Eideard

Detroit — Authorities said a man urinated on the side of the Royal Oak police station, and then walked inside one afternoon last week. Lt. Gordon Young told the Detroit Free Press that ”after urinating, the suspect entered the station in an attempt to file a police report on an undisclosed matter.”

That’s when witnesses informed the police at the front desk of the man’s activities while outside.

Deputy City Attorney Mark Liss said the man was issued a citation and likely will serve no jail time but pay a fine and court costs of $250.

Uh, OK. Cops are pretty understanding in Detroit. I guess.

Britain withdrew the last of its Royal Marines from the deadly Sangin District in Helmand Province on Monday, handing control over to American troops.

More than 100 British soldiers died in Sangin, nearly a third of that country’s casualties since 2001. British, Afghan and American military officials said the shift represented a routine battlefield rotation…

There are 9,500 British troops remaining in Afghanistan, the second largest component of the 150,000 coalition troops here. The United States recently completed an increase in its own forces to 100,000, the largest American force of the war. President Obama has promised to begin reducing American troops in Afghanistan beginning next July.

That’s OK. No matter which party controls the White House or Congress, Uncle Sugar is always first in line to be the cop of the world.

Used to make paper, clothing and car body panels, hemp could also be used to build environmentally-friendly homes of the future say researchers at the University of Bath.

A consortium, led by the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials based at the University, has constructed a small building on the Claverton campus out of hemp-lime to test its properties as a building material.

Called the “HemPod”, this one-storey building has highly insulating walls made from the chopped woody core, or shiv, of the industrial hemp plant mixed with a specially developed lime-based binder…

“We will be closely monitoring the house for 18 months using temperature and humidity sensors buried in the walls, measuring how quickly heat and water vapour travels through them…

“The walls are breathable and act as a sort of passive air-conditioning system, meaning that the internal humidity is kept constant and the quality of the air within the house is very good. The walls also have a ‘virtual thermal mass’ because of the remarkable pore structure of hemp shiv combined with the properties of the lime binder, which means the building is much more thermally efficient and the temperature inside the house stays fairly constant.”

Professor Pete Walker, Director of the BRE Centre for Innovative Construction Materials, added: “The aim of the project is to provide some robust data to persuade the mainstream building industry to use this building material more widely.

“Hemp grows really quickly; it only takes the area the size of a rugby pitch to grow enough hemp in three months to build a typical three-bedroom house…

“Lime has been used in construction for millennia, and combining it with industrial hemp is a significant development in the effort to make construction more sustainable.”

OK by me. Before I retired from the home-building industry, this kind of green construction was just being researched with an eye towards expanding renewable materials. This might be as useful as straw-bale construction is in my neck of the prairie.

A New York grandmother who spent two years in in-home hospice care and on morphine is suing a hospital for misdiagnosing her with cancer, a lawsuit says.

Ramona Jimenez, 85, of Long Island says she was wrongly diagnosed with stomach and lung cancer at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital, bluntly told she had two months to live and sent home to in-home hospice care…

After two years, during which she became addicted to the morphine, Jimenez’s family finally took her for tests at Stony Brook University Hospital where doctors told the astounded family they found no evidence of any cancer.

“This is everyone’s nightmare,” said Andrew Siben, who is preparing a multimillion-dollar malpractice lawsuit for Jimenez against Brookhaven.

“This is a classic case of misdiagnosis … a calamity of errors. This woman’s whole life has completely fallen apart…”

In November 2008, Jimenez went to Brookhaven with a bad stomach ache, was tested and told she had “stomach and lung cancer and had just two months to live,” Siben said…

“When I started taking all the drugs, I went out of my mind,” Jimenez said. “They gave me a lot of morphine. I couldn’t remember who I was.”

Last May the family took her for tests at Stony Brook.

“They looked at Brookhaven’s pictures and couldn’t see any cancer either,” Jimenez’s daughter Brunelda Morua said.

“When they told me I didn’t have cancer, it was like a miracle. They took me off the drugs, except the morphine,” said Jimenez, who is now on a treatment to wean her from the painkiller. “My mind cleared up.”

