allegations of fraud in the submission of petitions by political parties for the placement of the names of candidates on the ballot for federal primary elections. They do, however, investigate fraud in voter registration, the actual voting process and in the tabulation of ballots.”

The state Republican Party Chairman Eric Holcomb had called for a federal investigation.

"We don't know the extent of the crime. We don't know how many people. We don't know if it was organized. Those were some of my questions. How deep does it go? Does it go to one county? Does it go to one district? Does it go to one state? Does it go to 49 other states?"

Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker also supports an investigation. He released a statement that said, in part, "We continue to fully support the investigation into this isolated incident in St. Joseph County. We want to know who committed this act, and we want that person held accountable."

Nees thinks the candidates did not have knowledge of the alleged forgeries, but he says such things can easily happen.

"This appears to have been the actions of the northern Indiana political machine that operated within the Indiana Democratic Party, not within the campaigns of either President Obama or Secretary of State Clinton," he said.

"What's important to me is that this sort of thing not occur in the future. This happened with impunity because no one thought that they would ever get caught, and in fact it was likely that no one would ever catch them because no structural safeguard existed to ensure that this wouldn't occur."

Howey, the publisher of the political newsletter, told Fox News he also plans to examine the petitions that put Sen. John McCain’s name on the Republican ballot. “It makes sense to look at the whole thing,” he said.

As Nees sat on a bench on the leafy downtown green in New Haven, Conn., with the imposing ivy and Gothic architecture of Yale behind him, he reflected on what he had found back home in his home state.

"Election fraud is particularly troublesome, because it undermines the integrity of our voting process and basically of our democracy. Maintaining the integrity of elections in the United States is an important thing."

Emma Watson starts classes at Oxford

Emma Watson, the faamous "Harry Potter Girl" has transferred from Rhode Island's Brown University  to Oxford's Worcester College for a year "abroad".



In a post on her official blog published Sunday, Watson told fans that she will be out of the spotlight for a while as she continues her English literature classes.Having secured 9 A's in OGCSE Emma Watson has always been known as a bright student to the public.

More Students Skipping Meals To Binge Drink As 'Drunkorexia' Disorder Grows In Popularity

More university students are skipping meals to cut down on calories so they can binge drink at night, in a disorder known as "drunkorexia".

Research carried out by the University of Missouri in the United States revealed as many as one in five students were following the worrying trend.

Results from the study found the growing problem was more prevalent among female undergraduates as they ditched day-time calories and indulged in alcohol instead. Women were found to be three times more likely to have the disorder than men.

The 1,000 students questioned in the study said their reasons for prioritising drink over eating included saving money, controlling their weight and getting drunk faster.

Victoria Osborne, assistant professor of social work and public health at the university, examined the relationship between alcohol misuse and eating disorders. More than 15 per cent of those surveyed said they restricted their calorie intake to "save them" for drinking.

According to Osborne, drunkorexia could also have dangerous cognitive, behavioural and physical consequences, as well as putting people at risk for developing more serious eating disorders and addiction problems.

"Apart from each other, depriving the brain of adequate nutrition and consuming large amounts of alcohol can be dangerous," she said.

"Together, they can cause short- and long-term cognitive problems including difficulty concentrating, studying and making decisions."

But the epidemic is not just affecting students in the States.

Mia Hughes, a philosophy undergraduate at Manchester University said the problem was prevalent among first year females especially.

"When girls start university they put themselves under huge amounts of pressure to look good. They are constantly meeting new people and want to be the prettiest and the skinniest. All the wet t-shirt competitions and bikini-themed nights out don't help either," she told the Huffington Post UK.

"I'd say about 70 per cent of my female friends - including myself sometimes - will skip eating before a night out so they have a flat stomach."

The study also warned students drunkorexia could affect their ability to learn and make decisions.

But Pete Mercer, National Union of Students (NUS) vice-president rejected claims drunkorexia was a growing issue in the UK.

"That said, all behaviour that involves excessive alcohol consumption is of course very unhealthy and anyone who wishes to reduce their calorie intake should consider cutting back on alcohol and continuing to eat healthily", he added.

"Anyone who has any worries about their alcohol consumption should talk to Drinkaware or their students' union who will be able to give them advice and support."

Drinkaware and the NUS are currently working together on a 'why let good times go bad?' campaign to advise students to eat before going out to "help keep your night a good one". -The Huffington Post