Brain-Damaged UK Victims of Swine Flu Vaccine to Get £60 Million Compensation
April 22nd, 2015Via: IB Times:
Patients who suffered brain damage as a result of taking a swine flu vaccine are to receive multi-million-pound payouts from the UK government.
The government is expected to receive a bill of approximately £60 million, with each of the 60 victims expected to receive about £1 million each.
Peter Todd, a lawyer who represented many of the claimants, told the Sunday Times: “There has never been a case like this before. The victims of this vaccine have an incurable and lifelong condition and will require extensive medication.”
Following the swine flu outbreak of 2009, about 60 million people, most of them children, received the vaccine.
It was subsequently revealed that the vaccine, Pandemrix, can cause narcolepsy and cataplexy in about one in 16,000 people, and many more are expected to come forward with the symptoms.
Across Europe, more than 800 children are so far known to have been made ill by the vaccine.
FBI Admits Flaws in Hair Analysis Over Decades
April 20th, 2015Via: Washington Post:
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
Walmart Raises Suspicions After Closing 5 Stores In Same Day For “Plumbing” Problems
April 20th, 2015Via: Consumerist:
There are thousands of Walmarts in the U.S., so the fact that five of them were temporarily shut down all on the same day, all for the same reason, and all for the same estimated amount of time, may be statistically insignificant. But some workers and city officials are raising questions about what’s actually behind these six-month shutterings.
The five stores — two in Texas, one in California, one in Oklahoma, and another in Florida — were all closed on Monday without advance notice to shoppers or the thousands of affected employees. At each of the stores, the reason given for the closures — which are estimated to last upwards of six months — was problems with plumbing.
The Machines Are Coming
April 19th, 2015Via: New York Times:
THE machine hums along, quietly scanning the slides, generating Pap smear diagnostics, just the way a college-educated, well-compensated lab technician might.
A robot with emotion-detection software interviews visitors to the United States at the border. In field tests, this eerily named “embodied avatar kiosk” does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation. Emotional-processing software has gotten so good that ad companies are looking into “mood-targeted” advertising, and the government of Dubai wants to use it to scan all its closed-circuit TV feeds.
Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs.
Not just low-wage jobs, either.
Feds Say Cannabis Is Not Medicine While Holding The Patent on Cannabis as Medicine
April 19th, 2015U.S. Patent 6630507: Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants
Via: Ben Swann:
Iris Scanner Identifies a Person 40 Feet Away
April 18th, 2015Via: Discovery:
The CMU team recently posted a video successfully testing the system in a typical traffic stop scenario. Using the long-range iris scanner, the system was able to identify the driver of a vehicle by capturing an image of the eye via the side-view mirror.
What Microsoft Was for PCs, This Company Hopes to Be for Drones
April 16th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
Microsoft’s Windows operating system had a vital role in turning the personal computer into a ubiquitous technology. Jonathan Downey hopes his company Airware will play a similar part in the development of commercial drones.
The startup today launched a control system for drone makers to bundle with their small aircraft. It is intended to speed up the development of drone hardware and services that rely on drones, since it would free manufacturers or their customers from having to develop their own autopilots or flight planning software. Other companies will be able to build additional software to run on top of Airware’s system, adding features such as data collection options for a particular industry.
New Zealand: Grid Tie Solar System Deals for April-May
April 16th, 2015For readers in NZ:
The solar power company that I work for is discounting grid tie systems until 30 May 2015.
I got an email from the CEO last night. It’s time for us to grab more market share.
In addition to discounts on the hardware, you won’t have to pay:
* The distributed generation application fee for the lines company ($200)
* The final electrical inspection fee ($150)
* The transport fee (for systems outside of Auckland, could be up to $300)
The prices below include GST and installation on iron/coloursteel or decramastic roof types. The only additional cost would be for the import/export meter, which your electricity retailer will install. The costs vary depending on the retailer, but expect to pay between $85 and $200.
