XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 04/19/12

Thursday, 19 April 2012

Woman Hurt During Sex on Work Trip Wins Worker's Comp... -

A WOMAN who was injured while having sex in her hotel room during a work trip is entitled to compensation.
In the Federal Court today Justice John Nicholas ruled that the woman was injured during her “course of employment”.
The woman’s barrister argued that sex was an “ordinary incident of life” in a hotel room, much like showering and sleeping.
The Judge ruled that “if the applicant had been injured while playing a game of cards in her motel room she would be entitled to compensation” and the fact that the woman was engaged in sexual activity rather than some other lawful recreational activity while in her hotel room does not lead to any different result.
The woman, who cannot be named, challenged the rejection of her workers' compensation claim for facial and psychological injuries suffered when a glass light fitting came away from the wall above the bed as she was having sex in November 2007.
The woman in her late thirties was required to travel to a country town by her employer, the Human Relations Section of the Commonwealth Government agency.
She arranged to meet a male friend there who lived in the town. They went to a restaurant for dinner and at about 10pm or 11pm went back to the woman’s motel room where they had sex that resulted in her injury.

The male friend said in his statement at the time that they were "going hard” and he did not know if they bumped the light or it just fell off.

“I think she was on her back when it happened but I was not paying attention because we are rolling around.”

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/business/worker-injured-during-sex-gets-compo/story-e6frfm1i-1226333292525

Drifting fishermen die after luxury cruise liner sails past but doesn't stop -

Drifting fishermen die after luxury cruise liner sails past but doesn't stop -

Dying men on a disabled fishing boat were left drifting, despite the close passage of a huge cruise ship that didn’t stop even after its crew was alerted by anxious passengers who saw frantic signalling from the tiny craft, according to the survivor and those who spotted him.

Birders aboard the Star Princess say they alerted the ship’s officers about the plight of the tiny vessel, but the huge, white-hulled liner never slowed.

Princess Cruises, owned by Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines, said it was “aware of the allegations that Star Princess supposedly passed by a boat in distress that was carrying three Panamanian fishermen on March 10,” in a statement to National Public Radio. “At this time we cannot verify the facts as reported, and we are currently conducting an internal investigation,” the statement added.

But Adrian Vasquez, sole survivor of the drifting boat, has no doubt.

He confirmed the big cruise ship sailed by and identified pictures of his own tiny craft taken by the birders on board the Star Princess.

He said one of his fellow fishermen died hours after the ship passed and the other five days later. He was eventually rescued by Ecuadorians near the Galapagos Islands on March 28 after a month adrift and two weeks after seeing the Star Princess.

The grim sea saga may be another blow to the reputation of Carnival Cruise Lines, the world’s biggest cruise company. One of Carnival’s biggest and newest ships – the Costa Concordia – sank off Italy on Jan. 13 after its captain misjudged a daringly close pass to ‘salute’ Isola del Giglio. More than 30 of the 4,000-plus on board died in the dark and chaos, amidst allegations Capt. Francesco Schettino had abandoned ship early to save himself long before the last passengers.

In February, a fire on board another Carnival ship with more than 1,000 on board, the Costa Allegra, left it powerless and drifting in the sweltering Indian Ocean. Filth and human waste piled up until the ship could be towed by French fishermen to the Seychelles.

Carnival owns multiple cruise lines including Carnival, Costa, Cunard, Holland America, Princess Cruises, Seabourn and P&O.

Last month, on the Star Princess in the Gulf of Panama, birders Jeff Gilligan from Portland, Ore., and Judy Meredeth from Bend, Ore., spotted the drifting fishing vessel with powerful binoculars.

Photos taken by Mr. Gilligan from the Star Princess of the drifting nine-metre fishing boat, named “Fifty Cent', can be seen on Panama-Guide.com, the online English-language news outlet that first reported the story.

