Thursday, February 8, 2007

Anna Nicole Smith, who was born as Vickie Lynn Hogan, was found unconscious in the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida in her 6th floor hotel room. One of her attorneys has confirmed that she was pronounced dead at a hospital less than an hour later. She was 39.

Paramedics are reported to have performed CPR on the actress and had to have breathing equipment inserted into her chest after a nurse found her passed out in her hotel room and witnesses say that Smith was receiving CPR while the ambulance took her to the hospital around 2:00 p.m. [EST]. Smith’s bodyguard is reported to have given Smith “cardiopulmonary resuscitation” before paramedics arrived.

“I can confirm that she is deceased. It’s as shocking to me as to you guys. I don’t know what the cause was. This is just tragic and that’s all you can say right now and I don’t know anything further,” said one of Anna Nicole’s lawyers, Ron Rale.

Smith was taken by ambulance to Memorial Regional Hospital and “checked in Monday [to the hotel] at 8 p.m. as a guest. She was due to check out tomorrow,” said cafe spokeswoman, Danielle Giordaano.

“Our rescue crews got there, and they were escorted to a bedroom, where they found a female alone in her room and unresponsive. We then began our normal protocol for dealing with a non-breathing individual. The victim never regained consciousness and we continued with CPR and all life-support methods right up until the time we delivered her to the hospital and then the hospital takes over,” said a spokesman for the responding paramedics team. Smith was pronounced dead at the hospital at 2:49 p.m. [EST].

According to Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office investigator, Edwina Johnson, an autopsy will be performed on Smith on Friday and that her death is currently being investigated. Authorities are not yet treating her death as a crime.

One of Smith’s attorneys, Howard K. Stern, is reported to have been staying with Smith in her room, but authorities have yet to locate Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern is identified by TRIMSPA as Smith’s husband.

“He was here with her. I don’t know where he’s at right now,” said Charlie Tiger the chief of the Seminole Police Department also adding that Smith’s 5 month old baby was not with them.

Smith was a spokeswoman for the company TRIMSPA when she passed, and TrimSpa has removed all content from their site for now, shutting it down and posting only a message in response to her death.

“Today, Anna Nicole Smith’s grief stricken and tumultuous personal life came to an end. Anna came to our Company as a customer, but she departs it as a friend. While life for Anna Nicole was not easy these past few months, she held dear her husband, Howard K. Stern, her daughter, Dannielynn Hope, her most cherished friends, beloved dogs, and finally, her work with TRIMSPA. Anna knew both the joy of giving life, and the heartache of losing a child. We pray that she is granted the peace that eluded her more recent days on earth, and that she find comfort in the presence of her son, Daniel,” said the statement on TRIMSPA’s website posted by Alex Goen, CEO and Founder of TRIMSPA.

Smith was rushed to the hospital in November of 2006 after she was suffering from symptoms of pneumonia. Smith’s son, Daniel Smith, died on September 10, 2006 shortly after Anna gave birth to a baby girl 5 months ago.

Smith was shopping for a new boat in Florida and reports say she felt ill and had a fever for at least a day.

Friday, April 22, 2005

Ireland’s National Pensions Reserve Fund (NPRF) has posted a 2.4% return for the first quarter (9.6% annualized). On March 31, the funds value stood at €12.3bn, a rise of €290m (excluding state contributions) since December 31.

Donal Geaney, the fund’s chairman, told the press that growth in the past quarter had been driven by the Fund’s European equity investments.

Mr Geaney, former Élan CEO, has pursued a policy of diversification since February of this year, with the stated aim of placing a larger amount of the funds assets in companies with small market capitalizations and in property funds.

The fund was set up by the National Pensions Reserve Fund Act, 2000 to partially meet the expected rise in Irish pension costs from 2025 onwards.

Monday, October 19, 2009

A report accidentally published on the Internet provides insight into a secretive European Union surveillance project designed to monitor its citizens, as reported by Wikileaks earlier this month. Project INDECT aims to mine data from television, internet traffic, cellphone conversations, p2p file sharing and a range of other sources for crime prevention and threat prediction. The €14.68 million project began in January, 2009, and is scheduled to continue for five years under its current mandate.

