JoAnne Kloppenburg filed a request with Wisconsin election officials yesterday that asks for a full recount of all votes submitted in the April 5 state supreme court election. Kloppenburg was initially thought to have beaten the incumbent, David Prosser, by around 200 votes. Two days after the election, however, the…
Continue reading …A Toronto man has been arrested for the murder of a student who was attacked by an intruder as her boyfriend in Beijing watched helplessly via webcam. Qian Liu, 23, was found dead in her apartment after the boyfriend alerted her friends. Detectives are still seeking a missing webcam, laptop,…
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Always at the heart of a story, even when made to photograph celebrities, this bold film-maker was a truly generous spirit Tim Hetherington arrived at the Big Issue in the late 1990s, fresh out of college and landing in an editorial office that often felt like a dysfunctional college campus itself. We were a small crew – young and green and making the job up as we went along. If Tim thought he was joining the ranks of some idealistic guerrilla army (and I think, initially, that is exactly what he thought), he was too good natured – too abidingly generous of spirit – to let his disappointment show. He was our staff reporter, rolling into the office with his big voice booming and his camera bags clattering. He had been living in squats and sported clotted dreadlocks and comfort clothes (sweatshirts, tracky bottoms) that he wore until they literally rotted off his body. Some of my colleagues were dismayed by this. “He sat opposite me on the tube,” one reported in a scandalised whisper. “Legs apart, trousers all torn at the crotch. And he wasn’t wearing any pants!” Tim’s pictures were extraordinary: rigorous, alive and shot on the fly. We sent him to snap homeless shelters and demonstrations, dockers’ strikes and boxing gyms. Sometimes we would send him to photograph celebrities, too – an indignity he weathered with pained good humour. He couldn’t quite see the point of it. Why photograph celebrities when there were so many proper stories playing out right now, under our very noses? Tim Hetherington finally moved on from the Big Issue. He cut his dreads and bought a suit. He went to war zones, outraged then Liberian president Charles Taylor and found himself recognised as one of the finest photojournalists on the planet. But when I last saw him, in October, he was reassuringly just the same. His intense professionalism always went hand-in-hand with a childlike wonder at a world that never ceased to spark his interest. It is perhaps the fate of all great photographers that they will eventually cross the camera line and start being photographed themselves. Prior to that last, gut-wrenching image that reared up on BBC News last night, the final photo I saw of Tim was taken at the annual Oscar nominees’ lunch in February. Tim had been shortlisted for his devastating war documentary Restrepo , and this involved him rubbing shoulders with 150-odd Hollywood stars and industry players. Having once had to suffer photographing film celebrities, he had somehow conspired to become one himself. The nominees had been arranged in rows and gathered around an oversized Oscar statue. Helena Bonham Carter sat far out on the wings. Colin Firth and Mark Ruffalo perched up in the gods. And there, bang in the centre, right by the statue stood our old staff photographer – a winner before the envelope was opened. It was a position that seemed to reflect how Hetherington lived his life: in the thick of things, at the heart of the matter, honouring the Robert Capa dictum that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”. He was never one to sit out on the sidelines. Tim Hetherington War reporting Documentary Photography Libya Middle East Xan Brooks guardian.co.uk
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Sunshine predicted for bumper Easter bank holiday weekend, with temperatures predicted to soar past Corfu and Barcelona The UK’s bonus holiday – linking Easter, the royal wedding and May Day for nearly a fortnight’s break – has started, with scores of extra flights leaving for supposed hotspots overseas. But many of the long-booked trips will be landing in cooler climates, with pullovers a wise precaution in Corfu and Barcelona, while T-shirt weather continues across the British Isles. The cooler temperatures along the north Mediterranean coast will see London comfortably hotter at 24C (75F) than Barcelona at 16C and Corfu at 17C . In the UK, roads to the coast are getting busier, with the Meteorological Office confident that the warm, calm spell will continue well into next week. The Highways Agency announced the suspension of roadworks at many major sites to help holiday traffic flow, although essential repairs will continue on parts of the M1 and M25. The fire-damaged stretch of the M1 between junctions one and four in London has fully reopened. Others on the move include bats, which have taken to using canals as a seasonal corridor in the warmth, according to a report from British Waterways, and thousands of browntail moth caterpillars, which have spun sticky canopies of cocoons on Canvey island, in Essex, to pupate earlier than usual. The sunshine will also illuminate religious events, led by the Queen’s Maundy money service at Westminster Abbey. Her distribution of 85 coins to 85 men and 85 women, in memory of Christ washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, coincided with her 85th birthday. Had the calendar fallen a day earlier, two “deserving pensioners”, chosen for their record of community and church work, would have missed out. Meanwhile in Manchester, Oldham, Bolton and Bury, bishops and other clergy offered free shoe-shines in local shopping malls, in the Maundy tradition. Easter’s many secular attractions will be