Ulaanbaatar, /MONTSAME/
From foreign press

Obesity is not only dangerous to one's health, it's also costing the state dearly. New research published this week reveals that medical spending averages 1,400 U.S dollars more a year for an obese person than for someone whose weight is normal.
The study published Monday by the journal Health Affairs says that obesity related health spending in the United States has reached close to 147 billion dollars. The sum is twice that of a decade ago.
Diabetes, arthritis and heart disease are among the many ailments commonly associated with being overweight and the rising number of such conditions is draining financial and medical resources. "Unless you address obesity, you're never going to address rising health care costs," RTI International's health economist Eric Finkelstein said.
Around 70 percent of Americans are either obese or overweight, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With the average American more than 12 kg overweight Frieden said that the situation could get much worse. "Obesity and with it diabetes are the only major health problems that are getting worse in this country, and they're getting worse rapidly," Frieden said Monday at the CDC's first major conference on the obesity crisis.
In an effort to alleviate the problem, the agency released a strategy last week which included a proposal to increase healthy foods and drinks in schools. The encouragement of breast-feeding and the building of supermarkets in poorer areas are also cited as measures necessary to fight America's growing obesity problem.
Consumption of carbonated drinks and other sweetened beverages should also be discouraged in order to cut the number of calories ingested by people every day. Frieden has even suggested taxing such beverages.
The study found obesity-related conditions now account for 9.1 percent of all medical spending, up from 6.5 percent in 1998.
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A team of scientists have discovered that the Amazon river, and its transcontinental drainage, is around 11 million years old and took its present shape about 2.4 million years ago. The study was published in the July issue of U.S. journal Geology.
University of Liverpool researchers, in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam and Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, analyzed sedimentary material taken from two boreholes near the mouth of the river to calculate the age of the Amazon river and the Amazon deep sea fan.
Prior to this study, the exact age of the Amazon, one of the two largest rivers in the world, was not known. Until recently the Amazon Fan, a submarine sediment column around 10 km thick, had proven difficult to penetrate. New exploration efforts by Petrobras, however, have led to two new boreholes being drilled near the mouth of the Amazon -- one 2.5 miles (4.5 km) below sea level -- which resulted in new sedimentological and paleontological analysis of samples from the river sediment.
"River sediment records provide a unique insight into the palaeoclimate and geography of the hinterland," said Jorge Figueiredo from the University's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences.
"This new research has large implications for our understanding of South American paleogeography and the evolution of aquatic organisms in Amazonia and on the Atlantic coast. The origin of the Amazon river is a defining moment: a new ecosystem came into being at the same time as the uplifting Andes formed a geographic divide."