SHANGHAI Cheap Air Max 97 Summit White , April 30 (Xinhua) -- American qualifiers John Hyden and Tri Bourne set off to a brilliant start at the men' s Main Draw of the US$800,000 2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Shanghai Grand Slam as they pulled off a pair of upset wins to lead Pool E at the end of Wednesday' s action.
The 28th-seeded HydenBourne, who had failed to qualify through Tuesday' s qualification tournament but advanced to the Main Draw by winning a lucky losers draw following the withdrawal of Brazilian tandem Ricardo SantosAlvaro Filho, rallied past Brazil' s fifth seeds Vitor FelipeEvandro Oliveira 2-1 (22-24, 21-12, 15-7) before taking a 2-0 (21-17, 21-18) victory over Poland' s 12th seeds Grzegorz FijalekMariusz Prudel.
"It feels great! I feel blessed for the opportunity to play again Cheap Air Max 97 Undefeated ," said Bourne. "Yeah, we are lucky losers, we are really lucky, you know," Hyden said. "It' s nice and we were not expected to do much, so we just come out and hopefully jump on teams and they don' t know us very well."
With two wins in hands, HydenBourne have already booked a berth in the 24-team knock-out stage with one last pool match to play on Thursday.
"We play steady right now Cheap Air Max 97 Womens ," said Hyden, who finished 25th with Bourne at the season-opening Fuzhou Open last week. "First we wanna get out of the pool and then do the best we can."
The Netherlands 22nd seeds Jon Stiekema and Christiaan Varenhorst produced the other major upset on Wednesday as they claimed a surprising 2-0 (21-18, 21-15) victory over Brazil' s sixth seeds Alison CeruttiBruno Oscar Schmidt in a second round pool F play.
Newly-crowned Fuzhou Open champions Paolo Nicolai and Daniele Lupo of Italy also posted a pair of wins to lead the standings in Pool G. The Italian seventh seeds beat Norway' s Iver Andreas HorremGeir Eithun 2-1 (21-18, 14-21, 15-11) before downing Austria' s Robin SeidlAlexander Huber 2-0 (21-11, 21-19).
"We are playing very well, so this is very important for us. We want to continue like this Cheap Air Max 97 Mens ," said Lupo. Having won their first World Tour title in the Fuzhou Open, the Italians hoped to win more this season. "We are going up. Last season we were third overall in the World Tour and now we have won the gold medal," said Nicola. "We wanna win all the tournaments. I know it' s not possible, but our focus is this one."
Other top seeds winning two matches to lead respective groups are Philip DalhausserSean Rosenthal of the United States, Pablo Herrera AllepuzAdrian Gavira Collado from Spain, Latvia' s Aleksandrs SamoilovsJanis Smedins, Brazil' s Pedro Solberg SalgadoEmanuel Rego and Shanghai Grand Slam title holders Jacob GibbCasey Patterson of the United States.
Thirty-two teams are playing a single round robin in eight groups with top three finishers from each group to advance to the 24-team knockout stage.
The 2014 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour calendar features a record purse of US$10.2 million with a season that extends from late April to mid-December competing at 21 venues in 18 countries. This year' s FIVB World Tour includes a record 10 FIVB Grand Slam events Cheap Air Max 97 , the inaugural Grand Slam Finale and 11 FIVB Open Tournaments throughout the world, helping expand the door for development of the sport even further.
The 10 FIVB Grand Slam competitions, all double-gender, have eight with $800,000 in total purses while both The Hague, Netherlands and the Long Beach, Calif. Cheap Nike VaporMax Mens , USA event will have $1 million each in prize money, the most in FIVB Grand Slam history.
BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhua) -- Beijing had fewer smokers in 2016, the second year of the city's smoking ban, according to a white paper issued Wednesday.
The rate of smokers aged 15 years old and above in 2016 was 22.3 percent, 1.1 percentage points lower than 2014, amounting to 200 Cheap Nike VaporMax Womens ,000 less smokers in the city, according to a report on health conditions in Beijing released by the municipal health and family planning commission.
The quitting rate -- which measures the percentage of participants who quit smoking during the survey period -- rose by 1.9 percentage points to 16.8 percent in 2016.
Another 15.5 percent of the surveyed smokers said they will quit smoking in the next 12 months, said the report.
Beijing, which is home to more than four million adult smokers, rolled out what has been deemed the "strictest smoking ban in history" on June 1, 2015, prohibiting smoking in indoor public places Cheap Nike VaporMax CS , workplaces and public transportation.
Gao Xiaojun, spokesperson for the Beijing Health and Family Planning Commission, said at the press conference for the release of the white paper, that health authorities will organize contests to encourage smokers to quit.
The white paper, the eighth of its kind, also showed that Beijing's average life expectancy rose by 1.56 years in the last eight years, to reach 82.03.
Compared with statistics in 2009 Cheap Nike VaporMax Laceless , Beijing's maternal mortality rate went down by 25.6 percent and the infant mortality rate dropped by 37.7 percent, according to the white paper.
However, chronic diseases, including malignant tumors, heart diseases and cerebrovascular diseases, remain grave challenges for healthcare. Last year, mortality rates of these three types Cheap Nike VaporMax Flyknit , the most fatal chronic diseases for Beijing residents, all rose from their levels in 2015.
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by Xinhua writers Pempa Tsering, Purbu Tashi and Zhou Yan