joined on Saturday by one of the archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu’s characteristic initiatives, a public baptism by total immersion in a tank outside the city’s ancient Minster cathedral. Among 19 recruits from all denominations is Pentecostalist Lovely-Anna Louise Belfon-Kaaba, 23, a student at York University. She said: “I feel so lucky and proud to be publicly declaring my love, trust and faith for Jesus at this special time of the year.” Network Rail is optimistic about smoother journeys than last Easter, with less engineering work over the holiday and an estimated 18% more trains running. There will be disruption, however, on the West Coast line in north-west England, the Great Western line and at Liverpool Street station in London, where essential repairs and modernisation need the quieter holiday period to get work done. Rail services in Scotland have been disrupted by a trackside fire, which closed the line between Edinburgh and Glasgow as well as the line between Falkirk Grahamston and Cumbernauld. Holidaymakers travelling overseas this Easter are expected to top 2 million, in spite of the recession and the balmy climate in the UK, with Amsterdam, Dublin, Paris and Rome the favourite European destinations and New York topping long-haul bookings. Visa Europe said the royal wedding appeared to have led to a 104% rise in flight bookings out of the country next week, although a 244% increase in arrivals from overseas will more than compensate. VisitEngland said bookings suggested that just over a quarter of UK adults plan a trip involving at least one overnight stay in their own country over the triple-holiday period. National Express is predicting a bank holiday bonanza for its coaches, with services between London and 67 other centres laid on for the royal wedding. Bored visitors to the UK seaside might like to help remedy statistics released by the Marine Conservation Society, which show that litter on beaches increased by 3% last year. Weather London Transport Royal wedding Easter Martin Wainwright guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …If he were alive today, Johnny Cash might be surprised to learn that San Quentin did some good. Inmates from the California prison’s fire department rescued a man and woman whose boat capsized in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay, reports CNN . The woman, who was wearing a life…
Continue reading …A pipe bomb and two propane tanks have been found near a fire at a suburban Denver mall on the anniversary of the massacre at nearly Columbine High School. “The fact that has happened 12 years later near the school and with similar devices is very disturbing,” said a sheriff’s…
Continue reading …A Singapore man who went to a rooftop garden for a cigarette ended up saving a newborn’s life. The retired 60-year-old smoker heard soft mewing noises coming from nearby bushes and discovered a newborn baby buried just beneath the surface, reports the Straits Times . A plastic bag was wrapped around…
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A judge has granted an injunction on the grounds that revelations of a couple’s affair could harm the children involved I wasn’t planning to write about privacy again this week, but just when you think the coast is clear another contentious case comes speeding along the injunction superhighway. This week the court of appeal brings us the “Shhh. Not in Front of the Children Order”. Children, it turns out, can be the new passport to privacy. Don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to the decision in ETK v News Group Newspapers to stop the News of the World naming the man and woman, both married to other people, who had an affair when working together in the entertainment industry (as the judgment tantalisingly puts it). I do worry, however, about how the appeal judges got there. The News of the World argued that there was a public interest in discussing whether the affair was the true reason “X” (not her real name) was dispensed with by her employer. The court of appeal disagreed. Although the newspaper maintained that the relationship was not confidential because the pair’s co-workers knew about it, the appeal court said that was not enough to put it in the public domain. The case could have been won or lost on an examination of those facts alone, weighing, as the law requires, the right to privacy against freedom of expression, but the court of appeal decided to throw children into the balance on the side of the man seeking the injunction. The children were “bound to be harmed by immediate publicity”, said Lord Justice Ward, because it would undermine the family as a whole and “because the playground is a cruel place where the bullies feed on personal discomfort and embarrassment”. These things may be true, but was the court of appeal right to decide that the harmful effect of disclosure on children should “tip the balance” in favour of injuncting a newspaper? Adopting this approach, the court said that the rights of children to be taken into consideration when an injunction is sought are not confined to their article 8 (privacy) rights, but include the duty of the court, under international law and various international human rights documents, to treat the bests interests of the children as paramount when making any decision concerning them. In other words, the court of appeal treated the application for an injunction as an application concerning children. There are problems with viewing privacy through the prism of child-centred decision-making. Despite Lord Justice Ward’s protestations to the contrary, this case means that children are likely to become the trump card in injunctive proceedings: if an application for an injunction is going to be treated as an application concerning children, it is difficult to see how the effect on them will not frequently (if not always) “tip the balance”. More importantly, perhaps, it creates a two-tier right to a private life, which places privacy rights of people who have children above those who don’t. That looks like discrimination to me. Children Media law Privacy Siobhain Butterworth guardian.co.uk
