Witch gives birth in gallows
February 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
A Woman was hung from a tree after being accused of witchcraft - and gave birth as she struggled in the noose.
Pregnant Nolan Yekum and her husband Paul were dragged from their house and hung from a tree by fellow tribesmen who accused them of sorcery after the couple’s neighbor suddenly died.
Their ordeal occurred in Kilip village near Banz in Western Highlands Province, PNG’s newspaper The National reported today.
The woman and her baby girl, her third child, were doing well in Mt Hagen Hospital after two weeks in hiding, the report said.
Her husband said men entered their house in the middle of the night with a rope and tied it round their necks, accusing them of sorcery over their neighbor’s death.
They were dragged outside and hung from a tree, he said.
“We managed to loosen the noose to get our feet on the ground … we were able to free ourselves.
“My wife, who was about seven months pregnant, delivered the baby while struggling to free herself.
“It was a painful experience for me and her,” Mr Yekum said.
He said he pleaded with villagers to wait for his neighbor’s post-postmortem examination and he accused local police of failing to act.
The couple denied practicing sorcery.
Butcher of Bega Graeme Reeves is in hiding
February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Police have launched an investigation into the rogue doctor, known as the Butcher of Bega, who is accused of mutilating and sexually abusing hundreds of women.
As ex-doctor Graeme Reeves, of Castle Hill, went into hiding yesterday, The Daily Telegraph can reveal that other doctors accused of serious misconduct, including removing the wrong breast from a cancer victim, continue to practise.
Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione’s office confirmed allegations made against Graeme Reeves by hundreds of women across the state was likely to be referred to the state crime command.
As many as 500 of his female patients have come forward with complaints that Reeves sexually assaulted them or mutilated their genitals during operations performed when he was illegally practising as an obstetrician on the South Coast.
The police investigation comes 11 years after the state’s medical watchdog was first told Reeves’ treatment of one patient led to her death, in another case a baby died and the life of another patient was endangered.
In 1997, the Professional Standards Committee did not strike him off but banned him from being an obstetrician.
When he was struck off in 2004 by the Medical Tribunal, it was still not for malpractice but for breaching orders he not work as an obstetrician.
The Health Care Complaints Commission, which investigates complaints against doctors, revealed yesterday it had the power to refer doctors to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions but decided against it in the case of Reeves.
“An assessment was made that it was appropriate a complaint be referred to the Medical Board for possible deregistration,” HCCC executive officer Kim Swan said.
Bega MP Andrew Constance has called for an independent inquiry into the complaints procedures against doctors, particularly Reeves who worked at Bega and Pambula Hospitals in 2002.
Since 2003, the HCCC has referred 104 doctors to the Medical Tribunal but only six related to medical mistreatment, an investigation by The Daily Telegraph has revealed. Most involved over-prescription or misuse of drugs or having sex with patients.
Other cases where doctors have continued to practise include a doctor jailed for possessing child pornography, another jailed for having an arsenal of unregistered firearms and one who performed botched circumcisions on babies.
Medical Error Action Group founder Lorraine Long accused the HCCC and Medical Tribunal of taking the easy option.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get a decision that will get rid of the doctor,” she said.
“We advise victims not to go to the Medical Board. Go to us or go to the police. They (the Medical Board) are more worried about their reputation than the patient.”
Pakistan meddling shuts down YouTube
February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The Pakistan Government cut YouTube access to two third’s of the world’s internet users when it tried to block access at home.
The outage, for several hours on Sunday, was caused after the the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) ordered 70 internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site.
The authority did not say what the offensive material was but a PTA official told the Associated Press the ban concerned a trailer for a film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.
The block was meant to cover only only Pakistan but extended to about two-thirds of the global internet population, starting at 5.47pm (AEDT), according to Renesys Corporation, a US firm that keeps track of the internet.
The greatest effect was in Asia, were the outage lasted for up to two hours, Renesys said.
YouTube confirmed the outage yesterday, saying it was caused by a network in Pakistan.
“We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again,” YouTube said.
A YouTube spokeswoman did not say whether the clips that offended Pakistan’s Government had been removed. Several clips with interviews of Wilders were still up on the site yesterday afternoon, the AP said.
The outage comes less than a month after broken fibre-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.
16 year old girl a mother of seven
February 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The case has drawn attention to teen sex education and contraception laws in the Catholic country.