“We all watched him for a bit and thought, ‘This guy’s in distress. He’s trying to get our attention,' ” said Ms. Meredith, who told a member of the Princess’s sales staff who, in turn, contacted the ship’s officers. The Princess representative ”called the bridge and I sort of talked through the story,” Ms. Meredith told NPR. “And I was trying to have a sense of urgency in my voice – and tell them that the boat was in distress.”

Mr. Gilligan, who took pictures of 'Fifty Cent,' said: “We expected the ship to turn back or stop or something.”

Instead, the Star Princess continued on its way.

“That’s us,” Mr. Vasquez, 18, said when shown the pictures of ‘Fifty Cent’ taken by the birders. He told Panama-Guide.com: “It was a really big, white ship. I was waving a red T-shirt, and Fernando was waving a bright orange life jacket over his head.” By then, the three had already been drifting for more than a week after the outboard motor failed and were more than 200 kilometres from shore.

The 16-year-old Fernando Osario didn’t survive the month-long ordeal at sea. Oropeces Betancourt, 24, died the night after the close encounter with the Star Princess, according to Mr. Vasquez.

Ms. Meredith said she contacted Princess Cruises for an explanation after the cruise ended.

She said she received the following information: the captain was in contact with a fishing fleet that had asked him to divert slightly to avoid some nets and that after altering course, the fishermen “were waving their shirts because they were thanking the ship.”
Read more -
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/drifting-fishermen-die-after-luxury-cruise-liner-sails-past-but-doesnt-stop/article2407401/

Girl born with no hands wins national penmanship award -

A first-grader who was born without hands has won a national penmanship award, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

Annie Clark, a 7-year-old at Wilson Christian Academy in West Mifflin, Pa., got a trophy and $1,000 as one of two national winners of the Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellent Penmanship from the Zaner-Bloser language arts and reading company.

Annie writes by wedging a pencil between her arms, the same way she feeds herself and even paints her toenails, the newspaper reports.

The national award is one of two given to students with disabilities --- the other went to an Ohio student with a visual impairment.

But no one even knew there was a special category for the disabled until after Annie had won top penmanship honors among all students at her school and the entry was forwarded to the state competition.

Contest organizers, reading a letter accompanying the entry, noted her disability and suggested that she also enter the special category, the newspaper reports.

Read more -
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/04/girl-born-with-no-hands-wins-national-penmanship-awards/1#.T5B3x7NEgxp

Children grow up addicted to online porn sites - 4 out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online -

A 'guinea pig’ generation of children is growing up addicted to hardcore internet pornography, MPs were warned last night.
Four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online while one in three ten-year-olds has seen explicit material, a disturbing cross-party report reveals.
It also cites figures showing that more than a quarter of young patients being treated at a leading private clinic are receiving help for addiction to online pornography.

One appalled MP revealed that her son had told her that swapping hardcore images on memory sticks between pupils at his school is ‘absolutely rife’.
There are fears that the rise of internet pornography is leaving teenagers unable to maintain normal relationships and even increasing their susceptibility to grooming by sexual abusers.

Yesterday the backbench Tory behind the study, Claire Perry, demanded that internet providers offer parents a simple way of filtering out adult content.
Even very young children can accidentally stumble across pornography, the report for the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection said.

Last night Miranda Suit, founder of campaign group Safermedia, told the inquiry: ‘This generation is going through an experiment. No one knows how they will survive this unprecedented assault on their sexual development. They are guinea pigs for the next generation.’
David Cameron told MPs yesterday that he had called technology firms together to offer a ‘choice of blocking all adult and age-restricted content on their home internet’.
But the Prime Minister has been left frustrated by the unwillingness of the major internet service providers to force new customers to ‘opt in’ to adult content as opposed to the current system of ‘opting out’ by installing their own filters.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2131799/Children-grow-addicted-online-porn-sites-Third-10-year-olds-seen-explicit-images.html

"The chicken came first; not the egg." - 'Eggless' chick laid by hen in Sri Lanka -

A Sri Lanka hen has given birth to a chick without an egg, in a new twist on the age-old question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.

