Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Ernest Krajniak from Chilton, Wisconsin in the United States has been charged with arson after a lit cigarette ignited gasoline soaked clothes, setting his apartment ablaze.

On Friday April 3, Krajniak, 47, cleaned his entire apartment with about five gallons of gasoline, wiping everything down with the soaked clothes. After he was finished, he piled the soaked clothes in the center of his bedroom, lit a cigarette and then threw what was left of the still lit cigarette, into the pile.

Krajniak never called the fire department and never pulled the alarm. Instead he yelled ‘fire’ a few times then walked to the police station where an ambulance took him to a local hospital for the treatment of minor burns. The fire department later arrived to put out the blaze and his apartment was extensively smoke damaged. 11 other apartments were also damaged, leaving the occupants without a place to stay for at least a week.

“I should have never used that,” said Krajniak during a court appearance on Monday. He admitted to knowing that gasoline was highly flammable. He was arrested and his bond has been set a US$2,500. Krajniak’s next court appearance is scheduled for Monday, April 13. According to WISinfo.com, Krajniak has no prior criminal record.

The careless smoking of cigarettes has been blamed for thousands of fires across the U.S. In January 2008, an unnamed elderly woman in Buffalo, New York was receiving oxygen for medical problems in her home and lit a cigarette and began to smoke it. The oxygen coming from her mask then facilitated the ignition of her clothing, setting her on fire.

In the U.S. in 2002, only 4% of all residential fires were reportedly caused by smoking materials. These fires, however, were responsible for 19% of residential fire fatalities and 9% of injuries. The fatality rate due to smoking is nearly four times higher than the overall residential fire rate; injuries are more than twice as likely. Forty percent of all smoking fires start in the bedroom or living room/family room; in 35% of these fires, bedding or upholstered furniture are the items first ignited.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Hassan Hashash, a Palestinian aged 15, was detained by the Israeli military on Tuesday, April 12, at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus in the West Bank. Hashash had been hiding five explosive charges under a winter coat before attempting to ignite one in the presence of Israeli soldiers, the military said. In the sweltering 26°C (78°F) heat, the teenager’s incongruous attire caught the attention of an IDF paratrooper nicknamed Muli.

“The boy pulled out a matchbox, held up a pipe bomb, and attempted to detonate it,” said Muli. “We aimed our weapons at him and told him to move away from us” (Ynet).

The military reported that after taking the youth to an isolated area they searched him and found another four explosives.

“You could see it’s a young child who was sent [by someone],” said Muli. “I looked into his eyes: he was on the brink of tears and scared to death.”

The Hawara checkpoint has seen this kind of trouble before. In April 2004, soldiers there arrested a 16-year-old, also Palestinian, with a suicide bomb strapped to his body. The teenager, Hussam Abdo, later told an Israeli newspaper he was on a mission to kill Israeli soldiers. [1]

Israeli radio noted that this is the third Palestinian child in the past two months caught attempting to transfer explosives past Israeli checkpoints.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

New York –”Buy cheap Viagra through us – no prescription required!” Anyone with an active email account will recognize lines like this one. According to some reports, unsolicited advertisements (spam) for Viagra and similar drugs account for one in four spam messages.

Ever since pharmaceutical giant Pfizer promised to cure erectile dysfunction once and for all with its blue pills containing the drug sildenafil citrate, spammers have tried to tap into male anxiety by offering prescription-free sales of unapproved “generic” Viagra and clones such as Cialis soft tabs. Legislation like the U.S. CAN-SPAM act has done little to stem the tide of email advertising the products.

Now Pfizer has entered a pledge with Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest software company, to address the problem. The joint effort will focus on lawsuits against spammers as well as the companies they advertise. “Pfizer is joining with Microsoft on these actions as part of our shared pledge to reduce the sale of these products and to fight the senders of unsolicited e-mail that overwhelms people’s inboxes,” said Jeff Kindler, executive vice president at Pfizer.

Microsoft has filed civil actions against spammers advertising the websites CanadianPharmacy and E-Pharmacy Direct. Pfizer has filed lawsuits against the two companies, and has taken actions against websites which use the word “Viagra” in their domain names. Sales of controlled drugs from Canadian pharmacies to the United States are illegal, but most drugs sold in Canada have nevertheless undergone testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is not the case for many of the Viagra clones sold by Internet companies and manufactured in countries like China and India. While it was not clear that CanadianPharmacy was actually shipping drugs from Canada, Pfizer’s general counsel, Beth Levine, claimed that the company filled orders using a call center in Montreal, reported the Toronto Star.

