Archive for January 2011
Boob Doctors charged in porn star’s death
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Two doctors who performed breast enlargement surgery on a German porn actress have been charged with negligent manslaughter after the woman’s death, a prosecutor’s spokesman said.
The 23-year-old woman, identified only as “Sexy Cora,” fell into a coma during the surgery at the Alster Clinic in Hamburg on January 11, according to Wilhelm Moellers, the spokesman for the Hamburg state prosecutor. She died Thursday.
Doctors who responded to an emergency call to the clinic called police and filed charges that started the investigation of the clinic, Moellers said.
A statement from the clinic said the doctors were “extremely upset and deeply regret the death of patient C.W.” and that they are giving “full and complete support” to investigators.
“As matters stand currently a defect in the anesthetizing device can be ruled out,” the clinic statement said. “The claim that the monitoring could have given readings other than the actual vital functions of the patient has nothing to do with the facts and has no connection to reality…”
“Erroneous behavior by the doctors is unproven and at this point just an ‘assessment’ by one of the emergency medical personnel who’d brought Ms. W to the University Clinic Hamburg,” the clinic said…
Everyone’s standing in line, jostling each other to be certain the world knows they’re not to blame.
Politician’s wife was closer to his bodyguard – than he was!
Johnson and wife in better days
Alan Johnson’s former police bodyguard is facing disciplinary proceedings over allegations that he had an affair with the former shadow chancellor’s wife.
Mr Johnson announced his resignation after less than four months in the job, saying he was finding it “difficult to cope” with his personal crisis while carrying out his front bench duties…
Scotland Yard has confirmed that a police protection officer has been suspended and the case has been referred to its Directorate of Professional Standards over the allegations…
The officer is understood to be Paul Rice, a bodyguard that had protected Mr Johnson and his wife Laura…
Announcing his decision, Mr Johnson wrote to Mr Miliband saying: “I have decided to resign from the shadow cabinet for personal reasons to do with my family…
Scotland Yard reportedly began disciplinary proceedings yesterday after learning of the alleged affair with Mr Rice, a detective constable who had been the MP’s protection officer when he was Home Secretary.
Oops. Pretty heavy redefinition of the word “bodyguard”.
Police seize blogger’s guns after he endorses Tuscon shootings
After being notified of Arlington resident Travis Corcoran’s controversial blog post in which he implied members of Congress ought to be shot, the Arlington Police Department (APD) has placed a suspension on his license to carry firearms and seized all of his weapons.
Corcoran wrote and uploaded a post to his blog…following the Jan. 8 shooting of United States Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscan titled “1 down, 534 to go,” suggesting the other 534 members of Congress should be next. In an interview with the Advocate after the post gained wide attention on the Internet but before police became involved, Corcoran compared his post to a joke made among a group of friends in a casual setting.
APD Capt. Robert Bongiorno said the department took his statements made in the blog as a credible threat and took precautionary measures. The weapons were seized Jan. 13.
“Officers took a large amount of weapons and ammunition. Currently, we are working with federal law enforcement partners and the case remains an active and open investigation,” he said.
An “About TJIC” section of the blog suggested Corcoran may have owned around 10 guns. His license was issued out of Arlington.
Dipshit!
He tried to back away from the reaction to his crass idiocy – round one – by advising “while you are in the process of assassinating those 534 political leaders, it is important to aim very carefully so that you do not kill random people around them, as that would be wrong”.
Now, he says, he was just joking – just like you would among close friends.
South Koreans succeed in daring rescue of hijacked ship
South Korean naval special forces during the rescue operation
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
It was code-named “Dawn of Gulf of Aden,” and when South Korea gave it a green light Friday, its daring execution led to five hours of chilling drama on the high seas.
A South Korean navy destroyer and Lynx helicopters fired warning shots as elite forces, in pre-dawn darkness, silently approached the deck of the freighter Samho Jewelry, hijacked by Somali pirates Saturday, according to the Yonhap news agency.
The pirates fired with their AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The South Koreans shot back.
