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Friday, January 2, 2009

Portuguese Maria de Jesus died Tuesday, at 115 years and 114 days old. The vegetarian, non-smoking, teetotal farmer had only visited a hospital once in her life, outliving her husband by 57 years, and two of her five children. The cause of her death is either unknown or has not yet been released.

De Jesus had five children, 11 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren. She had no need for a mobility scooter — instead she lived on her farm and moved with a walking frame, declining nursing care. However, due to sight and hearing problems, she could not easiliy recognize her family, including daughter Madalena, 84, with whom she lived.

She never went to school, and could not write, but one of her children said of her that she never “fell ill, nor took any medication.”

She became the world’s oldest person after the November 26 death of American Edna Parker, who was 115 years and 220 days old. Her position as the world’s oldest person has now been taken by American Gertrude Baines, 114.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005A compound in the common daisy-like plant feverfew kills human leukemia stem cells and could form the basis for newer, more effective drugs for the disease.

American researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York say that it could take months to develop a useable drug from the compound, parthenolide.

However, they are working to do so with chemists at the University of Kentucky who have identified a water-soluble molecule with the same properties. The US National Cancer Institute has also accepted the work into its rapid access program, which aims to speed experimental drugs into human clinical trials.

“This research is a very important step in setting the stage for future development of a new therapy for leukemia,” says Rochester researcher Craig Jordan. “We have proof that we can kill leukemia stem cells with this type of agent, and that is good news.”

Parthenolide appears to target the roots of myeloid leukemia, stem cells, while current treatments including the relatively new drug Gleevec don’t. So, “You’re pulling the weed without getting to the root,” says Jordan.

Used for centuries to fight fevers, inflammation and arthritis, feverfew earned interest from the Rochester researchers after other scientists showed that it could prevent skin cancer in animal models.

So the researchers investigated how a concentrated form of the plant component parthenolide would affect leukemia cells and normal cells.

Comparing the impact of parthenolide to the common chemotherapy drug cytarabine, they found that parthenolide selectively killed leukemia cells while sparing normal cells better.

While the findings suggest that parthenolide is a good starting point for new drugs, people with leukemia aren’t being encouraged to take high doses of feverfew as they could not take enough of the remedy to halt the disease.

The research is reported in the journal Blood.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

On Monday, 46-year-old Dolores O’Riordan, lead singer of Irish rock band The Cranberries, was found dead, her publicist Lindsey Holmes confirmed; reports suggested she was found in her room at the London Hilton on Park Lane hotel. O’Riordan’s agent said she was in London, England, for a recording session. According to the police, her death was considered “unexplained” and no cause of death disclosed, though it was to be investigated.

Later one of the richest women of Ireland, O’Riordan joined the rock band, then known as “the Cranberry Saw Us”, as a teenager around 1989, after Niall Quinn had left the band. Also featuring drummer Fergal Lawler, bassist Mike Hogan and his brother Noel Hogan, the lead guitarist, the band released their first album Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? in 1993. The debut album featuring single Linger was an international success. The band went on to release six more albums featuring O’Riordan’s voice, including Something Else, which was released last year.

A year later, in 1994, the band released their second studio album, No Need to Argue, which featured the song Zombie, a song about bombings related to Northern Ireland. Zombie topped the singles charts in various countries. In the same year, O’Riordan married Don Burton, sometime manager of the Duran Duran band. Their third album, To the Faithful Departed, was released in 1996. The album did not receive the acclamation of the first two.

In 2003, the band split, and it was reunited in 2009. During those six years, O’Riordan released two solo albums — Are You Listening? in 2007 and No Baggage in 2009. 2012’s Roses was the first album The Cranberries released after reunification.

Last year, O’Riordan revealed through London’s Metro newspaper she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She also spoke of suffering from depression to The Irish News. In 2014, the singer was involved in assaulting a flight attendant and three police officials on a flight from New York, US to Ireland. She was fined €6000 (US$6600) after she pleaded guilty; medical reports said she suffered from mental illness during that incident. Last year, the band’s tour to North America and Europe for Something Else was cancelled partway through as O’Riordan suffered from a back problem.

After announcement of O’Riordan’s death, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar tweeted, “For anyone who grew up in Ireland in the 1990s, Dolores O’Riordan was the voice of a generation. As the female lead singer of a hugely successful rock band, she blazed a trail and might just have been Limerick’s greatest ever rock star. RIP.”

The official twitter handle of The Cranberries posted a tweet saying, “We are devastated on the passing of our friend Dolores. She was an extraordinary talent and we feel very privileged to have been part of her life from 1989 when we started the Cranberries. The world has lost a true artist today.”

Born on September 6, 1971 in Ballybricken, a town in southeastern Ireland, O’Riordan had six older siblings. She wrote songs since the age of twelve. James Walton, a priest from her home area, said, “The plan is for her to be buried here at home. When that will be will depend on when her body is released.”

Dolores O’Riordan is survived by three children and ex-husband Don Burton.

Friday, September 22, 2006

The upcoming 2006 Mississauga municipal election, to be held November 13, features an array of candidates looking to represent their wards in city council.

