Eideard

The High Court will consider a legal challenge from a 70-year-old Hindu today that would allow him to have an open-air cremation when he dies. The judicial review at the Royal Courts of Justice will hear a case brought by Davender Kumar Ghai, founder of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society, who wants the law changed to allow traditional Hindu funeral pyres in Britain.

Newcastle City Council has refused him a permit to be cremated in line with Hindu ritual, arguing that a pyre outside a crematorium is prohibited by the 1902 Cremation Act.

Although there have been Hindu cremations in the the past in Britain, in recent years the authorities have become stricter about enforcing the rules. There are more than 600,000 Hindus in Britain and many families pay thousands of pounds to fly the bodies of their loved ones to India for a traditional cremation.

Three years ago the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute after Mr Ghai organised a funeral pyre in Northumberland for Rajpal Mehat, 31, from India.

Hindus believe that cremation is essential to free the soul from the body after death. The dead person’s oldest son is usually expected to light the fire. Monks and children, having no children of their own, are sometimes buried instead of cremated. The pyre must take place at a site on which the sun shines directly at noon and which is close to running water.

Yup. Let’s expand the precedence of religious law over secular, national law. We followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have a few rituals of our own we’d like to introduce – in the States and the U.K.

Or does the number of member of a religion – registered to vote – enter into the equation?

UPDATE: The High Court has ruled against Mr. Ghai’s request.

NASA’s online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. Comedian Stephen Colbert won.

The name “Colbert” beat out NASA’s four suggested options in the space agency’s effort to have the public help name the addition. The new room will be launched later this year.

NASA’s mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report,” to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes.

NASA still reserves the right to choose an, uh, appropriate name.

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A Northern Ireland teenager has been charged with the murder of PSNI constable Stephen Carroll earlier this month.

The 17-year-old appeared at Lisburn magistrates court shortly before 11am today where he faced four charges including murder, possessing of an AKM assault rifle and 26 rounds of ammunition, gathering intelligence likely to be of use to terrorists, and membership of the Continuity IRA.

The youth, who cannot be named because of his age, denied all the charges, according to his solicitor.

Carroll, 48, was shot dead as he answered a call for help in Craigavon on 9 March. He was the first Police Service of Northern Ireland officer to be murdered by terrorists.

No just reason to comment on the individual arrested. That’s for the law courts to bring forth.

When you have a chance to achieve liberty through democratic and peaceful means, involving the whole population – that’s where you put all your efforts.

UPDATED: Second man arrested and charged. And a third.

Researchers in the UK plan to make what’s being hailed as an unlimited supply of blood for transfusions using discarded stem cells found in human embryos. They’ll test embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to find those with embryonic stem cells that will make O-negative blood, which is the one type that can be transfused into anyone without being rejected…

Supplies of blood available for life-saving transfusions are limited. Local and regional pleas for blood by the Red Cross, owing to critically low levels, have become routine in the past decade. There’s more to it all than just giving blood. There are a host of tests that must be run on donor blood to make sure it is free of infection. And blood has a limited shelf life. Blood stored for 29 days or more (nearly 2 weeks less than the current standard for blood storage) is more likely to cause infection in transfusion patients, a study last year found.

Embryonic stem cells have the ability to become all the cells of the body. The idea is that harnessing their power would allow infinite production of what’d being termed “synthetic” blood that would be free of any infections that sometime plague blood supplies.

“In principle, we could provide an unlimited supply of blood in this way,” said team member Marc Turner, director of the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service.

This is a fascinating and exciting time to be alive – and considering the wonders of modern science. I’ve mentioned it in older posts; but – starting with the pioneering work in genetics by Craig Venter – I’ve discovered what would be my career if I was just starting out in life. Computational analysis focused on medicine and science in general.

Yeah – I’d still be a geek.

The city of Toronto will pay 100 individuals $100 each to sit on streets posing as homeless people when it conducts its headcount of street people next month. The volunteers will have to attend a 30-minute training seminar to be “decoys,” have their locations assigned and then be given a $100 prepaid Visa card, the Toronto Sun reported.

In 2006, the city did its first Street Needs Assessment that also included decoys as a control measure and estimated there were 5,052 homeless people living on the streets and in shelters across the city, the newspaper said.

Homeless advocate Michael Shapcott of the Wellesley Institute told the Sun the $10,000 the city is giving away to decoys would be better spent going directly to shelters.

“The decoys are supposed to look like homeless people but a lot of homeless people don’t look like homeless people because it’s a survival strategy,” he said.

I’m really not clear on whether the decoys are checking on the veracity of the homeless – or the folks taking the survey.