When it was all over, the South Koreans had rescued 21 sailors, killed eight pirates and captured five others, said Lt. Gen. Lee Sung-ho, a spokesman for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The captain of the 11,500-ton ship was shot in the stomach during the rescue, but no other crew member was hurt…
A U.S. Navy helicopter from the USS Shoup performed a medical evacuation in the operation…
The South Koreans launched their secret rescue mission earlier in the week, chasing the Samho Jewelry for days in the Arabian Sea. When the pirates seemed exhausted and after intelligence that suggested a pirate “mother ship” was leaving a Somali port, the South Koreans decided to attempt the rescue, Yonhap said…
Somali pirates have seized seven other South Korean ships. All but one have been released with ransom payments, Yonhap said.
It appears that someone decided it’s time to change tactics, eh?
Nearly 125 arrested in sweeping mob roundup
The criminal accusations spanned several states and several decades, encompassing figures from seven mob families, and led to the arrest of nearly 125 people on federal charges on Thursday…
The charges were included in 16 indictments handed up in federal courts in four jurisdictions. Taken together, they amounted to what federal officials called the “largest mob roundup in F.B.I. history…”
The sweep began before dawn, with 800 federal agents and state and local investigators fanning out across the region. The targets, officials said, ran the gamut from what they called small-time bookmakers and shakedown artists to mob middle managers and the entire current leadership of the Colombo crime family, as well as two senior Gambino family figures. Prosecutors said 34 made members of New York’s five crime families — Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Luchese — and crime families in New Jersey and New England were among those arrested.
By taking out the leadership of the Colombos and charging large numbers of reputed crime figures from the other families, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors hoped the case would have a significant impact. But at the same time, officials acknowledged that the mob had shown itself to be remarkably resilient.
At the news conference, Eric Holder also announced that the Justice Department was merging its Organized Crime and Racketeering Section with its Gang Unit, a move he said would provide more-experienced prosecutors and increased resources for cases like the one announced on Thursday…
Most of the defendants whom prosecutors characterized as higher-ranking mob figures were held without bail after pleading not guilty.
RTFA for the details. Lots of details.
Coming from the streets I come from – I was relieved not to see the names of anyone I know. Not that I ever hung out with anyone who was a made man. One mob “associate” back in southern New England was part of the class action suit – with me – that won a judgement against the FBI for illegal wiretapping. Most of the plaintiffs were political rather than criminal targets. Not that the FBI cared much.
My gumba was offered a chance to become a made man a few years later – and turned it down. Like a lot of 2nd-generation Italian-Americans he had relatives on both sides of the street.
Nice to see the FBI spend some time – productive time at that – on something of benefit to the whole nation.
Prion disease spread in sheep via mother’s milk
Transmission of prion brain diseases such as bovine spongiform enecephalopathy (BSE) – also known as mad cow disease – and human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is generally attributed to the consumption of the brain or organ meat of infected animals but new research demonstrates lambs exposed to milk from prion-infected sheep with inflamed mammary glands can develop prion disease as well. The research…has major implications for human and livestock health.
“Prions cause devastating, ultimately fatal infections in humans,” says corresponding author Christina Sigurdson… “This study is the first demonstration of prions from an inflamed organ being secreted, and causing clinical symptoms in a natural host for prion disease…”
In the new research [.pdf], the team infected sheep with a common retrovirus that causes mastitis, and misfolded prions. They bred the sheep, in order to stimulate the females to produce milk, which they then collected and fed to lambs that had never been exposed to prions. The lambs developed prion disease after only two years, a speed which surprised the researchers, and “suggested that there was a high level of prion infectivity in milk,” says Sigurdson.
The research raises several disturbing possibilities.
A common virus in a sheep with prion disease can lead to prion contamination of the milk pool and may lead to prion infection of other animals.
The same virus in a prion-infected sheep could efficiently propagate prion infection within a flock, through transmission of prions to the lambs, via milk. This might be particularly likely on factory farms, where mastitis may be common, and could occur in goats as well as sheep.
Humans with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) might accumulate prions in inflamed organs, and could also secrete prions.
“This work cannot be directly extrapolated to cattle,” says Sigurdson. She says that BSE prions do not accumulate to detectible levels in lymphoid organs, and thus would not be expected to accumulate with inflammation.
“Nonetheless,” she says, “it would be worth testing milk from cattle with mastitis for prions as there may be other cellular sources for prions entry into milk.”
Since I don’t drink milk, it never occurred to me that it may be a vector for a disease like this. But, of course. It’s a perfectly natural source of infection. It’s just that I live in the land of beef cattle. In fact, with access to beef that is tested and certified BSE-free.