Brookhaven is silent about the whole affair. They deserve the worst – given that another hospital reviewed Brookhaven’s own X-rays, etc, and found nothing.

Another great reason to get a second opinion right off the bat – when you get negative medical news.

A Kentucky man accused of strangling his wife is poised to claim excessive caffeine from sodas, energy drinks and diet pills left him so mentally unstable he couldn’t have knowingly killed her…

Woody Will Smith, 33, is scheduled for trial starting today on a murder charge in the May 2009 death of Amanda Hornsby-Smith, 28.

Defense attorney Shannon Sexton filed notice with the Newport court of plans to argue his client ingested so much caffeine in the days leading up to the killing that it rendered him temporarily insane — unable even to form the intent of committing a crime…

A legal strategy invoking caffeine intoxication is unusual but has succeeded at least once before, in a case involving a man cleared in 2009 of charges of running down and injuring two people with a car in Washington state…

I am never surprised over silly-ass defenses accepted as legit by a court. Responsibility for your own acts, decisions, means nothing.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, said their own expert may testify there was no evidence Smith had consumed diet pills or energy drinks as he claimed before his wife died.

Prosecutor Michelle Snodgrass said Smith tested negative for amphetamine-type substances shortly after the killing…

Reports and case records say during that time, he was drinking five or six soft drinks and energy drinks a day, along with taking diet pills; it all added up to more than 400 milligrams of caffeine a day.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — published by the American Psychiatric Association showing standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders — defines overdose as more than 300 mg. That’s about three cups of coffee.

More than three cups of coffee classifies you as loony, overdosed on coffee?

Har! That explains the behavior of half the geeks in the world.

Yahoo is officially opening a very energy-efficient data center in upstate New York, a building that shows how design often trumps high-technology widgets.

The facility in Lockport, N.Y., near Buffalo, will get almost all of its cooling from outdoor air, which is a significant energy saver. The Yahoo data center, which can hold 50,000 servers, will have a power usage effectiveness rating of 1.08, far less than the industry average of 1.92.

The cool climate of upstate New York helps reduce the need for the chillers usually used in large data centers. The building itself will use what the company calls the Yahoo Chicken Coop design, a long, narrow building that makes it easier to circulate in outdoor air. The building is positioned to take advantage of the prevailing winds, too.

The basic laws of thermodynamics work the same in New York state as California. Amazing!

The data center…will use 40 percent less electricity than typical data centers and only one percent of its energy bill on cooling. Scrapping chillers saves water as well, conserving enough drinking water per year for 200,000 people, according to Yahoo.

Although it may sound like an obvious way to get free cooling, using outdoor air to cool data centers is not a common practice in data centers. Yahoo is seeking a patent for its Chicken Coop design which it could use for other data centers.

Which is absurd. You may as well grant patents for chimneys or attic fans.

Lose the beancounter attitude about patents, folks!

The United States under President George W. Bush was prepared to take in 100,000 Palestinian refugees as part of a Middle East peace deal, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday.

“The United States was ready to take in 100,000 refugees as citizens of the United States,” Olmert said, in what may be his most revealing comments to date about negotiations with the U.S. and the Palestinians when he was prime minister.

Olmert, who led Israel from 2006 to 2009, spoke weeks after direct talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians resumed in Washington…

Olmert said Sunday that he is hopeful about the new round of talks.

“We have a peace proposal, and I believe that it may bring about a peace accord between us and the Palestinians in a short time,” he said.

“The mere fact that the government of Israel agreed to take direct talks even when it causes pain to the government this means that it is courageous,” he said. “Maybe it’s the beginning of an understanding that there is no other choice.”

I never before realized that “pain to the government” was an actual ailment. I’ve experienced more than a few governments I would consider to be painful. And supporters of those governments who weren’t reluctant to inflict pain or even death – on the rest of the world.

Go ahead. Use the fingers on both hands.

In a sweeping operation aimed at uncovering “straw buyers” blamed for funneling high-powered guns to Mexican drug cartels, federal agents have arrested dozens of Arizonans and seized a large amount of weapons.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says its successful investigation is just the beginning of ramped-up efforts to stop the illegal export of American weapons and is aimed at nailing the middle men who buy weapons on behalf of others for use in major crimes.