For Microsoft’s part, they allege that the joint effort with Pfizer is part of their “multi-pronged attack on the barrage of spam.” As the creator of the popular email program Outlook, Microsoft has been criticized in the past for the product’s spam filtering process. Recently, Microsoft added anti-spam measures to its popular Exchange server. Exchange 2003 now includes support for accessing so-called real-time block lists, or RTBLs. An RTBL is a list of the IP addresses maintained by a third party; the addresses on the list are those of mailservers thought to have sent spam recently. Exchange 2003 can query the list for each message it receives.

Friday, January 12, 2007

The iPhone only made its appearance as a prototype and there have been controversies aroused.

The dispute has come up between the manufacturer of the iPhone (which was resented on Wednesday for the first time) – Apple Inc. – and a leader in network and communication systems, based in San Jose – Cisco. The company claims to possess the trademark for iPhone, and moreover, that it sells devices under the same brand through one of its divisions.

This became the reason for Cisco to file a lawsuit against Apple Inc. so that the latter would stop selling the device.

Cisco states that it has received the trademark in 2000, when the company overtook Infogear Technology Corp., which took place in 1996.

The Vice President and general counsel of the company, Mark Chandler, explained that there was no doubt about the excitement of the new device from Apple, but they should not use a trademark, which belongs to Cisco.

The iPhone developed by Cisco is a device which allows users to make phone calls over the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).

Friday, February 2, 2007

A United States Apache military helicopter has been shot down in Baghdad, Iraq says a military spokesman.

Reports say that the chopper went down near the U.S. air base, Taji, located just north of downtown Baghdad.

“I can confirm that we are looking into reports that a helicopter went down north of Baghdad,” said Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the U.S. military.

At least 2 soldiers were on board the aircraft, but their condition is not known.

Witnesses near the scene and police say that at least 2 Apaches were flying together when insurgents began to shoot at the choppers, shooting one of them down and hitting the other, but the helicopter still managed to fly away. The helicopters were believed to have been escorting a U.S. military convoy on the ground when shots were fired.

“I saw smoke coming out of the tail. The chopper was swinging around before it hit the ground one kilometer away from me and I heard a big explosion,” said local farmer, Hashim Assafi who also said that he had to find shelter as shots were fired in the direction of the helicopters.

In a statement posted on an Al-Qaeda in Iraq website, insurgents claim responsibility for shooting down the helicopter.

“We say to the enemies of God that the sky of the Islamic state of Iraq is forbidden just like its land,” said the statement.

This is the fourth helicopter operated by the U.S. military to crash or be shot down in two weeks.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

A couple from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada has been arrested on charges of public mischief after listing their seven day old baby girl on the popular Internet classified ads website Craigslist.

The listing claimed that the baby was unexpected, “healthy and very cute”. It asked CAN 10 000 for the baby. It also listed a phone number belonging to a stolen cellphone, which was used to find the couple.

It was first noticed by a 62-year old grandmother browsing the website for furniture, who said “I was shaking, and I thought, ‘Come on, how did this even get through?'” The couple claimed that the listing, which has since been removed, was a hoax.

The father, Jeremy Pete, had a history of car thefts and evasion of police, while the mother, 23-year-old Bethany Granholm, had convictions of property theft, fraud and impersonation. The parents have now been released, but charges are still being considered. The baby has been placed in provincial care.

A suspected copycat incident occurred just four days later, also offering a seven-day-old baby girl for CAN 10 000 on Craigslist. This incident turned out to be a hoax, and no child was in danger.

Last week saw a similar incident in Germany, where a couple listed a seven month old baby on eBay. In this case the police have launched a child trafficking investigation, despite the parents’ assertion that the listing was a joke.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Renault driver Fernando Alonso won the FIA 2008 Formula One SingTel Singapore Grand Prix on the street circuit at Marina Bay, Singapore.

This was the first nightly Formula One event that utilized artificial lighting and the 800th Formula One World Championship race overall. The previous GP at Singapore held in 1973 was not part of the Formula One.

The first part of the race saw the crucial failure of Alonso’s teammate Nelson Piquet Jr., causing a safety car to appear, mixing up the drivers.

Nico Rosberg (Williams–Toyota) and Robert Kubica (BMW Sauber) were forced to pit while the entrance to the boxes was closed. This became both good and bad news, causing these drivers to gain a number of positions, but later lose some of them on a stop-and-go penalty. Still Nico maintained his second position up to the finish line.

Pole-sitter Felipe Massa (Ferrari) made a mistake upon exiting from a pit-stop due to the error of an electronic system used by Ferrari to control the pit-stop instead the ordinary lollipop. He made his way to the opposite end of the pit lane with a tail of the fuel hose fragment. It took time for the pit crew to run down his car and release Massa, who now became last from his first starting position. Later he was penalized by a drive-through penalty for this incident, which did not adversely affect him.

