The Big O is the goal of many when it comes to sex. That mind-blowing, toe-curling, oh-baby-don’t-stop feeling you can only feel during the height of an orgasm. A group of experts have put out a guide to make achievement easier.
Achieving the Big O is not easy for most women during intercourse. But that’s not to say it isn’t possible. By taking charge of your pelvis during the act of sex you too can be screaming with pleasure according to Tracey Cox, sex author and presenter; Sarah Hedley, editor of Scarlett magazine; Dr Petra Boynton, sex and relationship expert and Katherine Hoyle, owner of ”Sh! Women’’s Erotic Emporium.”
Tightening up your pelvis muscles you can have a more intense orgasm. The easiest positions for a lady to get G Spot involvement during sex is by being on top or with the man behind. The G Spot is around the urethra tissue.
Feel instead of think when it comes to great sex. Change up positions often so you don’t get desensitised.
Sarah Hedley says: “The key to having a great orgasm is to get your mind ”in orgasm mode” way before you take your clothes off.”
And lastly remember to breath.
Katherine Hoyle says: “Breathing can really affect an orgasm. As you start having sex, your breathing rate increases and we often hold our breath. This means you tense up and climaxing is more difficult. If you’re aware of your breathing and try to regulate it, you”ll let go quicker and orgasm.”
Have fun and the good stuff comes your way. Orgasms aren’t rocket science folks. This is not the time to analyze deep space or cure cancer, it’s play time so relax and get happy.
50 years ago yesterday the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was launched. During the past half century NASA has changed our views of space and life. Everyday items in our homes might not have been had it not been for the space agency.
What devices do you use daily that came out of a need that NASA had?
Because of the need for a cordless drill on the Moon, Black and Decker started to develop more cordless products. One of those products was the cordless mini vacuum.
Everyday firefighters benefit from breathing apparatus designed for the space program. Before 1971 the average weight that allowed firefighters to have oxygen in a fire was 30 pounds. That has been reduced to 10 pounds and a better fit.
Green living is a key element of today’s society. Many of the advancements came straight from space. Solar energy panels were first designed by NASA in the early 1980’s.
Ray-Ban has used technology from NASA to make better sunglasses since 1988. Special coatings designed to protect the astronaut’s helmets are now used to protect our eyes.
If you check your blood pressure at home thank NASA. The portable kits were designed so that medical monitoring of astronaut’s blood pressure could take place during space travel.
There are many more discoveries that NASA made that help us daily. A list of the 50 coolest things is in this Independent article.
When you watch the news you don’t expect the White House to hand feed the reporters stories. Scott McClellan is stating that Fox News has been doing just that.
When you watch the news you don’t expect the White House to hand feed the reporters stories. Scott McClellan is stating that Fox News has been doing just that.
Fox News and the White House don’t seem to be up in arms over the claims that McCleallan is spouting about this issue.
McCleallan is quoted as to saying on MSNBC’s Hardball that Fox News is seen as a tool for the White House.
“I make a distinction between the journalists and… the commentators,” McClellan said. “There were commentators and other pundits of FOX News that were helpful to the White House… Certainly we got talking points to those people.”
Bill O’Reilly was one of the commentators that McClellan pin pointed during the interview. O’Reilly claims he’s not angry.
“I never once received a talking point from the White House, so McClellan is not telling the truth about me,” O’Reilly responded on his own The O’Reilly Factor on FOX. “Should I be angry? Naaah. But I have to call a lie a lie.”
McClellan had to admit on the show The Radio Factor that he messed up naming O’Reilly.
“The truth is, I messed up,” McClellan told O’Reilly. “I was specifically not trying to single anyone out, including you.”
It is true that the White House does send out “Fact Sheets” that show the pros of presidential actions. They are given out to all media though, not just Fox News.
In the UK the Birmingham City Council is censoring web sites its staff can look at. While banning some sites, including Wicca and atheism it allows other religious sites to be viewed. Playing Big Brother could soon land the Council into legal action.
Very few people would argue that blocking sites on sexual deviancy and criminal activity during office hours is okay. But a thin line has been drawn by the Council when they included sites on “witchcraft or Satanism” and “occult practices, atheistic views, voodoo rituals or any other form of mysticism” to be blocked while allowing sites regarding Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and other religions to be viewed. Is the Council saying with their move that Wiccans are in the same class as criminals?
The fact of the matter is the Council is discriminating workers because of religion or beliefs. That discrimination is against the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.
National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson will be asking the council to change their policy. If changes are not made then legal action will be pursued.
In a BBC report Mr Sanderson said: “It is discriminatory not only against atheists but they also are banning access to sites to do with witchcraft.
“Witchcraft these days is called Wicca, which is an actual legitimate and recognised religion.
“We feel very strongly that people who don’t believe should not be denied the access that people who do believe have got.”
Considering a fourth of the population in the UK consider themselves atheist the Council would have a strong case against them if they chose to ignore the protests.
The city council though is citing that the changes are due to taking control of Internet access.
A city council statement said the authority had a “long-standing Internet usage policy for staff”.
“We are currently implementing new Internet monitoring software to make the control of Internet access easier to manage.
“The aim of this is to provide greater control for individual line managers to monitor Internet usage, and for departments, such as trading standards and child protection, to gain access, if needed, to certain sites for business reasons.”
That sounds like a lot of words to say it’s just fine to discriminate
Using a new technique to look beneath Vincent van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass” a new painting was discovered. Scientists knew something was there, van Gogh was well known for painting over previous art.
“Patch of Grass” painted in Paris in 1887 used mostly blues and greens hides a portrait of a woman painted in browns and reds.
The painting is owned by the Kroller-Muller Museum.
Scientists use “synchrotron radiation induced X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy” to reveal hidden artwork under famous paintings. This method uses chemicals in the paint pigments, mercury and the element antimony are key chemicals, to see past the top layers.
The research on this painting by van Gogh is being conducted by Delft University of Technology in the the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Other institutions are helping in the process.
Researchers are studying the evolution of von Gogh’s work.
The restaurant chain Bennigans has filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company wants to liquidate its assets and shut down. Only company locations are closing. Local franchisees will remain open.
There are about 160 franchise locations that will not be affected by the bankruptcy.
Employees are the company owned Bennigan’s are not as lucky. At the Plano, Texas location employees were greeted by “WE ARE CLOSED. THANK YOU.” on the front door. Staff were informed on Tuesday morning that they were out of work by a telephone call.
The Chapter 7 filing lists 38 locations classified as debtors but does not list which locations are no longer open for business.
With food costs up and the economy down many restaurants are feeling a tight squeeze there days.
Metromedia Restaurants, owner of Bennigans indicated that they have 49 creditors and are unable to pay them.
Thousands are being evacuated in Budapest after a bomb was found on a constuction site. The bomb dates back to World War II.
The two-tonne bomb is one of the largest to be found in Budapest. During the war the nation was bombed heavily by the Allies.
Earlier this month a smaller, half-tonne bomb was discovered.
About 16,000 people live were the latest bomb was discovered. The discovery came after a mill was demolished that had been in operation for decades. People had worked over the massive explosive the entire time without being aware of the danger below.
Tamas Bansaghi, deputy mayor of Budapest said that the bomb’s defusing may take a long time. It is embedded in cement in a deep hole.
Holly Branson has given up a career in medicine for the near future to work with her father, Sir Richard Branson. The 26-year-old has just completed five years of study in medical school and one year of hospital training.
Branson has decided to take an internship with her father’s company instead of entering her second year of hospital training.
She is in line to inherit quite a nice slice of the fortune her father has made.
She told the Daily Mail: ‘I’m leaving medicine next Tuesday to start working with my dad.
‘He’s just offered me such an exciting opportunity I couldn’t turn him down. I trained very hard to get into medicine, so I won’t say I’ll never go back to it.
‘But I want to give this new project my all, so I’m deferring my medical training for a year.’
It is thought that the young Branson will be working on a network of super-surgeries that could replace standard GP practices.
Branson has been vocal in the past that though he was proud of his daughter’s educational achievements he wished for both her and his son Sam to follow in the family business.
Dick Cheney was due to speak at the Disabled American Veterans convention this August in Las Vegas. His invite has been revoked because of the excessive security demands the Vice-President demanded.
His staff demanded that sick vets would be sequestered for two hours prior to his speech and then would have to remain until Cheney had finished talking. The meeting hall that the speech is taking place at does not have rest rooms.
Cheney spoke to the group in 2004 demanding the same lock-downs which upset members.
Many of those that attend the convention are elderly. Many also have left part of their body on the battlefields that they served on during wars from WWII to the current one in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of their injuries they can’t be stuck in one room for several hours.
“It was a huge imposition on our delegates,” added David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official.
Autry said vets would’ve had to get up “at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on.”
Once inside, they “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” he said.
While Cheney has visited with veterans during his term his speaking rules are harsher than even President Bush’s.
The group had first invited President Bush to speak but the White House declined that offer.
John McCain has plans to speak in Las Vegas. It is expected that Barack Obama will also be there.
Why would a young person decide to become a terrorist? What kind of life do they lead that hate motives their future? And is terrorism also evil? Believe it or not the origins of terrorism had to do with positive change. That is not the way it is today.
Nearly a million people a year kill themselves in our modern world. About 10 to 20 million attempt it. Now factor in those who rebel. Who want to use their anger to strike out and hurt others before they kill themselves. Those young people who look to terrorize others. It’s a deadly mix.
One case in point is Cho Seung-Hui. He went on a rampage last year killing 32 students at the Virginia Tech campus before ending his own life. While some may not classify him as a terrorist, wasn’t he? Did he not invoke terror by his actions? His actions brought no positive changes, just fear. That is the mark of today’s breed of terrorist.
When did modern terrorism begin? Some speculate that along with the good of civil rights came the anger that fuels terror. They would be wrong, terrorism has been around a lot longer than that.
Used in the right way positive change can come about from nonviolent “terrorism.” Those long marches early in the civil rights movement were certainly not without a little of a fear factor for both sides. But it brought a change that was needed. Flower power and anti-war marches helped in a small part to end a war. In a bigger part it helped change the way many think of war. It’s now ‘ok’ to question governments about military action and still be patriotic.
The first time the word terrorism was used was during the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Public displays of violence brought about changes to the aristocratic class. After the terror a positive change took place. Now Marie ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Antoinette may have not agreed with that.
One man’s terror is another man fighting for freedom in some cases.
During the late 1960’s and on into the 1970’s a new breed of youth set out to change the social order. Those long haired freedom loving, drug taking Hippies could in some ways be labeled as terrorists.
They were angry with the status quo. They rejected the ideals of their parents and embraced Eastern beliefs. The Green Movements of today stem from those times. They fought against middle class values, opposed nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War. The believed that ‘love’ should be free regardless of the colour of ones skin or gender.
Many of our common social beliefs today are the direct result of Hippies.
They were not like the terrorists of today. Massive death tolls were not part of their agenda. In Afghanistan alone 2,405 lives have been taken in 2007 by the hands of terrorism.
Of course that’s not how we look at terrorism today. The UN’s definition of terrorism is:
`Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by semi-clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby – in contrast to assassination – the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators.`
How could one movement have made so many positive changes without heavy life loss?
Perhaps positive change is the key word. Negative changes can have the same beginnings just different means.
Another difference could be religion. Religious fundamentalists often target the young, brainwashing them to do their bidding. These religious fanatics factor in problems with economic, social and governing rules while they recruit. they are good, they know their market. If they were in advertising they would be making a killing. Instead they are making killing machines.
In many of the areas where violent terrorists reign education and a positive future are dim lights at the end of a very long tunnel.
In Bangladesh at a conference to discuss how to curb terrorism one participant had this simple but very real solution:
Let `the government spend less money on military and divert the same in bridging the inequalities between the rich and poor. This will definitely put an end to terrorism,` she felt.
Sadly neither governments nor anti-terrorist groups will likely listen to such a simple idea.
Florida had a fund created by the Legislature for Florida National Guard and Reserve troops to help out reserve families that were facing hardship because of the war. The $5 million in the fund has barely been used. It is now going back to the state.
The fund was set up in 2005 for the families of deployed troops to help with any financial difficulty. Aimed at making sure mortgage payments, car repairs and food was on the table for family members coping with a loved one overseas the fund has barely been touched.
Those who would be recipients of the fund have to show why they can’t make the payments themselves. Since 2005 about $600,000 has been given to 172 citizen soldiers and their families. This past year a total of $128,000 was given to 32 families.
Lawmakers have decided to reduce the fund to $400,000 and take back the rest of the money on July 1.
“Maybe we put too many dollars in there,” Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey said. “One of the things I wanted to be certain of when we created the program was that it wouldn’t be underfunded. I didn’t want one family turned away because of a lack of money.”
“We thought it was a great idea,” he said. “Never did we think the money wouldn’t be utilized.”
Former Rep. Joe Negron thinks that there are soldiers out there that could use the money but pride is stopping them from applying.
“I’ve talked to families that asked for money, and they’re almost apologetic that they had to ask for help,” Negron said. “I know in my heart many families are simply too proud or self-reliant to ask for money. And I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about that.”
Another reason that the fund was underused could be the fact that not everyone knew about it. While Guard officials say that they informed their troops of the fund state military leaders say they had a hard time promoting it.
There are about 700 Florida Guard troops deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan at this time. Since 2005 over 3,000 Guard members have seen active duty. There are no numbers for the amount of Reservists that are stationed overseas.
John McCain has had a spot removed by his dermatologist from his face. It is a routine part of Senator McCain’s checkups. The presidential candidate has a history of skin cancer.
The spot which has been described as a mole will be biopsied to make sure that the cancer has not returned.
“I, as I do every three months, visited my dermatologist this morning. She said that I was doing fine. (She) took a small little nick from my cheek as she does regularly and that will be … biopsied just to make sure that everything is fine,” he said.
McCain has had four malignant melanomas since 1993. Three of those cancers had not invaded cells further than the top layers of skin. The fourth melanoma however was invasive. The tumor was removed in 2000. Lymph nodes removed during that surgery showed that the cancer had not spread.
McCain strongly urges people to use sun screen to help prevent skin cancer. He, himself will always be at higher risk for a recurrence or a new cancer as a skin cancer survivor.
I want to again urge all Americans to wear sunscreen, particularly this summer, to stay out of the sun as much as possible,” he said, with his wife Cindy standing next to him.
“Remember a lot of the damage that people receive from the sun when they’re young sometimes comes back later in life.”
College costs are hitting campus cafeterias. Many universities are doing away with the all you can eat buffet trays to save money and reduce water waste.
By getting rid of the trays universities don’t have the added cost of washing them. That is not only a money saver but 30,000 gallons of water is not used in each month. Those trays helped students load up more produce. Without them students have to be able to carry their entrees in their hands. It’s proven to have reduced food waste.
The food services company Aramark serves over 25 higher education cafeterias in the United States. They found by eliminating the trays more than 186,000 meals were not wasted last year.
At the University of Maine 56 pounds less per person was served last year after their trays were removed.
The trayless dining movement started last year. Students are embracing the greener way to dine at colleges around the country.
More than a third of the 600 campuses that Sodexo food serves operates in including University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Georgia Tech, and Tulane in New Orleans have gone trayless.
Trayless dining is also helping students have a better diet.
Still going trayless is bound to have an accident or two. When a Sodexo executive wanted to prove that he could carry a main course, salad and coffee up a flight of stairs at Georgia Tech he wound up wearing his meal.
“Our executive was trying it for the first time,” Monica Zimmer, spokeswoman for food services giant Sodexo explained.
“He didn’t have quite as much practice as the students, and anyway, students are very good at balancing.”
Going trayless though is a great idea all around. Less food loss, less water wasted and healthier diets. Score one for a company trying to save a few bucks.
A Dutch man was surprised when local police informed him his prized begonias had a crop of marijuana plants concealed. The man believes local teens planted their weed inside his garden.
The 73-year-old has promised police that he will destroy the plants while keeping his own garden intact.
“Police officers suddenly noticed marijuana plants sprouting from his begonias,” a police spokeswoman in The Hague said on Friday.
In Holland it is illegal to grow marijuana. Police show tolerance though when it is sold in coffee shops.
Little Morgan Faith Ellerbe made a promise to her Daddy. On her fifth birthday she promised to give her long hair to a child who had none. After her long braid was cut off she sent a red balloon to heaven with a lock of her hair for her father.
Daniel Ellerbe died at the age of 38 in April from lung cancer. Before his passing he and his little girl made a pact. That pact took place when little Morgan Faith sat in a barber chair ready to donate the long hair that flowed down her back to Locks of Love.
The organization gives children who have lost their hair and are financially disadvantaged hair pieces. They operate in the United States and Canada serving those under the age of 18.
Morgan Faith whose father nicknamed Little Sweetie loves her new hair cut.
“My daddy talked about giving my hair to Locks of Love because kids don’t have hair,” Morgan said.
