Monday, May 29, 2017

Saturday morning, 35-year-old Portland, Oregon man Jeremy Christian was arrested and taken to the Multnomah County Detention Center on charges including murder, attempted murder and intimidation after verbally harassing two young women on a train and then attacking three men with a knife.

An official statement from the Portland Police Bureau said Christian “was on the MAX train yelling various remarks that would be best characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions. At least two of the victims attempted to intervene with the suspect and calm him down. The suspect attacked the men, stabbing three, before leaving the train.” According to witnesses, Christian approached 16-year-old Destinee Mangum and a Muslim friend of hers who was wearing a Muslim headdress. Of the three men who were attacked, one died on the train, another was pronounced dead later at a hospital, and a third is still alive.

“He told us to go back to Saudi Arabia and he told us we shouldn’t be here, to get out of his country,” Mangum told KPTV on Saturday. “He was just telling us that we basically weren’t anything and that we should kill ourselves.” Mangum and her friend then changed seats to avoid Christian. “This white male from the back of us was like he’s talking to you guys? You guys can’t disrespect these young ladies like that. Then they just all started arguing.” She said Christian began attacking people just as Mangum and her friend got off the train. “[I]t was just blood everywhere and we just started running for our lives.”

“[T]hey lost their lives because of me and my friend, and the way we look[…] I just want to say thank you to them and their family, and that I appreciate them,” said Mangum. “Without them, we probably would be dead right now.”

The two men who died were Ricky John Best, age 53, and Taliesin Myddrin Namkai-Meche, 23. The third knife victim, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, 21, was still hospitalized as of today. Best, who served 23 years in the U.S. Army, left behind four children. Namkai-Meche graduated from Reed College with a degree in economics and was working as an intern. Fletcher, who has disclosed publicly he is on the autism spectrum, was profiled by Venture in 2015 for his participation in a Portland poetry slam. At that time, Fletcher disclosed he had been institutionalized for “erratic anger” during middle school.

Christian has come to the attention of police before. He was convicted of robbery and kidnapping in 2002. On April 29, he showed up to a right-wing free speech march armed with a baseball bat and threatened counter-protesters. He was wearing a U.S. flag like a cape, shouting racial epithets and making the Nazi salute. The police took away his bat. He attended a number of alt-right rallies and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Christian has promoted white supremacist views on the Internet.

The attack took place the day before the beginning of the Muslim holy season, Ramadan. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has asked U.S. President Donald Trump to condemn the killings.

Friday, April 23, 2010

The oil rig Deepwater Horizon sank yesterday after an explosion Tuesday night that left eleven people missing.

According to an officer from the US Coast Guard, the rig sank sometime in the morning. The rig had caught fire after an explosion of unknown origin occurred two days ago. 115 of the 126 workers on board the time of the explosion have been rescued after evacuating in lifeboats, either by the Coast Guard or from other ships in the area.

The remaining eleven have not been located, although Coast Guard officials have expressed optimism that they are still alive.

The environmental impacts of the explosion and subsequent sinking of the rig are unclear. While up to 13,000 gallons of crude oil per hour has been released from the rig, until now, the effects have been considered minimal, as it had been burned off in the fire. That does have the potential to change, though, according to David Rainey, vice president of the lessor of the rig, BP. The rig, built in 2001 by Hyundai Heavy Industries was owned and operated by Transocean.

The rig was located roughly 50 miles southeast of the coast of Louisiana, and was under lease to BP since 2007. It was completing the construction of a new oil well, and was constructing a layer of cement in the well to reinforce it. This is considered dangerous, as it has the potential to produce an uncontrolled release of case, called a blowout. While the cause of the explosion has yet to be determined, a blowout is considered a possibility.

One survivor of the explosion, who declined to give his name, told the The New York Times that he was lying in bed when the explosion happened. “It caught me by surprise. I’ve been in offshore 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like that,” he recalled.

Stanley Murray, the father of another survivor named Chad, an electrician, said: “My son had just walked off the drill floor.” However, Murray said that a neighbor did not make it in time, adding that his son told him that the missing eleven workers could not have made it out alive. “The eleven that’s [sic] missing, they won’t find them,” Murray said.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample.

If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it may lead the way for the use of robotic surgery in even more delicate procedures, such as heart surgery. Note that this is not a fully automated system, as a human doctor controls the operation via remote control. Laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery is a treatment for obesity.

There were concerns that doctors, in the future, might only be trained in the remote control procedure. Ronald G. Latimer, M.D., of Santa Barbara, CA, warned “The fact that surgeons may have to open the patient or might actually need to revert to standard laparoscopic techniques demands that this basic training be a requirement before a robot is purchased. Robots do malfunction, so a backup system is imperative. We should not be seduced to buy this instrument to train surgeons if they are not able to do the primary operations themselves.”

There are precedents for just such a problem occurring. A previous “new technology”, the electrocardiogram (ECG), has lead to a lack of basic education on the older technology, the stethoscope. As a result, many heart conditions now go undiagnosed, especially in children and others who rarely undergo an ECG procedure.

April 12, 2005

In what authorities call a terrible tragedy, a four-year-old boy was killed Sunday afternoon by the family dog. The Orange County, Virginia USA boy was playing in his back yard while their dog, a Rottweiler–German Shepherd mix, was chained to a stake.

The parents of the boy were home when the mauling occurred, but there were no direct eye witnesses to the attack that took place in the Placid Pines mobile home park. County Sheriff C.G. Feldman said, “We’ll probably never know what provoked the attack.” he told the Associated Press, “The boy had grown up with the dog.”

A CBS6 broadcast said investigators saw no signs of parental negligence, and the boy was their only child. No charges against the parents were filed. The dog was euthanised Monday.

Sheriff Feldman stressed there were no similarities or connection with an earlier case of an elderly woman killed in an attack by 3 pit bulls in the nearby county of Spotsylvania just over a month ago.

Monday, March 8, 2010

The skeletal remains of 14-year-old Escondido, California teenager Amber Dubois were found north of the Pala Indian Reservation Saturday morning, police said. Dubois disappeared February 13, 2009 while walking to Escondido High School. The San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office made a positive identification through dental records.

According to Escondido Police Chief Jim Maher, police were following a lead when they came across the remains. Maher declined to say what the lead was or to describe in detail the site where the remains were found. He also refused to reveal whether John Albert Gardner III, suspect in the murder of Chelsea King, is being linked to the Dubois case.

Amber’s father, Maurice Dubois, made a statement thanking those who had helped in the search for Amber. “The entire community, everybody who helped out with the search effort, and above all our huge volunteer corps, they are the most dedicated people and without them we couldn’t have done anything,” he said.