An angry Deltona father whacked his teenage daughter’s boyfriend with a metal pipe after finding the boy naked in his daughter’s room. Authorities say the father, 45, didn’t even know his daughter had a boyfriend or that the youngster had been sneaking into the home for more than a year.

When he heard noises coming from his daughter’s bedroom Thursday morning and saw a stranger standing naked on the girl’s bed, he swung a metal pipe. He then chased the teen out the front door and called police.

The boy was taken to the hospital where doctors closed a head wound with staples.

The father was charged with aggravated battery on a child and bonded out on $10,000.

Source : Yahoo

GREEN BAY, Wis. – A 33-year-old woman is accused of stealing her daughter’s identity to attend high school and join the cheerleading squad

Wendy Brown is charged with felony identity theft after enrolling in a Wisconsin high school as her daughter.

The criminal complaint says Brown admitted to telling school officials she was 15 because she wanted to get her high school diploma and join the cheerleading squad.

She allegedly attended practices, received a cheerleader’s locker and went to a pool party at the coach’s house.

The complaint says Brown has a history of identity theft. Her daughter lives in Nevada with Brown’s mother.

There was no attorney listed in Brown’s online court records. Her home number could not be found.

A young man in Duchesne County has died from hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, possibly caused while he was cleaning up rodent droppings.
The man, who was healthy and between the ages of 19 and 29, fell ill and went to a hospital Sept. 2, the Utah Department of Health said. He died the next day.
The state health department and the TriCounty Health Department are investigating.
Hantavirus is shed in the urine and fecal droppings of rodents, typically deer mice. Humans can become infected by inhaling dust that contains dried contaminated rodent urine or feces.
TriCounty spokeswoman Jeramie Tubbs said they don’t know for sure where the man was exposed to the droppings. “It’s extremely difficult to track this down,” he said.
The last confirmed hantavirus infection in Utah occurred in 2004. From 2000 to 2007, there were a total of 13 confirmed hantavirus cases in Utah, and two people died.
While hantavirus infections in Utah are rare, they still do occur and are serious, the state health department said in a statement. Initial symptoms include fever, fatigue and muscle aches. Gastrointestinal symptoms and dizziness may also occur. As the disease progresses, symptoms can include cough and shortness of breath.
State health officials urge Utahns to eliminate or minimize contact with rodents or their droppings.

Source NYT

An unusually detailed study of people newly infected with H.I.V. in the United States has confirmed that the majority of new cases occur among gay and bisexual men and that blacks are most at risk. But the data show that whites and blacks tend to be infected at different times in their lives with the virus that causes AIDS.

Most new infections of white gay and bisexual men occur when the men are in their 30s and 40s, the study found, while black gay and bisexual men are more likely to be infected in their teens and 20s. The results were reported on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The C.D.C. reported last month that the study found that the virus was spreading faster in the United States than had been thought. In 2006, the study found, 56,300 people were newly infected with H.I.V. — 40 percent more than the agency’s previous estimate of roughly 40,000 new cases a year. The study was performed using new technology that allowed researchers to distinguish between new and older infections.

Dr. Kevin Fenton of the C.D.C. said the study’s findings served “as a powerful reminder that the U.S. epidemic of H.I.V. disease is far from over.”

The details of the agency’s demographic analysis were released on Thursday in the hope that knowledge of the age, race and other characteristics of the newly infected would better direct prevention efforts.

“The data really confirm what we had suspected and known before,” said Dr. Fenton, who emphasized the disease’s “disproportionate impact on gay and bisexual men and on blacks and Latinos.”

Black people, who make up about 12 percent of the population, accounted for more than 45 percent of the new infections, the study found, and the disparity was particularly acute among women.

Black women are nearly 15 times as likely to be infected with H.I.V. as white women. Hispanic women are four times as likely to be infected as white women. Black men have six times the H.I.V. incidence rate of white men and nearly three times that of Hispanic men.

Among those newly infected with the virus, black men were no more likely to be drug users or to engage in risky sex than were white men, according to the study. More research is needed to explain why young black men are at such greater risk for contracting the disease, but there are several hints from other studies, researchers said.

The fact that proportionally more blacks than whites are already infected would tend to produce higher transmission rates among blacks, said Dr. Richard Wolitski, acting director of the center’s division for H.I.V. and AIDS prevention. Young black men are much more likely to have been incarcerated. Infection rates among former convicts are high, largely because of behaviors outside of prison, studies show.

Dr. Wolitski said young black gay and bisexual men also tended to have partners who were older than their white counterparts and thus were more likely to have already been infected.

Girls and women make up 27 percent of those newly infected with the virus, and 80 percent of them contracted H.I.V. because of high-risk heterosexual contact. Among newly infected males, 81 percent of white men and 63 percent of black men were gay or bisexual.

In one of the most dismal statistics provided by the centers, researchers said that 80 percent of gay and bisexual men in 15 cities had not been reached by intensive H.I.V. prevention efforts that have proven effective. Agency officials said that more must be done, including expanded H.I.V. screening programs and better directing of prevention efforts at those most at risk.