The pollution in Beijing could see athletes wearing anti-pollution masks during the Olympic Games. The British Olympic Association has given their athletes that option.
Athletes from the United States, Australia and Canada will not be donning masks to help protect themselves this August.
The BOA chief executive Simon Clegg though wants his team to have the best chance to win regardless if it may embarrass the host country.
“This is a competitive issue,” Clegg told The Times newspaper. “We are in the business of trying to win medals here and beat our competitors.
“We are all hopeful that the Chinese authorities will have addressed this issue by August so the athletes are not put in a position where the measures we have put in place have to be deployed.
“But we are in the business of providing our athletes with competitive advantage. We need to put in place whatever strategies are appropriate to ensure that we give our athletes the best chance of delivering.”
If air pollution is not within air-quality standards endurance events could be postponed or cancelled warns the International Olympic Committee.
Beijing’s mayor, Guo Jinlong, has been trying to bring pollution levels down but admits that the task is massive in the crowded city.
What’s going on with Brits in flight? For the second time this month British passengers tried to open a cabin door in mid flight. this time around it was two women aged 26 and 27 who wanted some fresh air.
The two women had been drinking during the flight when they decided that they needed a bit of fresh air. That little stunt forced a quick landing in Frankfurt, Germany to rid the plane of the two.
It is suspected that the ladies brought their own party mix on board. They are also thought to have been smoking in the loo, a serious airline no-no.
When the staff of the XL Airways plane refused to sell them additional alcohol they were abusive according to a BBC News report.
“Their language was totally unacceptable, as was their behaviour. They were very abusive and threatening,” the spokeswoman said.
“We won’t tolerate this sort of behaviour. The cabin crew did an excellent job and were very professional.”
The 26-year-old is also accused of attempting to strike a flight attendant with a vodka bottle.
The captain decided after the pair attempted to open the door over Austria to get them off of his plane as soon as possible. Security on board kept the two in their seats until the unscheduled stop in Frankfurt.
The two woman are now facing a slew of charges of grievous bodily harm and violating air traffic regulations.
After the quick two hour stop and drop of the two the plane completed the schedule flight to Manchester. The flight had originated from the Greek island of Kos.
The women were questioned by the German police and released. They were allowed to return to the UK.
The XL Airlines are considering legal action against the party girls.
Earlier this month a passenger on a First Choice Boeing 767 plane to Cuba forced an unscheduled landing in Bermuda when he tried to open the doors during a flight.
The Olympic Village is open for business in Beijing. The flats will house four to eight people each are built to a standard higher than most homes in China.
Chen Zhili, vice-president of the organizing committee in Beijing spoke at the opening ceremony.
“We now welcome athletes from around the world to come to the Games.”
Chen, the so-called mayor of the village, added: “We will try to satisfy the needs of people from different cultural and religious backgrounds.”
Chinese athletes are the first to check in. They will be enjoying features that are uncommon in China such as tap water that is safe to drink.
In total 16,000 athletes from around the world will reside in the high-rise apartments. Some of the apartments are to be solar powered.
The food served in the village could possibly be the safest in all of China. Mobile laboratories will be used to spot check all the food served there.
After the games the village will be refitted and sold. The average Beijing resident though will not be able to afford the luxurious homes though. They will be going for a cool million.
Toronto is planning on installing 20 toilets around the city by next summer. The goal to keep the public commodes safe has the city seeking advice from other cities that have used the high-tech lavatories before.
Other cities have had trouble with drug addicts using the privies and hookers doing their business in them. Toronto wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Seattle was one city that ended up taking their loos away because of the criminal element. Seattle’s toilets are listed on eBay now.
One option is to have a fee for the use of a toilets. For the cost of a loonie those in need of a toilet will have 15 minutes to do their personal business.
There is also some talk about using black lights. Black lights make it impossible for addicts to see their veins.
The toilets coming to Toronto are expensive. The Astral Media Outdoor company that is providing Toronto with $1 billion worth of street furniture over the next twenty years. For that cost they are responsible for maintaining, repairing and cleaning the furniture. They plan to recoup their money by using the bus shelters as mini billboards.
The loos will be in highly visible areas where there is high demand for a Jiffy Johnny.
All of the public “out houses” will be accessible for those in wheelchairs. They will be open 24 hours a day. If a toilet proves to be in an area that gives way to crime they can be relocated.
In March 2007 little Ester Zulemita Rivas was stolen from her mother Ana Escobar by a gunman. The Guatemalan mother only had one picture of her baby to help her get through the long days. Last week she was able to finally hug the child again.
The case is the first link between armed child snatching gangs and international adoptions in Guatemala.
A DNA test given to little Esther stopped an adoption that would have placed her in the United States and forever away from her 27-year-old shop worker mother.
“I can’t explain how excited and happy I am,” Ms Escobar said last week after hearing the good news. “There are people who don’t believe in miracles and then there are people to whom miracles happen.
“Carrying the picture of Esther gave me comfort and company through these 16 long months. I will tell her the story as soon as she can understand what happened”.
The Central American country makes a large earning from international adoptions. It has often been speculated that the children in some of these adoptions were stolen from their homes but that was never before proven. Last year the government started to crack down on fast track international placements that can cost new parents about $30,000.
“This was run by a mafia, and we going after them,” said Jaime Tecu, director of a team now reviewing all pending adoptions from Guatemala. “This is the first time that we’ve been able to show with irrefutable evidence that a stolen child was put up for adoption.”
The largest majority of these adoptions due with families in the United States. One in 100 children that are born in Guatemala will grown up with new parents in the US.
Ms. Escobar is a testament for mothers whose children have been ripped from their arms by gunmen in the small nation. She and five other mothers at one point went on a hunger strike to demand the government take action on their pleas. For 18 months she tracked down hospitals, orphanages and looked at the children running alone in the street looking for her Esther.
A miracle happened in May when she was sitting at the National Adoption Council offices. A little girl that strongly reminded her of the six month old daughter that she had lost was ushered into another room. The office tried to tell her all the papers were in order for that little girl including DNA results that said another woman was her mother. That didn’t stop Escobar, she convinced the authorities to retest the DNA. This week she learned that her feelings were correct. Esther was the girl in the other room.
Mr. Tecu says that officials are now investigating those involved with the child’s adoption from the lawyers to the doctor who falsified DNA tests.
Because Ms. Escobar identified the gunman and was high profile in her campaign to find her daughter she is in hiding.
Guatemala has been under the microscope for some time when it comes to international adoptions. Last year the United Nations urged the government to suspend all adoptions because of corruption.
The nation is now implementing the Hague Convention that regulates international adoptions. Lawyers have been removed from the process and in their place is an independent commission.
In 2006 there were 4,135 children adopted children sent to the US. The only nation with a higher US international adoption rate is China with 6,493 in that year.
There is controversy on all sides of this issue. Some innocent people have been accused of being baby thieves, their lives ended by lynch mob. There have been reports of baby farms where poor women have been paid to supply the adoption trade.
There are also the children whose parents do honestly hope for a better life for their children putting them up for adoption. Those children may face a more difficult time with the new restraints put on the adoption trade.
In the end though after the bits and pieces of regulation are ironed out children will be the victors. At least that is the hope.
The residents in Texas are trying to get back to normal life after Hurricane Dolly dumped flooding rain on them. Now they are having to deal with the creatures that are swimming in the waters; snakes, tarantulas and fire ants.
Health Services Commissioner David Lakey has said for those of the Rio Grande Valley to stay out of the water. That may be good advice but for those who want to get back home the water can’t be avoided.
It’s been estimated that the land won’t dry out for at least six more weeks. Emergency services are pumping the water as fast as they can but it’s a time consuming process.
Tempers are flaring as neighbours try to drain their front yards by using backhoes to make drainage ditches. The water often just invades the next door neighbour’s property.
agapito on flickr (Public Domain)
That water is full of stinging fire ants and tarantulas. Although tarantulas look scary, they are sometimes as large as a dinner plate, their bite is only painful not deadly. Fire ants have caused deaths in the past for those allergic to their venom.
Electricity has yet to be restored for 118,000 residents in the area.
The weather forecast isn’t being gentle either with showers being called for in the area.
The blog MPD Enforcer 2.0 is often critical of police management in Memphis. The police are not happy with this and are going after them with a lawsuit. At this point they want AOL to name names.
The lawsuit is also seeking e-mail addresses and phone numbers associated with MPD Enforcer 2.0.
Police manager Larry Godwin and the city are the ones behind the lawsuit. The bloggers use the name of a porn star from the movie “Boogie Nights,” Dirk Diggler to make posts. The blog also encourages others with similar views to e-mail them. There has also been an online petition calling for Godwin’s resignation.
Why all the fuss? The blog is critical of Godwin’s job performance. Because the lawsuit is sealed details are not allowed to be on public record.
As Amos Maki of CommercialAppeal.com notes, “[it isn't] clear if the lawsuit is aimed at shutting down the site or if it’s part of an effort to stop leaks that might affect investigations.”
The operators of the blog have retained the services of Paul Alan Levy to represent them in the case. Levy is a well known First Amendment lawyer.
The Blog does seem to have inside information about the department. One of the posts quoted Godwin about moving officers who make repeated complaints.
“We’re looking for a pattern,” Godwin said. “Sometimes drug dealers and others will keep filing complaints just to try to cause an officer trouble. We investigate those claims and watch the officer to see if there is a problem and if early intervention might solve it.”
If Godwin wins what will that precedent do for other bloggers who are tired of red tape or bad management at their jobs? Does that mean bloggers will not be allowed to speak or fear a lawsuit?
I am sure there will be much more to come as this lawsuit steps forward.
Last year Randy Pausch’s last lecture made the rounds online. The Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist spent the time lecturing about facing cancer and living. He passed away today in Virginia.
“It’s not about how to achieve your dreams, it’s all about leading your life. If you lead your life in a right way, karma will take care of itself. And dreams will come to you.” — from The Last Lecture
The book, The Last Lecture, expands on the points that the professor made to his class. Jeff Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal helped Pausch write the book.
Many were inspired by his lecture last year that dealt with the joy of life instead of the sadness of his coming death. It was titled “Really achieving your childhood dreams” something Pausch believed strongly in. His dreams in childhood were writing a World Book Encyclopedia entry, experiencing zero gravity and creating Disney attractions . He achieved them all.
He died on July 25 at his home in Chesapeake, Virginia with his wife Jai and their children close by.
In Duncanville, Texas has a weekend hangout for adults that they would love to wipe out. The Cherry Pit is where the swinging set come out to play every weekend. Sex parties with 5 to 80 people are common.
More than 7,000 people have shown up at one time or other throughout the past year. It’s a profitable little club fetching the owners up to $10,000 a month. It also has a criminal element that the city would like to get rid of.
The Cherry Pit according to city officials is an illegal sexually oriented business. The problem is the city needs to build a strong enough case against the ‘club’ to make sure it sticks. A recent raid just may have gotten the goods to do that.
There are investigations ongoing that include a web of organized criminal activity, prostitution, narcotics trafficking and money laundering. Sex is just the icing on the cake at the Cherry Pit.
The city admits that they are looking at every angle they can to shut the place down. The Cherry Pit’s attorney says that his clients are having to deal with trumped up charges.
The Cherry Pit uses ‘fun money’ much like you’d find at an amusement park to solicit sex acts. That little tidbit of information was enough to get a raid brewing last weekend.
The police on the scene expected to find bondage gear and thongs littering the place. An informant had visited the month before letting the police in on the sordid details. Safe sex is not the name of the game at the Cherry Pit. Condoms are rarely used when folks are sexing it up on the beds with dirty sheets. The hot tub is a stew of hot untreated water.
This time around though they got a little more to fuel the fire with. Loaded guns were laying about along with hundreds of bottles of liquor. Pay dirt.
The owner Mr. Trulock, 59, believes that he is in the right to have any kind of private party he wants to at his home according to Dallas News.
“Trulock compared his sexually oriented business to a church group holding a barbecue and charging a $10 admittance to cover the cost of the food,” the affidavit said.
So how much does this little sex BBQ costs to get in? A mere $50 donation for the men. It’s generally free for the ladies of the night. After all without the chicks there wouldn’t be any menfolk hopping on down to the Cherry Pit.
Part of the Cherry Pit is a private home, with some of the rooms blocked off. The public area consists of a kitchen, bedrooms and a fully stocked bar. There is also a hot tub and a dance floor.
The city has tried what they can to curb the appeal of the place. There are No Parking signs in front of the home. Patrons now park elsewhere and are shuttled in.
The owner is using Texan law also. He has posted ‘no trespassing’ signs on his property. By Texas law he has the right to legally shoot anyone that comes onto his land without his permission.
The city put out a news release on Wednesday. In it Detective Dan Hunt stated that the owners of the Cherry Pit are endangering and exploiting the patrons that visit.
“Individuals that elect to participate in the swingers’ lifestyle behind closed doors should not be charged to do so, and they should not be exposed to disease, fire hazards, or any other dangerous hazardous environment. They [the owners] are taking advantage of swingers while claiming to be champions for their cause.”
John Ordover has a group of dining buddies that rent out New York City restaurants to get together and eat in the nude. That’s right, naked dining is a new fad in the Big Apple.
The group has yet to have a restaurant tell them no according to 46-year-old Ordover. During the clothes on hours he works as a web marketer. His group isn’t the only one stripping down to the basics though. In New York naked yoga is becoming trendy too. There is also a comedy club that caters to those who would rather yuck it up in the buff.
50 regular diners whose motto is “no hot soup” meets for monthly dinners. They are not out to shock the natives they just enjoy eating without their clothes on. Waiters at the establishments they go to have to keep their uniforms on because of city laws.
But this is New York and a group of naked friends isn’t that big of a deal.
“If you work in a restaurant in New York City, the chances are you’ve seen a lot more shocking things than a room full of naked diners,” Ordover explained.
When Fiona and Andrew O’Driscoll got married they had a very unusual offer for a wedding present. Kate Housley offered to carry a baby for them when they were ready for a child. That child will be born this October.
Fiona has Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser Syndrome. she was born with ovaries but not a womb. The only way she and husband Andrew could have children is through adoption or surrogacy.
The O’Dricoll’s met Dennis and Kate Housley through Surrogacy UK, a not-for-profit group. After seven months of getting to know each other Kate made the offer to carry the O’Driscoll’s child five days before their wedding.
Mrs. Housley has two children of her own. She enjoy’s being pregnant but admits to the Telegraph this time around is different because she’s not attached to the baby inside her.
“I don’t stroke or talk to it, I’m much more detached – I suppose it’s because I’ve bonded with the parents, not the baby.
“I don’t want any more babies of my own. I’ve had mine and they have brought us happiness and everything else.”
On Monday afternoon Sam Diesel died when the squad car he was sitting in had a failure with the air conditioning. He was baked in the hot car for three hours while his handler Sara Movahedi wrote reports. Sam was a police dog.
His death is bringing changes to Florida to protect the lives of the K-9 force.
When the windows are rolled up in a hot car a dog can perish within minutes. The written policy in Lakeland and Mulberry, Florida is to have the dogs remain in patrol cars while officers are in the police station. As long as the A/C is working that is safe but when it fails like it did on Monday the dogs lives are in danger. Not to mention the cost of keeping the cars running.
Members of the K-9 units have been encouraged to bring the dogs inside with them when they are working up reports.
In Bartow the K-9 unit rarely leaves their dogs alone. On the few occasions they are left by themselves in a car a heat sensor is running to make sure the dogs are safe. The BPD has a spare heat sensor just in case one stops working.
Officer Movahedi is distraught. She is on leave until Friday, trying to cope with the loss of Sam. Police K-9 handlers train with their dogs for 400 hours before they are put in the field.
When Movahedi returns to her post she will be working with Silvo who trained with former Mulberry police officer Dave Davis.
Movahedi had been waiting for a newer vehicle on Monday. The 2004 Crown Victoria that Sam died in did not have a heat sensor, it had not yet arrived.
A new policy is now in place to protect the dogs. All K-9 units are now required to check and report on their dogs every 30 minutes. If an officer fails to report in dispatchers will call them.
The chief of police is tentatively planning a memorial for Sam but is waiting for input from his handler.
Residents of the island Lesbos in Greece have lost a court ruling that would have put the word lesbian on the no-no list. The Greek citizens that reside on Lesbos are called Lesbians. They didn’t want their name associated with gay women.
An Athens court ruled that the islanders had no justification for feeling slighted because the word does not define the islander’ identity.
Since 600 BC the word lesbian has applied to homosexual women. The origins come from the female poet Sappho who wrote love poems about both genders.
Dimitris Lambros spearheaded the case for the residents of Lesbos. He claimed that the word lesbian violates the human rights of those that live on the island and call themselves Lesbians. He went on to claim that the word used in a sexual content disgraces the islanders worldwide.
The court didn’t see it that why. The plaintiffs are now having to come up with the court expenses unless they plan to appeal the judge’s decision.
