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Due to the damage by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding, a number of colleges and universities in the New Orleans metropolitan area will not be able to hold classes for the fall 2005 semester. It is estimated that 75,000 to 100,000 students have been displaced. [1]. In response, institutions across the United States and Canada are offering late registration for displaced students so that their academic progress is not unduly delayed. Some are offering free or reduced admission to displaced students. At some universities, especially state universities, this offer is limited to residents of the area.

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.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Europe — In recent weeks several large European BitTorrent and ed2k link sites have either been closed by the police or have gone offline voluntarily. Sites in France, Netherlands, Finland and Slovenia have been affected.

On December 14, FIOD-ECD, the Dutch economic crimes police, raided the premises of the hosting provider Mindlab. Servers hosting sites Releases4u.com and Shareconnector.com were seized by the police. The reported number of systems seized differs, from 4 (tweakers.net) to 11 (the register). The raids were initiated by BREIN, a Dutch non-government “copyright oversight organization”.

BitTorrent link sites distribute torrents, which are computer files with information about a larger, shared file co-ordinated by small servers known as trackers. Unlike predecessors of P2P applications like Napster, this sharing is not centralised on the servers of link site operators, and no illegal files exist on the servers of link site operators. Although such a system has been previously thought to be a legal loophole for file sharers, the recent spate of raids by copyright enforcement authorities apparently proves otherwise.

Prior to raids Mindlab clients Releases4u and ShareConnector were the largest link sites for the ed2k network in the Netherlands. Mindlab had previously refused to remove the servers for Releases4u and ShareConnector, arguing that such link sites were legal in the Netherlands.

The servers were taken down after a discussion that went nowhere according to Tim Kuik, head of BREIN. “We simply ran of patience,” he says.

At the same time, FinReactor, one of the largest link sites in Finland was raided by the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi, KRP) at the request of Finnish copyright organisations.

On December 19 two large BitTorrent sites, SuprNova.org and TorrentBits.org closed without providing an explanation, although these have apparently been voluntary decisions by the operators of the sites.

Prior to its closure SuprNova.org, based in Slovenia, was generally considered to be the largest BitTorrent link site on the Internet that hosted links to both authorised (e.g. Linux software) and unauthorised files (e.g. Hollywood films). This closure is surprising as it has been generally thought that its location in Slovenia would make it invulnerable to the actions of American-based copyright enforcement groups.

According to a statement made later on the site by its site’s 18 year-old owner, who goes by the nickname Sloncek, and an interview for Slyck, he decided to voluntarily close the links section of the site after the news about arrests of admins of several prominent P2P sites and after receiving legal warnings.

Although the forums and the IRC network will remain online, SuprNova.org claims that it will no longer hold links to BitTorrent files again.

At the end of 2004, eXeem, a project to decentralize the BitTorrent link network developed by SuprNova.org, reached a beta stage.

In a bid to avoid the pitfall of Napster, most other major filesharing networks are decentralized, including Gnutella, Gnutella 2, KaZaA and eDonkey2000.

The goal of Exceem was to eliminate the need for torrent link sites and trackers by allowing every user to easily publish new files on the network without having to post a torrent file on a centralized server and distribute them without dedicated trackers. The closed beta testing with more than 5,000 users was underway by December. The status of eXeem after the closure of SuprNova.org remains unclear.

TorrentBits.org, another link site was closed at about the same time, the reason of which is still unknown at this time. The site’s founder and owner, known by the nickname “Redbeard”, remains unavailable for comment.

Other torrent sites that have reportedly closed are Delirium Vault, Youceff Torrents (closed by French police), Phoenix Torrents (closed voluntarily).

Activities of P2P link sites have not been proved to be illegal and so far no link site was successfully sued by copyright owners. However, police in many countries are often willing to close the sites when they are accused of copyright violations. Confiscating the servers is usually enough to destroy the site, as most of the sites are run by volunteers on a non-profit basis, who are unable and unwilling to fight a prolonged legal battle.

The first large link site to be closed, ShareReactor, was taken down by Swiss police on March 10th, 2004.

Raids have apparently followed a trend of a higher probability of raids when site owners have received donations from file sharers; some believe that this allows authorities to charge operators of such link sites for copyright crime instead of copyright infringement. ShareReactor and ShareConnector were both closed soon after purchasing new server equipment using money donated by their users.

Many people have suspected that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a trade association representing the interests of major movie studios based in the United States, are linked to police actions, although the extent of their involvement is unknown at this stage. The MPAA has taken credit for the closure of FinReactor, although the KRP has officially denied that MPAA had any contacts with Finnish authorities [1].

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen which was debuted at CodeCon 2002. BitTorrent allows many people to download one file at fast speeds. It does this by having downloaders swap portions of a file with one another, instead of downloading from a single centralised server or individual. It is particularly suited to quickly distributing new files to a large number of users.

eDonkey2000 is a peer-to-peer file sharing application developed by MetaMachine, using the Multisource File Transfer Protocol. eDonkey network encourages permanent sharing of files, ensuring good long-term availability, but is not as effective as BitTorrent in quickly spreading new releases.