The chick is fully formed and healthy, although the mother has died.

The government veterinary officer in the area said he had never seen anything like it before.

PR Yapa, the chief veterinary officer of Welimada, where it took place, examined the hen's carcass.

He found that the fertilised egg had developed within the hen's reproductive system, but stayed inside the hen's body until it hatched.

A post-mortem conducted on the hen's body concluded that it died of internal wounds.

The BBC's Charles Haviland in Colombo says that the story has made headlines in Sri Lanka, with the Sri Lankan Daily Mirror's concluding: "The chicken came first; not the egg."

Read more -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/17769677

US Taxpayer cash spent to get rats coked up, see if they like music of Miles Davis... -

Taxpayers may feel kind of blue when they discover their dollars went to fund a study to determine rats like to bop to the music of Miles Davis while hopped up on cocaine.

The study, which was performed at Albany Medical College, drew jeers from the animal rights group In Defense of Animals and landed it on its top ten list of Real Ridiculous Research.

The research found that sober rats don’t really like music that much. After the silence, the rats liked Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” more than Miles Davis’s iconic jazz tune “Four.”

But when the rats were given doses of cocaine, their tasted shifted and they gravitated toward the jazz.

The studies, which were funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, were aimed at analyzing the links between pharmacology and neurology in drug abuse.

“These experiments... show that your tax dollars and animals’ lives are frivolously wasted on research that adds nothing to medical progress and tells us nothing we care to know — or didn't know already,” In Defense of Animals wrote in its introduction to the list.

Albany Medical College protested its spot on the list of ridiculous research.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to find medications that can help diminish drug cravings in humans,” Jeffrey R. Gordon, spokesman for the medical school, told The Pulse.

The group, which only focused its ire on National Institutes of Health experiments that involved research on animals, had issues with a few other studies, including one about the sex habits of hamsters.

Lehigh and University of Minnesota researchers found that putting hamsters on a diet didn’t increase their appetite for the opposite sex.

The animal rights group dubbed the study another example of wasteful tax dollars spending and “white-coated welfare.”

A Lehigh University spokesperson begged to differ.

"This study is part of a line of research that seeks better understanding of behaviors essential to survival, including seeking food and reproduction,” university spokesman Jordan Reese told Lehighvalleylive.com. “How the brain regulates these behaviors is relevant, for example, to understanding the effects of commonly prescribed drugs, including those used to treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and related drugs used to control appetite.”

Other studies that made the group’s list included the effect of lemon scent on monkey erections, contagious yawning in chimpanzees and the role of single mothers in the prairie vole community.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/rats-cocaine-love-miles-davis-dumb-animal-research-paid-tax-dollars-article-1.1063528#ixzz1sQ6zpibr

US spent millions creating 'Sexpulse,' a Gay website which features sexually-explicit images and games -

The National Institutes of Health has spent millions of dollars over the past decade to fund the construction of an HIV-prevention website that, among other sexually explicit features, includes a graphic image of homosexual sex and a Space Invaders-style interactive game that uses a penis-shaped blaster to shoot down gay epithets.
The grant money went to a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota that created a site called Sexpulse. The goal was to draw in what are termed MISM -- or "men who use the Internet to seek sex with men" -- in order to educate them and ultimately reduce their risk of contracting HIV.
But the site used unorthodox methods to get subjects' attention and keep them interested. The site includes pornographic images of homosexual sex as well as naked and scantily clad men. It includes several risqué interactive features, like the Space Invaders-style arcade game.
The conservative Traditional Values Coalition, which flagged the government-backed research and described it as "gay porn," complains the website and studies are a multimillion-dollar waste.
"We can't spend money on this. America is broke," coalition President Andrea Lafferty said. "People are losing their homes, they're losing their jobs ... and what we're doing is we're funding year after year these cockamamie grants by people at NIH."
NIH records show the government started awarding grants to the Minnesota team beginning in 2001, renewing them almost every year since then. The 2012 grant was valued at more than $680,000; in total, NIH has awarded more than $5 million to the team. The researchers started developing the Sexpulse site in 2005 and continue to work on the project -- the project leader told FoxNews.com that total funding through 2015 is expected to top $7 million.
The values coalition, which frequently complains about NIH spending, is drawing attention to the Sexpulse grants as Congress renews a heated debate over government waste in the wake of the General Services Administration scandal. In that case, an internal report found the agency spent more than $820,000 on a Las Vegas retreat.
"This is a lot more money," Lafferty noted of the NIH funding.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/19/nih-under-fire-for-grants-toward-creation-homoerotic-website/