Stanley Kobierowski was arrested with the highest blood alcohol level in Rhode Island history on Tuesday morning. His level of 0.491 percent should have had him comatose yet he was behind the wheel of his car.
Kobierowski was charged with driving while intoxicated and resisting arrest after driving into a message board on Interstate 95 in Providence.
When police arrived the man had trouble getting out of his car and then grabbed it refusing to move. The troopers had to carry the drunken man to the breakdown lane before taking him to the barracks. When a breath test revealed his reading at 0.489 he was taken to hospital and put into detox.
He is set to appear in court on Friday. The judge allowed him to go home until then.
He is very lucky to be alive, according to the health department a blood alcohol level of 0.30 is classified as stupor, 0.4 is comatose and 0.5 is considered fatal.
The world has changed drastically in the past fifteen years as the internet gained popularity, could that world quickly be on the way out? The online world has approximately 1 billion residents. Free transfer of information is now at risk.
What do you want to learn more about? With a computer the options are currently endless. Mostly the Internet is a useful tool. There are always a few bad apples out there though that use it as a source of crime. But overall it’s a handy little helper. It also makes folks a ton of money.
Money.
The be all and end all of life it seems.
Sometimes the Internet helps out the little guy. Such was the case when Telus and Rogers started charging for text messaging without bothering to let the public know. It backfired when people used the Internet to fight against the big wigs. In a classic David Vs. Goliath match David won. The extra charge vanished.
Canada is now about to be a guinea pig when it comes to how the Internet is “portioned” out. In a year and a half the “free Internet” will be gone with the wind. If Bell Canada and Telus get their way the Internet will be as free as Cable TV. That’s right, we’re going to be paying a ton just to surf, like we are paying a ton to watch more than a few channels on TV. The big time money players will be shouting dire predictions about safety and security. Those hot little words that really mean pay up Bud, we’re in this for the money Honey.
Fast forward to 2010 when we Canadians get the thrill of paying to have a set package of programs to surf to. Those of us who opt out of certain “channels” can expect to pay more for that “privilege.”
Here’s the ‘fun’ part, thousands of sites will not be part of the ‘package.’ Imagine logging on and not being able to browse over to Digital Journal on a whim without paying for your ‘fix.’
It’s coming. Heck it’s already here if you look at China. The world looks down upon the Chinese government for their web restrictions.
The corporate giants are hoping that the polite people of Canada will lay back and take being ……. let’s say screwed.
Oh and those buzz words of security and safety? Notice privacy isn’t one of them. Every single little site you venture out to will be logged and recorded. Going to Randy sex Maids will be on your monthly bill for all to see. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy doesn’t it?
So what’s is the plan to save the Internet from Goliath, David? Well just like the battle over text messaging fees, the Internet is the battlefield. A war is coming that won’t be fought with bullets but with web sites and signatures. Are you ready? Are you going to be a soldier for a free Internet or lay down and be polite?
A free Internet or a censored money pit. The choice just well lay in your hands.
Product placement is big business. The very shows we love push products as the actors go through their motions without saying a word. Still, one doesn’t expect to have the fiction of product placement on the morning news. Leave it to Fox to change that.
Fox 5 TV news in Las Vegas’s morning anchors are currently sharing their desks with two cups of McDonald’s iced coffees. Those coffees aren’t being drunk; in fact that would be impossible. Those iced drinks are fake and weigh about seven pounds each.
KVVU news director Adam P. Bradshaw says the cups that go into place after 7 a.m. when the hard news leaves is a “nontraditional revenue source.”
The station nor McDonald’s are talking about the price tag for the product placement but you can be sure it isn’t pennies.
Bradshaw stresses that just because the Golden Arches has their little advertising on the desk doesn’t mean if a negative story about the fast food giant comes over the wire it won’t be reported. After all this is the news.
Don’t try telling that to Kelly McBride, the ethics group leader for Poynter Institute. She is worried that now news stations have slipped down a gray slide where conglomerates control what’s being pushed out of news anchors mouths.
If that is the case Las Vegas isn’t alone on that slippery slope; Seattle, New York and Chicago are all playing the product placement game.
As for Las Vegas? Bradshaw is already thinking of two ceramic mugs of hot black McDonald’s coffee will be sitting on the morning news desk come the fall.
Reece Fleming’s dying wish was to marry Elleanor Purgslove. The couple married the day after he proposed at a laser tag party at his home. The wedding was held in Machworth, Derby. The next day Reece died with his family. He was eight years old.
The young boy told his mother that he could go now after his marriage wish had taken place.
When Reece was just 4 he was diagnosed with leukemia in July 2004. He bravely fought the disease for four years. In May of 2008 doctors could do no more; they gave the schoolboy just weeks to live.
His mother and stepfather spent the rest of his short life giving him memories. They were able to help him achieve as much as possible before he died.
The pretend wedding happened on July 4. The mayor’s own limo carried the couple to dinner. Both families worked hard in just 24 hours to give the children this dream with rings, a certificate and a stand-in vicar.
Ms Fleming added: “Even on the Saturday that he died, he got out of bed and walked to the sofa.
“He always tried walking, right to the end, so we thought if he walked for us then we would walk for him.”
The mourners at young Reece’s funeral walked behind a horse-drawn hearse carrying his remains.
Sufferers of sleep apnea may have a risk of heart attack during the night. A new study out shows that the changes brought on by the disorder to blood pressure, nerves and hormones can be a factor.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA} is a common problem where the tissues in the back of the throat temporarily collapse during sleep. When this happens there are brief episodes of interrupted breathing. A machine that forces air can be used by those with the condition.
The study by Dr. Virend K. Somers and associates is in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The team believed that OSA could be a trigger for heart attacks and that the symptoms would happen at night following up to the attack itself. They investigated this theoury by studying 92 heart attack patients at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Two to three weeks after the patients heart attacks an overnight sleep test was performed to see if they suffered from OSA.
The testing found that 64 of the patients did indeed have the sleep disorder. All of the patients involved in the study had similar health backgrounds and current medications.
In those with OSA the timing of heart attacks was most common between midnight and 6 am while those without the disorder had heart attacks generally between 6am and noon. Patients with OSA were 6 times more likely to have a heart attack during the night.
This study shows that persons with OSA who have nighttime sudden death may have heart attacks as a contributing factor.
Researchers are recommending that patients with night time heart attacks be tested to see if they have OSA.
They are the sheets that are to die for. Egyptian cotton. Brought to you by children picking cotton in 40C heat for 20 pence a day. The sheets we crave are made of cotton that is farmed by children who can’t read or write, let alone sleep on luxury.
The poor are always the ones that serve the rich. When it comes to the finest cotton sheets those poor are Egyptian children working 10 hour days. They toil so their families can eat. They toil for bread.
Education is for other children. The children that work the harvests that change with each season will likely never step into a classroom. In summer and autumn it’s the cotton season. Little hands dripping with pesticides remove bollworm. In the summer it’s common that the children have trouble breathing with all the chemicals that hover around them.
In Egypt 2.7 million of the nation’s labourers are children. Most work in agricultural venues from dusk to dawn.
Those fine cotton sheets on sale at Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Habitat, Ikea are a billion dollar business. Considering the low cost of child labour farm owners are making a killing.
The United States and the UK are the largest importers of the nation’s cotton fields.
Many have small farms but they are the working poor. By the time fertilizer and seeds are paid for there is barely enough to pay for meager meals. They are not part of the billion dollar farms.
Those who are suffering more are the children. You can be assured that any Egyptian cotton you buy in Britain has been picked or processed or tilled by children, some as young as five and six. They have no opportunities to thrive or grow, or even, as children, to have dreams and ambitions.’
Hamdi Wabid, a campaigner for the Land Centre for Human Rights, an NGO that fights for cotton farmers.
Enjoy your good night’s sleep on your cotton sheets.
Gangland violence visited the streets of Toronto this weekend. As the dawn broke Sunday morning three men were found dead in a car on a residential street on the city’s east side.
Police believe the deaths of Adrian Bannerman, 29, Aaron MacDonald, 20, and Kurt Charles, 27, all of Toronto was gang related. they were found dead in a gold Nissan Pathfinder parked on Lunness Road near Browns Line. The shooting may have happened somewhere else in the city.
Police received a 911 call stating that there were three men dead inside the vehicle around 3:40 a.m. Sunday morning.
Police arrived to find all three were dead at the scene from gunshot wounds. The men also suffered from undisclosed trauma. Bullet holes pierced the Pathfinder leading the police to say that the victims were shot from outside of the vehicle.
The men had been at a nightclub earlier in the evening. Police are looking for the driver of the car.
The murders brought up the city’s death toll to 35 for 2008. Six murders took place this week.
Parenting fads are ever changing. What was the ‘in’ thing yesterday will be out with tomorrow’s wash. So what’s hot on the parent track? Green is in and plastic is out.
More parents are opting for greener products to raise their young. From bamboo crib sheets to plain wooden toys parents are starting Junior out to be eco conscious.
Daddy is no longer the guy who hangs out for an hour and then disappears. Canadian fathers are taking longer parental leaves to take care of baby. More fathers work from work or are stay at home dads then ever before.
Moms are blogging their children’s early life. Yesterday it was making detailed scrapbooks, today mom’s write it all out.
Birthing baby is more likely to take place at home, that is if mom doesn’t opt for an elective C-section.
Parents are monitoring their kids with techno gadgets. Drug testing is as easy as using a piece of hair. Cellphones and jackets are being equipped with GPS. Parents are checking the online travels of their surfing kids.
More and more parents with the means are hiring people to replace extended families. Those with the green are paying for baby planners, lactation consultants, night nurses and parenting coaches.
Children’s birthday parties are getting simpler. No longer is it cool to outdo the Jones. Re-gifting is becoming a bigger trend. Some parents are asking for donations to charity in their child’s name instead of a present.
Multiple births are becoming more common thanks to fertility treatments and mothers being older. It’s not uncommon to see double and triple strollers coming down the street.
What’s old becomes what’s new again with family dinners becoming more popular. Sitting down as a family instead of rushing around is helping to teach good manners and install some family values.
So what’s on the way out?
There is no longer a normal family. Dad, mom, 2.5 kids and the family dog is last generation. Today families come in all sizes, single moms by choice, same-sex couples, kids before marriage and open adoptions are common.
Those crazy creative names are thankfully out of style. Back to old fashioned names that are spelled in the old school.
Children aren’t being over-booked for classes at the toddler stage. good old playtime is back in vague.
In Toronto at least homework is being reduced. Until Grade 2 most kids aren’t being sent home with hours more of book work.
Chicken fingers and fries are out, giving way to little gourmets. Children’s paletes are being treated like adults as food culture is growing up.
The Mommy Wars are over! Finally moms can feel secure in whatever role they fit into. Stay-at-home moms are just as valued as working moms and visa versa.
King Street West in Toronto was closed Sunday night after a shooting near a Parkdale rooming house. The victim was shot in the leg with a shotgun.
A three-story red brick building used as a rooming house was the focus of a three hour stand off with police. Several of the residents fled the building. Police used a megaphone to order remaining occupants to come out of the building. Three men came out with the police ordering them to walk backwards with their hands on their heads.
Several other people were escorted out of the building by 10 armed police officers. The police focused on one unit where it is believed the shooter resides.
King Street remains closed as the police continue the investigation.
The victim has not cooperated with the police. He is in hospital with minor injuries.
The incident took place at the corner of King and Tyndale Avenue, near Dufferin Street. Area streetcars were rerouted to Queen Street during the three hours.
Did two young Roma girls drown after venturing into the waters outside of Naples or did something more sinister cause their deaths?
Yesterday the attitudes of Italians were questions as sunbathers ignored the bodies of two Gypsy girls laid out on the sand.
The two children, aged 14 and 16 were part of an Roma encampment that had been evacuated earlier this year. After the Romas had left the encampment it was burnt to the ground.
A civil liberties group, EveryOne is asking for authorities to investigate how the girls died.
The two girls were part of a group of four who had spent Saturday morning selling trinkets to those on the beach. Another version of the story has the girls begging patrons at the beach at Torregaveta.
At about 1 p.m. it is claimed that the girls entered the water on their own accord. None of the four girls knew how to swim. Strong currents carried the girls off. Two of the girls were rescued by life guards from a nearby private beach. The older two were unable to be rescued in time. Their bodies were dragged on shore and covered by beach towels.
“But the knot of curious onlookers that formed around the girls’ bodies dissolved as [swiftly] as it had formed,” the newspaper Corriere della Sera reported. “Few left the beach or abandoned their sunbathing. When the police from the mortuary arrived an hour later with coffins, the two girls were carried away on the shoulders [of the officers] between bathers stretched out in the sun.”
There are questions brewing as to why the girls entered the water. They left their wares when they went into the waves which is not a normal practice. Also the fact that they went into the water in full view of others goes against their culture.
Gypsies are often discriminated in Italy. The new government of Silvio Berlusconi has appointed three special commissioners to deal with the Roma since taking office in May. A mass fingerprinting of the country’s Roma population, including minors has been ordered. There are an estimated 150,000 Roma in Italy.
Commission president, José Manuel Barroso has stated that the information collected was to ensure that the Roma children were going to school after the European commission questioned the government on the census. The European parliament has a motion ongoing to condemn the practice as an act of discrimination.
A statement from the group said: “Two young Roma would never have left their scant merchandise for ‘a refreshing dip’ in the waves. Two Gypsy girls would never have gone bathing in full view of everyone because of the modesty that is one of their distinguishing characteristics.”
The group said it had asked for a meeting with the authorities, adding: “We await their response.”
Working under the cover of night the Public Space guerrilla gardening group is out to beautify a section of Toronto. The group works illegally to spruce up parts of the city.
The corner of Boston Avenue and Dundas Street was a wasteland of weeds and garbage until the illegal night owl gardeners set up shop. It is now a thriving garden.
The police have looked the other way as the group has set forth to beautify without permission from city or property owners.
Terry Aldebert is the director of the east Toronto group. The members shell out their own money to change bus stops, terraces and other locations into urban garden havens.
Aldebert is an instructor at the University of Toronto. She and about 10 other gardening volunteers toil the land in a city with a lot of public spaces.
“I got involved with guerrilla gardening because I didn’t have a yard and I wanted to get into gardening,” Aldebert said.
China is in the last days of preparation before the Olympics. One last item on the to do list, get rid of ethnic minorities. It has been claimed Chinese police are pressuring some of their nation’s minorities to pack their bags and live the city quickly.
The minorities being targeted according to a report in the Globe and Mail are Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongolians. They join ethnic minorities, migrant workers, petitioners and social activists in a city wide crack down that has spread in recent months. Some are being expelled by force by Chinese police.
Last week Dechen Pemba, a British woman of Tibetan heritage was deported. The woman had a valid visa and had spent the past two years teaching. With no explantion she was escorted to Beijing airport by a team of security agents and forcifully put on a plane.
Tibetans and Mongolians are on the list because of their ties to Tibet. It is feared that they will protest as the games begin. The greatest pressure though is reserved for Uyghurs who are considered not only a protest risk but also a risk for being potential terrorists. At one time Beijing had a slew of Uyghur restaurants. Most have been forced to close their doors during the past two years.
One family that will be going to Xinjiang in the next few days spoke to reporters without disclosing their last name. They feared they would be in more trouble if they did.
“Since 2006, there are fewer and fewer Xinjiang restaurants,” he said. “The police come in and just take people away without any explanation, which frightens us very much.”
Nuer himself has been detained five times by the police in the past two years. “They never explain why they are taking me to the police station. They search me and then they release me without filing any charges against me.”
For those targeted its a race against time to leave the city before it will be over run by tourists.
A sheep farm in south-east London was the scene of a number of sexual assaults on an undisclosed number of sheep. A 27-year-old is being held by police after DNA at the scene linked him with the attacks.
The arrest follows several complaints that sheep were being molested in Botany Bay Lane, Chislehurst during May and June of this year. Witnesses had run the man off numerous times, often with him leaving his clothes behind. Forensic scientists were able to use the discarded clothing to recover DNA.
Two sheep were found dead in the fields during the time period of the attacks but the deaths have not been linked to the molestations.
The suspect is also charged with suspicion of drugs possession with intent to supply. It is still being investigated as to whether or not the sheep molester also took photos of the animals prior to the attacks.
The maximum prison sentence for bestiality in England is two years.
Passengers bound for Cuba had a pit stop in Bermuda Wednesday after a drunken passenger tried to open the First Choice Boeing 767 plane’s door mid-flight.
Air rage such as this incident is becoming more common on British flights. Last year Civil Aviation Authority dealt with 2,219 reports of disruptive behaviour on flights in 2006-2007. The previous year there had been 1,359 reported incidents. Common causes have to do with smoking and drinking during the flight. Domestic disputes, anger over seating and people feeling their personal space has been violated are also causes cited in the reports. There were 42 cases that escalated to the point where disruptive passengers had to be restrained for the remainder of a flight. Fourteen flights had to be diverted while 19 flights never made it off the original runways before the abusive passengers were handled. 235 cases resulted in passengers being ordered off of the flights. In 235 cases security in some form, either police or airport, had to be called in to take care of the matter.
