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Monday, February 26, 2007

Canadian Astral Media Inc. will buy out Standard Radio Inc., which runs many radio stations in Canada. Standard Radio Inc. is the largest privately owned multimedia company in Canada.

Montreal based Astral Media Inc. will buy all of the assets from Standard Radio Inc. for about CAN$1.2-billion. Standard Radio Inc.’s 52 radio stations, and Astral’s 29, will be brought together by Astral Media Inc. This will give Astral 81 radio stations in total. This makes Astral the largest radio operator in Canada of FM and AM radio.

“With the acquisition of Standard Radio, Astral Media will not only be acquiring the best performing radio stations in the country, we will at the same time acquire a company with similar values and culture. said Ian Greenberg, President and CEO of Astral Media.

“Over the past four decades the Slaight family has built a remarkable collection of strong radio brands and has contributed meaningfully in shaping the Canadian radio industry as we know it today. We are delighted with the prospect of welcoming Standard Radio’s employees into our team.”

Gary Slaight, President and CEO of Standard Radio also commented on the deal.

“We are looking forward to becoming a part of the Astral Media family,” said Gary Slaight, President and CEO of Standard Radio. “We are pleased to see our legacy live on with a company such as Astral that has such a strong track record and commitment to its employees and to the Canadian radio and television industries.”

All of Astral’s radio stations are run in Quebec and Atlantic Canada and it also runs various television stations across Canada. Astral also has two french channels that broadcast on Sirius satellite radio Canada.

The company hopes to finalize the deal in or before April.

Monday, September 12, 2022

On Saturday Albania’s Interior Ministry blamed Iranian actors for a cyberattack on Friday evening which targeted the national police’s computer systems. Albania reported a previous attack in July.

The ministry said in a statement “[t]he national police’s computer systems were hit Friday by a cyberattack which, according to initial information, was committed by the same actors who in July attacked the country’s public and government service systems”. The attack comes days after Iran was blamed for the attack in July. The statement also said the authorities had deliberately closed down their border crossing management software “[i]n order to neutralise the criminal act and secure the systems”, with local media reporting queues at border crossings.

On Wednesday the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama accused Iran of directing the attack against Albanian institutions on July 15, stating it was a bid to “paralyse public services and hack data and electronic communications from the government systems”. While Rama went on to say that the attack failed in its purpose, he also stated that Albania was severing diplomatic ties with Iran, giving Iranian embassy staff 24 hours to leave the country. The Associated Press called this the first known case of diplomatic ties being cut over a cyberattack.

Iran called the accusations “baseless” and deemed the cutting of diplomatic ties to be “ill-considered and short-sighted”.

On Friday the US imposed sanctions against the Iranian intelligence agency in response to the July attack. NATO, of which Albania is a member, and the European Union also denounced the attack.

Iran and Albania have been foes since 2013 when Albania agreed to host members of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, also known as Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), at the request of the US and United Nations. MEK is an Iranian opposition group, and considered a terrorist group by Iran.

Thursday, April 26, 2012

In the United States, the state of Connecticut has repealed the death penalty, becoming the seventeenth state in the U.S. to do so. The state’s governor Dannel Malloy signed the repeal into law on Wednesday and is to take effect immediately.

“This afternoon I signed legislation that will, effective today, replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of release as the highest form of legal punishment in Connecticut. Although it is an historic moment – Connecticut joins 16 other states and the rest of the industrialized world by taking this action – it is a moment for sober reflection, not celebration,” said Malloy in a written statement on his website.

In future convictions, the death penalty will be replaced with life imprisonment with no possibility of parole. However, despite the state’s decision, prisoners currently serving a death row sentence are still set to be executed as planned. Currently in Connecticut, eleven prisoners are serving a death row sentence, all of them men. The repeal bill was passed in the state’s house of representatives with 86 supporting the measure and 63 opposing it. The senate had passed the measure just seven days before.

Jodi Rell, then Connecticut’s governor, blocked a prior attempt at repeal by state lawmakers in 2009.

Only one person in Connecticut has been executed since 1976, when the U.S. government reinstated the death penalty after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld capital punishment. That execution of serial killer Michael Bruce Ross occurred in 2005 by lethal injection.

“As our state moves beyond this divisive debate, I hope we can all redouble our efforts and common work to improve the fairness and integrity of our criminal justice system, and to minimize its fallibility,” added Malloy.

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Nintendo has released its newest video game console in North America. Known as the Wii, the system and games have an MSRP of US$249.99 and US$49.99 respectively. The North American release is to be followed by the December 2nd launch in Japan and the December 8th launch in Europe.