Friday, March 10, 2006

On February 8, the same day Super Size Me opened in Prague, a Czech film company’s volunteer known as Karel Gustav Bozan began a 1 month diet of Czech pub food and beer in a Czech version called “Super Spek Me”; which translates loosely as “Super Flab Me”.

Zuzana Pudilova of Aerofilms described the volunteer at that time: “He is a well-built man between 45 and 50. He is almost 2 metres tall, he is not exactly thin but until now he has had quite a healthy lifestyle.”

Karel ate typical Czech pub food for an entire month with three rules: no vegetables or fresh fruit (unless they came with a meal) no exercise, and lots of beer.

Karel’s menu consisted entirely of typical Czech dishes. Obesity therapist, Iva Malkova, had warned at the beginning of the project: “People in the Czech Republic eat much more fat, especially animal fat than is recommended.” Pub meals in the Czech Republic often consist of such fatty items as goose with dumplings or sausages.

Yesterday the results were announced; Karel lost six kilos, his cholesterol went down and so did his liver enzymes, triglyceride and uric acid levels. His blood pressure did not change. At his interview with Radio Prague he said: “I feel good, great! The food was varied and there were even enough greens in the garnish. As for beer, I tried to alternate brands but I always settled it with Pilsner. I liked the experiment, it was all paid for by the distributor, Aerofilms. I would do it again, maybe they will propose it to me!”

Zuzana Pudilova of Aerofilms said: “The result of the experiment is surprising – both for us and the experts who monitored it. The medical report says our volunteer has lost weight and his blood sugar has dropped. So we have come to the conclusion that fatty Czech pub grub is not all that bad for you – which I guess wasn’t meant to be the result of the experiment at all.”

Saturday, July 17, 2010

A car bomb that exploded at about 20:00 MDT Thursday (01:00 Friday UTC) in a violent area of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico killed several people and injured more.

Police spokesman Jacinto Seguro said Friday that Mexican federal police received a call that an officer was dead. Seguro went on to say, “When they went to check the car, there was a dead body in there, dressed up like a police officer, but it wasn’t one of ours. They put him in a civilian car but dressed him up in a municipal police uniform. That’s when the bomb went off. It’s like an act of terrorism.”

Federal police spokesman Ramon Salinas said the blast killed two officers, a paramedic, and one civilian, although Mayor Jose Reyes said that only three died. At least six others were injured, although reports have said the total injured may be as high as sixteen. Four remain in the hospital, including three paramedics and one civilian.

Mexican authorities say it was a car bomb, but counter-terrorism experts are still unsure as to what caused the vehicle to explode. Intelligence expert Fred Burton said, “For this to be an improvised grenade attack, in some capacity, it doesn’t surprise me.”

The Juárez Cartel, one of the two drug-traffickers in the area, claimed responsibility for the bombing in a graffiti message. “We have more car bombs,” the graffiti said.

Ciudad Juárez has a history for trafficking drugs to the United States, especially into Texas.

Before the explosion, the police arrested a suspected leader of the Juarez cartel, Jesus Armando Acosta Guerrero.

This year more than 7,000 people have died as a result of drug-related violence in Mexico since this year began. Attorney General Arturo Chavez on Friday said nearly 25,000 people have died in the last three and a half year period.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

As the Hong Kong legislative election approaches, six candidates considered to be in the pan-democracy camp suspended their campaigns on Friday. They were performing poorly in public opinion polls, and encouraged supporters to vote for other pan-democracy candidates instead.

The candidates suspending their campaigns were Sumly Chan from the Civic Party, Kalvin Ho Kai-ming from the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood, Suzanne Wu from the Labour Party, and independents Andy Chui, Paul Zimmerman, and Clarice Cheung.

Sumly Chan from the Civic Party and Kalvin Ho Kai-ming from the Association for Democracy and People’s Livelihood were running for the District Council (Second) functional constituency, commonly referred as “Super District Council” seats. Both of them suggested their supporters vote for pan-democratic candidates with a higher likelihood of winning, to continue the pan-democrats’ majority in the “Super District Council” seats. Kalvin Ho Kai-ming asked voters to choose a candidate with similar stance and ideology to his own party’s.

The four other candidates were all running for geographical constituencies. Both Andy Chui and Paul Zimmerman were running for the Hong Kong Island constituency, Labour Party chairwoman Suzanne Wu was running for the Kowloon East constituency, and independent Clarice Cheung was running for the New Territories West constituency. Zimmerman recommended supporters vote for Demosisto’s Nathan Law instead.

All of these candidates performed poorly in the public opinion polls. The 2016 Hong Kong legislative election is to be held on Sunday. It elects 70 legislators to the Legislative Council.