On Wednesday’s flight the passenger was arrested when the plane landed in Bermuda. The flight originated in Gatwick. After a night at a Bermuda hotel the rest of the 257 passengers and 11 crew finished the final leg of the trip landing in Cuba on Thursday.
A First Choice spokeswoman said: “The safety of all our customers and crew is our number-one priority and First Choice Airways operates a zero tolerance policy in regard to abusive or drunken behaviour on our flights. On landing in Bermuda the disruptive passenger was met by airport officials and placed in their custody.”
When Landon Wilburn got tired of the speeders in his neighbourhood he took matters into his own hands. He stands out in his bike helmet, reflective vest and Hot Wheels radar gun clocking speeders that rush through the Stone Lakes subdivision he lives in.
Like many of the others living on his street Landon was frustrated by drivers going double the posted speed limit. Yelling at the law breakers didn’t make them slow down so the boy became creative.
Wilburn donned a reflective vest and bike helmet for protection as he clocks actual speed of passing cars with his Hot Wheels brand radar gun. He carries with him a flashlight featuring a built in siren.
City officials say that if 70 percent of the neighbours agree they will install speed bumps in the neighbourhood. That is if the residents will foot half of the cost.
Will the city foot the cost of a child getting hit by one of those speeders though? 3 votes
Pretty pink houses with a fountain in front generally aren’t the location of major pot farms. On Tuesday Alachua County Sheriff’s Office Bomb Team joined officers on a drug raid when 33 pipe bombs were discovered at the pink home.
Timothy Robert Treffinger, 43, the occupant of the house is now sitting at Alachua County jail on a $25,000 bail. He has been charged with suspicion of armed trafficking in cannabis and possession of a destructive device.
Monday night a search warrant was issued at the home after an ongoing drug investigation led the police to believe they were dealing with an indoor growing operation.
When the property was searched police discovered that in addition to 267 mature marijuana plants there was an assortment of 40 guns. Then the payload was found, 33 incendiary devices resembling pipe bombs and one that resembled a grenade.
That discovery has turned a simple grow-op operation into a federal case.
The local bomb team has been sent out to deal with pipe bombs before but never so many at one location.
The bombs were “concealed” in various rooms on the property. At least one was rigged to act as a booby trap. The bombs were not professional quality but had they exploded they would have been able to get the job of killing people done.
Natalie Cole has been battling Hepatitis C with anti-viral medicine. Her publicist just announced that the Grammy Award winner has the virus which is thought to have been contracted from past drug use.
The daughter of legendary Nat King Cole went into drug rehab in 1984 for LSD, cocaine and heroin.
Hepatitis C can remain undetected in the body for years. It can cause liver problems and death.
“I’ve been so fortunate to have learned so much from my past experiences,” Cole said in the statement announcing her diagnosis.
“I am embraced by the love and support of my family and friends; I am committed to my belief in myself and in my abiding faith to meet this challenge with a heartfelt optimism and determination.
“This is how I intend to deal with this current challenge in my life.”
Cole’s doctor Dr. Graham Woolf has stated the singer has responded well to medication and is now virus negative. She has suffered side effects from the anti-viral medication used to treat the virus. Antivirals can cause fatigue, muscle aches and dehydration.
Most hepatitis C patients become infected when sharing injection equipment for drugs. The virus has also been transmitted through shared razors, body and ear piercing.
Ms. Cole is in the process of releasing a new album to follow up the 1991 Grammy winner Unforgettable…With Love.
$900 just for their books each year. This year for those taking courses in business and economics may have a huge break. Flat World Knowledge is giving away texts. The firm is based in Nyack, New York and aims to change the way students go to college. the texts though aren’t like the ones at the local college bookstore. The offerings will be via the Internet with video and audio clips embedded.
Those are major advantages over paper editions, says Dana Lanham, an advertising professor at University of North Carolina in Charlotte. “Being online lets the content be so dynamic,” says Lanham, who will teach some 70 students using Flat World texts this fall. “Usually textbooks are out of date as soon as you print them.”
The firm will be offering the texts at at least 15 campuses across the nation. If the semester goes well then all academic institutions come this January will be able to offer the books.
Not all colleges will be on the bandwagon. Bookstores on campus bring in a nice chunk of change every term. That may soon change as states pass legislation to control the cost of textbooks. So far 34 states are on board at reducing the costs of books that their college students have to pay for.
Until lower costs are standard practice students have to become wiser when purchasing their books. In the past used textbooks was one way to combat the higher costs but schools are now having their texts tailor made for each course.
some students have to try to get through each year without ever buying a text.
If more text book companies go the way of Flat World Knowledge though students may demand that the cost of their textbooks be reduced. That may be the start of a revolution when it comes to higher education.
In March 2005 the savage murder of young Morgan Jay Shepherd took place in Brisbane , Australia. The teenager was beheaded after a drinking binge “thrill kill.”
James Roughan, 28 and Christopher Jones, 24 are the alleged killers of the seventeen-year-old.
The teen was stabbed a total of 133 times before his head was sawed off of his body. After the murder it is alleged that Roughan and Jones used the head as both a puppet and a bowling ball. Roughan denies any part of that savagery.
Prosecutor David Meredith has called the death a “thrill kill” with no true motive. Roughan is now on trial for the murder. He was plead guilty to a lesser charge of accessory to murder after the fact and to interfering with a corpse but not guilty to the actual murder. Prosecutors have rejected the plea.
Homes and buildings blocking the path to beautify Beijing for the Olympics are facing the wrecking ball as China takes final touches into gearing up for the games.
One of those buildings is a nut shop owned by the Yu family. Established in 1981 the little shop looks like its held together with tape and string. It is also along the path that will see the Olympic torch relay pass on the way to opening ceremonies. It won’t be there on that day though.
More than 1.25 million people have faced eviction since Beijing won the Olympic bid in 2001. Some weeks have seen as many as 13,000 losing their home.
The government is offering money to those whose homes are being torn down to make way for a “prettier” city. the Yu family was offered $49,523. That is a third of what it would cost for a new apartment in his neighbourhood. His neighbour Wang Zhenjiang told him to demand more money.
“It’s all about money,” Wang said, jabbing the air. “Under a one-party dictatorship, ordinary people have to put up with being wronged.”
But Yu said, “If they come, we can do nothing but let them tear it down. When have you ever heard of the weak winning a case?”
The Yu house is scheduled to be torn down on Sunday.
Two sisters down the road have taken a stand for their leaky home. Their family has been in the house for six generations. Houses on both sides have been torn down by the government.
The sisters have erected a large wooden sign declaring, “Protect property ownership in line with the constitution; guard your home until death.” Above their front door, a smaller paper sign asks, “Where is the law of the God?”
“The Olympic slogan is ‘One World, One Dream,’ ” said Zhang Donghua, the younger sister’s husband. “The constitution protects the private property of citizens, and our livelihood depends on this place. . . . How can this represent one world, one dream?”
The best way to stop the spread of disease is to stay home from work when you’re ill. That isn’t always an option for workers in the United States. Many employees do not have sick days.
As many as 43 per cent of United States residents working in private industry have to make due without paid sick days according to data from the federal government. Being sick means loss of pay and at times being fired.
More companies are cutting back on sick days offered to their workers. Some companies have put sick days and vacation time in the same basket while others have eliminated them completely. Unlike other industrialized countries the U.S. does not have a mandate when it comes to their residents being paid for time off work due to illness.
“Sick time is changing,” said Kim Stattner, an expert on absence management for Hewitt Associates, an international company that provides human resources programs and consulting. “The practices and designs are not as generous as they once were.”
Some states, though, have started to support labor organizations and health officials. California recently sent a bill titled Healthy Families, Healthy Workplaces (AB 2716) that would give employees in the state paid sick time to the Senate. If passed, employees will earn an hour of sick time for every 30 hours they work. Ohio also shows promise in passing laws to ensure employees can stay home when ill and not fear a loss of wages.
San Francisco has already enacted the sick leave legislation on the blocks for the rest of the state. After three months employees are covered. In the nation’s capitol employers are also required to grant employees three to seven days a year for time off when ill after being on the job for a year.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, D-Conn. are trying to pass a bill that would bring the United States up to date like 135 developed countries that require employees to give sick leave to full time employees. The bill, Healthy Families Act, would require businesses with over 15 employees to give their staff at least 7 paid sick days a year.
“The public supports it,” said Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment who has studied the proposed laws. “In San Francisco, the law was so popular that the people who were opposed to it didn’t even mount a challenge. Paid sick time is a human need that is self-evident.”
A new book reveals that in the days after 9/11 Vice President Dick Cheney was convinced he had been exposed to a lethal dose of anthrax just weeks after the terror in New York.
“The Dark Side, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals” by Jane Mayer contends fear brought from this incident was the source of his hard line tactics on fighting terror.
The fear of anthrax poisoning came in October 18, 2001 when an alarm at the White House signaled that dangerous levels of of radioactive, chemical or biological agents had been detected. Those who had entered the White House situation room were thought to have been exposed to whatever agent that had set off the alarm.
Cheney was one of those that were believed to have already received a lethal dose. Cheney is said to have gone to emergency at the National Security council calmly. It was later learned that the detection system had malfunctioned.
The situation had been kept secret until the book came out.
According to the book penned by the New Yorker writer following the situation Cheney took little change. Eleven days later he insisted on leaving the White House to retreat to one of his “secure, undisclosed locations.”
Who says the periodic table is boring? With a new series featured on YouTube, the elements come to life. Some of the experiments that are featured are too dangerous for the classroom.
The videos are a project from Nottingham designed to make the elements come alive. The completed project will feature each one of the 118 elements.
Professor Martyn Poliakoff is one of the scientists that is taking part in the project. Filming only started weeks a few weeks ago. The first of the videos on YouTube have garnered more than 100,000 hits. The videos should be completed by the end of the month.
John Mellencamp is scheduled to hold a news conference in Boston Tuesday to announce the location of this year’s concert. The September 20 show will be in Mansfield, Mass. at the Comcast Center.
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Governor Deval Patrick will welcome co-founder of Farm Aid Mellencamp. The concert will be presented by Whole Foods Market and Horizon Organic.
Already on the lineup are Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and Dave Matthews. More names will be added to the concert.
Started in 1985 Farm Aid’s annual concert has raised over $30 million. The charity concert supports family farms.
Tickets for Farm Aid 2008 Presented by Whole Foods Market and Horizon Organic will go on sale July 28 at 10 a.m. EDT and are available at all Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.com, or by calling (866) 448-7849.
Students in Texas don’t learn the facts of life like others across the United States instead they are taught to ‘just say no’ and to heck with life saving lessons on ’safe sex.’ After all if everyone is a virgin when they get married who needs a condom.
The teaching of abstinence in sex education since 1995 didn’t bring about any of the state’s objectives. Instead of decreasing the number of teen pregnancies by 2003 the state saw higher numbers than states that did teach their teens birth control. Gonorrhea was double the national average in the same year in Lubbock County.
In 1995 then governor George Bush signed the law mandating abstinence-only education in the state of Texas.
By 2004 the State had spent more than $10 million dollars on the program that stays away from discussion on other ways to avoid teenage pregnancy or halting the spread of HIV. The program in 2004 had failed miserably. Ranked in the bottom four states of teen births (15-17 year-old mothers). Still the state went forth teaching a program that is shunned by The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
The CDC in 2004 said of the program: “The effect was very chilling.”
The tide had not turned in 2005 according to a state-sponsored study by Texas A&M University researchers. The study revealed that instead of slowing down students in all high school grades were more sexually active after undergoing abstinence education.
“We didn’t find what many would like for us to find,” said A&M researcher Buzz Pruitt, who met with state health authorities last week to discuss the data.
* decrease the pregnancy rate among teens.
* reduce the proportion of adolescents engaged in sex.
* reduce the incidence of STDs in adolescents.
* increase the number of youth and adults served through abstinence education.
It’s now 2008. This year Texas spent $17 million to teach their teens to remain virgins. This year according to federal statistics 52.9 percent of Texas students from grades 9 to 12 had sexual intercourse compared to the national average of 47.8. Those children who disregarded their lessons also failed to use a condom more often than those taught about safe sex in school.
In Texas a school has the option of teaching abstinence or nothing at all. That will not be changing in the near future.
“The governor is comfortable with the current law and supports abstinence programs,” said Allison Castle, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry.
When the bill was written during George Bush’s watch as governor it was not meant to eliminate comprehensive sex education in schools, rather offer up an alternative approach to teenagers.
“I think the interpretation has morphed into abstinence-only, which is not our policy,” Democrat Garnet Coleman of Houston said. “If I could fix anything, it’d be to make the law more instructive to say, ‘This is what you can teach”‘ about contraceptives.
In California a teacher can show their students the proper way to use a condom using a banana as a visual tool. In Texas a student has to learn about condoms either from their parents or from their friends but not in a school.
How much more funding will be shoveled down the drain in Texas for a program that doesn’t work is anyone’s guess. What is safe to say is the students in the state do not heed the lessons. In the end, the state pays a much higher cost than funding a program that doesn’t work. It also gets to fund more programs for teen mothers who didn’t learn that birth control can also to a way to avoid pregnancy when they have sex.
Health Canada has issued a warning about a common epinephrine injector. Both the Twinject 0.3 milligram auto-injector and the Twinject 0.15 milligram auto-injector could pose a risk to users.
The epi-pens have been on the market since August 1, 2005. Since that time there have been 30 reports of malfunctions. Most of those 30 were life-threatening requiring emergency care.
The injectors are supposed to be used when a person has a severe allergic reaction causing anaphylactic shock. The device injects epinephrine, also known as adrenalin into the body in order to kick start the heart while a person is being transported to hospital for further treatment.
The malfunctions of these injectors have been reported as mechanical errors preventing the distribution of the first or second dose, a bent or cracked needle or an injector that did not deliver any of the drug at all.
Patients that have an auto-injector are encouraged to contact the manufacturer at 1-877-894-6532 or talk to their doctor.
The North Pole-35 station, a Russian research station located on an Arctic ice floe is having to be evacuated because of global warming. The ice floe has started to disintegrate much sooner than it was expected to.
The station is home to 21 researchers and two dogs lodged in huts. The original plan was to remove the researchers in August but the icebreaker Arktika will be on hand to escort the research vessel Mikhail Somov to the station later this week.
Last September when the researchers arrived the ice floe was five kilometres long and three kilometres wide. That has changed drastically to the size of just 600m by 300m. It is expected to completely break up as it drifts toward a current that is known for its warmer waters.
The researchers are in the process of packing up their huts and equipment preparing for the ships arrival. Sergei Balyasnikov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg has stated that the evacuation is needed to take place quickly before those on the ice floe are put in peril.
Amheuser-Busch maker of Budweiser and Bud Light has been bought out by Belgian brewer InBev for $52 billion. The deal creates the world’s largest brewer and the fourth-largest consumer product to be merged under the name of Anheuser-Busch InBev.
On Sunday the board of directors for Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. accepted the offer that InBev SA put before them. InBev is the maker of Stella Artois and Beck’s. Shareholders will receive $70 a share under the new deal, a increase of $5 for an offer that the Anheuser-Busch company rejected in June.
All of the details are not clear on the merger that has concerns coming from both Missouri politicians and Mexico’s Grupo Modelo which is Anheuser-Busch has a 50 percent share of.
“Our agreement with Anheuser-Busch was carefully constructed to ensure we have a definitive say in who our partner is. We are confident that our agreement, which is governed by Mexican law, gives us the right to decide whether or not to consent to the potential acquisition of Anheuser-Busch by InBev,” Grupo Modelo said in a statement.
Fans of the beer are not happy with the merger. Two websites, SaveBudweiser.com and SaveAB.com are already up and running trying to reverse the decision.
InBev has not yet said if layoffs will be part of the merger or how the takeover will affect the 6,000 employees of the brewery. Still with the company having to plan to cut pension and health benefits for salaried employees to stay afloat the merger may be the best bet for those who work for the makers of the `King of Beers.`
When little Seth of Bendigo, Victoria, Australia got curious about the family’s loo water supply in July 13 he plopped two of his little fingers into the water to check it out. Six hours later the tot’s fingers were finally removed from the toilet.
Seth’s fingers were sucked down the drain so tightly his parents had to call for help after a half hour. The hole was corroded so much that when the crew tried to remove it Seth was in horrible pain. Bruce Quarrier, CFA fire officer said as he told of the process to free the tyke.
That freeing process basically destroyed the entire bathroom. First the crews had to work underneath the home to cut pipes away and then they lifted the loo up. To do that they had to remove tiles off of the wall. In the end little Seth was transported to Bendigo Base Hospital still attached to the pipe and drain of the toilet.
