The death toll from floods and landslides caused by heavy rains in Sri Lanka has risen to 92, officials said.
Soldiers looking for victims recovered at least seven more bodies on Sunday from Aranayake – one of the worst-hit villages in the district of Kegalle.
Starting last weekend Sri Lanka has seen the heaviest rains in 25 years. Continue reading…
DAVAO CITY, Philippines — The police warned 14-year-old Bobby Alia that there would be consequences after he was accused of stealing a cellphone in November 2003, the boy’s mother said. A few days later he was dead, stabbed in the back with a butcher knife.
He was the third of Clarita Alia’s sons to die in Davao, the southern Philippines’ largest city, in killings that remain unsolved. A fourth was killed in 2007. All had been accused of crimes, all were stabbed and all, Ms. Alia said, had received similar warnings from the police.
For years, rights groups have called for an investigation into whether Davao’s mayor, Rodrigo Duterte — the tough-talking politician who next month will become president of the Philippines — was complicit in the killings of hundreds of people in Davao since the 1980s by what they describe as government-sanctioned death squads. Continue reading…
Philippines’ president-elect Rodrigo Duterte vowed Sunday to reintroduce capital punishment and give security forces “shoot-to-kill” orders in a devastating war on crime.
In his first press conference since winning the May 9 elections in a landslide, the tough-talking mayor of southern Davao city warned his campaign threats to kill were not rhetoric.
“What I will do is urge Congress to restore (the) death penalty by hanging,” Duterte, 71, told a press conference in Davao.
He also said he would give security forces “shoot-to-kill” orders against organised criminals or those who violently resisted arrest. Source
A 29-year-old woman who traveled to South Florida for cosmetic surgery died after her procedure Thursday afternoon, police said.
Heather Meadows, a mother of two from West Virginia, suffered medical complications at Encore Plastic Surgery in Miami-Dade County, Hialeah policetold the Miami Herald. Medical staff at a nearby hospital later pronounced her dead.
State health officials said the licensed clinic has no active complaints. Yet the newspaper linked Encore to an active medical malpractice case and a 2013 death at another Hialeah clinic following a buttocks augmentation. Source
A victim of childhood sex abuse was allowed to end her life under Dutch euthanasia laws after doctors and psychiatrists concluded that the woman’s post-traumatic stress disorder and physical health were incurable. The death of the Dutch woman in her 20s has fuelled the ongoing debate on the ethics of euthanasia in Britain, with some MPs arguing that allowing a victim of sex abuse to die is equivalent to punishing the victim.
The details of the case were documented by the Dutch Euthanasia Commission, which revealed that the woman began to suffer from mental disorders about 15 years ago. She was suffering from severe anorexia, chronic depression, suicidal mood swings, tendencies to self-harm, hallucinations, obsessions and compulsions. She was also almost entirely bedridden, according to a report. Source
The shocking, and seemingly irreversible, destruction of the US honeybee population took a huge hit in the past year, with 44 percent of all hives collapsing between April 2015 and April 2016.This was the second worst year for colony losses since the “Beepocolypse” started a decade ago, according to The Bee Informed Partnership, the collaboration between the US Department of Agriculture, research labs, and universities that is tracking the alarming numbers. Source
Scientists working on the http://reanima.tech/portfolio-view/project-2/(ReAnima Project) will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of amino acids, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas. The first trial will be a non-randomised, single group ‘proof of concept’ trial and will take place at Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand, India. Source
(CNN) Hepatitis C-related deaths reached an all-time high in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday, surpassing total combined deaths from 60 other infectious diseases including HIV, pneumococcal disease and tuberculosis. The increase occurred despite recent advances in medications that can cure most infections within three months.
Florida has more death row inmates than nearly any other state in the country, and it remains a bastion of capital punishment as fewer executions are carried out nationwide. But after a frantic few months that saw Florida’s system of imposing death sentences struck down and rewritten, it remains an open question what will happen to the hundreds who remain on the state’s death row — and how much longer any of them will stay there.
On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could lead to nearly 400 death-row prisoners receiving life sentences, a move experts say could be the country’s single biggest jettisoning of death sentences in decades.
“We’re looking at potentially the largest number of death sentences being vacated at a single time” since the early 1970s, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Source
Advocates for physician-assisted suicide are on a roll as they hope to parlay their West Coast momentum to the Empire State.
Physician-assisted suicide, also known as aid in dying, is legal in Oregon and Washington, and will soon be in California, as a newly passed bill there becomes law. Vermont and Montana also allow for the practice. It has been legal in Oregon for 18 years, longer than any other state.
Among its opponents are the New York state Catholic bishops, who, as in other states, argue that allowing physicians to kill dying patients violates medical ethics and will be used against the poor, the lonely and the forgotten. Source
The bill’s supporters “see this as a bellwether state,” Kathleen Gallagher, director of pro-life activities for the New York State Catholic Conference, told NCR.
Two biotech companies in the United States have been given the green light to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people.