INDECT produced the accidentally published report as part of their “Extraction of Information for Crime Prevention by Combining Web Derived Knowledge and Unstructured Data” project, but do not enumerate all potential applications of the search and surveillance technology. Police are discussed as a prime example of users, with Polish and British forces detailed as active project participants. INDECT is funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and includes participation from Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Indicated in the initial trial’s report, the scope of data collected is particularly broad; days of television news, radio, newspapers, and recorded telephone conversations are included. Several weeks of content from online sources were agglomerated, including mining Wikipedia for users’ and article subjects’ relations with others, organisations, and in-project movements.

Watermarking of published digital works such as film, audio, or other documents is discussed in the Project INDECT remit; its purpose is to integrate and track this information, its movement within the system and across the Internet. An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube is shown to the right. The simplified example of the system in operation shows a file of documents with a visible INDECT-titled cover taken from an office and exchanged in a car park. How the police are alerted to the document theft is unclear in the video; as a “threat”, it would be the INDECT system’s job to predict it.

Throughout the video use of CCTV equipment, facial recognition, number plate reading, and aerial surveillance give friend-or-foe information with an overlaid map to authorities. The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursuing, and capturing the document recipient. The file of documents is retrieved, and the recipient roughly detained.

Technology research performed as part of Project INDECT has clear use in countering industrial and international espionage, although the potential use in maintaining any security and predicting leaks is much broader. Quoted in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Liberty’s director, Shami Chakrabarti, described a possible future implementation of INDECT as a “sinister step” with “positively chilling” repercussions Europe-wide.

“It is inevitable that the project has a sensitive dimension due to the security focussed goals of the project,” Suresh Manandhar, leader of the University of York researchers involved in the “Work Package 4” INDECT component, responded to Wikinews. “However, it is important to bear in mind that the scientific methods are much more general and has wider applications. The project will most likely have lot of commercial potential. The project has an Ethics board to oversee the project activities. As a responsible scientists [sic] it is of utmost importance to us that we conform to ethical guidelines.”

Although Wikinews attempted to contact Professor Helen Petrie of York University, the local member of Project INDECT’s Ethics board, no response was forthcoming. The professor’s area of expertise is universal access, and she has authored a variety of papers on web-accessibility for blind and disabled users. A full list of the Ethics board members is unavailable, making their suitability unassessable and distancing them from public accountability.

One potential application of Project INDECT would be implementation and enforcement of the U.K.’s “MoD Manual of Security“. The 2,389-page 2001 version passed to Wikileaks this month — commonly known as JSP-440, and marked “RESTRICTED” — goes into considerable detail on how, as a serious threat, investigative journalists should be monitored, and effectively thwarted; just the scenario the Project INDECT video could be portraying.

When approached by Wikinews about the implications of using INDECT, a representative of the U.K.’s Attorney General declined to comment on legal checks and balances such a system might require. Further U.K. enquiries were eventually referred to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who have not yet responded.

Wikinews’ Brian McNeil contacted Eddan Katz, the International Affairs Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.). Katz last spoke to Wikinews in early 2008 on copyright, not long after taking his current position with the E.F.F. He was back in Brussels to speak to EU officials, Project INDECT was on his agenda too — having learned of it only two weeks earlier. Katz linked Project INDECT with a September report, NeoConopticon — The EU Security-Industrial Complex, authored by Ben Hayes for the Transnational Institute. The report raises serious questions about the heavy involvement of defence and IT companies in “security research”.

On the record, Katz answered a few questions for Wikinews.

((WN)) Is this illegal? Is this an invasion of privacy? Spying on citizens?

Eddan Katz When the European Parliament issued the September 5, 2001 report on the American ECHELON system they knew such an infrastructure is in violation of data protection law, undermines the values of privacy and is the first step towards a totalitarian surveillance information society.

((WN)) Who is making the decisions based on this information, about what?

E.K. What’s concerning to such a large extent is the fact that the projects seem to be agnostic to that question. These are the searching systems and those people that are working on it in these research labs do search technology anyway. […] but its inclusion in a database and its availability to law enforcement and its simultaneity of application that’s so concerning, […] because the people who built it aren’t thinking about those questions, and the social questions, and the political questions, and all this kind of stuff. [… It] seems like it’s intransparent, unaccountable.