At hospital doctors used hydraulic spreaders that resembled the jaws of life and hacksaws to finally free Seth from the pipe.
“It was one of those incidents you get where there are no shortcuts,” Quarrier told reporters.
“The parents and grandparents were upset but there was no short way of doing it without causing injury.
“The boy was frightened at times, but was often laughing and in good spirits and came away with no cuts or bruises, just one blister.”
When all was said and done the family’s bathroom was destroyed. Quarrier is fairly certain that crews won’t be called back to the home for a repeat performance from Seth.
As for his parents there is no word how they feel about having to front the cost of a new bathroom because of their curious little one.
Olive Riley has died at the age of 108. Living in a nursing home in New South Wales she had the title of the world’s oldest blogger.
The woman who was born in 1899 was the focus of a documentary about her life in 2004.
Since last year Ms. Riley posted about 70 entries on her life experiences. She received feedback from around the world.
Her blog The Life of Riley appears to be down at the moment. In it were memories of both World Wars and the Great Depression. She wrote about rearing her three children and the odd assortment of jobs she had along the way.
Summer is the time of year that many people take a much needed vacation but what about those with farms? Most farmers are bound to their land year round without a break. That could be changing with AgriConnect out of Alberta, Canada.
Functioning much like a dating service, AgriConnect links farmers with those who are willing to lend a hand in times of need or just to take a break.
Farmers can’t just ask a neighbour to bring in their mail when they want to hit the road for a week. With the service of AgriConnect though they can find a match who will tend their land until they return for a fee of some sort. The service is free and open to landowners and farm-sitters. Compensation for the sitting is worked out between the sitter and the farmer and doesn’t always have to be in cash. One suggestion is half a butchered cow for a week of sitting.
Company founder Frank Campbell relies on sponsors for funding. The idea of the service came to him about three years ago when he was camping with a friend who farmed. The friend would rise early each morning and drive 100 kilometres to do his farming chores and then back to the camp. A relaxing trip it was not.
Campbell started researching about some sort of service that would be of help to others like his friend in Canada. while there was a service in Australia nothing was available here. Quitting his job in the oil sector Campbell set to right that problem. This June his company debuted in Saskatchewan. Campbell hopes to have the service available to Western Canada within two years. Already he has 80 sitters in his database.
The service could prove to be a godsend for those who fill our bellies without a break.
The American Civil Liberties Union praised a federal appellate court ruling that stated school officials had violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old Arizona girl who was strip searched when a classmate alleged she was possessing ibuprofen.
The court ruling makes such strip searches illegal when a third party, such as another student makes broad accusations to get themselves out of trouble.
Adam Wolf, an attorney with the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project and co-counsel in the case with the law firms Humphrey & Petersen and McNamara, Goldsmith, Jackson & Macdonald said on Friday, “This ruling is a victory for our fundamental right to privacy, sending a clear signal that such traumatizing searches have no place in America’s schools.”
The case focused on an eighth grade honor roll student Savana Redding who attends Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona who was removed from her classroom on October 8, 2003 by the vice principal, Kerry Wilson. Another student had prescription strength ibuprofen which is the equivalent of two Advil. During questioning of that student it was alleged that Redding had given her the pills. Redding had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse yet was questioned on the allegations. Redding told the principal that the pills were not hers and agreed to a search of her possessions. After finding nothing in the girl’s backpack an administrative assistant took Redding to the school nurse for a strip search as ordered by Wilson.
The school nurse had the child strip to her bra and panties. She was then orderd to expose her breasts and to pull her underwear out at the crotch exposing her pelvic area. The strip search also revealed none of the ibuprofen pills.
In response to today’s court victory, Redding said, “I took my case to court because I wanted to make sure that school officials wouldn’t be able to violate anyone else’s rights like this again. This was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, and I am relieved that a court has finally recognized that the Constitution protects students from being strip searched in schools on the basis of unreliable rumors.”
The strip search was undergone only because of claims from another student facing punishment. There was no attempt to corroborate those accusations prior to the strip search with other students or teachers. There was no evidence that Redding was trying to hide the pills in her underwear nor had the child who had accused Redding in the first place ever suggested that Redding was hiding the pills on her person. There was no attempt to contact Redding’s parents prior to the strip search.
“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”
“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity,” the court continued.
The court also ruled that because such a search is deemed unconstitutional Kerry Wilson cannot claim immunity and is liable financially.
The case is, Redding v. Safford Unified School District, No. 05-15759.
The tiny town of Mulberry, Florida has a big problem. Raw sewage has leaked out in the heart of this town with a little more than 3,000 people threatening to expose health risks. It has an even bigger problem, the cost to fix it will break the bank.
There is a vacant lot in the center of Mulberry that concerns the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. On that lot 205,605 gallons of raw sewage was discharged between February and May. That spill could end up costing the city up to hundreds of thousands just in fines. The clean up could cost even more. In a poor county like Polk where it lays those funds just aren’t available in the city’s rainy day funds.
Chuck Moore who owns the property told the city about the stinky problem over a year ago in April 2007. That means this leak has been going on for a long time, long enough to have spewed over a million gallons of human waste right in the center of town. Tests conducted for Moore and the DEP show the soil and standing surface liquid are loaded with fecal coliform. When fecal coliform is present the potential for include ear infections, dysentery, typhoid fever, viral and bacterial gastroenteritis, and hepatitis A is also present. Not a pretty picture for this quaint southern town.
The city promises to replace the leaking sewer pipe and remove the contaminated soil from Moore’s land putting clean soil to replace it. In a month that is, another month that will allow even more sewage to escape.
So far there is at least one neighbour who has health issues that could have stemmed from the smelly stew. Irene Mercado lives next door, or lived there until her doctor ordered her to move until the problem is fixed. She has been diagnosed with a staph bacteria infection called MRSA. Her home has taken on a stank that comes from Moore’s property. Her body is covered with rashes. She coughs a lot. For the time being she is staying in Lakeland with her daughter who has taken the ailing woman in.
A potential huge problem lays downstream of Moore’s property. Purcell Elementary School’s playground fence runs along a storm water ditch that is full of the sewage. The Polk School System has begun testing the soil to see if it has become contaminated. If the tests that are due in this week show a problem it’s going to cost the city not the School Board to fix it.
We don’t have an option of not providing a safe playground,’ Schools Superintendent Gail McKinzie told the Lakeland Ledger. ‘Mulberry needs to step up and get it right.’
It’s not just the people who are suffering, animals are turning up dead on the property. So far Moore has found ducks and otters that have died. He also found an alligator who had died and another one that had a strange dark yellow colouring.
Moore had planned to build a home on the property as a model. That is no longer possible as the leak has softened the ground and it is unstable to build on. He is now suing the city for running city pipes onto his private property and is adding the sewage leak onto the lawsuit.
Now here’s the scariest aspect of this problem. Moore’s little leak may be coming from a pipe that isn’t on his property.
‘The city’s records aren’t the best,’ he said. ‘And some of these pipes go back years and years and years.’
Keith Hall, the city’s utilities director acknowledged sewage has leaked onto Moore’s property. ‘But just because it’s leaking onto his property doesn’t mean the pipe is on his property.’
Moore said environmental specialists have poured dye into a lift station on Fourth Avenue to try and see if it leaks and where.
When the lift station fills up and begins pumping, Moore said, ‘the dye goes everywhere.’
The city has shut down that pump and vacuums the waste daily. A new pipe is on the schedule to be installed sometime next month. The cost for the repairs will be between $100,000 and $125,000. The cost of the soil replacement hasn’t been calculated yet.
When Kenya’s latest smoking laws including a ban of smoking in public places went into force on Tuesday the largest tobacco manufacturer went to court to challenge it. The case will be heard next week.
The law that was put in place last Tuesday takes a huge stand against cigarettes. Not only are sales now limited to those over the age of 18 but tobacco firms can not sponsor public events. The new laws also control the production, manufacture, sale, advertising and use of tobacco products within Kenya. Previous attempts to place the law into motion were stopped because the government hadn’t given the tobacco industry enough compliance time causing them to destroy millions of dollars of their product.
Mastermind Tobacco Kenya Limited has asked the courts to nullify the Tobacco Control Act 2007 for being unconstitutional and not a legitimate use of the state police powers.
“The act creates penal sanctions and/or imposes penal consequences despite the fact that neither the manufacture and use of tobacco products is a prohibited activity,” according to court documents seen by AFP.
“The act consequently seeks to criminalise an otherwise lawful activity and thereby violates the constitution,” it said.
Smokers are also not so happy with the bans. When the capitol of Nairobi placed a ban on public smoking last year smokers argued that emissions from industry and vehicles along with open sewers posed a greater overall threat to the population than their cigarette smoke.
Those who violate the ban face between three years and six months in prison plus fines up to $46,000.
The government of Kenya earns about 76 million dollars a year from smokers. They also pay out about 275 million dollars a year on treating tobacco-related diseases.
Toronto has its first case of West Nile Virus this year. A mosquito found within the city tested positive to the virus. There have been no human or bird cases so far this summer.
“The positive mosquito result reinforces the need for the public to take precautions to safeguard themselves from West Nile virus,” said Dr. Howard Shapiro, Toronto Associate Medical Officer of Health.
“Although the overall risk of becoming infected with WNV is low, anyone can get sick from WNV and the risk of severe illness increases with age. People with compromised immune systems due to illnesses or immune suppressing treatments are also at higher risk of severe illness
from WNV.”
The mosquito was found in the Dufferin and St. Clair area during a routine check.
The risk of WNV starts during the summer months peaking in August. Health Canada advises the population to take certain precautions in order to avoid the virus carried by mosquitoes.
Those precautions include wearing light coloured clothing and covering up in areas where mosquitoes are, removing free standing water to reduce breeding areas, and be extra cautious in the early morning and early evening hours.
The West Nile Virus can cause in rare cases severe illness that can result in death. Symptoms generally take place within two to fifteen days after being bitten by an infected mosquito. Symptoms of the virus include fever, headache and body aches. At times there is also a mild rash and swollen lymph glands. Most people have no symptoms or they have flu-like symptoms. Those most at risk have weakened immune systems. Those who get the more severe cases of WNV experience rapid onset of severe headache, high fever, stiff neck, nausea, difficulty swallowing, vomiting, drowsiness, confusion, loss of consciousness, lack of coordination, muscle weakness and paralysis. If you experience these symptoms seek immediate medical attention.
There is no special treatment, medicine or cure for the virus. Serious cases are treated with supportive therapies to prevent complications and ease the symptoms. These cases may require constant nursing care.
Consumers are being warned by Health Canada not to use products sold as “social tonics” manufactured by Canadian retailer Purepillz.
Health Canada warns that four products being marketed “Peaq”, “Freq”, “PureRush”, and “PureSpun” as safe alternatives to street drugs are anything but safe. The pills contain compounds that have the same effect of amphetamines and the drug MDMA. There have been reports of hallucinations, convulsions and slowed breathing associated with the pills.
These products can not be sold legally in Canada. Containing benzylpiperazine (known as BZP) and 3-trifluoromethylphenylpiperazine (3-TFMPP) they require a drug identification number in order to be marketed legally.
There are no medical uses for BZP and 3-TFMPP while BZP is often touted as a natural substance. At this time Health Canada is assessing these products to see if it would be appropriate to regulate them under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
Consumers requiring more information about this advisory can contact Health Canada’s public enquiries line at (613) 957-2991, or toll free at 1-866-225-0709.
When an American blogger in Egypt sent out a one-word message on Twitter as he was being jailed, it helped to free him. But the translator that accompanied him remained behind bars. Now that man was freed as well.
James Karl Buck sent out the news with a one-word Twitter message on Tuesday.
“Free.”
For almost three months Buck and others have been working to free his translator Mohammed Maree.
Buck had just started using Twitter back in April when the social networking program helped free him when arrested while photographing an anti-government protests over low wages and rising food prices. Maree was arrested along side Buck. With the help of signatures and thousands of activists Maree is now a free man.
An article on CNN said that Buck apologized to the translator as soon as he was freed.
“He was totally in good spirits; he joked with me,” Buck said. “I told him he was a hero, and that because of his case and what he suffered, he’s brought a lot of attention to the government’s behavior in Egypt.”
Buck is a grad student from the University of California, Berkeley working on photography project for his master’s thesis. He met Maree in Mahalla and hired him to act as his translator. Maree is a 23-year-old Egyptian going to veterinary school.
Buck wants the world to know that Maree is a hero.
“I think he’s a hero. Some people might think it sounds silly,” Buck said. “But he went to jail for his beliefs. Instead of selling out or making something up, he really was willing to stand up to the intimidation. It’s people like him that make cracks in a dark wall to let light come in.”
Lisa Heughan may have appeared in movies and in Playboy during the 1990’s but yesterday her appearance took place at College Park court in Toronto.
The actress/model has been charged with robbery, assault with a weapon, carrying a concealed weapon, possession of a weapon and uttering threats.
She is set to reappear in court on Monday for a bail hearing.
Heughnan is accused of trying to snatch an elderly woman’s purse at the Queen Station subway stop. A man with a cell phone camera took the former Playboy model’s picture as the crime took place. When the elderly woman fled for safety on the subway Heughnan went after the photographer slashing his back according to allegations from Toronto police. She fled the train at Bloor Station.
The man with the cell phone wasn’t the only photo bug on the scene. TTC special constables were able to recognize Heughnan from images on surveillance video as she made her way through the Yonge-Bloor subway station. She was arrested there and transported to 53 division where she was booked.
Allegedly stealing a purse is a long way off from the woman she was in August 1990 when she appeared in Playboy as part of a “Girls of Canada” spread. She went on to appear in TV shows and the movie Cannonball Rollerbabes as “Spike,” the leader of the Rollerbabes gang.
She has had her taste of trouble though in the past. She claimed that U.S. immigration agents at Pearson International Airport harassed her in 1992. In 1996 she stated that she was a victim in a 20-year-old child molestation case.
In 2004 while pregnant she allegedly throttled a doctor’s assistant. She was able to avoid criminal charges of assault, threatening bodily harm and mischief by signing a peace bond in that case.
In 2005 she kidnapped her infant daughter from a supervised CAS visit. That kidnapping resulted in a very public Amber Alert going out for the return of the six-week-old infant. She was given a suspended sentence in that case.
The TTC is hoping that the woman that was attacked will come forward to help process the case.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague will be seeking to place an arrest warrant on Monday for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for charges of war crimes.
It is alleged that al-Bashir is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his nation’s residents in the Darfur region over the past five years. The official charges are genocide and crimes against humanity in the orchestration of a campaign of violence.
Some within the United Nations are concerned the plans for the arrest warrant will complicate the peace process triggering a military response by Sudanese forces endangering the nearly 10,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers in Darfur. On Thursday seven peacekeepers were killed and 22 wounded during an ambush by an unidentified armed group. The group had obvious training.
The ambassador to the UN from Sudan, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad has warned that if an arrest warrant does go out it will destroy all international efforts to reach a peace settlement in the region.
China has a roster of 112 official Olympic restaurants. Not one of those will be offering the local favorite of dog unless they want to get blacklisted.
In China dog meat is considered to have medicinal properties. When patrons now order “fragrant meat” they will be politely suggested to try another meal.
The ban was issued by the Beijing Catering Trade Association to respect the habits of other nationalities. It’s just one step that Beijing is implementing to avoid foreign visitors to the Games from being offended by local customs. The bans are also in place so that foreigners don’t amuse themselves at the cost of the local Chinese population.
People in China have also been told that they should line up in the queues politely, to smile at others and not to spit in the streets.
This is not the first time dog meat has been banned by a country that is hosting the international games. In 1988 South Korea also issued a dog meat ban for diners.
Your LCD monitor that you may be using to surf the web or chat with your friends on a cell phone isn’t as environmentally friendly as once believed. LCD panels contain nitrogen trifloride a chemical that has a greater impact than carbon dioxide.
17,000 times greater an impact to be precise. It’s not being monitored by the Kyoto Protocol though because at the time it was drafted LCDs were not produced in quantities that could have as strong an impact. That was then.
Nitrogen trifluoride emissions stay in the atmosphere for 550 years. Those emissions are strong, so strong that there is no force in nature that is able to remove it. This year the impact of nitrogen trifluoride emissions will be on par to Austria’s CO2 output. That figure is expected to double in just one year. With China, Korea and the United States all opening NF3 manufacturing facilities it could in the future be a greater threat to the environment that CO2. Add in the switch to digital television which increases LCD consumption and the world could see those figures sky rocket quickly. As television companies ease out of their current production quality older television sets will begin to get disposed of including the earliest LCD models.
LCD monitors have the reputation of being environmentally friendly. Compared to CRT models they use half to two-thirds less energy. There is also less heat output helping to lower air conditioning costs. The manufacturers have had some controversies though.