‘Tidal wave of butterflies’ hits Toronto - the biggest springtime butterfly migration in history -

Butterflies may not grow on trees, but it’s starting to look like they do.

Eastern Canada is in the midst of what’s believed to be the biggest springtime butterfly migration in history. Hundreds of thousands of butterflies have made their way north — many more than usual and much earlier than expected.

While butterfly observers are in a frenzy, others are wondering where they all came from. And with Thursday’s forecasted high of 22 C in Toronto, the new arrivals will be out and about and hard to miss.

“There’s never been anything like this. This is like a tidal wave of butterflies making their way north,” said Jeremy Kerr, a biologist at the University of Ottawa.

Glenn Richardson, president of the Toronto Entomologists’ Association who’s been observing butterflies since the late 1960s, called it “the largest migration that I’ve ever seen.” He estimates the population is 20 times higher than usual.

About 90 per cent of the butterflies are red admirals, easily identified by their dark brown, red and black wing patterns. They are common in Ontario summers, but spend winters in the southeastern U.S.

Abnormally warm weather down south — the U.S. had its hottest March ever — created ideal conditions for the insects to grow and populate. That heat also cued the northern migration.

“Normally what would happen is … they’d hit some really cold zone and they would lose the ability to disperse in that area — they would stop,” said Kerr, who leads the Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research. “But they were hitting temperatures they would expect to find at the end of June, so they just kept going.”

And with strong southern winds earlier this week, the record number of butterflies invaded much sooner than usual. By Tuesday morning they were spread across Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Maxim Larrivée, a postdoctoral fellow working with Kerr, said they have travelled 300 to 400 kilometres per day.

Although it’s difficult to pin down exact numbers, Kerr said there could be millions of butterflies across Eastern Canada. Larrivée said one man found an estimated 20,000 butterflies in the backyard of his London, Ont. home and there are other reports of butterfly-covered trees.

Read more -
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1163931--tidal-wave-of-butterflies-hits-eastern-canada

Newt Gingrich’s Secret Service detail likely costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a day -

Even though by his own estimation he has very little prospect of winning the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich is still likely costing the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars a day with his Secret Service detail on the campaign trail.

Gingrich reportedly requested Secret Service protection in February and was granted a detail in early March. In April 2008, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan told the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee that it was then costing the agency roughly $38,000 a day to service each candidate receiving protection, which was then just Sens. Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton.

A source with knowledge of the inner workings of the Gingrich campaign told The Daily Caller that Gingrich recently had three people on his personal security detail, though sometimes there are “many more.”

“Others on the campaign told me that some of the Secret Service members were even saying it was a waste of time and that he shouldn’t have it,” the source told TheDC. “Staff members thought it was ridiculous too, and just another example of Newt’s arrogance and self-importance.”

In 2008, Arizona Sen. John McCain didn’t request Secret Service protection until late April — months after the point he was considered the presumptive GOP nominee.

The leader of a government waste watchdog group told TheDC that Gingrich should give up his protection because it amounts to a wasteful use of taxpayer money.

“As a former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich should understand better than most how important it is to spend taxpayer dollars wisely,” said David Williams of the Taxpayer Protection Alliance. “Speaker Gingrich needs to give up his taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection to show people that he understands that every tax dollar saved is important.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/19/gingrichs-secret-service-detail-likely-costing-taxpayers-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-a-day/