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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

One thousand residents of the Defense Department-managed Armed Forces Retirement Home in Washington, D.C. filed a class-action lawsuit on May 24, asserting that the cut-backs in medical and dental services imposed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are illegal. The operating budget for the home was reduced from $63 million in 2004 to $58 million for 2005. The residents cite cuts in on-site X-ray, electrocardiogram, physical and dental services, and the closing of the home’s main clinic and an on-site pharmacy.

Chief Financial Officer Steve McManus responded that the changes not only save money but also achieved improved efficiencies. “We’re really trying to improve the benefits to our residents,” he said.

Most of the home’s costs are paid for by a trust fund and monthly fees paid by residents. By law, the Armed Forces Retirement Homes are required to fund, “on-site primary care, medical care and a continuum of long-term care services.”

Saturday, November 27, 2010

A 19-year-old Oregon, U.S. resident has been charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction after a sting operation; authorities say Mohamed Osman Mohamud, born in Somalia, tried to detonate a van bomb using a mobile phone at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland.

The device, police stated, was fake; he reportedly obtained it from undercover agents during a sting operation. Reports say Mohamud, a US citizen, had been in regular contact with somebody in north-west Pakistan.

Authorities intercepted e-mails they say were between Mohamud and this contact in August 2009. Holton reassured Oregon residents, adding that there was “no reason to believe there is any continuing threat arising from this case”. Mohamud allegededly told an FBI agent “I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured.” Dwight Holton, a U.S. attorney, described Mohamud’s “chilling determination” as a “stark reminder that there are people—even here in Oregon—who are determined to kill Americans.”

An FBI agent told reporters “[t]he threat was very real. Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale. I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.” On the day of the tree lighting ceremony, he drove a vehicle to the area where the event was to be held, and was arrested, prosecutors said, twenty minutes before the tree was to be lit. He kicked at agents as they tried to apprehend him and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!).

Court papers indicated that an undercover agent told Mohamud that he was an associate of the Pakistani contact. When the agent and Mohamud discussed the plan, Mohamud said that he wanted a “huge mass that will be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays”. Mohamud told the agent that he had wanted to carry out a jihad (holy war) against the U.S. since he was fifteen years old.

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, April 1, 2010

The Servicio Médico Legal (in Spanish, Legal Medical Service) of Rancagua, Chile boss, Juan Díaz Menares, was suspended from his job for using a public bus to transport the body of three-year-old Juanita Carey.

The decision was made by the administrative lawyer in the case, Hernán Rojas, who is heading the investigation into the irregular move of the body. Díaz defends the sending of the body via a public bus, ensuring that “the procedure was right, because it was sent as it is established”. “There’s an aberrant situation at a national level, not just this”, said Díaz; “It is always done […] we are a centralized service, we don’t rule ourselves.”

“Everything that comes out of here, biological or bony samples, as in this case, go out from the safekeeping chain”, he also said. He confirmed that he was not going to resign, as Radio Cooperativa had reported.

Last Wednesday, it was revealed that the body of the child, who died in Pichilemu after the February 27 catastrophe, stayed three nights in a storage area of bus company Pullman Cargo. A Pullman Cargo representative reported to Radio Cooperativa that the body was sent last Friday from Pichilemu to Santiago via bus, and that the container did not have any description of what it contained, beyond the word “fragile”. They also said that “it was not even paid for express mail, which would have allowed the delivery to occur on Saturday, not last Monday”.

The body of the child was cremated Wednesday, and her ashes were buried in Santiago, Chile.

Friday, November 3, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is St. Paul’s West (Ward 21). One candidate responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include John Adams, Tony Corpuz, Joe Mihevc (incumbent), and John Sewell.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Virgil Griffith recently made headlines when his new tool, the WikiScanner, was revealed. The tool allows users to search for some edits to several editions of the online free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia made from Internet addresses assigned to particular companies.

The media buzz made Virgil’s tool near-inaccessible as it was swamped with queries. Initially broken by Wired, the articles highlighted edits from network addresses assigned to Diebold and the CIA, and encouraged readers to reveal and share their findings. Mainstream media such as the BBC revealed that edits made from CIA addresses had made changes to the article on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that edits were made from Vatican addresses to Gerry Adams’s article.