LCD technology uses arsenic and mercury which has raised concerns of health and environmental issues. The technology though is beginning to address those issues. Now the news that NF3 is a threat could make for newer changes if the public starts to protest. We’ll have to wait and see how the manufacturers deal with this latest issue.
Mars has a salty taste according to the Phoenix lander’s first soil tasting. Soil near the north pole of Mars shows that the dirt is similar to what can be found in the average backyard here on Earth.
This is the latest finding that give researchers hope that the planet has favorable conditions for primate life.
At this time Phoenix has yet to find organic carbon though which is considered by scientists the building block of life. But there is ice.
Had that ice been water the scientists may have been jumping up and down. Water is another essential requirement for life.
For Mars to become habitable it would need to have liquid water, a stable energy source and organic, or carbon-containing, compounds.
Still the news from space is very promising.
“There’s nothing about it that would preclude life. In fact, it seems very friendly,” mission scientist Samuel Kounaves of Tufts University said of the Martian soil tested. “There’s nothing about it that’s toxic.”
The Phoenix is performing tests like chemists here on Earth would be doing with soil. One experiment heated the soil to a high temperature and sniffed the gas finding traces of water vapor.
That proves to scientists that in its past Mars has interacted with water. More soil sample experiments are planned.
Susan has a prosthetic leg which entitles her to certain rights, one of which is parking in spot designated for those with disabilities. When she saw two able bodied men scoop up that space at London Drugs in Vancouver she wrote them a note.
After parking in a regular space beside the car Susan put the note on the windshield of the car and Waited for them to return. When they returned she talked to them about the fact that they parked illegally and needed to have a permit in order to take the handicapped parking space. That didn’t go over well with one of the men.
“He just keeps swearing at me. He puts his parcel down in the back seat and then he goes to the front. I’m standing here…. So he whacks me into the door” of her car, she told CBC News Wednesday.
When the man noticed that she had put a note on their car, he slammed her with the door, she said.
“He threw the ripped-up notice in my car and he pushed me again. I didn’t get up. I stayed down,” Susan said, adding she was slightly hurt.
The incident was captured on the store’s surveillance camera. Now Vancouver police are on the lookout for the men and just released their photos from that camera footage.
Both of the men appear to be between 25 and 30. The man who injured Susan is dark-skinned and clean-shaven with a muscular build. The other man is tall and slender. He sports a small tattoo on his left wrist.
Scientists in Australia have found a potential new way of combating malaria. The researchers believe that by targeting the eight genes that help malaria attack the body it’s possible to prevent the infected red blood cells from sticking to blood vessels.
Malaria kills up to 3 million people each year. Most of those deaths are in tropical areas of the world where mosquitoes thrive. The disease takes place when a mosquito injects microscopic parasites into healthy red blood cells. Those parasites go on to change the structure of blood cells and produce more offspring that goes on to infect more red blood cells.
Professor Alan Cowman and his group’s research will be published in this week’s issue of Cell.
Malaria causes infected cells to lost their rigid shape and develop knobs on their surface. That restructuring of the cell causes for the blood not to flow properly.
“This stops the cells from being cleared by the spleen, which is a protective mechanism for the parasite,” Cowman says. “It’s absolutely essential for the parasite to survive in our bodies.”
That structural change also allows for infected cells to clog. Those clogs can become a serious issue when brain involvement takes place such as in the case of cerebral malaria.
The research team discovered that by disrupted just one of the eight genes that are affected the infected cells no longer can stick to the walls of blood vessels.
“It really is a big step in understanding the parasite itself,” Cowman says.
“In the long term it points toward concentrating on some of these proteins so that they don’t work any more, so the parasite would be cleared much more efficiently.”
This new knowledge could be a new way to treat the disease. With more understanding of ways to weaken the parasite it is possible in the future to be able to produce a vaccine against the disease.
Earlier tonight I posted an article about a pastor who posed as homeless to teach his congregation a sermon. Reading some of the comments that came out of that article baffled me, so my fellow man I am asking you to teach me so I can understand.
I was raised in a “Christian” although I am now agnostic but those early Bible story teachings are a foundation of my being. One of the most profound for me personally was loving your neighbour as you love yourself. That neighbour didn’t have to look like you, sound like you nor have the same amount of money as you. It’s a simple policy. Love. Kindness. Acceptance.
I know that it can sound foolish at times to think of each person as a neighbour but I do. My rose coloured glasses can get foggy at times and those are the times I need to learn to understand others don’t hold the same principles that I do. I have been laughed at for being too gullible, too ‘innocent’ and at times too ’stupid’ to comprehend that not all people are the same. At the core. That some people are ‘less than.’ So I am asking for help in understanding.
Teach me the reasons why some people are to be hated for the colour of their skin, the way they pray, their issues of mental health. Teach me so I can understand how people can use religion as a reason to bred intolerance of those who don’t believe in the same beliefs. Teach me so I can understand why killing others for such beliefs is acceptable to a people. I honestly want to understand.
Teach me why children can play together in harmony and yet as they age they back away from one time friends because of their differences. Why if a drunk is a banker he is better than the drunk in the gutter. Why ignoring those with nothing is considered the social norm.
I’m not stupid, I understand that some people are too dangerous to be around. That though is a smallish population of those living on the street. Does that smaller number override the rest?
Show me the reasons why the poor are to be judged. Why should a mother on food stamps buy only the no name products to feed their families or face ridicule. Why a person who is living paycheque to paycheque and loses their job, home and possessions suddenly becomes a person to reject.
On Sunday morning a homeless man was sleeping in the doorway of Trinity Methodist Church in Prestatyn, Denbighshire surrounded by lager cans and syringes. You’d think that the caring Christians entering God’s House would help a man down on his luck.
You’d be wrong if you bet on it.
Most of those who entered the building were embarrassed by the sleeping tramp that cluttered up their pristine entry. Not one personr took the time to say a kind word to the man.
That man was the church’s pastor, Reverend Derek Rigby wearing a wig and torn clothes. He had told the members of his congregation he would be late to services. Only one member knew the plan in case someone called 999.
Rigby didn’t shave for three days to add to the overall appearance of homelessness. Pouring lager on the clothes also added to the image.
“When I got to the church I arranged a couple of cans and some plastic syringes, without needles, which I have at home for the dog. It gave the impression of a real down and out.”
He added in an interview with the BBC: “None of them spoke to me, apart from a few who told me off and told me to get away from their cars, which they kept checking.
He waited until the children had left for Sunday School classes to reveal himself to the members of the church. The members who ignored the bum now were shocked at knowing how they treated a man of the cloth.
Mr Rigby said he had intended to communicate a “serious message of acceptance in an emotive way”, and used the example of the Disciples not recognising Jesus on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection.
This was the third church where Pastor Rigby taught this sermon. It is the first of those churches though to ignore a person because of their appearance. In London and Newport congregations had acted differently.
He added: “I told them they were stingy because I had been given as much as £4.50, a packet of biscuits and a blanket in the other places, but in Prestatyn I got nothing.
Prisoners in Polk County, Florida get their three squares a day but there are no extras going on their plates. They are offered water or powdered milk and there is no coffee to get them started in the morning.
With money tight and the need to not seek more from taxpayers who are law abiding Sheriff Grady Judd has trimmed down the food costs going for just the basics. If the prisoners don’t let the new meal plan he suggests that they don’t commit a crime and buy their own.
No longer will the inmates be given cornbread or fresh eggs. Beloved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are a thing of the past also.
By being tough Judd has slashed $195,000 from the jail’s budget. The ultimate goal is a $200,000 cut. Judd is almost there.
“These are tough budget times, and every penny we save is a penny we don’t have to ask the taxpayer for,” Judd said in a press release. “If inmates want to eat pb&j sandwiches and drink coffee, tea, and juice, they need to behave, quit violating the law, and stay out of the county jail.”
Crackers have replaced cornbread. That one change saves taxpayers $33,304 a year. By cutting out tea and juice the jail is saving $56,630 a year.
The new breakfast will include only one slice of bread instead of the prior two. That slice reduction cut another $25,116 off of the kitchen costs at the jail.
In a time when those who obey the law have a hard time feeding a family it is only right that prisoners that are provided with all of their meals don’t have extra frills.
A naked child. A picture. Is it child porn or art? That is a debate going on now over the latest cover of Australia’s leading art journal, Art Monthly.
The cover features Olympia Nelson, a child of six posing on a rock with white cliffs in the background. Melbourne photographer Polixeni Papapetrou who also is the child’s mother took the nude photo. Critics say that the photos and the magazine itself was clearly designed to provoke. If that was their goal they succeeded it. Art Monthly has lost public funding and new protocols on children in art have been drawn up.
The child staring out from the cover of Art Monthly is now 11, the photo itself is five years old. She likes the picture that her mother took of her.
“I was really, really offended by what Kevin Rudd said about this picture. It is one of my favourites – if not my favourite – photo my mum has ever taken of me.”
What Kevin Rudd said about the picture is:
“I can’t stand that stuff… We are talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.”
Australia has been debating about children in art for some time. In May Bill Henson’s collection of photographs depicting naked adolescents were seized from a Sydney gallery. Quietly abandoning the case weeks later no charges were brought against either Henson nor the gallery and the display went back up within weeks.
Getting down to brass tacks is Hetty Johnston. She is a child protection activist who understands at times art may collide with other issues.
“When [art and pornography] collide, we have to err with the children. We need to put a line in the sand – because clearly some of those in the arts world can’t – and say this is a no-go zone.”
There are two sides to this story. One side views any type of art that features a naked child should be considered pornography. The other side says if the art is not intended to titillate then it should not fall under pornographic classification.
There is also a difference between an art gallery and posting nude pictures of children on the Internet.
The police now have to deal with the fall out.
Once again, the matter looks likely to end up in the hands of police, thanks to the Opposition leader Brendan Nelson, who has asked officers to investigate. He said: “These people with Art Monthly have sought to… send a two-fingered salute to the rest of the country about the controversy surrounding Bill Henson’s photography. I think it is time for us to take a stand.”
Of course this is nothing new nor is it only an issue in Australia. Censorship is alive and well and has been for as long as art and literature has been around. Every year there are lists of classic books that have been banned from libraries. In the past James Joyce’s Ulysses, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Norman Mailer’s The Naked And The Dead and, naturally, D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover have all dealt with those who deem them unsuitable for the masses.
I remember the screaming when a young Brooke Shields cooed that nothing came between her and her Calvin’s.
Is it child porn?
For some it could be. For others though it can be considered art. Where is the line?
The debate will continue until the end of time over what is right and wrong when it comes to children in art.
Does it mean when we take pictures of our babies taking a bath we’re pornographers? In the end it could come to that. And that would be a shame.
Bloggers that are embedded within the military of the United States have to deal with censorship. If they fail to paint all with rose colored glasses they can be told to cease their blog. That is what happened to Zoriah Miller from his side of the story.
Miller is a photojournalist and blogger who was embedded with a Marine unit. Miller was there on June 26 when a suicide bomber attacked a meeting of tribal sheiks in Iraq’s Anbar province and killed 20 people. Three of the dead were U.S. Marines.
Miller takes pictures for a living. Those pictures were included in his account of the incident, including one that was of a fallen soldier. That lone picture is the root of him being “disembedded” from the Marine unit he was with.
The military ordered Miller to be placed on the next plane to Baghdad. A dust storm scrubbed that plan so a security guard was assigned to keep him in place.
“Tuesday [Jul. 1] I awoke to a call in their combat operations centre, and the person on the phone told me they were a PAO (Public Affairs Officer) at Camp Fallujah, and he wanted me to take my blog down right away,” Miller told IPS. “I asked them why, and was told then called back after five minutes by a higher ranking PAO who claimed I had broken my contract by showing photos of dead Americans with U.S. uniforms and boots.”
Miller said the PAO claimed he was not allowed, by the embed contract, to show dead or wounded U.S. citizens or soldiers in the field. “I never signed any contract for that,” Miller said.
Miller thought because the soldier was unidentifiable he was within the rules and regulations set forth by the United States military on what journalists are allowed to post. He even waited four days until after the widely covered incident took place to post the photo.
The military seeing that it had a weak case back stepped on the reasons of Miller’s dismissal. The new reason is that he detailed information on the effectiveness of the attack putting all military members in greater risk for harm.
“The bottom line is that the thing they cited as the reason for my dismissal was ‘information the enemy could use against you’. They realised, probably from keeping track of my blog, that I was not showing identifiable features of a soldier…and they couldn’t find a reason to kick me out. Because it was a high ranking person who got killed, they were all fired up.”
Miller concluded, “Up to that point they said it was because I showed pictures of bodies with pieces of uniform and boots. The letter, though, doesn’t mention that at all. I checked the document I had about ground rules for media embeds, and I followed them.”
The photojournalist is headed back to the United States. He’s not going with his tail behind his leg however, he’s on a mission.
“You’re a war photographer, but once you take a picture of what war is like then you get into trouble,” he said.
The Iraqi national security adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie stated on Tuesday that his nation will not accept any security deals until they have a clear date on when the U.S. is planning on withdrawing troops.
President Bush opposed a clearcut timeline when it comes to troop withdraw. On Monday Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly said that he expects the U.S.’s pending troop deal to have some type of withdraw timetable.
It seems the White House is a little hard of hearing though. On Monday the U.S. government said it did not believe Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was asking for a rigid time line for the troops to exit Iraq.
So far the U.S. has no comments on al-Rubaie’s Tuesday announcement.
Speaking to reporters al-Rubaie made his position very clear.
“Our stance in the negotiations underway with the American side will be strong … We will not accept any memorandum of understanding that doesn’t have specific dates to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq,” al-Rubaie said.
The Iraqi proposal has U.S.-led forces leaving all cities in Iraq when Iraqi forces have resumed security responsibility in all of its 18 provisions. The time that is required for that should be reviewed every six months for the next three to five years.
A U.N. mandate expires at the end of the year requiring the United States and Iraq to have an agreement about troop status. In recent weeks the government in Iraq has felt more confident in its ability to keep the country stable.
Iraq violence has fallen to the lowest levels in four years. It is believed that this change has come as a result of the 2007 buildup of American forces, the Sunni tribal revolt against al-Qaida in Iraq and crackdowns against Shiite militias and Sunni extremists.
That security is harsh. On Tuesday 13 people were wounded when a crowd seeking aid payments for the poor, widows, orphans and disabled became unruly and guards opened fire.
When you send your kids off to college you know that some partying will be taking place. It’s the first time most kids are out on their own and able to experiment without Mom and Dad watching. That drinking though can come with a death sentence.
Drinking games can lead to alcohol poisoning. College students are the most at risk for consuming large amounts of alcohol in a relatively short period. A lot of college students also drink for only one purpose, to get totally smashed.
Between 1999 to 2005 over 157 college students drank themselves to death. Of those 83 who died were not even old enough to drink legally in the United States.
In almost every case of death by alcohol a friend knew that the person was drunk and put them to bed to “sleep it off.” That is a fatal mistake. With blood alcohol levels are an average of 0.40 the only way to survive is to be taken to the hospital and seek treatment.
It’s not that the colleges are unaware of the problem or ignoring it. Every year Freshmen are told the dangers of extreme drinking and more laws have been passed to make binge drinking a crime. It hasn’t registered. This is the time in one’s life that believing you are indestructible can prove deadly.
While there are new laws the court doesn’t generally make a big deal over such cases. Jail time is rare, most often giving alcohol to a minor brings forth a fine, a few hours of community service and a slap on the wrist.
Most of the dead are young men letting it all hang out on the weekends. December is the deadliest month as finals wrap up.
On average college students drink the same amount as other adults during any given week or month. The difference though is how they drink. While older adults tend to have a beer or two a night the college student waits for a party and downs a weeks worth of alcohol in a single setting.
Federal figures do not indicate if the adults falling in the age brackets are college students but a 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed that the most likely to binge drink.
One game that has been proven very deadly is drinking 21 shots on ones 21st birthday. 11 people have died on their 21st birthdays as a result of this game.
Being upfront with your kids about the real dangers of alcohol poisoning may be the best defense. You may look “old fashioned” but maybe, just maybe they will stick it in the back of their head and remember your warnings.
The rest of the world may be aiming to stop cluster bombing but the Pentagon simply plans to make “safer” ones. Faced with international pressure, the United States is revising its cluster bomb policies.
The changes were outlined in a three-page memo signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The new policy will go into effect in 2018 and require that all bomblets in a cluster bomb must detonate.
Cluster bombs can scatter hundreds of small explosives over a large area. One of the largest problems with this type of explosive is that live munitions are left behind, sometimes taking years to explode. Those explosions tend to go off at the peril of civilians innocently making a wrong step.
By next June, the Defense Department also plans to begin reducing the bombs in their inventory that do not meet the new safety requirements.
This comes just a little more than a month after 111 nations, including the UK, signed an agreement to ban cluster bombs and to destroy any stockpiles within eight years. The United States was one of the few countries along with Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan that did not sign the pledge.
