Author: Admin

Monday, August 6, 2007

At least six miners are trapped approximately 1700 feet underground in a coal mine in Utah after portions of the shaft collapsed. The mine is owned by Utah American Energy and is close to the town of Huntington, Emery County, 160 km south of Salt Lake City.

Robert Murray, The CEO, President, Director and owner of Murray Energy and the owner of Utah American Energy, said during a press conference at 5:00 p.m. (eastern time), an “earthquake caused the collapse at about 3:00 a.m. (mountain time).”

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) recorded what is allegedly a magnitude 3.9 earthquake at 2:48 a.m. (mountain time) on Monday morning 21 km (13 miles) east, southeast of Mount Pleasant, Utah, but the director of the USGS seismology stations Walter Arabasz, says that no earthquake caused the collapse.

Murray states that at least “two mining machines will be brought in to clean out the debris” at the beginning of the collapse and that he will “spare no expense” in rescuing the men.

“We have four rescue teams working to free the trapped miners. We will try four ways to get to the miners which include drilling 1,700 feet from the top of the mountain. We will also drill a hole” in a neighboring mine shaft sealed in 2004 after it was finished being mined that is “about 100 feet from the miners.”

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced Tuesday that they had seized approximately 160 kilograms of cocaine discovered in buckets of frozen mango puree imported from Mexico.

Investigations led the police to a shipping container destined for the Port of Montréal, in the Canadian province of Québec. A CBSA officer at the Container Examination Centre in Montréal identified the suspect container. The drug was found in brick-shaped plastic wrapping of about 4 kilograms in weight each. There were 1,200 buckets of frozen mango puree in the shipment, not all with cocaine inside.

RCMP Sgt. André Potvin told reporters that the value of the shipment was significant and was the largest maritime port drug haul in the force’s history. At CA$20 per half-gram, “that’s in the vicinity of $38 million,” said Potvin.

The investigation by the RCMP Drug Section, CBSA Intelligence officers, the Marine Security Enforcement Team and the Port of Montréal Security Group, determined that an import company, named Quality Mexport, was allegedly a front for the drug-smuggling operation.

Five Mexicans, holding visitor status in Canada, were arrested in the matter. They are:

• Juan Manuel Huerta Canela, 31;
• Jose Gerardo Bernal Vasquez, 52;
• Jose Luis Navarro Ochoa, 33;
• Jesus Manuel Villa Quiroz, 32; and
• Alfonso Strag Estrada, age 50.

The suspects have been charged with importing and possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking. The charges are allegations at this point in time.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell announced Tuesday morning that a deal had been struck between state and local officials and the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey franchise. The Penguins organization will formally announce the deal tonight, prior to the Penguins game against the Buffalo Sabres at the Mellon Arena. The deal will ensure that the Penguins will remain in the city with a 30 year lease on a new arena to be built in downtown Pittsburgh. The framework of the deal was constructed in an emergency meeting last Thursday in Philadelphia, when both government and franchise officials indicated that progress had been made, with the details laid out over the weekend. With the new deal, the Penguins organization would be expected to pay $3.8 million per year, as well as $7.5 million per year from both Don Barden, owner of Majestic Star Casino, and the state economic development fund. The Penguins organization has also been given the option of building a parking garage on property of the Pittsburgh Sports Authority between Centre and Fifth avenues, by contributing $500,000 per year.

The new arena is expected to cost approximately $290 million, and should be completed and ready to host hockey games by 2009. The Penguins will sign a temporary lease to keep the team at Mellon Arena until the new building is finished.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

A new study by researchers of Boston University’s School of Public Health and colleagues sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows children with severe pneumonia can be effectively treated at home and do not need to be hospitalized. This finding is hugely significant for developing countries where children cannot be brought to a hospital easily or where no hospitals exist.

Per the study the change of treatment could save many children’s lives and take pressure off health systems. Every year pneumonia kills 2 million children under the age of 5. The researchers found that antibiotics given at home could significantly reduce deaths.

The group examined 2,037 children between 3 to 59 months in seven areas in Pakistan. About half of them were given antibiotics and sent home while the other ones got intravenous antibiotics in the hospital. Both groups were found to show equal progress in healing off the illness.

Current WHO guidelines recommend that pneumonia should be treated in a hospital with injectable antibiotics. With the new study there are indicators that pneumonia can be treated just as effectively at home with oral antibiotics.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

One of the most important arguments in the run-up to the Iraq war made by Colin Powell in his United Nations speech and President Bush in his State of the Union address was that Iraq had an active biological weapons program and possessed mobile biological weapons labs. According to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the main source for this information was an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball who was a source for the German central intelligence agency BND.