The E.U. report Katz refers to was ratified just six days before the September 11 attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In their analysis of the never-officially-recognised U.S. Echelon spy system it states, “[i]n principle, activities and measures undertaken for the purposes of state security or law enforcement do not fall within the scope of the EC Treaty.” On privacy and data-protection legislation enacted at E.U. level it comments, “[such does] not apply to ‘the processing of data/activities concerning public security, defence, state security (including the economic well-being of the state when the activities relate to state security matters) and the activities of the state in areas of criminal law'”.

Part of the remit in their analysis of Echelon was rumours of ‘commercial abuse’ of intelligence; “[i]f a Member State were to promote the use of an interception system, which was also used for industrial espionage, by allowing its own intelligence service to operate such a system or by giving foreign intelligence services access to its territory for this purpose, it would undoubtedly constitute a breach of EC law […] activities of this kind would be fundamentally at odds with the concept of a common market underpinning the EC Treaty, as it would amount to a distortion of competition”.

Ben Hayes’ NeoConoptiocon report, in a concluding section, “Following the money“, states, “[w]hat is happening in practice is that multinational corporations are using the ESRP [European Seventh Research Programme] to promote their own profit-driven agendas, while the EU is using the programme to further its own security and defence policy objectives. As suggested from the outset of this report, the kind of security described above represents a marriage of unchecked police powers and unbridled capitalism, at the expense of the democratic system.”

Monday, December 2, 2013

Police in the West Midlands in England today said nearly 200 kilograms worth of drugs with value possibly as great as £30 million (about US$49 million or €36 million) has been seized from a unit in the town of Brownhills. In what an officer described as “one of the largest [seizures] in the force’s 39 year history”, West Midlands Police reported recovering six big cellophane-wrapped cardboard boxes containing cannabis, cocaine, and MDMA (“ecstasy”) in a police raid operation on the Maybrook Industrial Estate in the town on Wednesday.

The seized boxes, which had been loaded onto five freight pallets, contained 120 one-kilogram bags of cannabis, 50 one-kilogram bags of MDMA, and five one-kilogram bricks of cocaine. In a press release, West Midlands Police described what happened after officers found the drugs as they were being unloaded in the operation. “When officers opened the boxes they discovered a deep layer of protective foam chips beneath which the drugs were carefully layered”, the force said. “All the drugs were wrapped in thick plastic bags taped closed with the cannabis vacuum packed to prevent its distinctive pungent aroma from drawing unwanted attention.” Police moved the drugs via forklift truck to a flatbed lorry to remove them.

Detective Sergeant Carl Russell of West Midlands Police’s Force CID said the seizure was the largest he had ever made in the 24 years he has been in West Midlands Police and one of the biggest seizures the force has made since its formation in 1974. “The impact this seizure will have on drug dealing in the region and the UK as a whole cannot be underestimated”, he said. “The drugs had almost certainly been packed to order ready for shipping within Britain but possibly even further afield. Our operation will have a national effect and we are working closely with a range of law enforcement agencies to identify those involved in this crime at whatever level.”

Expert testing on the drugs is ongoing. Estimates described as “conservative” suggest the value of the drugs amounts to £10 million (about US$16.4 million or €12 million), although they could be worth as much as £30 million, subject to purity tests, police said.

Police arrested three men at the unit on suspicion of supplying a controlled drug. The men, a 50-year-old from Brownhills, a 51-year-old from the Norton area of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, and one aged 53 from Brownhills, have been released on bail as police investigations to “hunt those responsible” continue. West Midlands Police told Wikinews no person has yet been charged in connection with the seizure. Supplying a controlled drug is an imprisonable offence in England, although length of jail sentences vary according to the class and quantity of drugs and the significance of offenders’ roles in committing the crime.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

At least one person is seriously wounded and one dead after a 17 year-old male opened fire and shot his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Forsyth, 17, four times outside the Herbert Henry Dow High School located in Midland, Michigan before turning the gun on himself. The shooter was pronounced dead on the scene and according to Midland Police Chief, James St. Louis, the shooter died in the parking lot of the school while the girl is in a local hospital. She is said to be in stable but serious condition at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan.