The other way round, safety car finally lead Alonso to victory gaining 14 places from the start, which he earned after an unsuccessful second qualification session.

Lewis Hamilton (McLaren–Mercedes) pushed hard on Rosberg trying to regain his second starting position, but finally came third.

Kimi Räikkönen (Ferrari) suffered an accident with five laps to go trying to overtake Timo Glock‘s Toyota and was out of the race. Glock finished fourth.

This allowed Sebastian Vettel (STR-Ferrari), the previous race triumphant, to gain one position and finish fifth.

Top eight was closed by Nick Heidfeld (BMW Sauber),David Coulthard (Red Bull-Renault) and Kazuki Nakajima (Williams-Toyota).

In the Drivers’s standings, Lewis Hamilton extends his lead over Felipe Massa up to seven points and to twenty points over Robert Kubica. McLaren is now one point ahead of Ferrari and fifteen over BMW Sauber in the Constructors’ Championship.

Friday, March 21, 2008

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered evidence that points to the existence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Saturn‘s moon Titan.

“We believe that about 100 kilometers (62 miles) beneath the ice and organic-rich surface is an internal ocean of liquid water mixed with ammonia,” said Bryan Stiles of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

If the findings turn out to be true, this will be the fourth such moon in our solar system found to have some form of water on it. Currently only three other moons, all from Jupiter, have been found to have known water sources. Ganymede, Callisto and Europa are so far the only known moons with a water source.

Members of the mission’s science team used Cassini’s Synthetic Aperture Radar to collect imaging data during 19 separate passes over Titan between October 2005 and May 2007. The radar can see through Titan’s dense, methane-rich atmospheric haze, detailing never-before-seen surface features and establishing their locations on the moon’s surface.

Using data from the radar’s early observations, the scientists and radar engineers established the locations of 50 unique landmarks on Titan’s surface. They then searched for these same lakes, canyons and mountains in the reams of data returned by Cassini in its later flybys of Titan. They found prominent surface features had shifted from their expected positions by up to 30 kilometers (19 miles). A systematic displacement of surface features would be difficult to explain unless the moon’s icy crust was decoupled from its core by an internal ocean, making it easier for the crust to move.

Cassini scientists will not have long to wait before another go at Titan. On March 25, just prior to its closest approach at an altitude of 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), Cassini will employ its Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer to examine Titan’s upper atmosphere. Immediately after closest approach, the spacecraft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer will capture high-resolution images of Titan’s southeast quadrant.

The study of Titan is a major goal of the Cassini-Huygens mission because it may preserve, in deep-freeze, many of the chemical compounds that preceded life on Earth. Titan is the only moon in the solar system that possesses a dense atmosphere. The moon’s atmosphere is 1.5 times denser than Earth’s. Titan is the largest of Saturn’s moons, bigger than the planet Mercury.

Friday, January 8, 2010

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only Japanese civilian to be officially recognized as having survived both the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in August of 1945 at the conclusion of World War Two, has died this Monday at the age of ninety-three, due to stomach cancer—one of the numerous illnesses that he suffered throughout his lifetime as a direct result of his exposure to nuclear radiation.

Mr. Yamaguchi, although he was against his nation’s involvement in the War, worked as a engineer for Mitsubishi—a company that helped equip and supply the Japanese Imperial Army. He was on business in Hiroshima at the time of the first bombing on August sixth. His almost direct exposure to the atomic explosion temporarily blinded him, ruptured his ear drum (leaving him permanently deaf in his left ear), and severely burnt the top half of his body. Three days later, having gone back to work in Nagasaki, he was approximately three kilometers away from the site of the second bomb. Although he was exposed to significant radiation in this instance as well, Mr. Yamaguchi was left relatively unscathed.

Following Japan’s surrender and the end of the War days later, Mr. Yamaguchi worked as a translator for the occupying American forces and later as a local schoolmaster, before eventually returning to Mitsubishi—which had since then become an automobile manufacturer.

In his later years, Mr. Yamaguchi became a respected lecturer who gave talks about his experiences, and publicly spoke out against the stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

For instance, in 2006, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly. “Having been granted this miracle, it is my responsibility to pass on the truth to the people of the world,” Mr. Yamaguchi said to the Assembly. He went on to say, “My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die.”

When asked by the British Broadcasting Corporation what his reaction was to Mr. Yamaguchi’s death, the mayor of Nagasaki said that “a precious storyteller has been lost.”

Among the family and friends Mr. Yamaguchi left behind were his three adult children—who have also had health issues in their lifetimes thus far that they think may have be related to their father’s initial exposure.