Google has launched its Chrome browser in beta.

You can download the same here

http://www.google.com/chrome

Twelve days after the Kosi breached its embankment here on August 18, Nepal police cut a 15-metre chasm across a highway to send the floodwaters surging southwards into Bihar.

People and police here blame the dyke breach on “inaction” by India, which owns the Kosi barrage and embankment, and say they were forced to dig up the Kusaha-Laukahi-Inaruwa-Biratnagar highway to save themselves.

“We had no way out. We cut the highway to save our villages in the northern Terai region,” said Vishnu Kharka, a sub-inspector who is guarding the spot with 20 other policemen so that nobody can plug the hole, which the fuming waters have widened to 20 metres.

The result is that only three panchayats in Nepal are flooded now while the situation has worsened dramatically in 14 Bihar districts, where 100 have died and at least two million are marooned or homeless. Unofficial figures say thousands are dead and 5 million have been affected. The worst hit are Supaul, Madhepura, Saharsa, Araria and Katihar districts.

Indian engineers and officials posted at Kusaha to monitor the embankment were driven away by angry residents within hours of the August 18 breach.

“We saw the river banging on the embankment from August 5-6. But these lazy and luxury-loving Indian officials did not even inspect the river’s pressure,” said S.N. Mandal of nearby Laukahi as he turned his gaze towards the vast expanse of water to the north and south of the highway.

“These officials suddenly vanished the day the embankment was breached, flooding large parts of Nepal and Bihar. You see, there is no Indian official around the breached embankment.”

“We chased them out,” admitted a Kusaha resident, Dilip Gupta. “They were just partying with liquor and women in the dhabas and their guesthouse. We never saw them patrol the embankment. They had no business staying here when they were not doing their job. The embankment would not have given way had they monitored it.”

Nepal foreign minister Upendra Yadav, however, said on Saturday during his Delhi visit that immediately after the embankment breach, the Indians had tried to repair it but were prevented by local people.

Officials in Patna and Delhi have claimed that an Indian team is trying to plug the breach with an assurance of security from Nepal Prime Minister Prachanda. But this correspondent did not see a single Indian official or worker in the area. The guesthouse too has vanished under water.

“We can’t go there now. We can begin work to repair the breaches only under protection from the Indian Army. The Nepalese are after our lives,” a water resources official in Araria said. “Jaan mujhe pyari hai (I love my life).”

The Araria-Forbesganj-Jogbani highway in Bihar went under water yesterday, cutting the state’s road link with Kusaha.

The Nepal foreign minister has suggested that the terms of the 1954 Kosi agreement be amended to give Kathmandu the right to carry out essential repairs on the barrage and embankment.

“We cannot even put a stone into the Kosi’s waters. We detected the crack in the embankment but the Indian technical team had an argument with the local people and could not do the work,” Yadav said on Saturday.

He added that “this is not the time to enter into a blame game” but alleged that India had not repaired the barrage or the embankment “in the last five years”.

People from the three flooded Nepal panchayats — Shripur, Haripur and Kushwa – have taken shelter on the truncated highway, swimming all the way from their villages.

The only sounds here are the roar of the river and the chants of women praying to the water god in the rain. Yadav has suggested that under the Kosi agreement, India is bound to compensate the flood-hit Nepalese.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has released Rs 1,000 crore and 1.2 million tonnes of foodgrain in aid for Bihar’s flood victims. Local people are helping with relief operations.

Children born to fathers older than 30 are more likely to develop bipolar disorder, a common condition sometimes known as manic depression, researchers reported on Monday.

The paternal risk also grows with the age of a father, rising to 37 percent by the time a man is 55 years, said Emma Frans, an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who led the study.

The brain disorder causes extreme shifts in mood, energy and ability to function. It is marked by high periods of elation or irritability and low periods of sadness and hopelessness that can last months.

The findings published in the Archives of General Psychiatry bolster evidence that children of older fathers are at higher risk of psychological conditions such as bipolar disorder, autism and schizophrenia, the researchers said.

“Advanced paternal age is a risk factor for bipolar disorder in the offspring,” Frans and colleagues wrote.

One explanation could be that a man’s degraded sperm quality as he ages could increase the likelihood of genetic mutations that may lead to biopolar disorder, Frans said.

“Despite the robust evidence supporting the association between paternal age and severe mental disorders, the association between advanced paternal age and bipolar disorder has not been investigated,” the team added.

The findings are another step toward unraveling the mystery of how the condition affecting an estimated 1 percent to 3 percent of adults worldwide arises, the researchers said.

Last month, an international research team linked two genetic variants to an increased risk for the disease, which is often treated with AstraZeneca Plc’s blockbuster drug Seroquel. The condition often runs in families.

The Swedish researchers used a national medical registry to identify nearly 14,000 men and women diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For each person, they also randomly selected five people of the same sex and age without the condition.

