Tucson gunman appears in court for Giffords shooting

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Jared Loughner, a 22-year-old former college student, has appeared in federal court following the shooting on Saturday at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. The shooting killed five people including John Roll, a federal judge, and injured 19 including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Loughner has been charged in federal court with attempted assassination of a member of Congress, first-degree murder and attempting to kill employees of the federal government. Prosecutors for the State of Arizona are trying to determine whether they can bring charges for the other killings and attempted killings in state court.

Loughner confirmed his identity to the court and was denied bail but did not enter a plea. He stated that he understood the potential punishment for the charges include the death penalty or life imprisonment. He is being represented by Judy Clarke, who has previously defended Theodore Kaczynski (the ‘Unabomber’) and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Surgeons have had to perform emergency surgery on Giffords, including a hemicraniectomy, which involves removing a large section of her skull to reduce the pressure from the swelling in the brain caused by the gunshot wound. Dr. Michael Lemole, one neurosurgeon operating on Giffords said that she was “not out of the woods yet”. He also noted that “swelling can sometimes take three days or five days to maximize. But every day that goes by and we don’t see an increase, we’re slightly more optimistic.” Giffords has been able to respond to basic commands from doctors like holding up two fingers.

Meanwhile, debates rage following allegations that Loughner had a political basis for his attack. Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik blamed some extreme rhetoric in the media. “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. This has not become the nice United States of America that most of us grew up in and I think it’s time that we do the soul-searching.”

Friday, June 29, 2007

The European Union banned all of Indonesia’s air carriers yesterday, none of which presently operate services to Europe, as well as several from Russia, Ukraine and Angola. They are the latest additions to the already extensive List of air carriers banned in the EU. The ban is scheduled to come into effect on July 6. Just hours after the ban a Boeing 737 operated by one of the blacklisted airlines, TAAG Angola Airlines, crashed into a house during landing, causing at least six fatalities in Northern Angola.

Indonesia currently has 51 airlines, having grounded several and revoked the licences of others on June 25. The EU said that substandard maintenance and operation and a slow reaction by Indonesia to solve the problem were the main causes of the ban. EU holidaymakers who have booked flights with banned airlines via travel agents will be refunded for the services.

EU transport commissioner Jacques Barrot said of the ban “Once more, the EU blacklist will prove to be an essential tool not only to prevent unsafe airlines from flying to Europe and to inform passengers travelling worldwide, but also to make sure that airlines and civil aviation authorities take appropriate actions to improve safety.”

Operations and safety editor at Flight International David Learmount commented that Indonesia, whose airline industry was deregulated the early 1990s, is one of a handful of cases where deregulation has lowered safety standards instead of improving them, saying of the move by the EU “Standards in aviation safety have been going up dramatically on a worldwide basis, but there are still places where they are [of the standards of] the 70s and 80s. In Indonesia the safety watchdog was told earlier this year to pull its socks up, but the EU is clearly convinced that it has not done so.”

One unnamed EU official was reported by The Guardian to have described Indonesia’s civil aviation authority as “not very reliable”, referring to a lack of reaction to warnings of an imminent ban and requests that Indonesia reassured officials that the problem was being dealt with.

Indonesia has responded to the ban by saying that, according to information unseen by the EU, Indonesian safety standards are rising. Director-general of civil aviation at the Indonesian transport ministry Budhi Mulyawan Suyitno told Reuters new agency that, “Our data can show them that we have improved on every line. The US had already downgraded Indonesia’s safety rating earlier this year.

Also affected by the bans are Ukraine’s Volare Aviation, while Russia has imposed bans on four of its airlines after consulting the EU and restricted six others, Bulgaria has revoked the licences of six cargo airlines and Moldova has banned eight airlines.

Meanwhile, Pakistan International Airlines, subject of a controversial EU ban earlier this year, had restrictions on some of its aircraft lifted. The airline’s fleet of Boeing 777s and some of their Boeing 747s and Airbus 310s will now be allowed back into European airspace.

The announcements come after three accidents involving Indonesian airliners – the New Year’s Day crash of Adam Air Flight 574, which killed 102 people, the subsequent accident involving Adam Air Flight 172, which cracked in half on a hard landing but held together, preventing serious injury, and the March crash of state-run Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, which claimed 23 lives. All the accidents involved ageing Boeing 737 aircraft.

Thursday, November 26, 2020

On Monday, United States General Services Administration administrator Emily W. Murphy sent a letter to President-elect Joe Biden and his team, giving them permission to access what she described as post-election resources for a presidential transition process following the 2020 US Presidential Election on November 3, which multiple national news outlets have projected former US Vice President Joe Biden won against incumbent US President Donald Trump.

Murphy claimed she made this decision without influence from the White House, insisting she was “never directly or indirectly pressured by any Executive Branch official”. However, she claimed she and her family had received violent threats due to her involvement in the process of allowing the incoming president elect access to federal documents.

President Trump, who appointed Murphy to her position himself in 2017, responded to her letter on Twitter, calling for the beginning of a presidential transition process “in the best interests of the country”. The president’s response is a drastic departure in tone from his previous rhetoric and demeanor regarding the issue, in which he asserted he had won the election despite several key swing states certifying their results in favor of Biden.

The president did not concede or admit defeat in the election in his statement, however, and vowed to keep fighting “the good fight” with court cases challenging the election results in swing states.