According to Cmdr. Bob Mehal, a spokesman from the Pentagon, eliminating cluster bombs would “would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk.” That philosophy is not held by all in the government. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt is one who is opposed to the United States not outlawing the deadly munitions.
“Now the Bush administration’s ‘new’ policy is to wait another 10 years,” said Leahy, calling it “another squandered opportunity for U.S. leadership.” He said that in wake of the international treaty agreement, the Pentagon’s plan to wait another decade before requiring the 99 percent detonation rate cannot be justified.
Congress voted this past year to cease the export of the weapons for one year. It’s expected the next vote will continue the ban.
During 2001-2002 more than 1,200 cluster bombs were released by the United States over Afghanistan. Those bombs contained 250,000 small explosives. During the first weeks of the Iraqi War, the United States and British forces dropped 1.8 million bomblets.
When the treaty is finally signed in December there is a provision that may force the United States to remove their arsenals of cluster bombs from U.S. bases within borders of the countries that sign.
Uranium from Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program is headed for Port Hope, Ontario. The shipment is bringing additional controversy to a community that has been refining uranium since World War II.
The company that will be working with the uranium has one plant down in the town 100 km from Toronto because of toxins leaking into the water table. With such issues already will the residents be safe with this massive shipment?
The Iraqi uranium is called “yellowcake.” It’s the seed material that is used in higher-grade nuclear enrichment. The last shipment is huge, 500 tonnes of the radiative material.
The community is spilt between refining the radioactive material. On one hand it does provide high paying jobs but the other hand is the cost to the environment because of those jobs. There has been worries for a long time over the contamination of both the air and the water table from the plant’s refining of natural uranium.
Saturday the shipment had reached Montreal in a top-secret journey to the Port Hope plant. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars the Canadian company Cameco Corp. is hoping that their buy will benefit the company and produce clean electricity.
The plan is for the stockpile of yellowcake to be refined for use in energy-producing reactors.
Last July one of the company’s Port Hope refineries was shut down after it was revealed that uranium, arsenic and fluorides had been leaking into the groundwater for what could have been decades.
The residents of Port Hope have a right to be concerned. In an article I wrote in November residents were found to have radioactive particles in their bodies. This was after the residents paid out of their own pockets for testing that should have been compiled by the government. Now the company that was responsible then is bringing in tonnes more product to refine.
Will the price for the community be less this time around?
FedEx made a little address mistake on Tuesday delivering 200 pounds of pot to the wrong address. Someone in Pembroke Pines, Florida sent a shipment to Baltimore counting on FedEx’s reliability.
When the local FedEx delivery man brought a shipment to the wrong address the police were brought in.
The intended recipient, 30-year-old Richard Gwatidzo now sits in jail without his happy package. He was charged on Thursday with possession of a large quantity of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute, along with other drug-related charges after the police redelivered the goods posing as FedEx workers.
Police are trying to figure out who sent the package. In the end the police seized 400 pounds of pot shipped in 8 packages.
Ana Maria Iregui wanted to find a way to honor those who have died fighting in Iraq. This Fourth of July she did so by placing 4,113 Popsicle crosses on her lawn.
Each cross is a loss of a soldier fighting in Iraq. Working with family and friends the Flordia woman cut, glued and put the crosses in place Friday. Her lawn now looks like a small Arlington National Cemetery,
According to the Associated Press the death toll of United States military members is now 4,113.
As to why Iregui transformed her yard she told WKMG Orlando:
“Number one, it makes me very proud,” Iregui said. “Number two, very sad and thankful — extremely thankful.”
Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo of Portugal are part of a dying breed. The couple makes traditional ornamental ceramic penises.
For over three decades the couple has been carefully shaping thousands of penises. In a small workshop the pair aged 68 and 65 shape their units and paint them in life like colours before shipping them to Germany, France and North America.
“The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered, I see no possibility of survival,” Francisco said as he prepared moulds of the couple’s top-of-the-range two-foot phallic-shaped bottles in his workshop. “It will never be like it was in the past.”
The tradition started in their village of Caldas da Rainha after King Dom Luis asked for local potters to make something interesting. Since his rule from 1861 to 1889 the potters have been doing just that.
Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro came up with the first pottery art of the male member.
Some of the products that the couple makes include ceramic mugs with a penis sticking out of the bottom or the side, penis-shaped bottles and ceramic soccer figures with the male organ popping out. At one point they were producing 1,000 bottles a month sending their wares to Germany, France and Canada.
Now they are the lone ceramic penis makers in their village and sell mainly to visitors and local shops. Their two-foot phallic-shaped bottles sell for 15 euros.
He created much of the modern devices we use today and yet very little is known about the man. Do you use an electric motor? He designed it in the 1880’s. So why don’t we know him as well as we do the other inventing giants from the turn of the century?
Born in 1856 in Croatian Krajina [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla t=_blank]Nikola Tesla[/url] made many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that we rely on to this day.
He was a success story coming to the United States and making his way. He had an enemy though, Thomas Edison. Edison feared[url=http://www.pbs.org/tesla/index.html t=_blank] Tesla’s [/url]knowledge often creating diversions that would belittle the man.
One of Tesla’s patents is the basis of modern alternating current electric power (AC) systems, including the polyphase power distribution systems and the AC motor. Because of his work in this medium he has been dubbed ” The Father of Physics” and “the man who invented the twentieth century” and “the patron saint of modern electricity”.
He formed Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing in 1886. For a year he worked in New York as a labourer to support himself after his investors disagreed on his plan for an alternating current motor and relieved him of his duties. In 1888 he reemerged at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company’s Pittsburgh lab. There he started his work on transmitting alternating current electricity over large distances.
Have you needed an X-ray lately? Again Tesla is the man to thank for the beginnings of the science behind the medical procedure. He worried about the skin damage that came from the rudimentary foundations of radiation testing. His findings though were mostly lost in a lab fire in March 1895.
When Tesla powered the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago he was the man of the hour.
[quote]Within the room was suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers. When the current was turned on, the vacuum bulbs or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Mr. Tesla in London about two years ago, where they produced so much wonder and astonishment.[/quote]
He spoke six languages. He had mental illness. He was a genius.
He created a world wide communications system at the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. J.P. Morgan financed his dream and then destroyed it. His dream would provide free energy for the world and that is why Morgan stopped his funding.
Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown.
His inventions touched every phase of our lives. He worked in so many areas that everyone living in the modern world is touched by his work. He not only changed the world with his electrical inventions but also with his work in robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics and theoretical physics.
Have you listened to your radio today? In 1943 the Supreme court of the United States credited him with inventing the device.
J. Edgar Hoover took his papers as soon as he died a poor man alone in a hotel at the age of 86 thought to be a mad scientist.
So why is all of these so important for us living in the year 2008?
Tesla had papers with his work on beam weaponry stolen from his estate right after his death. Those papers are the source of many top secret weapons projects to this day. His notes of being able to project lethal beams of energy through the atmosphere have never been able to come to reality but his ideas have lingered in labs.
The fact that his ideas on circuits could still power the world for free is another source that governments may not want out.
Perhaps we need to be looking at the past for ways to survive the future. Could Tesla be the key to global change? Can humanity survive without his work leading us on?
It took minutes for someone to destroy the Hitler wax figure at the new Madame Tussuad’s museum in Berlin. A 41-year-old German man ripped the head off of the figure that had taken four months to create.
As the first customers started coming through the day on opening day a man rushed the security guards to make his destructive protest of the exhibit.
Many had criticized that having Hitler in the museum was in bad taste. The War World Two dictator is a part of German history that many in the nation would prefer to forget. In Germany it is even illegal to show Nazi symbols and any art glorifying Hitler. Because of those laws the exhibit was cordoned off to make sure that no visitors would posed with the figure.
Artists with Madame Tussuad’s had spent four painstaking months creating the exhibit. Creating the wax figure 25 workers used over 2,000 pictures and a model of the “Fuehreer” that is in the London branch of the museum. It figured Hitler sitting in a mock bunker during the last days of his life.
The museum had placed signs around the exhibit for guests not to take photos or pose with Hitler “out of respect for the millions of people who died during World War Two”. Cameras were set up to capture any inappropriate behavior and put a quick stop to it.
Adolfo Flora wants to live but he’s got an uphill battle fighting liver cancer and hepatitis C. He has already had a liver transplant but that was in London. Now he wants Ontario to pay for it. That is not going to happen for Mr. Flora.
In the 1970’s Flora contracted hepatitis C during a tainted blood tranfusion. In 1999 he was diagnosed with live cancer. Somehow he has managed to survive for 9 years without a transplant. He’s now running out of time.
He has already spent about $450,000 of his own money for treatment in London, England. He has had both chemoembolization and a living liver transplant from his brother. He has tried to get Ontario to refund that money through OHiP. That is not going to happen. The Ontario Court of Appeal has denied an appeal he made after the Divisional Court and the province’s Health Services Appeal and Review Board had already done before.
mr. Flora has been told by several doctors in Ontario that his case is now terminal. He is not a suitable candidate for a liver transplant and has been told he has about six to eight months left to live.
Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Eleanore Cronk wrote in a decision released Friday that she was “sympathetic to the difficult circumstances and choices that confronted Mr. Flora when his liver cancer was detected.”
Cronk said that although his situation was compelling, the case rested on the reasonableness of the decision to not fund his surgery and concluded there was “no basis on which to interfere with the board’s decision.”
A class at the Alsager school in Cheshire, UK gave two boys detention when they refused to pray to Allah. The incident took place during Alison Phillips’ RE class this Tuesday.
The class was learning about the Islam religion when Phillips required all of the students to partake in a prayer. The year seven students of 11 and 12 year-olds were ordered to kneel down and pray to Allah during the religious education class.
Parents have since accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing students to take part in the exercise.
Phillips wanted her class to have a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshiped.
Parent Sharon Luinen told The Telegraph her feelings on the subject.
“This isn’t right, it’s taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn’t join in Muslim prayer.
“Making them pray to Allah, who isn’t who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful.”
Two of the boys in the class refused to follow orders and received a detention. All of the students in the class missed their refreshment break because of the incident.
One of the pupils handed the teacher a bottle of water when the class was asked if anyone had any. The teacher then began to wash her feet with the liquid.
Phillips is staying away from the school while emotions are high over the incident. She has not been suspended over the matter.
The Cheshire County Council is investigating the incident. A spokesman for the Council gave the following comments:
“The headteacher contacted the authority immediately complaints were received. Enquiries are being made into the circumstances as a matter of urgency and all parents will be informed accordingly.
“Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire’s diversity curriculum on the basis that knowledge is, of course, is essential to understanding.
“We accept that such teaching has to be conducted with commonsense and sensitivity.”
Stephen Harper believes that next year getting the United States aboard to help with the fight of climate change will go much more smoothly than it has for the past eight years.
Next week Harper will join other world leaders for the annual Group of Eight summit. Harper said that there is a growing international conviction that all countries should sign on to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Harper is quoted in The Star as to saying:
“I think, if you don’t see a change this year, you’re certainly going to see a change on that front next year.”
Bush has often been criticized for not getting aboard with other global leaders when it comes to specific emissions-reduction targets. Both McCain and Obama have vowed to take a much stronger action if they are elected to become the United States’ next president.
Harper’s government in Canada has set specific targets for reducing greenhouse gases after insisting that the nation could not meet the targets set forth by the Kyoto Protocol. There are many though that say Harper’s plan is lax and ineffective.
Toronto has a lack of public loos that only makes a difference when you’re caught out with a need that can’t be ignored. Now stores and grocery stores have to allow customers to use the washroom if needed.
Since 1976 a rule has been in effect for stores and supermarkets to have a public washroom but that rule is often ignored. Now the city’s Licensing and Standards Committee plans on investigating possible enforcement options against those who refuse a person the use of a loo.
Some stores only allow you into their restroom if you buy something. I have dealt with this one quite a few times. Most of the time I had planned to but I have been caught without much money and in need before. Once I was out and coming down with a stomach bug and ordered to buy a donut or something at a coffee shop in order to make it to the loo in time.
Larry Harmon, better known as Bozo the Clown has died at the age of 83. He passed away from congestive heart failure. Harmon was not the first Bozo but he was the one who turned the character into a show business icon.
Harmon, ever the entrepreneur licensed the character to others allowing local television stations to hire their very own Bozo the Clown.
“You might say, in a way, I was cloning BTC (Bozo the Clown) before anybody else out there got around to cloning DNA,” Harmon told the AP in a 1996 interview.
The first Bozo the Clown, Pinto Colvig was also the voice for Walt Disney’s Goofy. The character was created by Alan W. Livingston in 1946. But it was Harmon who brought the Bozo that we grew up with into being.
Harmon’s wife Susan said that her husband was the perfect Bozo.
“He was the most optimistic man I ever met. He always saw a bright side; he always had something good to say about everybody. He was the love of my life,” she said Thursday.
Toledo, Ohio born Harmon leaves behind his wife Susan and is survived by his son, Jeff Harmon, and daughters Lori Harmon, Marci Breth-Carabet and Leslie Breth.
On Wednesday The American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of pages of documents that the Navy compiled on investigations of civilian deaths in Iraq. One of those deaths was the cousin of the Iraqi ambassador to the United States.
“At every step of the way, the Bush administration and Defense Department have gone to unprecedented lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Our democracy depends on an informed public and that is why it is so important that the American people see these documents. These documents will help to fill the information void around the issue of civilian casualties in Iraq and will lead to a more complete understanding of the prosecution of the war.”
The documents that were released came from Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigations about eight events. One of these includes the investigation of the conditions concerning the death of Mohammed al-Sumaidaie, a cousin of the Iraqi ambassador to the U.S, Samir al-Sumaidaie. Within the documents for this incident were findings that cover-ups may have happened.
The documents also reveal how the Defense Department has tried to shield the public from the human lives that have been lost in the Iraqi War.
Some of the practices that have been used by the State Department include banning photographers on U.S. military bases from covering when caskets arrive containing United States soldiers, funding Iraqi journalists to only highlight the positive aspects of the war, requiring United States journalists to submit stories for pre-publication view after “allowing” them to stay with military units, erasing footage of civilian deaths on stories that journalists are covering and refusing to give real statistics on the actual number of civilian deaths.
The released documents show some of the most horrible aspects of war, the innocent civilians caught in the cross fire of a military action.
“Here I am, locked in a room with a guard, for what is said to be my own protection. Been here three days now. I don’t know what you know or if I can even tell you but I’ve failed to do what I’ve always been about and what you have taught me . . . standing up for what is right. Had I done that, this mess would be non-existent.” — Letter from a U.S. Marine involved in the death of Hashim Awad to his family.
54 year-old Awad was pulled from his home by U.S. Marines on April 26, 2006. After the marines killed him on the side of the road they planted false evidence to make it appear that the man was an insurgent. The Marines attempted to cover up the story but an investigation blew the lid off of the story.
A Court Martial hearing found the following convictions:
one Marine was found guilty of Conspiracy to Commit Kidnapping and Kidnapping
three Marines were found guilty of Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice and Assault
one Marine was convicted of Conspiracy to Kidnap and Murder to include Willfully and Wrongfully Seize and Carry Away Awad Against his Will
one Marine was convicted of Conspiracy to Kidnap, Larceny, and Housebreaking
one Marine was convicted of Conspiracy to Kidnap, False Official Statement, Premeditated Murder, and Larceny
That is just one of the stories that the released documents tell. The documents reveal the worst of war. The stories of those who live in the land where bullets fly have a right to expect their lives not to be endangered when at all possible. Clearly this is not the case on several occasions. As more and more documents come forth from this military action it is clear that there have been crimes committed that the government of the United States would prefer to have buried under the desert sand. By denying journalists the right to report on the true nature of this war it is promoting a new stage in government that should not be repeated. People have the right and need to know what truly goes on when a military action is ongoing. Only then can educated choices be made.
The powers that be in the government want to be able to listen in like a fly on the wall when you’re on the phone. The program is to track terrorists and American targets for a week without a warrant. But is that really what is going on?
When Computer World spoke to the Department of Justice about those demands that civil liberties groups have going on to the details of mobile phone tracking they had the status quo to say, or did they?
Computer World spoke to the DOJ on the matter, and received the usual “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, highlighting how important phone records can be in tracing children and serial murderers – but not terrorists, this time, so missing a trick there.
Whoa Nellie, hold your horses here. Since when have children been thought to be terrorists? It’s all well and good to track serial killers and the like within the legal arm but why are the kids being listened in on?
Oh my gawd, did you see what Jessie was wearing?
I know and isn’t Brandon a hunk?
Yes, our children’s phone calls are a matter of national security.
“This is a critical opportunity to shed much-needed light on possibly unconstitutional government surveillance techniques,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney at the ACLU, “Signing up for cell phone services should not be synonymous with signing up to be spied on and tracked by the government.”