After factoring for maternal age, the researchers found that children born to fathers older than 30 had an 11 percent higher risk of developing bipolar disorder compared to younger fathers. Children whose fathers were older than 55 had a 37 percent increased risk.

Frans said the findings did not mean that older men should not father children because the overall risk is still low, she added.

“The study sheds light on the negative effect of older fathers but most older men will still have healthy children,” she said in a telephone interview.

Anthropologists from Brazil and the US have uncovered Amazonian settlements in Brazil dating from about 1250 to 1650, before European colonists came in. The findings, reported in the journal Science, show that these towns were more developed than previously thought, making up actual networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza.

The urban communities were discovered at the headwaters of the Xingu River, in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park. This means that the Amazon rainforest, previously thought of as pristine, was actually heavily influenced by human activities.

The team was led by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, whose team collaborated tightly with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. They went to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles of forest. Each road was pointing north-east to south-west in order to keep with the mid-year summer solstice. Researchers also found a series of dams and artificial ponds which the dwellers used for fish farming.

The researchers also discovered signs of farming, wetland management and fish farms in the ancient settlements that are now almost completely covered by rainforest. The remains are hardly visible, but they could be identified by members of the Kuikuro tribe, who apparently are the direct descendants of those ancient tribes. The scientists used both satellite imagery and GPS navigation in order to uncover the towns, which used to be surrounded by large walls, similar to the ones encountered in medieval European and ancient Greek towns.

The tribes living in the newly found settlements, which date back to before the first Europeans arrived in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon in the 15th Century, don’t seem to be as sophisticated as well-known cultures like the Maya to the north, but still, their culture was much more complex that anthropologists had believed.

Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the settlements in a 2003 Science paper.

Google has agreed to license imagery for their mapping products from a satellite due to launch on September 4th. This new satellite can take detailed imagery for an area the size of New Mexico in one day. What does that mean? Well, you could get high resolution pan-sharpened imagery for the entire country in around 30 days. Impressive.

The level of detail will be approximately 50cm per pixel — that’s just under 20 inches. If you want to see what that looks like, take a look at this. Imagine having a Google Maps/Earth content that is this detailed, 100% complete and updated once a month — that’s powerful stuff.

“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation. It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.” — Kate Hurowitz (Google)

And for bragging rights, Google’s even got their logo on the side of the rocket as pictured above.

Google is ready to launch its browser chrome in Beta mode on Tuesday.(09/02/2008)

This has come as a pleasant surprise and wonder how secretive Google has been about this development. Chrome will have traits from both firefox and safari.

–It has a tab-centric interface, with a default home page that shows snapshots of your favorite sites and new memory management techniques designed to prevent tabs from bogging down your browsing;

–It uses sandboxing to prevent malware from doing damage to your PC;

–It includes built-in anti-phishing;

–It uses an all-new JavaScript implementation designed to provide snappy performance for Web-based applications;

–It includes Gears, the Google-initiated platform that helps online apps provide offline capabilities;

–It’s open source;

–It’s based on Webkit, the same open-source browser engine that powers Apple’s Safari.

A mother was convicted Friday of killing her month-old daughter by burning her in a microwave oven, with jurors rejecting a defense attorney’s claims there was evidence that someone else was responsible.

China Arnold, 28, showed no reaction when the jury’s verdict was announced and then lowered her head, looking down at the defense table. Relatives in the courtroom cried and covered their faces with their hands. They later left the courthouse without commenting.

Arnold was found guilty of aggravated murder and could be sentenced to death. The jury was scheduled to return Tuesday to begin hearing evidence in the death-penalty phase of the case.

Arnold was accused of killing daughter Paris Talley in 2005. A judge declared a mistrial in February, and the retrial began Aug. 18. Jury deliberations started Thursday following closing arguments.

Attorneys on both sides remained under a court order Friday barring them from speaking publicly about the case.

Prosecutors said Arnold intentionally put her baby in the microwave oven and cooked the child to death after a fight with her boyfriend.

Arnolds’ cellmate testified that Arnold confessed to putting the baby in the microwave and turning it on because she was worried her boyfriend would leave her if he found out the child wasn’t his.

The baby’s DNA was found inside the microwave in Arnold’s apartment, prosecutors said. A forensic pathologist testified that the girl likely died after being burned in the microwave oven for more than two minutes.

Defense attorney Jon Paul Rion told the jury that Arnold couldn’t remember what happened and was probably too drunk that night to have put the infant in the oven. Another forensic pathologist testified that Arnold had a blood-alcohol level nearly four times the legal driving limit.

Rion also told the jury there was evidence that someone else was responsible.

He cited testimony from an 8-year-old boy who said he saw another boy walk into the kitchen of a nearby apartment with the baby, heard the microwave go on, and then later saw the burned baby in the microwave.

Judge John Kessler declared a mistrial Feb. 11 after he privately heard testimony from the juvenile.

In rebuttal, however, the 8-year-old’s mother testified Wednesday that they lived some distance away and they were not at Arnold’s apartment complex when the baby died. Her former live-in boyfriend also testified that he was certain the boy was not at the location.