To date, the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud have not gained any momentum in the courts. Two days prior to Michigan’s final certification of its election results, a federal judge dismissed a Trump lawsuit attempting to prevent the state of Pennsylvania from certifying their results.

Trump and his legal team have come under scrutiny from both sides of the aisle in response to their claims of election fraud. Biden and others in the Democratic Party warned the delayed transition process could potentially be a threat to national security, in withholding resources from Biden and his team. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer commented the president’s tweets Monday are likely as near as the US public will ever have to an official concession from the president.

Other Republicans have broken with Trump and have urged him to move forward with the presidential transition, such as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who denounced the Trump legal team’s claims as a “national embarrassment”. Additionally, businessman and Trump loyalist Stephen Schwarzman said the president should accept the election outcome and “move on”. Over 100 Republican national security experts signed an open letter urging Republican officials to push the president to concede the election.

Traditionally, the General Services Administration has acted once the national media has called the presidential race for a candidate. Joe Biden is projected to win the electoral college and was also victorious in the popular vote, winning by over six million votes. He was projected on November 7 to have won, and would be sworn into office on January 20.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The name Robert Cailliau may not ring a bell to the general public, but his invention is the reason why you are reading this: Dr. Cailliau together with his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, making the internet accessible so it could grow from an academic tool to a mass communication medium. Last January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged.

Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.

Wikinews: At the start of this interview, we would like to offer you a fresh pint on a terrace, but since this is an e-mail interview, we will limit ourselves to a virtual beer, which you can enjoy here.

Robert Cailliau: Yes, I myself once (at the 2nd international WWW Conference, Chicago) said that there is no such thing as a virtual beer: people will still want to sit together. Anyway, here we go.

Friday, November 10, 2006

In an internet-based study published today on the website of the British Medical Journal, Australian investigators tested how well Googling could help to establish a difficult diagnosis. The search results met against their criteria in 15 out of 26 cases.

Previous anecdotes of the use of Google in reaching a difficult diagnosis are presented in the paper. In a case described in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a physician diagnosed IPEX syndrome after submitting the typical diagnostic clues to the search engine. A patient’s father replied to doctor’s saying that his son had acute subclavian vein thrombosis of unknown origin: “But of course hehas Paget-von Schrötter syndrome.”

Hangwi Tang and Jennifer Hwee Kwoon Ng from the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane selected clinical cases from the NEJM blind to the correct diagnosis. They selected 3 to 5 rather specific features, searched Google, and selected the 3 disorders from the results that seemed to fit the case best. If one of those was right, Google was said to be “right”.

The scientists admit that an internet search probably works better with specific symptoms rather than with phrases such as “fever ill pain”. Also, the percentage may depend on the operating physician’s knowledge base, and the test was not double-blind.

Experts commented that the internet is not a replacement for doctors, but should be seen as a way of supporting doctors and patients. A spokeswoman for the Patient Association added that “a lot of sites are not credible. There are lots of good sites out there, but we also know that there are many that are not credible.”

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Two more vessels have been hijacked in Somalia. Pirates have captured an Indonesian tugboat with a barge that was working for French oil firm Total and a Turkish container ship.

The Turkish vessel’s seizure was confirmed by a US Fifth Fleet spokesman. MV Bosphorus Prodigy is a 330 ft (100 m) container vessel flagged in Antigua and Barbuda. It is owned and operated by Isko Marine Company based in Istanbul.

The Fifth Fleet could not confirm the tugboat’s seizure, but an anonymous official with Total in Yemen could. He explained the boat and barge were headed to Malaysia from the Yemeni port of Mukalla. He said the crew consisted of both Indonesians and other nationalities, and that the vessels, which had been hired by a subcontractor, were not carrying any oil at the time.

The new hijackings came as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime asked for greater policing in the area by international bodies, and for the signing of agreements that allowed the arresting officer to take pirates back to the officer’s country for prosecution.

“Pirates cannot be keelhauled or forced to walk the plank, nor should they be dumped off the Somali coast,” said the office’s head Antonio Maria Costa. “They need to be brought to justice”.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Last Tuesday in Taipei, Google Taiwan held an annual summary press conference named “Collective Intelligence & Innovation” (In Chinese: ?????????). With many products had already been presented to the public like wikis, blogs, and photo albums in the Web 2.0 era, Google served to provide lots of services like Google Apps, Google Maps and YouTube with suitable versions in Taiwan differing other countries this year.

Global Deputy Director of Google Kai-Fu Lee said: “The contents on the Internet were mostly limited with some copyright issue in the past, but after many products in the Web 2.0 era are presented, several contents are progressively released and opened to the public in the presence. As those factors, we [Google] hope developers in Taiwan can develop useful tools for local people to apply with people’s life.”

“In order to change minds in public, we [Google] conjoined some required elements into people’s life, and services on iGoogle in Taiwan are progressively more and newer because of the improvements of developers. We hoped a simple service can be multiplied with releases of useful and functional tools,” he also said.

Also in this conference, the Engineering Director of the Google Taiwan R&D Center Li-feng Chien also announced the achievements on the “Google Taipei Developers’ Day” and invited developers named Chi-pao Hu and Yi-ru Lin to share some actual applications on iGoogle.