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This Easter break is expected to be one of the busiest on the roads and railways for several years, as millions take full advantage of the four-day holiday
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Dr Patrick Degenaar explains how retinal prosthetics may one day allow humans to see in ultraviolet and infrared, a concept explored in a film unveiled at the Human+ exhibition in Dublin The purpose of retinal prosthetics is to restore sight to patients who have a degenerative condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which affects one in 3,500 people. In the condition, the retina’s light-sensing cells – rods and cones – become inactive and eventually die. Symptoms start with night blindness and worsening tunnel vision, but eventually there is a total loss of sight. In 1992, research showed that the eye’s communication cells – known as retinal ganglion cells – remain intact in patients with retinitis pigmentosa. The discovery opened up the prospect of restoring some form of visual function to these people by controlling the cells’ communication patterns. In the past two decades since the research was published, hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested in retinal prosthesis research. Unfortunately, in contrast to the development of cochlear implants – which restore hearing to the deaf – progress has been slow. The highest resolution prosthesis to date was created by the Retina Implant company based in Tübingen, Germany. Their 1,500-electrode implant has allowed one of their patients, Mika , to distinguish large white characters on a black background. One of the key challenges has been the fundamental architecture of our visual system. The eye is not simply a camera, but the first stage in a system for understanding the world around us. There are around 50 different types of processing neuron in the retina, and more than 20 types of retinal ganglion cell. So the visual cortex of the brain expects to receive the visual world encoded in a “neural song” of many different voices. Precise coding to reproduce this song is hard to achieve with implanted electrodes and the result is that the patient sees phosphenes – flashing dots of light – rather than what we would normally define as sight. Optogenetics , an exciting new gene therapy technique, has the potential to bypass many of these problems and last year was hailed as the ‘Method of the Year’ by the journal Nature. Invented by Ernst Bamberg and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt eight years ago, the technique uses gene therapy to sensitise nerve cells to particular colours of light. Intense pulses of this wavelength of light make the photosensitised nerve cells fire. Neurologists call each firing of a nerve an “action potential” – the currency of information in the nervous system. So in optogenetic retinal prosthetics, rather than performing highly complex surgery to implant electrodes into a patient’s retina, a solution of a special virus would simply be injected to introduce new genes into the nerve cells. The patient would then wear a headset that records and interprets the visual scene and sends coded pulses of light to the retina. As a single pulse of light can generate a single action potential, the information encoded from the visual scene can be much more in tune with the neural song expected by the visual cortex. The OptoNeuro European project I lead at Newcastle University is researching this new approach, and we hope to start human trials towards the middle of this decade. The first optogenetic retinal prostheses will not deliver perfect vision, so we have teamed up with the London-based design practice Superflux to explore how the user’s interaction with this new technology can be made both more practical and meaningful in the coming years. The key objective is to maximise the useful sight restored to the patient while also exploring the unique possibilities of this new, modified – even enhanced – form of vision. In their concept video Song of the Machine (above), Anab Jain, Jon Ardern and Justin Pickard explore the personal and emotional complexities that might arise once this science leaves the lab and begins to touch our daily lives. The title is derived from the idea that in optogenetic retinal prosthetics the body is itself modified to interface with the machine in order to transfer the neural song. Even if resolution is low, the prosthesis could allow users to experience the visual world in wavelengths beyond those perceptible to normal-sighted humans. For example the eye absorbs ultraviolet light before it reaches the retina, and nature finds it difficult to make infrared light receptors. Such constraints do not affect modern camera technology. This “multi-spectral imaging” could be used for purely pragmatic purposes, such as telling at a glance whether an object is too hot to touch. Alternatively, it could create a certain visual poetry by allowing us to experience a flower in all its ultraviolet glory – as seen by honey bees. By exploring these possibilities in our research, it may be possible to improve the experience of the patients who will eventually wear these prosthese, allowing them to enjoy some of the benefits of the new field of augmented reality. Dr Patrick Degenaar is an optogenetics researcher at Newcastle University where he leads the OptoNeuro project Neuroscience Genetics Biology Blindness and visual impairment Disability Health Exhibitions Augmented reality guardian.co.uk
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