Trina Honey – Enphase Systems
1.5kW system $6,495
6 x 260W Trina Honey panels
6 Enphase M250 micro inverters
Enphase Envoy Communications Gateway
2kW system $7,795
8 x 260W Trina Honey panels
8 Enphase M250 micro inverters
Enphase Envoy Communications Gateway
3kW system $9,995
12 x 260W Trina Honey panels
12 Enphase M250 micro inverters
Enphase Envoy Communications Gateway
4kW system $14,750
16 x 260W Trina Honey panels
16 Enphase M250 micro inverters
Enphase Envoy Communications Gateway
5kW system $17,995
20 x 260W Trina Honey panels
20 Enphase M250 micro inverters
Enphase Envoy Communications Gateway
I definitely suggest Enphase micros as the way to go for power conversion (watch this), but if your budget is more constrained, we’re also doing deals on systems using Zeversolar string inverters.
Trina Honey – Zeversolar Systems
1.5kW system $5,995
6 x 260W Trina Honey panels
2kW Zeversolar inverter
2kW system $6,495
8 x 260W Trina Honey panels
3kW Zeversolar inverter
3kW system $9,495
12 x 260W Trina Honey panels
3kW Zeversolar inverter
4kW system $11,795
16 x 260W Trina Honey panels
5kW Zeversolar inverter
5kW Package $14,500
20 x 260W Trina Honey panels
5kW Zeversolar inverter
Newcastle: Inside Britain’s Busiest Food Bank
April 16th, 2015Via: Vice:
Since the coalition came to power in 2010, food poverty in Britain has risen dramatically. For those struggling to exist because of low pay, zero-hour contacts or delayed benefit payments, food banks aren’t just helpful – they’re a lifeline. They’ve also been one of the key points of contention in the build up to the imminent general election.
It’s not hard to see why. Year on year, the numbers of people turning to food banks have continued to rise. There are no government stats, but the Trussell Trust, which runs more than 430 food banks in the UK and is the only source of routinely collected data from the last decade, says 913,138 people were given food parcels by its volunteers last year – an annual increase of nearly 300 percent.
In Shy Bairns Get Nowt, VICE heads to Newcastle to go inside one of the busiest food banks in Britain, where food is being distributed for free to over 1000 people a week. We meet the dedicated volunteers and the locals for whom poverty has become a part of everyday life after decades of industrial decline and years of austerity cuts. Inevitably, in such a situation, the system will occasionally falter.
61-Year-Old Mailman Lands Gyrocopter on Capital Lawn to Bring Attention to Political Corruption
April 15th, 2015This incident is only hours old and media are already starting the character assassination routine on Doug Hughes. I haven’t looked into the message yet in detail, but here’s the Civilist Papers website in case you want to look at it without the media spin treatment:
Via: Tampa Bay Times:
Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Ruskin, told his friends he was going to do it. He was going to fly a gyrocopter through protected airspace and put it down on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, then try to deliver 535 letters of protest to 535 members of Congress.
The stunt seemed so outlandish that not even his closest friend thought he would pull it off.
“My biggest fear was he was going to get killed,” said Mike Shanahan, 65, of Apollo Beach, who works with Hughes for the Postal Service.
After 21/2 years of planning, Hughes came hovering low over the buildings of northeast D.C. about 1:20 p.m., like a distant bird. He rounded the Washington Monument a few minutes later, flew straight up the expanse of the National Mall and brought his small craft down right in front of the Capitol, where he was quickly surrounded by police and surrendered without incident.
The flight stunned police, Secret Service and witnesses. Authorities briefly shut down the Capitol as a security measure. The incident brought out dozens of reporters and cameras from national media outlets — exactly what Hughes had hoped for. Hughes, who sees himself as a sort of showman patriot, a mix of Paul Revere and P.T. Barnum, wanted to do something so big and brazen that it would hijack the news cycle and turn America’s attention toward his pet issue: campaign finance reform.
“No sane person would do what I’m doing,” Hughes told the Tampa Bay Times in the weeks before he took flight. He was doing it, he said, because the United States is “heading full-throttle toward a breakdown.”
“There’s no question that we need government, but we don’t have to accept that it’s a corrupt government that sells out to the highest bidder,” Hughes said.