Readers of the BBC news website were quick to point out that edits to Wikipedia also originated from the BBC network addresses. Peter Clifton, head of BBC Interactive, confessed to writing about himself and revealed that a prankster within the BBC had edited George W. Bush’s entry to state that his middle name was “Wanker”. The BBC’s Internet address range had a total of nearly 8,000 edits to other various English Wikipedia articles such as Janet Jackson, Super Furry Animals and Freeview.

Without confirmation such as Peter Clifton gave, it is usually impossible to determine from the IP address alone if the edits made from it were even performed by an employee of the organization. While it is likely that the majority of edits are from an organisation’s employees there is the possibility that visitors could be using a company address, or a public-wifi could be on offer. All of this would appear to be edits from the company according to Wikiscanner, and even when the edits do come from employees or representatives, there is no way to tell from the data alone whether the company endorses the edits, or even knows about them.

While Wikipedia advertises itself as the encyclopaedia “anyone can edit”, there are guidelines on the site directing how users may edit the articles—and even, in some cases, who shouldn’t be editing them. None of Wikipedia’s “conflict of interest” policies attempt to limit what people can edit based on the Internet address that they are using.

Wikinews had already started an investigation into just what edits the tool revealed. Hampered by the difficulty getting results due to the traffic load on the web server, we began checking company names and names of media groups. In addition to verifying that the vast majority of edits from network addresses assigned to the BBC were beneficial to the Wikipedia project, the others, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters and AP received a fairly clean bill of health. People using Reuters’ Internet connectivity appeared the first to discover Wikipedia, editing as early as February 2002. Users from AP had made a few edits to articles about the AP, none of which could be considered negative contributions, other contributions included additions to several The Simpsons episodes. However, edits originating at address space assigned to FOX News, and its parent company, News Corporation were more frequently unproductive, many which under Wikipedia and most other Wikimedia project policy, would be considered vandalism and would usually result in a block or ban of editing Wikimedia projects.

The edits from FOX’s address space, now totalling almost 700, start with an edit to the article on FOX which deleted links to websites critical of FOX. Some of the edits could be characterized as an attempt conceal criticism voiced in the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism which alleges bias by FOX News. This was replaced with a link to the company’s official response and another to a story put out by FOX News questioning the validity of the film’s sources. The same Internet address at FOX News then removed criticism from the article on Alan Colmes.

Other addresses within FOX also edited articles on FOX News employees such as Brit Hume, Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace inserting positive information, highlighting their ratings successes and slogan, “fair and balanced” before going on to describe the New York Times as “left wing” and blanking the quotes section on the article about their columnist Mike Straka. The current version of this article is disputed on neutrality grounds as the entire biography and criticism sections have been removed. Including comments about anti-war protesters – “whom he has denounced as “smelly”, “stupid”, “stinking”, “jobless”, “anti-American” and “traitors”.“

More recent edits include downplaying Sean Hannity‘s importance to the show Hannity and Colmes by removing the fact that he is the shows executive producer and referring to him as simply “host” or “co-host”. Details of Wendy Murdoch‘s previous marriage to the husband from the couple who sponsored her trip to study in the United States were excised by another Fox News address.

Investigation of a wider field of media organisations revealed that the News Corporation subsidiary British Sky Broadcasting has the same history of juvenile and prank edits with insults posted against staff on their payroll as well as UK celebrities. The main proxy server that allows their staff on the Internet currently has a large warning of who the IP address belongs to and a list of block messages and block/edit warnings. Some of the vandalism committed through their proxy has been described as “racist” and “potentially libelous”.

WikiScanner cannot identify the origin of any edit made by a registered user. Users are not required to register an account to edit Wikipedia, and those who do not register have their edits associated with an IP address. Edits from unregistered users are, inaccurately, called “anonymous” edits.

Wikimedia’s privacy policy does not allow revealing the IP address of registered users except as dictated by Wikimedia’s privacy policy. Users of Wikiscanner cannot find out about editing by registered users, even if they are coming from the same IP address as the “anonymous” users who did not register.

Virgil’s conditions for speaking to the media include the format of a link to his website. His goal, to get a Google search for “Virgil” to return his page as the top listing. As of publication he’s succeeded.

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.