Launched officially at midnight, more than a thousand people gathered in New York’s Time Square to be among the first to buy one of the Wii. In contrast to the crowds that have challenged crowd control officials over the last two days in connection with the launch of Sony’s Playstation 3, the Wii crowds have been much calmer. Many observers attribute this to the fact that Nintendo had more than ten times as many Wii consoles available on launching day than Sony did for their PS3 that had been hounded by part shortages in manufacturing right up to the day of launch.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said that several tough choices had been made in the design of the Wii. The company decided to develop a new way of playing games with revolutionary controllers instead of following the PS3 and the Xbox down the road of stunning graphic and multimedia options. This produced a console with a much talked-about sensor/controller design and the lowest price point of the three major consoles. While not having a DVD player or high-definition TV capabilities, the Wii retails for about $250 while its competitors the Xbox 360 and PS3 retail for about $400 and $600 respectively.

While the Wii will launch with several games available, one of its advertised advantages is that the new console is largely compatible with older games made for the GameCube, giving the new console an instant and extensive launching library. A GameCube controller will be needed to play GameCube games with the Wii. Several hardware items that GameCube games may be expecting, such as the modem or broadband adapter or the GameBoy player are not supported on the Wii.

Across the country in Los Angeles about 500 people were waiting for the doors to open at Universal City Walk’s Game Stop store. Fearing that the Wii introduction might be as contentious as the PS3 debut just a few days ago, the store handed out numbered wristbands to the throng. No problems were reported.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample.

If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it may lead the way for the use of robotic surgery in even more delicate procedures, such as heart surgery. Note that this is not a fully automated system, as a human doctor controls the operation via remote control. Laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery is a treatment for obesity.

There were concerns that doctors, in the future, might only be trained in the remote control procedure. Ronald G. Latimer, M.D., of Santa Barbara, CA, warned “The fact that surgeons may have to open the patient or might actually need to revert to standard laparoscopic techniques demands that this basic training be a requirement before a robot is purchased. Robots do malfunction, so a backup system is imperative. We should not be seduced to buy this instrument to train surgeons if they are not able to do the primary operations themselves.”

There are precedents for just such a problem occurring. A previous “new technology”, the electrocardiogram (ECG), has lead to a lack of basic education on the older technology, the stethoscope. As a result, many heart conditions now go undiagnosed, especially in children and others who rarely undergo an ECG procedure.

Thursday, March 2, 2006

Buffalo, New York —In an unanimous vote, the City of Buffalo‘s Planning Board voted to table the Elmwood Village hotel Proposal, postponing voting on legislation for up to 30 days.

The Board said its decision was due to the lack of public involvement, saying that there have not been enough meetings.

The Elmwood Village Hotel is a proposed project by Savarino Construction Services Corporation and was designed by Karl Frizlen of The Frizlen Group. The hotel would be placed on Elmwood and Forest Avenues in Buffalo, New York. In order for the hotel to be built, at least five buildings, that include both businesses and residents, must be demolished.

The Forever Elmwood Corp. is a Buffalo-based non-profit organization founded in 1994. Justin Azzarella, the Executive Director for the organization voiced support for the proposal, stating: “I am here today to lend Forever Elmwood’s support the hotel project. Particularly, Forever Elmwood is encouraged by the fact that this building follows the more stringent Elmwood Village Design Guidelines. We have been speaking with Savarino Construction, and they have promised us [Forever Elmwood] that they will engage the community further, including the surrounding Block Clubs and businesses. For that reason, while Forever Elmwood is in support of this project and the type of project that it is, we are asking also that the project be tabled so that the community can be further engaged. Specifically the surrounding Block clubs which include the Granger, Claremont, Asland and The Lincoln Parkway Block Clubs.”

“Because of the excellent work that Karl does and the game plan that they have, I think its an ideal use of this particular location. I think that this particular type of development needs to be encouraged and promoted as opposed to roadblocked,” said a man who owns five properties near the proposal site.

However, Evelyn Bencinich, a resident of Granger Place and whose house would be located directly behind the hotel said, “My property value will be depreciated or non-existent because no one is going to want to live behind a multi-story hotel. We are facing up to a year of noisy and dangerous demolition and construction. Children, pets and even drunk rebellers could wander on site and get hurt. Traffic tie-ups caused by large machinery and garbage bins is inevitable. Where will pedestrians walk? We could experience increased unsanitary flooding in our yards and basements due to the digging and cementing for the underground parking garage. Rats will be displaced into the immediate neighborhoods and be in great abundance. Once we get past the year of nightmare construction, what if you build it and they don’t come? We could ultimately have a seven million dollar rooming house on our corner.”

Patty Morris, co-owner of Don Apparel with Nancy Pollina at 1119 Elmwood also asked that the project be tabled saying, “this has only been public knowledge for less than two weeks and the public never saw the redesign. How can you vote on anything that no one has seen yet? The Board cut off Morris saying, “so specifically you don’t have any problem with it [the design] you just…” Morris then said, “Oh I am totally against this project, but thats besides the point isn’t it.”

The planning board is also concerned that the current design may still be too big.

At one point Board member Susan Curran Hoyt said, “we know you’ve cut down your number of rooms on this project, but we still see it doesn’t seem to fit the description of a ‘botique’ hotel,” and asked Eva Hassett, Vice President of Savarino Construction, “we wonder if you could reduce the rooms further.”

