Venezuelan president issues theatrical reply to report suggesting he had been rushed to hospital with kidney failure The call came at about 11am. Journalists should come to the presidential palace in Caracas immediately. Hugo Chávez had something to say. When reporters arrived at the Miraflores palace on Thursday they found the Venezuelan president – who had supposedly been rushed to hospital with kidney failure just 48 hours earlier – wearing a bright red tracksuit and clutching a baseball. “I’m fine,” said a distinctly jovial Chávez. “Those who don’t love me and wish me ill, well, bad luck.” It was a typically theatrical riposte to yet another story speculating about his health: a report on Wednesday by the Miami-based El Nuevo Herald newspaper claiming that 57-year-old Chávez had been rushed to hospital with kidney failure the previous day. “I’ve had presidents calling,” Chávez complained of the fallout from the story, which he said had triggered concerned phone calls from other heads of state. “It’s morbid and inhumane. We must stop the speculation. I ask the Venezuelan people to ignore these rumours. If anything happened, I’d be the first person to tell you about any difficulty. Nothing’s happened beyond what’s normal in the treatment process.” Chávez’s hastily arranged appearance before the domestic and international press, came one day after the El Nuevo Herald report about the supposed severity of his illness . The paper had quoted an unidentified source as saying: “He [Chávez] was in a pretty bad overall state.” The source who had supposedly seen Chávez being admitted to a military hospital, went on to tell the paper: “When he arrived, he was pretty serious and that is why he was brought in for emergency care.” Chávez dismissed the reports. “To answer your question [about my health], here I am. I am my answer,” he told the assembled press pack. Peppering his two-hour appearance with sporting metaphors and clutching a baseball for much of the interview, he told reporters: “I had cancer. It was in a ball, contained.” Speculation about Chávez’s health reached fever pitch in June, after he disappeared from the public eye and spent nearly one month out of the country, ruling in absentia, partly from a Cuban hospital bed. Conspiracy theories and speculation that he had fallen into a coma, had a heart-attack or was suffering from lung problems spread rapidly on the internet. Then, in early July, Chávez finally admitted what many had suspected – he was suffering from cancer. Doctors had found “a strange formation in the pelvic region” he said during 15-minute address on television. “I had neglected my health and I was reluctant to have medical checkups. It was a fundamental mistake for a revolutionary.” Since then, Chávez has undergone chemotherapy and shaved his head. He has also vowed to put up a fight in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections. But he has yet to disclose exactly what kind of cancer he is fighting. On Thursday he was scarcely more revealing. After being asked for details of his illness, he simply responded: “What is it you want? Do you want me to get out my tumour, to show you what kind of cancer it is? Well, I won’t. Why do you want to know?” he inquired. “Would you ask your friend that?” Hugo Chávez Venezuela Tom Phillips guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The Onion seems to have registered a rare misfire in the joke department. It set off a scare at the US Capitol this morning with a fake tweet reading, “BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building,” reports the Washington Post . A few others in a similar vein…
Continue reading …Conservatives are tripping over each other in their zeal to attack Warren Buffett, and it’s not hard to see why, writes EJ Dionne in the Washington Post . “Buffett’s sin is that he spoke a truth that conservatives want to keep covered up,” namely that there’s a “bias in the tax…
Continue reading …
Watch the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, transmitted live from Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre The ceremony will begin at 12.30am BST (7.30pm EDT) Founded 20 years ago by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research , the Ig Nobel awards recognise genuine academic research and “honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”. At 7.30pm EDT on Thursday (12.30am on Friday, British Summer Time), this year’s crop of winners will collect their awards in front of a 1,200-strong crowd who will throw paper planes onto the stage as the newly minted laureates make their 60-second acceptance speeches. A flavour of what to expect Last year, psychologists Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest at the University of Amsterdam shared the medicine Ig Nobel for their discovery that breathing difficulties brought on by asthma can be alleviated by repeated rollercoaster rides . The 2010 biology prize went to Gareth Jones at Bristol University and collaborators in China for showing that female fruit bats that performed oral sex on their mates copulated for longer . “It is the first documented case of fellatio by adult animals other than humans to my knowledge, and opens questions about whether female animals can manipulate males via sexual activity, perhaps in this case to improve their chances of successful fertilisation,” Jones told the Guardian . Have you ever thought that your boss is promoting all the wrong people? Show them last year’s management Ig Nobel, awarded to Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania for demonstrating mathematically that companies work more efficiently if staff are promoted at random . Further back in the archives, who can forget the 2006 medicine prize? Francis M Fesmire, Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven showed that hiccups can be cured with digital rectal massage . Apparently a whole range of other treatments – gagging and tongue-pulling manoeuvres, pressing the eyeball, swallowing a teaspoon of granulated sugar, even strong drugs – had failed to work where the massage succeeded. Over two decades and hundreds of prizes, the Ig Nobels have brought the world’s attention to homosexual necrophiliac ducks , an alarm that makes an annoying noise that teenagers can hear but that is inaudible to adults , why woodpeckers don’t get headaches , why dry spaghetti often breaks into more than two pieces when bent , how female malaria mosquitos are attracted equally to the smell of Limburger cheese and the smell of human feet and that dung beetles are actually quite particular about what they eat . This year’s crop of new laureates might want to look to one of their own when out celebrating in Cambridge after the ceremony at Harvard on Thursday night. In 2009, Javier Morales of the National University of Mexico, was awarded the chemistry Ig Nobel for finding a way to turn the national drink, tequila, into diamonds . Thin films of the precious material were produced by heating 80%-proof tequila blanco in a pressure vessel. Something, I’m sure you’ll agree, that demonstrates why the curiosity-driven, blue-skies research celebrated by the Ig Nobels will always come in handy some day. Ig Nobel Prizes Science prizes People in science United States Alok Jha guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