Study: Chess masters may really be wired differently
Professionals use the caudate nucleus in the center of the brain
Tracking blood flow in the brain to detect spikes of activity, researchers found that master players of shogi — a Japanese game similar to chess — use two regions of the brain to make critical moves.
Unlike amateur players, who use the precuneus area of the parietal lobe, professionals use the caudate nucleus in the center of the brain, said Keiji Tanaka at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute’s Cognitive Brain Mapping Laboratory.
“Professionals are trained extensively for a long time, over 10 years, hours every day. This extensive training (may have) shifted the activity from the cerebral cortex to the caudate nucleus,” the study’s lead author Tanaka said.
“Amateurs use the precuneus only a third of the time (that professionals do),” Tanaka said.
The findings were published in the journal Science.
Experts believe the caudate nucleus is responsible for switching bodily movements.
“The caudate nucleus is very well developed in rats and mice, while the cerebral cortex is very developed in primates … by becoming expert, shogi masters start to use all parts of the brain,” Tanaka said.
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I sent Eid a few subjective comments in response to his showing me this study. I do that hoping to irritate the hell out of him, but it doesn’t always work. In fact, he asked me to post the story along with a few subjective comments. Cripes. Read the rest of this entry »
Wave-generated white hole boosts Hawking radiation theory
A team of UBC physicists and engineers have designed an experiment featuring a trough of flowing water to help bolster a 35-year-old theory proposed by eminent physicist Stephen Hawking.
In 1974, Hawking predicted that black holes–often thought of having gravitational pulls so strong that nothing escapes from them–emit a very weak level of radiation. According to the theory, pairs of photons are torn apart by a black hole’s gravitational field–one photon falls into the black hole, but the other escapes as a form of radiation.
In results outlined in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters, a team of UBC researchers led by international postdoctoral researcher Silke Weinfurtner put the test to Hawking’s theory by creating a ‘white hole’ in a six-metre-long flume of flowing water.
Placing an airplane wing-shaped obstacle in the path of the flowing water created a region of high-velocity flow which blocked surface waves, generated downstream, from traveling upstream. The obstruction simulated a white hole, the temporal reverse of a black hole.
The shallow surface waves divided into pairs of deep-water waves, analogous to the photon pairs featured in Hawking’s theory. Like in black holes, they showed that the analog would also emit a thermal spectrum of radiation.
“While this creative simulation obviously doesn’t prove Hawking’s theory, it does show that his ideas apply broadly,” says UBC theoretical physicist William Unruh…
“In addition to their relevance to Hawking’s theory, the experiments have raised a number of unanswered fluid mechanics questions of engineering interest,” says Researcher in Environmental Fluid Mechanics Gregory Lawrence.
Like a lot of good science, more questions than answers may result. Devising rigorous and accurate analogues surely helps.
South Koreans brave harsh weather for taste of commando life
Over a thousand South Korean civilians braved sub-zero temperatures around the country to take part in boot camps run by a special commando unit, hoping to get into shape and improve their self-discipline.
The boot camps, which run for three days and have been held since 2003, are aimed at “educating” civilians about national security in a country that shares a heavily-armed border with North Korea…
About 250 people, including some high school students, took part in the boot camp at Bucheon, just west of Seoul, one of six run around the country.
Instead of staying warm at home during their winter break, participants wearing camouflage dragged parachutes, underwent training in a tear-gas filled hut and took part in “flying fox” exercises from a wooden tower. The cold was unforgiving, with temperatures hitting 14ºF in Seoul and surrounding areas…
South Korea has a mandatory conscription policy for men, who have to complete 24 months of military service between graduating from high school and turning 30.
The boot camps have been running since 2003 and 18,000 people have taken part. The oldest was a 49-year-old housewife, army officials said…
“After the training, we expect them to live life with hope and challenge themselves, rather than feeling abandoned and frustrated, while thinking about the camp slogan: ‘Make the impossible possible’”…said Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-tak.
Some participants said the training had in fact changed their outlook on life.
“Once I get out of here, I will be good to my mother. I will be good to my mother and father and willingly help them,” said 15-year-old Woo Seung-yeon.
Otherwise they may send you back, eh?
National Pandas get extended stay
Just in case you hadn’t noticed. This was one of the central events in the press conference with President Hu and President Obama.