“One thing I didn’t talk about was the price levels of these rooms and that will be important to know. The room rate will be somewhere between US$120 and $160 a night, which is about the same price of the Hampton Inn down town and the smaller you make the hotel, the more expensive the rooms will get. We believe that we’ve made a good compromise in terms of the size of the hotel and perhaps botique means different things to different people,” said Hassett.

The board was also concerned that there is not enough parking asking, “are there alternative plans for valet parking off-site, in the event that you have a full hotel or a large event going on?”

“We are exploring several possibilities with respect to additional parking for valet and parking near-by,” replied Hassett. “We are also exploring the possibility of using the rear of 1105 Elmwood for additional parking, which would give us an additional ten or eleven spaces.”

The new design has a total of 55 parking spaces for 72 rooms, with 39 of them underground and the rest on ground level.

Hassett also said that a “parking study” will be done on the area.

Concerns that the second floor of the hotel will be too close to the property of 605 Forest were also brought up. The board asked how far the hotel would be from the property and Karl Frizlen replied saying it would “be approximately five feet from the property line,” but he also admitted that, “I do not know exactly how close the house next door” will be from the hotel, but did say “I think the house is about four or five feet away from the property line and we [the hotel] sit right on the property line.”

The board is concerned the setback from the property is not enough saying the space between the building and the hotel is “pretty narrow.”

The City’s Common Council also agreed to table the proposal also citing the need for more public engagement and the need for more organizations to respond including the Buffalo Preservation Board and the Office of Historic Preservation.

During that meeting, Hassett also said the proposal to try and get a variance to obtain the properties of 605 and 607 Forest were “now off the agenda.”

The Common Council is expected to meet and hold a public hearing about the project and the rezoning of the properties to be demolished (1119-1121 Elmwood) on Tuesday March 7, 2006 at 2:00 p.m. in Council Chambers at City Hall. At the moment the properties are not zoned for a hotel.

Tuesday, December 7, 2004

EUROPE — Lycos Europe has ended its anti-spam operation: “Make Love Not Spam.” A company spokesperson said the objective of the time-limited campaign was to raise people’s awareness. The reasons why it ended the campaign was variously reported and speculated in media. The operation, while fairly popular, suffered unexpected troubles and drew criticism from security experts and others from the start.

The company started distributing a screensaver on November 29, 2004 on makelovenotspam.com. Once installed, the computer would send HTTP requests to spammers’ servers when not in use. The intent was to raise the running costs of those servers. Lycos coordinated these requests by choosing targets from lists generated by organizations such as Spamcop.com. The servers were monitored so as to keep them under heavy load, but alive.

Security experts roundly criticized the program. Steve Linford, director of a non-profit anti-spam organization SpamHaus, and Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant of Sophos, pointed out that lowering moral standards to fight spammers was not a good idea. The legality of attacking the servers was also debated since it resembles “Distributed Denial of Service” attacks (DDoS), except that Lycos did not completely shut down the target servers.

Other troubles arose. The day after the campaign was launched, there was an alleged takeover of the web site’s top page by a cracker. The page was replaced with a warning against the use of the screensaver, according to a screenshot sent via email to the Finnish security firm F-Secure. A Lycos spokesperson said that the screenshot was a hoax: there was no trace of intrusion in the server log and the site was simply unavailable due to a high demand.

Some Internet service providers blocked either the traffic to Lycos-Europe, or the requests generated by the screensaver.

Next, one of the targeted sites redirected all traffic to the Lycos’ server, making Lycos itself a target. The company had maintained that its server was immune from the attack. Lycos stopped distributing the program on December 3, 2004 and asked clients to “stay tuned.” The company later ended the program.

On December 6, F-Secure reported a virus email disguised as the anti-spam screensaver. When its attachment (a zip file) is opened, it self-extracts and installs a “Trojan horse” –harmful program disguised as legitimate software. The Trojan horse was set up to monitor keystrokes in order to steal passwords, bank account numbers and other important information.

Lycos’ software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times by the end of the campaign.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Gmail, Google’s popular e-mail service launched earlier last year, is now available to any American cell phone user via text messaging.

Cell phone owners can send Google their phone number, and are then sent an access code via SMS that enables them to open an account. Google has stated that the number is only used to “manage the number of accounts created per phone”, and that it “will never be sold or shared for marketing purposes” without the user’s permission.

The service is not necessarily free — cell phone service providers may charge for the delivery of the code.

While the system currently only works in the U.S., Google says it has plans to add more countries.

Monday, July 25, 2005

A suspect package discovered in Little Wormwood Scrubs, west London is apparently a fifth bomb made to the same design as those used in the 21 July attacks. The device was subjected to controlled explosion by the police over the weekend and its discovery has led to speculation that a fifth bombing attempt may have been intended that day. The device was apparently a nail bomb.

Little Wormwood Scrubs is just north of Shepherd’s Bush (scene of one of Thursday’s bombing attempts) and White City (the location of the BBC’s TV centre). It also borders on North Pole sidings, which are used by the Eurostar cross-channel train which travels through the Channel Tunnel.