Back on June 20th when the House passed new surveillance laws Bush was quoted on ABCNews.com as to saying:
President Bush praised the bill Friday. “It will help our intelligence professionals learn enemies’ plans for new attacks,” he said in a statement before television cameras a few hours before the vote.
So children may have plans of attacks? Come on folks, Big Brother is staring us in the face and he’s not looking that pretty.
The way the law stands now with the new bill the government can initiate a wiretap for a week if “important intelligence” could be lost. The court then has 30 days to object the government after that week is completed and a case is filed.
“What we have here is the opportunity for the government to commit mass untargeted surveillance,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.
How do you feel about this issue? Do you think that the government should be allowed to listen into your calls or those of your children?
Three Polish doctors and six nurses are accused of killing homeless people in their nation following a medical trial of a vaccine for H5N1 bird flu. The nine could be criminally prosecuted because of deceiving those dead.
21 people died after they received £1-2 thinking they would be getting a standard flu shot. Investigators found that the dead were being used as human guinea pigs to test the anti bird-flu vaccine.
Authorities have not proven a direct link between the deaths and the actions of the medical staff yet. That hasn’t stopped Poland’s health minister, Ewa Kopacz from saying that those involved should not be allowed to return to their positions.
“It is in the interests of all doctors that those who are responsible for this are punished,” the minister added.
There is also some question as if the pharmaceutical companies running the medical trials were deceived.
Those accused of the deception say that those who were tested knew that they were involved with a trial using the anti-H5N1 drug and volunteered willingly.
Poland’s health care service already has a bad reputation. In 2002 it came out that sme ambulance medics were getting kickbacks for dead patients from funeral companies. It was revealed that those medics outright killed some of their patients.
The town of Big Sur in California is silent tonight other than the sounds of an out-of-control wildfire after all residents were ordered to leave. The fire has jumped a fire line and is barreling towards homes.
In a scene straight out of the movies the only major road out of Big Sur was packed with evacuees. Cars packed with lifetimes of memories jammed Highway 1 after deputies gave residents the order to vacate by late afternoon. The order is affecting about 650 people.
Lightening is the cause of most of the fires that are threatening California right now. Over 1,100 wildfires have seared 680 miles of prime real estate across Northern California since June 20.
On Wednesday a mile mile stretch along Highway 1 was ordered to evacuate.The evaluations have closed access to the many resorts in the area which tourists flock to.
81 square miles of forest have been charred in the Los Padres National Forest. Fire fighters have about 3 percent of the fire contained.
When Lester Hooper got in an argument with Derrick Perry over a parking spot in Brooklyn on January he decided to use his badge for a little pay back.
The state trooper allegedly wrote up a total of five traffic tickets to the Brooklyn man from January 28 to February 6 without even seeing him.
All of the shady tickets were written up in Westchester County using Perry’s name and license-plate number.
The State Police Internal Affairs Bureau isn’t releasing the details of the parking spat that resulted in the ticked trooper other than saying that it involved offensive contact between Perry and Hooper’s wife.
Perry though isn’t being shy about his version of things. He claims that Hooper was riled up because Perry didn’t move his truck out of a parking spot fast enough for the policeman.
Hooper was busted after allegations about the phony tickets to Perry started a three-month investigation.
It looks like Perry is a speed demon if you read the tickets. According to one he was clocked at 80 mph in a 55 mph in Harrison. He also was cited for failing to signal while motoring on Interstate 287, Hooper also issued speeding tickets in Greenburgh and White Plains to the Brooklyn man.
Hooper was arraigned Tuesday in Harrison, Greenburgh and White Plains on charges of offering a false instrument for filing and issuing a false certificate, both felonies, along with three counts of official police misconduct. After posting $2,000 bail he was released.
The three-year State Police veteran has been suspended without pay.
It appears that care for the elderly in many of Ontario’s nursing homes is not up to par. Three-quarters of such residences are not meeting provincial standards for basic needs according to a study by The Canadian Press after reviews of violation records.
“They’re saying . . . don’t put your mother here because the quality of care is so bad.”
Pat Armstrong, York University professor
In some of the homes seniors sit for hours in soiled diapers and others are restrained when it is not necessary. These horrible conditions are among some of the findings in an investigation carried out by The Canadian Press.
In some Toronto communities as many as 91 percent of homes set up for senior citizens have been cited for violating the basic standards set up to protect the elderly. Those standards expect for residents to be well-fed, clean and pain free. These homes are also being cited for how care of incontinent residents is being conducted and how restraints are being used.
Overall in Ontario just over 60 percent in nursing homes have been cited for violations.
There are 616 nursing homes throughout the province that have their inspection results posted online. Within these homes there were 400 general standards violations posted. This is disheartening. In 2004 George Smitherman then the health minister had promised a “revolution” in long-term care. That revolution has yet to appear.
“We are committed to putting patients first and are continuing to invest and deliver more quality bedside care to Ontarians,” said George Smitherman, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health and Long-Term Care. “We will build on the progress that has been made by adding more staff to our long-term care homes. And by improving funding accountability, we will know every dollar will go to improving the quality of life and satisfaction for thousands of Ontarians.”
The Canadian Press report found many that work in the homes embarrassed by the level of care they are able to provide knowing that it is not up to par.
Provincial inspection reports dated from April 2007 to March 2008 were studied by the Canadian Press. The study revealed that some long-term care facilities have had repeated citations for failing to bathe their residents twice a week. There are some residents that do not even own a toothbrush.
One home in Brampton, Tullamore, was cited as to having 16 residents with restraints applied incorrectly. In Elliot Lake, St. Joseph’s Manor allowed residents to remain in soiled clothes and foul-smelling diapers. In Techumseh, Banwell Gardens was cited as to making residents who were unable to feed themselves wait up to an hour at a dining room table before they were served breakfast. In Fergus at Caressant Care an inspector observed a resident dump hot oatmeal in his lab and then try to eat it with his hands without any staff intervention.
Those homes have said they have addressed the majority of violations. They have been dealing with a staff shortage that hinders their ability to maintain basic standards of care.
In Ontario long-term care homes have a list of 400 rules that they are expected to following dealing with food temperature to a clean environment for their residents. There are also many rules for documentation and paperwork. One-third of the violations that Ontario nursing homes have been cited for deal with administrative infractions.
Some of the homes say that the long list of rules and the constant documentation is what is behind the undesirable care of residents.
That said it still doesn’t make sense that residents are having to sit for hours in soiled diapers or wait until food is good to be feed. Staffing has to be increased at these homes in order to provide basic care. Ontario has the second worst long-term staffing levels in Canada. At this time there are about 28,900 personal support workers and 10,650 licenced nurses to care for the 75,000 residents that are housed in Ontario. The average age of a resident in long-term care is 83-years-old. 85 percent of those in these residential care centers need constant help with basic tasks such as dressing and going to the washroom
Many personal support residents have to care for as many as a dozen residents. In an ideal world that work load would be cut in half. It is impossible for all of the daily tasks to be performed for each and every resident with homes so understaffed.
When Justin McCain, 18, and Antonio Blount, 31 went to get a marriage licence in Newport News, Virgina McCain appeared to be a female. That move skirted the issue of legalities in the state that forbids same-sex marriages.
In Virgina couples getting married must have a bride and a groom. The paper work though did not ask what gender a bride or groom was. In the McCain-Blount coupling McCain signed the dotted line and pledged an oath saying he was the bride.
McCain also pronounced his name as Justine when he and his husband went to get their marriage licence.
The pair were later married in Norfolk. The pair may never have been discovered except for the fact that McCain wanted to change his name to Penelopsky Aaryonna Goldberry. The judge that had just married the pair then asked McCain what his gender was. The couple’s marriage was then voided.
Because of the confusion that didn’t require brides to be female the wording has been changed on marriage licence applications. The new wording is very clear about genders with the terms “male applicant” and “female applicant” being used.
The couple were not charged with a crime in their attempt to marry.
Starbucks Corp. announced Monday that it will be closing 600 of its stores in the United States. The closures are part of the company that started in 1971 to transform the company.
The closures are part of an effect to transform the company. All of the stores that will be closed are under performing other company stores.
Most of the stores will be closed during the 2008 fiscal year and the first half of the 2009 fiscal year.
The closings will cost approximately $200 million of asset write-offs that will be shown on the third quarter of the 2008 fiscal year.
Starbucks expects to pay out $8 million in severance packages. By closing the stores the company expects a net cash outflow of $100 million.
The coffee powerhouse bases in Seattle also plans on opening fewer stores in fiscal 2009.
The employees that stores are being closed could be placed in other stores according to the company.
As the price of fuel increases so do the costs of operating a police department. Toronto’s police budget is having to deal with a $70,000 budget increase to keep the fleet’s engines running.
The city’s previous annual budget for fueling its fleet in 2007 was $6.5 million dollars. It takes a lot of gas to have the 1,300 car fleet ready for action. In 2008 that fuel cost is expected to be up to $7.4 million dollars.
The cost of fuel is one area that can’t be cut when operating police services.
London, Ontario’s fleet has switched to using propane which has cut its fuel costs by 25 per cent. That decrease though will be affected by the rising costs of propane fuel.
Toronto’s police fleet has admitted that they will need to find more eco-friendly means to save their budget.
“We’re looking to economize in non-frontline functions. For example, we’re looking at hybrid vehicles or much smaller vehicles for people like parking enforcement officers,” Toronto Police Services organization spokesperson Mark Pugash told CTV Toronto.
A chilling essay written by a British schoolboy weeks before his death closely matched his actual death. The essay of Ben Kinsella was found among his possessions in North London on Sunday.
The 16-year-old wrote about an attack in his essay that could appear to some to have foretold his death.
“I’ve been stabbed, three times in the chest, twice in the back, once in the gut for good measure.
“The pavement feels so very cold on my so very punctured back. Everything feels cold. Numbness persists. As I stare up at my killer-to-be he feels not the slightest measure of remorse at what he has just committed. Instead his dark smile sickens me in ways I couldn’t imagine.”
The child described feeling lonely even surrounded by those who loved in hosipal. He also described the feeling of freedom from heaven.
Ben once appeared on the ITV drama The Bill.
He is believed to have been an innocent victim of a fight that had gone from a pub in Islington to the street.
A group of minors had been told to leave Shillibeers bar just before 2 a.m. on Sunday.
Ben was stabbed at some point in the aftermath by as many as four separate young attackers. He suffered several stab wounds to his neck and chest. As the son of Birds of a Feather actress Linda Robson, Louis held him young Ben bled to death.
Ben’s family read his essay after his death and decided to allow the public to hear his words.
“I can only wonder whether I deserve to die here, now. Was it all for a reason? Who can say?
“As my mind becomes inflamed with questions I can only feel the pain pass over me like a shadow. Blood escapes my wounds. Blood once destined for greatness now seeps into the drains.”
“I knew I was gone and couldn’t ever come back. I just wished I had the strength to say goodbye. I was dead now.”
The world has had a very talented youth torn from its arms. Heaven has received an author.
A football player from Georgia Tech in Atlanta has been arrested with charges of rape and sodomy. The arrest comes from an alleged incident that happened on the campus in late April.
The student was released on $40,000 bond Saturday. He has been suspended indefinitely from the football team until the outcome of the case is determined.
The incident was reported to DeKalb County police on April 25 at 4 a.m. The DeKalb County police notified the campus police force of the allegation at 4:14 a.m. that an incident may have taken place at Undergraduate Living Center. The Center is an on-campus dormitory.
The student charged with the offense did not use any weapons.
Charles Lea is representing Georgia Tech cornerback Jerrard Tarrant in the case. Lea says his client is not guilty of the charges.
The nineteen Tech player was listed on The Journal-Constitution’s Top 50 in Georgia for the 2007 signing class and was first-team all-state in Class AAA.
As the city of Qingdao in China prepares to host the sailing regatta for the Olympics thousands of people are in force to clear an algae bloom that could impede the competitions.
There is an all out effort to clear up the algae by the middle of July in Qingdao with as many as 20,000 people working on the project. There are 1,000 boats scooping the algae out of the Yellow Sea. Xinhua, the official news agency in China reports that a third of the waters that are expected to be used during the games are covered in the algae.
The condition of water quality has been a large concern for the sailing events for some time. One of those concerns is that many of China’s coastal cities dump untreated sewage into the sea. There are also often high levels of nitrates from runoff waters from both agricultural and industrial chemicals combining in the sea. These very nitrates are a cause of red tides of algae that often bloom along the coastline of China.
Officials in Qingdao deny that runoff waters are the cause of this year’s red tide. They are blaming Mother Nature’s increased rainfall and warming waters in the Yellow Sea. Algae now blooms on over 5,000 square miles in the sea.
Yuan Zhiping, an official with the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Committee stated on Sunday that his government plans to block the algae from the Olympic sailing areas with a fence that is 30 miles long.
“I believe we will make sure the Olympics sailing area is clean by July 15 through our efforts, and make sure the Olympics sailing goes smoothly,” Yuan said, according to the Shandong News Web site.
Photographs coming from the area show wooden boats overflowing with algae collected from the sea. The state’s media is reporting that 100,000 tons of the algae has already been removed from the waters. That algae will be transported and used as feed for pigs and other farm animals.
A new ruling by the Law Lords may pose a dangerous precedent in the UK concerning criminals. The ruling allows defendants in criminal trials to know the identity of witnesses testifying against them.
The rule means if a witness refuses to reveal themselves the criminal could walk free instead of standing trial.
This new ruling has questions as to the protection of witnesses going to criminal trials. It also may be a free out of jail card for as many as 40 criminals who can now launch a new appeal because of the new rule.
Mr Yates, who is assistant commissioner of the Met is quoted in BBC News with comments he made after the double murder conviction of Iain Davis was quashed by the Law Lords.
“To see clearly guilty people walking free is just awful.
“Special measures are only used in the most extreme cases, which means these are our most dangerous criminals, people who have been jailed for up to 40 years. And they could be walking free.”
Justice Secretary Jack Straw told listeners to the BBC Radio 4’s Today show that the issue of protecting witness identities will be addressed but that it has to be balanced with the need for those on trial to hear the evidence that is pending the outcome of their cases.
“It is fundamental that defendants should be able literally to see and hear the evidence before them.
“But you have to balance that against what actually happens in real life these days where you’ve got very serious gun and drug crime and there is a such a high level of
Why is it that sex is a top story “seller”? We gravitate to anything of a sexual nature at times giggling over the scribbles covering the page. Sex. It means so many things. Life, pain, beauty, suffering, love and death.
When we think of words that mean life we tend to go for things like water, food, fuels and bypass the thoughts of sex. But let’s face it, sex is life. Without sex there is no need for water, fuel or chocolate chip cookies.
We are sexual creatures. We crave it, consume it and roll around in it. In private.
Many religions have taught us that sex is BAD. Naughty. Dirty thoughts. Mind in the gutter.
Is that why we crave it so much? Because we shouldn’t? Or should we?
My youngest son asked me to explain what makes the seven deadly sins sins. I was in a smart alec mood and told him they were sins because we like them. If it feels good it has to be a sin.
Sex feels good.
Sex should feel good at least.
And then you have those who pervert the most wonderful basic feeling in the world and make it a crime. When that happens sex is bad. Horrible. Disgusting.
Sex in the news ranges from both ends of the spectrum. It’s either very, very good or it’s down right despicable. Good sex can extend life. Criminal sex acts can end it.
The fear of not being able to perform loving relations because of injury in war is a cause of suicide with war vets. Fear of sex itself can stem from sexual abuse in childhood.
Angeline Jolie talks about how sex is great while pregnant. Down in Antarctica they make sure those snow bunnies have plenty of condoms for the long winter sexy nights. In Chile Viagra is the secret to a long life.
And then there are those who destroy beauty. Sex offenders who continue to commit crimes. To target the innocents before they are ready to know the wonders of love and lovemaking. Who pervert religion with abuses.
And the media world writes it up. It sells. The good, the bad and the ugly line the pages of newspapers and online journals. We who write the news of the day are the ones that sell sex. Does that make us pimps? Pimping out a tasty little nibble to sate the masses?
Does it matter? Do the words we write make a difference when it comes to sex? When we report on sexual abuses is it to sell a story or to educate the public or a combination of both?
When we write a whimsical piece about a sex toy is it to amuse the masses or to amuse ourselves? When the tone of an article tells the way we honestly feel are we undermining the true nature of the news at hand? Do are own opinions on same sex relationships, sexual abuse, sex advancements and sex toys colour the mind of the reader?
We are the educators in a sense. We tell the stories that others learn from or are shocked by.
And we write it up. Sex. It sells. But how it sells is our responsibility. Are we being responsible enough?
I have a voice. Take that how you will. I write about the world and the problems that I find out about. I don’t write about fluffy puppies most of the time. Most of my articles are at digitaljournal.com . This is a gathering of some of my articles. Comments ... Continue reading »