More than 30 firms said to be keen to bid for new contracts as Ken Clarke seeks to improve confidence in alternatives to prison Ministers are preparing for a massive expansion in electronic tagging of offenders, with private security companies being invited to bid for more than £1bn worth of contracts next month. The use of electronic tagging has grown rapidly since it was first used in 1999 by courts in England and Wales to enforce curfews. Now more than 20,000 offenders are monitored by private security firms on any given day. The current eight-year contracts, which are held by G4S and Serco electronic monitoring services, are due to end shortly. The Ministry of Justice says more than 30 companies have expressed an interest in competing for the new contracts when bids are invited this October. Fewer than 3,500 electronic tagging orders were made in 1999, a figure that rose to cover more than 70,000 people last year. It is estimated that more than 450,000 people in England and Wales have spent time electronically tagged over the past decade. The justice secretary, Ken Clarke, is planning a further significant expansion in the use of tagging as part of his drive to improve public confidence in alternatives to prison. His sentencing and punishment bill, which is now before parliament, will give the courts powers to extend the tag curfew limit from 12 hours a day to 16. The bill also proposes doubling the length of a curfew order from six to 12 months. The extension of tagging comes as G4S prepares to take over the Victorian inner city prison at Winson Green, Birmingham, this weekend, the first in the UK to be transferred from the public to private sector. Serco is about to start the first “payment by results” offender services pilot scheme at Doncaster prison with similar schemes to follow at eight more prisons. Plans for the largest-ever wave of jail privatisation with nine public sector prisons being put out to tender this autumn have already been announced. Only last week the justice minister, Lord McNally, warned a Liberal Democrat conference fringe meeting of the danger of a ” semi-monopoly ” developing with the largest security companies, such as G4S and Serco, winning the majority of justice contracts. The main form of tagging used in England and Wales involves the offender wearing a tag around their ankle or wrist which sends a signal back to a monitoring unit at their home address. A text message-style signal is sent to the company’s monitoring centre if the offender breaks the circuit by leaving home during the curfew hours. Tagging is used both as a community penalty and to monitor prisoners released early on home detention curfews. The latest expansion in tagging comes despite official statements that electronic tags have no impact in reducing the reoffending rates of criminals or the number of contractual penalty payments of more than £273,000 over the past four years by G4S and Serco for service failures. “The re-competition [sic] of these contracts offers the market an opportunity of significant scale (based on current spend, the total contract value is likely to be in the region of £1bn),” says the Ministry of Justice in its latest competition strategy document. Ministers hope the new contracts will cut the current unit cost of £1,063 for a 90-day adult curfew and £1,935 for a 120-day juvenile curfew. “The expected reductions in the unit cost of delivery are likely to provide significant opportunities for both savings and service improvement. This will also provide opportunities for greater involvement of small and medium enterprises – in this case, companies offering innovative tagging technology,” says the strategy. Up until now more ambitious uses of electronic tagging, such as satellite tracking and voice verification to monitor an individual’s daily movements, have been limited by the impact of tall buildings on the patchy mobile phone networks the system relies on. The Ministry of Justice has always maintained that tagging provides the courts with a credible alternative to prison. But ministers admitted to MPs two years ago: “Current evidence suggests that electronic monitoring has a neutral effect on reoffending. However, international research does suggest that it can be effective in helping to ensure compliance with other, more rehabilitative, community penalties.” Harry Fletcher of Napo, the probation service union, said he was shocked that tagging had become a £1bn industry: “There is no evidence that tagging has any impact on reducing crime. It is also very expensive, with a 90-day tag costing £1,100 to the taxpayer. That is for an outlay of only £400 to £500 assuming only one call-out to the offender for each order. So there is a huge markup,” he said. Prisons and probation UK criminal justice Kenneth Clarke Alan Travis guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Two nonprofit rights groups are bringing technology to bear on a rebel group that has terrorized Uganda and central Africa for more than two decades. Mashable takes note of a digital mapping service called LRA Crisis Tracker that provides real-time accounts of assaults, kidnappings, and worse committed by the infamous…
Continue reading …Meet the Bridge to Nowhere’s little brother. Alaska is preparing to build a $64 million, 4,500-foot runway on tiny Akun Island, with the federal government footing the vast majority of the bill ($59 million to the state’s $5 million), according to an Alaska Dispatch report spotted by CNN . The…
Continue reading …Abortion opponents are hailing a victory in Mexico, where the nation’s Supreme Court left in place a law in the state of Baja California that declares life begins at conception. But those in favor of abortion rights have hope, notes the Los Angeles Times . Seven of the panel’s 11 justices…
Continue reading …Conventional wisdom states that being an unpaid intern means making an awful lot of coffee, but two such interns decided not to take that sort of treatment lying down. Alex Footman and Eric Glatt are suing Fox Searchlight Pictures over their Black Swan internships, claiming that the production company violated…
Continue reading …