A doctor and two nurses were arrested for killing four patients in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, investigators said on Tuesday. An arrest warrant filed on Monday charged that the doctor and nurses administered lethal doses of morphine and another drug to patients at Memorial Medical Centre.
Mickey Spillane, the crime novelist who created the tough-as-nails detective Mike Hammer, died on Monday at 88 at his home in South Carolina, said a mortuary employee. ”He died today,” said Josh Campbell of Goldfinch Funeral Home in Murrells Inlet in the south-eastern United States, without giving a cause of death.
Technology that helps airlines keep track of luggage and sounds an alarm when a shoplifter tries to leave the store may be able to stop surgeons from losing a sponge inside a patient, a study said on Monday. An earlier study found that medical personnel left foreign objects, most often sponges, inside a patient’s body in one out of every 10 000 surgeries.
What are you complaining about? If you’re a New Yorker, it’s often about noise and trash and occasionally about politics or morals. Those are some of the concerns expressed over the past 300 years by citizens writing to their mayor, as unearthed by an artist who mined the city’s archives to create the New York City Museum of Complaint.
A federal judge said that evidence favours a coalition of entertainment companies in their copyright infringement case against a distributor of online file-sharing software. United States District Judge Stephen Wilson made the statement on Monday during a hearing in the landmark case against the StreamCast firm behind the Morpheus file-swapping software.
The New York Times plans to shrink the size of its pages in 2008, making them about 4cm narrower, the newspaper reported in Tuesday’s edition. The newspaper also plans to cut 1Â 050 jobs, including 800 positions at a New Jersey printing plant whose workload will shift to another in New York City.
Space shuttle Discovery made a smooth landing in Florida on Monday, completing a 13-day mission considered critical for the United States space programme’s recovery from the 2003 Columbia disaster. The orbiter landed on schedule under overcast skies at the Kennedy Space Centre at 1.14pm GMT.
The New York Times on Friday received a letter containing a suspicious white powder and a copy of a recent editorial in which the paper defended its coverage of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism programmes. The powder incident raised fears of a repeat of a series of anthrax attacks in the United States, which started one week after the September 11 attacks in 2001.
Ralph Ginzburg, a scandalous editor and publisher of Eros, the magazine ”of sexual candour”, who was convicted in the 1960s for sending it through the mail, has died of cancer, media reports said on Friday. Ginzburg died on Thursday at the age of 76 in New York.
Comedian Red Buttons, winner of a best-supporting-role Oscar for <i>Sayonara</i> (1958) with Marlon Brando, died in Los Angeles on Thursday at 87, his spokesperson said. Buttons, whose real name was Aaron Chwatt, died of circulation problems that he had suffered from for several years.
World-renowned mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has died in the American state of New Mexico after a years-long battle with breast cancer, opera officials said there on Saturday. Lieberson was known internationally as a captivating "arch-maverick" of an opera singer.
Meerkats actively teach their young how to catch and eat their prey, British researchers said in a study that is one of the first to prove that animals show such complex behaviour. While animals are known to learn from one another by watching, the team at Britain’s University of Cambridge said they had demonstrated that the animals actually teach, as defined by clear principles.
The headbutt: it’s the new butt of internet jokes. As swiftly as a speeding shot on goal, riffs on Zinedine Zidane’s infamous moment of soccer rage have invaded cyberspace. Though fans across the world are clearly divided on whether the French star deserves condemnation or sympathy for headbutting Italy’s Marco Materazzi, the web has been typically merciless.
Elite cyclist Floyd Landis has Tour de France fans and even many physicians stumped. How can a guy whose hip is falling apart hop on a bike, let alone be a contender in this most grueling challenge? His degenerating condition has crumbled the ball of his hip joint so that it no longer fits neatly into the socket, his doctor says.
Microsoft on Wednesday was calling on users of its Windows and Office 2000 software to install security patches that prevent hackers from taking over their computers. The Redmond, Washington, software giant also made available monthly installments engineered to remove malware.
Yahoo! and Microsoft released software on Wednesday that built a bridge between their previously exclusive online instant messaging (IM) systems. The move fulfilled a promise the United States internet titans made late last year and marked the first time rival global messaging service providers arranged to co-mingle members.