The girl, who was not named because she is a minor, prematurely delivered three girls each weighing 1.7kg last Tuesday, the newspaper La Voz del Interior said, quoting doctors in the central city of Cordoba.
In all she will have seven children celebrating her birthday with her today.
She already has a two-year-old boy born when she was 14, and another set of girl triplets born 18 months ago, when she was 15. She also suffered a miscarriage in the past.
Doctor Jose Oviedo, the deputy director of the maternity hospital in Cordoba, said the mother and her three newborns were all doing well.
The girl’s 49-year-old mother, who lives with her daughter and her growing family in Leones, a town in Cordoba province, said the children had not been planned for and that her daughter had been taking contraceptive injections.
“We didn’t want any more kids. When we found out she was going to have triplets we wanted to die because she doesn’t have work, the father of the kids has abandoned her and I am the only one providing economic support,” she told the newspaper.
She said that, after the last lot of triplets, she had asked for her teen daughter’s fallopian tubes to be tied to prevent further pregnancies.
But doctors refused because Argentine law prohibits such procedures for girls under 21.
Jorge Margherit, the director of the Leones hospital where the young mother went for her first four deliveries, said the contraceptive injections he had provided had obviously failed.
“Despite all we did, she fell pregnant and we were surprised to find out that she was again going to have triplets,” he said.
The girl’s obstetrician, Veronica Torres, said the pregnancy occurred without any form or fertility treatment, making her repeated delivery of triplets “very rare”.
The girl’s frequent pregnancies occurred despite her receiving sex education information, according to social worker Ester Ocampo.
The demands of caring for so many little children prevent the girl from attending school.
But the municipality of Leon has stepped up to provide the young mother with a tract of land, where the provincial government has built a house for the large family. It is currently occupied by the girl’s brother.
Free nappies and electricity are also being supplied, and neighbours are said to be helping out.
Seed ‘doomsday vault’ comes to life
February 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The vault aims to provide humankind with a Noah’s Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Nobel Peace Prize winning environmentalist Wangari Matai will be among the personalities present at the inauguration of the vault, which has been carved into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, just 1000km from the North Pole.
The vault, made up of three spacious cold chambers each measuring 27m by 10m, creates a long trident-shaped tunnel bored into the sandstone and limestone.
It has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all known varieties of the planet’s main food crops, making it possible to re-establish plants if they disappear from their natural environment or are obliterated by major disasters.
“The facility is built to hold twice as many varieties of agricultural crops as we think exist,” explained Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and project mastermind.
“It will not be filled up in my lifetime, nor in my grand children’s lifetime,” he predicted.
Norway has assumed the €6 million ($9.6m) charge for building the vault in its Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, where ironically no crops grow.
Secured behind an airlock door, the three airtight chambers have the capacity to house duplicates of samples from all the world’s more than 1400 existing seed banks.
Many of the more vulnerable seed banks have begun contributing to the “doomsday vault” collection, but some of the world’s biodiversity has already disappeared, with gene vaults in both Iraq and Afghanistan destroyed by war and a seed bank in the Philippines annihilated by a typhoon.
By the time of the inauguration, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault should hold some 250,000 samples, which will remain the property of their countries of origin.
Pakistan and Kenya, both undergoing periods of serious unrest, have sent seed collections, while samples sent from Colombia have been closely scrutinised by police to avoid the project becoming a vehicle for drug trafficking.
“I’ve been working in this field for 30 years and I thought I knew at least all the crops,” Mr Fowler said.
After receiving a list of all the different seeds in the vault, however, “I must admit there are a number of crops I’ve never heard of before”, he said.
That’s a spectacular amount of diversity for Svalbard, where no trees can grow due to the permafrost and where the mercury plummets to an average 14C below zero in winter.
The Norwegian archipelago, which is home to some 2300 people, was selected not despite but because of its inhospitable climate, as well as its remote location far from civil strife.
The seeds of wheat, maize, oats and other crops will be stored at a constant temperature of minus 18C Celsius, and even if the freezer system fails the permafrost will ensure that temperatures never rise above 3.5C below freezing.
“Svalbard really met all the criteria,” Mr Fowler said.
Protected by high walls of fortified concrete, an armored door, a sensor alarm and the native polar bears that roam the region, the “doomsday vault” has been built 130m above current sea level - high enough that it would not flood if the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt entirely due to global warming.
The concrete cocoon has also been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks or a plunging plane, something that could come in handy in light of the 6.4-scale tremor - the biggest earthquake in Norway’s history - registered near the archipelago on Thursday.