Arizona’s status as a guns-and-drug hub for the rest of the country has created an industry that brings tons of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States and sends cash and guns back to Mexico, according to federal agents…

“We have a huge problem here,” said Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, “We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels…”

Agents worked the newest operation in Arizona and New Mexico from May until early August as part of the ATF’s Gun Runner Impact Team. It seized about 1,300 weapons and more than 71,000 rounds of ammunition.

Although the effort was deemed a success, agents admit there is no reliable way to track the number of weapons from the U.S. being used in Mexico’s ongoing drug war…

The dozens of arrests that agents made in the course of the operation will likely not do much to cut off those supply routes…

The operation required the cooperation of Mexican authorities, who supplied ATF agents with information on firearms seized at crime scenes there.

Court records indicate the guns purchased in Arizona came from federally licensed firearms dealers throughout the state, including some who sell them at the Arizona State Fair.

RTFA.

When you know you’re fronting for murderers, you are no different. Ignorance is a pretty flimsy alibi in this day and age.

Members of a religious cult feared to be planning a mass suicide in a California desert were discovered hours after they went missing. Officials combed desert areas in their search for the group, which included eight children, aged as young as three, and was led by a suburban housewife Reyna Marisol Chicas, 32.

But hours after the fears of the mass suicide were publicised, the 13 people were found by a neighbourhood patrol on Sunday, praying outside a high school in Palmdale for an end to school violence and sexual immorality.

“No crime has been committed and there are no charges pending,” said Captain Mike Parker of Palmdale sheriff’s station, where the group was taken for “discussions about their future intentions“.

Fears had been raised earlier overnight when it emerged that the group, made up of El Salvadorian immigrants, left behind a bag with a relative which contained farewell notes in which members indicated the world was about to end and they were “going to heaven.”

An alert issued by the California Highway Patrol said: “It is believed, through further investigation, that their intentions are to commit mass suicide.”

Police Captain Mike Parker said: “The letters essentially stated that they were all going to heaven shortly to meet Jesus and their deceased relatives…”

The bag they left behind also contained mobile phones, cash and deeds to their homes.

Uh, OK. I guess they changed their minds. Or whatever they use for decision-making.

With a final shot of cement, BP permanently “killed” its deep-sea well in the Gulf of Mexico that ruptured in April and unleashed the worst oil spill in U.S. history, the top U.S. spill official said on Sunday.

Some 153 days after the Macondo well ruptured, the U.S. government confirmed that BP had succeeded in drilling a relief well nearly 18,000 feet below the ocean surface and permanently sealing the well with cement.

“The Macondo 252 well is effectively dead,” retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, who has overseen the U.S. government’s response, said in a statement. “We can now state, definitively, that the Macondo well poses no continuing threat to the Gulf of Mexico.”

President Barack Obama…welcomed the long-awaited development as an “important milestone.”

Obama said his administration was now focused on making sure the Gulf Coast “recovers fully from this disaster. This road will not be easy, but we will continue to work closely with the people of the Gulf to rebuild their livelihoods and restore the environment that supports them,” Obama said in a statement…

The development provided an anticlimactic end to the disaster nearly five months after the well ruptured on April 20, causing an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig that killed 11 workers and spewed more than 4 million barrels of oil into the sea…

The spill marred the coasts of four U.S. Gulf states, prompted a ban on new deepwater drilling and left BP’s image in tatters in the United States, home to 40 percent of the London-based oil giant’s business…

For the U.S. offshore drilling industry, which is reeling from a deepwater drilling ban imposed by the White House soon after the spill, uncertainty still abounds. Operators in the Gulf…will now have to contend with stricter federal regulations that will make it harder and more expensive to drill.

Get used to the whining. In Oil Patch states like Texas and Louisiana, Republican and Democrat politicians alike – mostly – will spend half their campaigning time towards the Fall elections complaining about the burdens borne by the “poor oil industry”. While the oil industry picks up the tab for re-electing loyal servants.

But, don’t hold your breath.