It costs a pretty penny to mint one United States cent. With the prices of zinc and copper going through the roof, the smallest US denomination is now worth more as a commodity than a currency, prompting Americans to wonder whether they should drop the little coin with Abraham Lincoln on its face down the well for good.
The <i>MySpace</i> website deemed a virtual clubhouse where teenagers bare details of their lives has eclipsed internet oldster <i>Yahoo!</i> as the most popular website in the United States, a research firm said on Tuesday. Yahoo! rejected the claim as "misleading" because it ranked the search engine’s domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.
More and more United States police dogs are enjoying similar protection to their human partners in fighting crime. The latest group are the dogs of one Southern California town who will be strutting the streets this week with the new bulletproof vests. Prompted by the shooting death of a police dog last year, an anonymous donor in Glendale, gave funds to bulletproof the four dogs of his community’s K-9 unit.
A Silicon Valley judge is being asked to stop an aviation designer from gabbing about a plan by high-flying Google’s founders to convert a wide-body passenger jet into a globe-ranging party plane. Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Joseph Huber scheduled an August 7 hearing to resolve the dispute.
New York authorities are investigating whether a doctor who survived the explosion of a four-storey home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Monday might have caused the blast rather than sell the home as part of a divorce judgement in his ex-wife’s favour.
Daniel Libeskind has had his fingers badly burned by the acrimonious project to rebuild the World Trade Center site, but the Ground Zero architect remains convinced his vision will be realised. Since his master plan was chosen from an international field in February 2003, Libeskind has been forced to watch as major elements of his blueprint have been radically modified or taken out of his hands altogether.
Two astronauts floated out of the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday to repair equipment crucial for the completion of the orbiting laboratory. Astronauts Mike Fossum and Piers Sellers, who arrived at the ISS last week aboard the Discovery shuttle with five other colleagues, started the second of three planned spacewalks.
As competition between Boeing and European aviation rival Airbus heats up, the two groups may see a new dogfight over the issue of government subsidies, analysts say. The prospect of a new political row is looming as Boeing is gaining on Airbus due to the success of its 787 ”Dreamliner” programme.
Intel’s attempt to stanch the loss of market share to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), its smaller rival in the computer microprocessor business, appears to be working and may allow it to gain lost ground over the next six months. AMD on Thursday warned second-quarter revenue would be about .22-billion, or about 9% below the previous period.
The FBI uncovered a plot to bomb New York’s Holland Tunnel, subways and other tunnels by Muslim extremists, one of whom has been arrested in Beirut, The Daily News reported on Friday. The daily said the terrorists hoped to flood lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Online search giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are not doing enough to combat fraud that cost United States advertisers $800-million last year, a study released on Wednesday claimed. "Pay-per-click" advertising is a core revenue source for search engines and has come under attack by those concerned about fraud.
International companies and local elites in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are pocketing revenues from copper and cobalt production instead of sharing it with local communities or spending it to reduce poverty, a watchdog group charged this week.
Former Enron chairperson and chief executive Kenneth Lay, awaiting sentencing after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges, has died, United States media reported on Wednesday. ”Ken Lay passed away early this morning in Aspen,” said a family statement read out on CNN.
The undisputed king of the world competitive-eating circuit, Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi, retained his title on Tuesday, wolfing down a world-record 53-and-three-quarters hot dogs in just 12 minutes. The 28-year-old "gurgitator" from Nagano, Japan, won the coveted Mustard Yellow Belt for the sixth successive year.
The White House on Monday unveiled plans to sell Pakistan up to 36 F-16 fighters in a deal that could total -billion and which drew an unhappy response from United States ally India. Washington had blocked the sale of F-16s to Pakistan for 15 years to protest its nuclear weapons programme, but gave the green light in March 2005 to reward the South Asian ally for its help in the ”war on terror”.
The United States government is stepping in to wash potty mouths and clothe exposed bodies on the national airwaves, with new fines that increase penalties tenfold for violating decency standards. The new measures, signed into law in mid-June by President George Bush, culminate years of pressure from religious conservative groups to ”clean up” the airwaves.