Several German intelligence officials responsible for Curveball have now told the LA Times that the Bush administration and the CIA have repeatedly exaggerated his claims and ignored warnings of the BND that the source was unreliable. Recounting his reaction after seeing Powell’s United Nations speech one German intelligence officer said: “We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence.” This corroborates reporting by the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit from 2003 and 2004 based on statements of unnamed senior German intelligence officials.

Nine months earlier, in May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in Curveball’s file in U.S. intelligence databases. Powell was never warned that his United Nations speech contained material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false, even though several people present at Powell’s CIA meetings were fully aware of this.

At this time German intelligence officers would not let the CIA meet directly with Curveball, but allowed a CIA doctor to draw blood samples. Questioning the validity of Curveball’s information in front of his CIA supervisor, the doctor was advised to “Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about.”

Shortly after Powell’s UN speech and several days before the invasion, United Nations weapons inspectors attempted to directly verify several key claims made by Curveball, but concluded that they were unsustainable. The White House insisted on its WMD claims based on Curveball’s information.

Even after the invasion, when more and more of Curveball’s accounts were shown to be pure fabrication, the CIA and the Bush administration relied on Curveball’s information. When U.S. forces discovered trucks with lab equipment and Curveball claimed that these were identical to the ones he has been reporting about, the CIA rushed to publish a White Paper claiming that these trucks were part of Saddam Hussein’s secret biological weapons program and Bush claimed publicly that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Several days later, twelve of the thirteen WMD experts who analyzed the trucks agreed that the equipment was not suited for biological weapons production, with the only dissenting voice coming from the author of the original White Paper.

The White Paper remains posted on the CIA website to this date, and President Bush has not yet retracted his statement that Iraq produced “germ warfare agents” made in his State of the Union address or his postwar assertions that “we found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Cheek numbing, eye watering winds whip across the plains of the Laramie Basin, Wyoming. The ground is yellow brown with patches of recalcitrant snow. Sheep Mountain is losing its winter coat. All normal affairs for March. The March edition of the Wyoming Basin Outlook Report also reports, based on February accumulations, that Snow Water Equivalent is at 99% of average.

The SWE is a measure of the snow pack that feeds the streams, rivers and reservoirs that Wyoming, Nebraska and other states depend upon for water. Current averages are compared to the average SWE for 1971-2000. In recent years, snow pack in this region has been anything but normal.

The Outlook Reports are issued January to June. Since March 2000, only five of 46 months have been above normal. While many of the winter months have been near normal, June’s snow pack is far below average. Even in 2006, the wettest year of the last eight years, June snow pack was only 37% of the average.

In an e-mail interview with Wikinews, Lee Hackleman, Water Supply Specialist, said

In a phone interview with Wikinews, Myra Wilensky of the National Wildlife Federation in nearby Colorado, also commented on changing snow patterns.

This is part of a general increase in temperature in the region. An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cited by the National Wildlife Federation estimates that the temperature will rise almost 7 degrees (F) by 2100.

The NWF’s main concern is the fate of the wildlife in the region, particularly how the impact of pine bark beetles. Warmer winters have led to mass infestations in Western lodge pole pine forests and The New York Times reports that they are now moving on to white bark pines in Yellowstone particularly impacting grizzly bears there. In turn, the grizzlies are shifting to feeding on Canadian thistle, an invasive species that might be choking out native plants.

Changing weather patterns have also affected large migratory animals.

Water for people has also become a major issue in the region.

Kansas has long fought Wyoming over water rights issues. And Montana is currently suing Wyoming, claiming that the Yellowstone River Compact signed in 1950 gives rights to both surface and ground water, while Wyoming disagrees. On February 18, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the lawsuit.

Authorities do not see this fight over increasingly limited water resources going away anytime soon.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

A Paris fire in a hotel killed 22 people, 10 of whom were children, while injuring 53 — 11 seriously. The hotel was an overcrowded, budget accommodation type of housing. Most of the inhabitants were African, many housed by social services, according to an Associated Press report.

The 32 room, six-story Paris Opera hotel, was made to house 61 guests, but 90 were staying at the time of the fire, with 84 of them placed by city or state social services.

The fire is thought to have started in the breakfast room at 2:20 am Friday, local time.

Along with the Africans, who were mostly refugees, others wounded included French, Senegalese, Portuguese, Americans, Ukrainians, and Tunisians, according to a report from Turkish Zaman.com. The hotel is situated near to La Galerie Lafayette, Printemps shopping center, and Paris Opera.

It took nearly 250 fire-fighters to control the fire, and the number of casualties was high because of the single exit.

“It’s hard in that kind of situation to tell people to calm down. They jumped. People on the first floor threw their children out the windows,” Alfred Millot, head of the fire service at the nearby upmarket Galeries Lafayette department store, told Agence France-Presse.

“With our own equipment, we started fighting the fire from the ground floor. I came running and people were already jumping through the windows,” said Millot.

His store warehouse was used as a temporary morgue. Families were counselled and assisted in re-uniting by the Red Cross.