Deafness affects more than 250 million people worldwide. It typically involves the loss of sensory receptors, called hair cells, for their “tufts” of hair-like protrusions, and their associated neurons. The transplantation of stem cells that are capable of producing functional cell types might be a promising treatment for hearing impairment, but no human candidate cell type has been available to develop this technology.

A new study led by Dr. Marcelo N. Rivolta of the University of Sheffield has successfully isolated human auditory stem cells from fetal cochleae and found they had the capacity to differentiate into sensory hair cells and neurons…

They were able to formulate conditions that allowed for the progressive differentiation into neurons and hair cells with the same functional electrophysiological characteristics as cells seen in vivo.

“The results are the first in vitro renewable stem cell system derived from the human auditory organ and have the potential for a variety of applications, such as studying the development of human cochlear neurons and hair cells, as models for drug screening and helping to develop cell-based therapies for deafness,” say the authors…

Dr Ralph Holme, director of biomedical research for Royal National Institute for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People, said: “There are currently no treatments to restore permanent hearing loss so this has the potential to make a difference to millions of deaf people.”

I’ll have to keep tabs on this one – for a couple of folks in my family. Including me.

A reward of $2 million each will be paid to informers who help arrest Mexico’s 24 most-wanted drug gang chiefs, the attorney general has said. Correspondents say the most-wanted list is a public challenge to the cartels…

US and Mexican agencies are increasing their co-operation as the gang violence spills over the border, where kidnaps and killings are on the rise. The reward offer comes two days before a trip to Mexico by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a month before President Barack Obama is due to visit…

The drug gangs have splintered into six main cartels, under pressure from law enforcement action on both sides of the border, according to the attorney general’s office in Mexico.

Some of the men, such as Joaquin Guzman and Ismael Zamabada, allegedly of the Pacific cartel, are also targeted by separate $5m (£3.43m) bounties from the US government.

Make it “Dead or Alive” and I might drag some old hardware from the closet and head South, myself.

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Six weeks after fires devastated parts of southern Australia, residents of one of the worst-affected towns have finally been allowed to go
home.

Marysville was almost completely destroyed by bushfires on 7 February. It has been sealed off ever since by the police, who have been searching for the remains of victims and investigating suspicions of arson.

Forty-five people died when fires tore through Marysville, north-east of the Victorian state capital, Melbourne. The destruction of the picturesque town became a symbol of the bushfire disaster, the worst in Australia’s recent history…

Victoria’s Deputy Police Commissioner Kieran Walshe says the forensic work in Marysville is over.

“It’s in excess of 4,000 buildings and structures that we’ve searched in the last couple of weeks, so it’s been a massive exercise to get that done,” he said. “We’re comfortable now that we’ve located and recovered all human remains,” he added.

Now, folks must begin that terrible long journey back to normalcy. I’m afraid that for some, that’s never going to come.

You can sit around and make up existential one-liners every day. Losing everything you possess means losing a lot of memories, a great deal of the history of your life.

Click photo for BBC Video
Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Gang violence is surging in Mexico, where 40,000 soldiers have been deployed across the country to root out drug cartels. Beheadings, attacks on police, and shootings in clubs and restaurants are a daily occurrence in some regions.

One of the worst areas for the violence has been the border city of Juarez, where thousands of Mexican troops are now trying to re-establish control.

Driving into Mexico’s most dangerous city is slightly nerve-wracking, to say the least. Murder, kidnapping and extortion on a grand scale. Ciudad Juarez has not exactly been the safest place.

So the first time you cross that bridge over the Rio Grande, which divides Mexico and the United States, there is a slight flutter in your stomach. Then you see the soldiers. Juarez has been flooded with troops. Thousands have arrived in the past few weeks, under direct orders from the president.

“The army is in control of the police station,” police spokesman Mauricio Mauricio says. “They have the order of the president of Mexico to take control.”

Matthew Prices reports from the front lines. A few hours drive from my home in New Mexico.

A man who thought he was dying and confessed to having killed a neighbour in 1977 has been charged with murder after making a recovery, US media say. James Brewer could now face the death penalty over the unsolved killing in Tennessee 32 years ago, reports say.

Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted to police he shot dead 20-year-old Jimmy Carroll.

The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved.

“He wanted to cleanse his soul, because he thought he was going to the great beyond,” said police detective Tony Grasso, who interviewed Mr Brewer in an Oklahoma hospital…

The former factory worker changed his name to Michael Anderson and settled down with his wife, Dorothy, in the town of Shawnee. The couple became active members of the local church, where Mrs Brewer established a Bible study group.

Har!