Police and fire officials are trying to determine why a man set himself on fire in downtown Portland near a fur store that has been the scene of numerous protests.
Portland Fire Bureau Lt. Damon Simmons said Wednesday evening the man died at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. The Multnomah County medical examiner identified him as 26-year-old Daniel Shaull.
Firefighters arrived at the scene shortly after 11 a.m. Wednesday to find a man with serious burns. Simmons says police and bystanders apparently extinguished the flames.
Witnesses told KATU-TV the man was screaming, "There are animals dying! Animals dying!"
Mike Cheema owns a food cart nearby. He says the man tried to run into the building but the door was locked.
A former Massachusetts dentist is accused of placing paper clips instead of stainless steel posts inside the teeth of root canal patients while billing Medicaid for the more expensive parts.
The state attorney general announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted former Fall River dentist Michael Clair last week. The charges include assault and battery, larceny, submitting false claims to Medicaid and illegally prescribing drugs.
Prosecutors say Clair was suspended by Medicaid in 2002. He allegedly hired other dentists for his clinic and filed claims under their numbers between August 2003 and June 2005. He's also accused of illegally prescribing drugs to staffers who returned medications to him.
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Posted by: Fred ||
03/18/2010 00:00 ||
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The thirld world is coming to your neighborhood.
A judge has awarded a San Francisco attorney $7,000 in damages in a rare trial under California's anti-spam law - $1,000 for each unsolicited, misleading commercial e-mail he received.
Daniel Balsam, who started suing spammers even before he graduated from law school in 2008, filed suit against Trancos Inc., a Redwood City advertising company, over a series of ads that showed up in his personal e-mail in-box in 2007.
The "from" line in each e-mail named a nonexistent source - for example, "Your Promotion," "Paid Survey" or "Join Elite." At least one message had a subject line, promising recipients $5 to complete a survey, that the judge described as misleading. None of the advertising e-mails named Trancos, which sent all the messages.
The ads violated California's 2004 anti-spam law, Judge Marie Weiner of San Mateo County Superior Court said in a March 10 ruling. The law prohibits sending an uninvited commercial e-mail from California, or to a California recipient, that misrepresents either the source or the subject.
The federal government has a similar law, but it allows suits only by the government or an Internet service provider and not by individual recipients. California allows suits by consumers and provides damages of $1,000 for each serving of spam, even if, like Balsam, the recipient didn't accept any of the offers and lost no money.
Some anti-spam suits have been tried in small claims courts, but lawyers on both sides of Balsam's case said it appeared to be the first suit by a consumer to go to trial in Superior Court. Weiner presided over the nonjury proceedings in October. "Advertisers who work to hide their identities are violating consumer trust," said Timothy Walton, Balsam's lawyer in the case.
Trancos' lawyer, Robert Nelson, described his client as "a successful, ethical Internet advertising business," and said it would appeal the ruling.
He argued that spam is largely regulated by federal law and that only a consumer who is actually defrauded and suffers losses - which Balsam did not claim - is entitled to sue under state law.
Weiner rejected that argument in her ruling, saying Congress allowed states to prohibit deceptive e-mail headers, subject lines and content. She said Trancos had deliberately sought to "impair a recipient's ability to identify, locate or respond to it as the initiator of the e-mail" and is liable for damages.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/18/2010 00:00 ||
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Fess Parker played the role well. Davey Crocket wasn't born on a mountaintop. He was born in a cabin alongside a creek in a valley that was airable.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
03/18/2010 19:07 Comments ||
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Deacon - and Davey's grandparents were killed by Indians and are buried only a few miles from where you live.
Levi Johnston has been ordered to make interim child support payments of $1,750 per month to the mother of his child, Bristol Palin. The figure is 20 percent of the adjusted annual income of the 19-year-old Johnson as set out in Alaska statute. An annual income about $105,000. Makes you wonder where a 19 year old doofus got that kind of money and whether he'll get it next year.
Bristol Palin, also 19, is the oldest daughter of former Alaska Gov. and GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. The son of Bristol Palin and Johnston, Tripp, was born in December 2008.
The payments for Johnston, based on estimated income of $105,000 are retroactive to May 2009. The payments are slightly lower for January through April 2009 because of Johnston's lower income. Geez, Levi. That sucks, seeing how you're on the verge of being the answer to a trivia question. Oh, well. The p0rn industry's always looking for people...
Palmer Superior Court Judge Judge Kari C. Kristiansen set a trial date in the matter for Sept. 23.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/18/2010 00:00 ||
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A North Korean custom worth serious consideration of importing.
North Korea has executed a ruling party official blamed for a botched currency reform, in a desperate attempt to quell public unrest and stem negative impact on Pyongyang's power succession, a news report said on Thursday. The execution by firing squad in Pyongyang last week of Pak Nam-ki, Labour Party chief for planned economy, was for the crime of "a son of a bourgeois conspiring to infiltrate the ranks of revolutionaries to destroy the national economy," South Korea's Yonhap news agency said, quoting sources.
Posted by: ed ||
03/18/2010 07:33 ||
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Turkey: making friends, influencing people ... Well, at least they're not killing them this time...
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has threatened to expel thousands of illegal Armenian immigrants after American and Swedish lawmakers passed resolutions condemning as genocide the mass killings of Armenians early in the last century.
Turkey, which is predominantly Muslim, warned that the votes could hurt a fragile effort to reconcile with Armenia, which is predominantly Christian, after a century of hostility.
Asked about the votes in an interview with the BBC Turkish service that was broadcast late on Tuesday, Mr. Erdogan said: There are currently 170,000 Armenians living in our country. Only 70,000 of them are Turkish citizens, but we are tolerating the remaining 100,000. If necessary, I may have to tell these 100,000 to go back to their country because they are not my citizens.'
Posted by: Steve White ||
03/18/2010 00:00 ||
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..making room for illegal Turks to return from EUrope.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
03/18/2010 21:22 Comments ||
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All the palaver about racist, threatening tea partiers, and yet it's an anonymous teachers' union member angry about Obama threatening his or her job that pulls out the old "hang 'em in effigy" schtick.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
03/18/2010 21:40 Comments ||
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The link's a gyp - no pictures. :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/18/2010 22:39 Comments ||
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EUROPEAN researchers have taken the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter's invisibility cape after they made an object disappear using a three-dimensional "cloak".
Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in Science.
"It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet - except this time the carpet also disappears," they said.
"We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective carpet," said Nicholas Stenger, one of the researchers who worked on the project.
"When we looked at it through a lens and did spectroscopy, no matter what angle we looked at the object from, we saw nothing. The bump became invisible," said Mr Stenger.
The "cloak" they used to make the microscopic bump disappear was composed of special lenses that work by bending light waves to suppress light as it scattered from the bump, the study says.
The invisibility cloak was minute, measuring 100 microns by 30 microns - one micron being one-thousandth of a millimeter - and the bump it hid was 10 times smaller, said Mr Stenger.
The researchers are working now to recreate the disappearing bump but on a larger scale, but Mr Stenger said Harry Potter's invisibility cape would not be hanging in would-be wizards' wardrobes in the near future.
"Theoretically, it would be possible to do this on a large scale but technically, it's totally impossible with the knowledge we have now," he said.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
A former Massachusetts dentist is accused of placing paper clips instead of stainless steel posts inside the teeth of root canal patients while billing Medicaid for the more expensive parts.
Levi Johnston has been ordered to make interim child support payments of $1,750 per month to the mother of his child, Bristol Palin. The figure is 20 percent of the adjusted annual income of the 19-year-old Johnson as set out in Alaska statute.