Wikinews contributor Nicholas Moreau has contacted as many candidates as possible, including Tony Ciufo, asking them to answer common questions sent in an email. There is no incumbent in the newly created ward; the sixteen resident competing for the position are Shah Rukh Alam, John Briers, Jamie Dookie, Dale D’Souza, Prag Euclid, Adnan Hashmi, Elias Hazineh, Jack Janiak, Fasal Javaid, Craig Lawrence, Sue M. McFadden, Patrick Mendes, Barbara Polis, Graziano Roti, Ali Tahmourpour, and Scott Wilson.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

On Monday, Australian telecommunications company Telstra has introduced dual carrier HSPA+ standard for broadband Internet business customers in the Next G network. This is the first time this technology is being introduced on national scale. The bandwidths the users can deploy increased into two to three times, with Telstra becoming the world’s fastest national mobile broadband service. The switch started with enabling the service for premium users. After some feedback, Telstra may expand the plan.

The higher speeds for wireless are intended to simplify and ease multitasking of users.

John Paitaridis, Telstra’s executive director, network products and services in Enterprise & Government, said “One of the reasons we decided to launch first to Enterprise And Government and Business customers is that clients are saying that their ability to access applications quicker makes a difference to their business and when they start to equate time savings and doing calculations around productivity it does become a return on investment.”

Telstra Business Group Managing Director Deena Shiff also stated that the efforts aren’t as sudden as it might seem, having feedback of many users as the base.

Australians are telling us they can’t afford to be tied to the desk all day and these new speeds mean they can now access mobile broadband at speeds typically reserved for the office. We have been deploying the high-speed capability in the network since December 2009 and now, with the launch of the new Ultimate USB Modem, these new speeds are available to customers across all capital city CBDs and associated airports, selected metropolitan areas and in more than 100 regional locations. These high-speed zones cover approximately 50 per cent of the Australian population and match the areas of highest customer demand and will make the frustration of waiting around for files to download a thing of the past. In other metropolitan and regional areas, the Telstra Ultimate USB Modem offers typical download speeds ranging from 550kbps up to 8Mbps… Our customers have told us that they want higher speed mobile broadband so they can work more flexibly outside of the office and we are delighted to be the first in the world to offer these new blistering speeds on a national network. The new Telstra Ultimate USB Modem provides customers with the speeds needed to handle large files, multi-task and update cloud-hosted applications effortlessly on the go when they are in a coverage area.

Previous modems were able to reach peak speed 21Mbps, with real life speeds ranging from 0.5Mbps to 8 Mbps. The theoretically expected maximum of the new technology is 42Mbps with user speeds varying between 1.1 and 20 Mbps. The new speed is twice as fast. This is caused by that the dual-carrier “Evolved High-Speed Packet Access” technology allows networks to send and receive wireless data using two channels simultaneously. This technology can be deployed on Next G networks. Telstra switched to them in February, thus making the switch to HSPA possible now.

Telstra delayed the implementation of the new technology until elections end. This decision was intended to avoid wrong interpretation of them by Coalition. Coalition’s claims include that wireless networks can be an alternative to the Labor party “fibre-to-the-home” proposal to introduce more expensive wired Internet. The announcement of the new technology, initially planned on August 25, was delayed, with Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton explaining, “We just didn’t want to feel like we were influencing the [telecommunications] debate.”

The political parties have different plans on development and funds on the Internet. The Labor party aims to spend AUD 43 billion to bring 1 Gbps wired Internet nationwide, and the Coalition plans to spend AUD 6 billion to introduce a variety of improvements including upgrade of existing copper Internet as well as expansion of wireless Internet to support 12Mbps. Opposition leader Tony Abbott has said in the past that Australians shouldn’t assume wireless technologies won’t ever be comparable to fixed-line technology. Telstra’s upgrade shows that wireless broadband is reaching the 100 Mbps minimum speeds promised by Labor’s national broadband network.

Telstra has only 2000 devices which support the new technology. This is why the opportunity to try it out is being given only to the Business plan customers, and they receive it for the same price as they were paying for the previous NextG plan. Since October 5, the device will be available for sale, with the Business customers able to buy it with 75% discount and a prepaid data allowance. The upgrade is expected to cover roughly 50% of the population. This is happening at the same time as one of Telstra’s competitors Vodafone is doubling data download quotas on mobile cap plans.

As some testing showed, real life download speeds reached only about the half of the maximum. Telstra executive director of wireless Mike Wright explained that the predicted figures were the estimates, with real life speeds lower due to interfering environmental conditions: “It’s possible to achieve better than the typical user speed claims, but those claims occur in the ideal network environment with good signal quality. When you’re out on the streets you get a lot of variation where the network is subject to signal quality, your location and the network load.”

Thursday, May 12, 2011

American plus-size model and actress Mia Amber Davis has died at the age of 36 in Los Angeles, California. Davis, who appeared in the film Road Trip, died one day after undergoing routine knee surgery.

Davis was more than 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall and weighed over 300 pounds (136.1 kilogrammes). She was having the surgery after a prolonged basketball injury from her college days. The model returned to the hospital after feeling dizzy and later died there.

Michael Yard, Davis’ husband, was in New York at the time of her death. He spoke to TMZ, saying “I want to know what happened to my wife.”

Davis was also the editor of Plus Model Magazine. Magazine editor Madeline Jones commented on Davis’ death in a blog post, writing “Mia was a super model and industry leader because it was her love for the women she represented that kept pushing her when the industry itself did not embrace her. Anyone else would have given up, but Mia remained steadfast in her career, knowing that she was not just doing it for her own benefit, but for women of all ages.”

Davis is best remembered for her appearance in Road Trip. She played a heavyset woman named Rhonda who seduces a geek played by DJ Qualls.