Chief St. Louis says that the boy pulled out a gun and began to shoot the girl after the two had a conversation. He then shot himself. St. Louis also said that the mother of the girl, who had dropped her daughter off at school for the day, tried to stop the incident from happening by driving her car in between the girl and boy, but was not successful. The boy, whose name is not known, apparently had stored the gun inside his backpack.

According to Midland Deputy Chief, Bob Lane, the boy was not a student at the school and was not granted access into the school. Lane also stated that the boy then placed a phone call to Forsyth telling her to meet him outside the school just before 11:00 a.m. [EST].

The school hosts nearly 1,500 students. The school was in lockdown, but according to a statement on the school’s website, the lockdown was cancelled.

“This morning a shooting incident took place at Dow High outside the building near the cafeteria. A Code Red lock-down was issued, but has been lifted,” said the statement.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Today, the satellite radio providers XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio submitted a joint application to transfer control of their ground and space-based transmitters to the new, merged company. This is a major step for the XM/Sirius merger deal, as FCC approval represents a major hurdle for the merger. This document also answers some questions that have plagued subscribers of both services.

While there is not much information for the casual listener, two of the most frequently asked questions have been addressed, at least in part:

Pricing has been clarified, to some exeent. From the FCC filing: “After the merger, customers may elect to receive fewer channels at a monthly price lower than $12.95;substantially similar programming at the existing $12.95 price; or more channels, including someof the ‘best of both’ networks, at a modest premium to the cost of one service, and considerablyless than the cost of subscribing to both services.” The document goes on to explain that channel blocking will be available, and that credit will be given for blocked channels.

The filing also addresses the potential need for new receivers. “Subscribers could continue to use their existing radios or eventually purchase new radios capable of receiving all of the content of both services when they become available.” Apparently, some programming will be available on both networks, but this will be limited. To get the full range of programming, subscribers will need new equipment.

Another major stumbling block for the merger deal is the potential for monopoly. To counter the arguments that the merged company will become a monopoly, the document goes on to describe the nature of satellite radio’s competition: HD radio, Internet radio, AM and FM radio, portable media players, mobile phones, and even CD players. “It is clear that all of the above providers view themselves as being in direct competitionwith each other,” the document alleges, and then goes on to quote statements by the National Association of Broadcasters in support of this assertion. “local radio stations compete for listeners with other forms of audio delivery offering an almost unlimited array of content. IPods and other MP3 players, music [subscription] services, podcasting and the Internet streaming of U.S. and foreign radio stations literally provide content from around the world to listeners in each local radio market in America.”

As this is only the first step in the FCC process, and the FCC is only one of three major steps in the merger process, the deal is far from over. However, convincing the FCC that the merger should happen will remove a major barrier in the companies’ efforts.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

Yesterday morning near the international airport located on Weno island of Chuuk state of the Federated States of Micronesia, Oceania a passenger airplane of model Boeing 737-800 flown by the Air Niugini carrier crashed into sea as its pilot missed the runway. All 47 people on board — by differing reports, 36 passengers and eleven crew or 35 passengers and twelve crew — survived.

The report by the international commercial aviation safety organization Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre indicated the crash coincided with a sudden intensification of the weather conditions. timeanddate.com-supplied data from CustomWeather reported rain showers at 9:40 a.m. local time, following cloudy conditions at 8:50 a.m.

The airplane reportedly landed around 9:30 a.m. local time, short of the runway by about 160 m to 200 m (about 525 to 650 feet), according to reports. Locals immediately began to rescue the passengers and crew on fishing boats. Officials arrived after about ten minutes, according to a witness quoted by The Guardian.

In an interview, a passenger alleged the crew started panicking and yelling, The Guardian reported. A first responder, Dr James Yaingeluo, also said the airplane crew were in panic. He said, “There was a little bit [of] chaos at first because everybody was really panicked and tried to get out of the plane […] other than that we were doing as much as we can. Luckily there are no casualties.”

Yaingeluo said nine people were taken to a hospital. Four people remained in hospital, one “seriously injured”, according to reports recounted by ABC News on Friday evening.

Flight 73 was coming from Pohnpei in the Federated States of Micronesia. Its destination was Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, with a stop at the Chuuk state.