|
Internet-centered technology has advanced to the point that smartphone apps and e-commerce sites seemingly sprout overnight. Indeed, many can be built inexpensively from off-the-shelf software in weeks. Scientific breakthroughs, however, often require decades of research and millions of dollars. At the end of every year, I feature three teams of Chicago innovators whose ideas won’t hit the big-time soon but have the potential to improve, even save, our lives a decade from now.
A man died Thursday night after getting Tasered at the Chicago Police Department's 5th District Station and again at a Far South Side hospital, authorities said.
Philip O. Coleman, 38, was arrested around 7:15 p.m. Wednesday for beating his 69-year-old mother, injuring her head and legs, police said in a statement. Coleman "became combative" and spit blood on the faces of an officer and a supervisor, police said.
Coleman was then taken to Roseland Community Hospital "where he became physically aggressive with hospital staff and accompanying CPS officers," police said. "Once again, reasonable force was employed, including a Taser deployment, to gain control of the offender."
Coleman was admitted to Roseland, where he was given a sedative and later died, police said in the statement. The department did not release any other details of the death.
Coleman was pronounced dead at 5:47 p.m. Thursday at Roseland. An autopsy is scheduled for today.
Coleman's father, Percy Coleman, said today that police “aren’t going to get away with it.”
“My son … (has) never been in trouble,” he said. “He’s a grad of the University of Chicago. They won’t be able to run him out that he’s a drug dealer, this and that.”
Percy Coleman refused to comment further.
The Independent Police Review Authority is investigating the incident, a spokesman for the agency said.
pnickeas@tribune.com
Twitter: @peternickeas
LONDON (Reuters) – A partnership stuck on Friday between bwin.party Digital Entertainment and a Belgian casino group has defused one of many disputes pitting online gambling companies against governments across Europe.
The agreement came a month after bwin.party’s co-CEO was questioned by Belgian authorities in an escalating license dispute the company said was costing it 700,000 euros ($ 916,000) in monthly revenue.
By joining forces with Belcasinos, a unit of local casino owner Group Partouche, bwin.party neatly met a requirement to have a presence in Belgium to win a license for online poker, casino and sports betting.
The agreement is a rare bright spot in a tough regulatory environment for online gambling companies across the continent.
Betting online on sports events or playing poker on the Internet are increasingly popular pastimes in Europe, where operators say they are held back by unfair and discriminatory rules in many European Union countries.
“It is not a European Union in any way, it is a patchwork of different countries who happen to be in the EU,” said Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the betting research unit at Nottingham Business School in central England.
“Different countries have different vested interests and different ideas they are trying to promote. Are they trying to protect consumers or to maximize their tax take?” he said.
The 27 EU member states retain the right to regulate their gambling sectors as they see fit, but rules must comply with EU law, broadly meaning they must be consistent and proportionate.
Some companies are scaling back activities in European markets where, they say, regulatory risks are too high or tax rates are punitive.
Betting exchange operator Betfair for instance said this week it was halting marketing and investment in unregulated markets, including EU members Cyprus, Germany and Greece.
William Hill, Britain‘s largest bookmaker, has joined Betfair in pulling out of Greece and has also stopped offering sports betting to German residents because of a 5 percent turnover tax.
STAKES RISE
The stakes are high. Online gambling is growing at an annual rate of almost 15 percent in the EU and will be worth an estimated 13 billion euros ($ 17 billion) by 2015, according to EU figures.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive, stepped in to the debate in October when it published a medium-term plan to clarify regulations and promote cooperation between member states, ruling out EU-wide legislation for the time being.
“All citizens must be adequately protected, money laundering and fraud must be prevented, sport must be safeguarded against betting-related match-fixing and national rules must comply with EU law,” Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier said, setting out his approach.
The online operators accuse the European Commission of failing to follow through properly on complaints lodged about regulation in no fewer than 20 or the 27 EU member states.
Barnier has written to member states accused of breaching EU law in the way they handle gambling, seeking an update on the situation by the end of the year.
However, the industry questions whether the EU will go into battle over gambling when it is facing so many other problems.
“They will chip away at some of the most blatant ones,” said Clive Hawkswood, chief executive of trade body the Remote Gambling Association. “What we really need is for them to take some to the European Court and take enforcement action.”
BRITISH TAXES
Gambling companies themselves have taken advantage of different tax regimes where they work in their favor.
This is illustrated in Britain, historically the biggest betting market in Europe and a place with a well-developed gambling culture where bookmakers have operated in town centers for 50 years.
In recent years, most betting companies have moved their British online betting operations to Britain’s overseas territory of Gibraltar. There they are sheltered from a 15 percent tax on gross profit faced by operators based in Britain.
New legislation will close off that loophole after 2014. The shift to a taxation model based on the location of the consumer was expected to cost gambling companies as much as 270 million pounds ($ 435 million) by 2016-17.
Analyst Nick Batram at brokerage Peel Hunt said smaller players would likely be picked off because of the impact of higher tax and regulatory burdens across Europe.
“It is getting more complicated and more expensive. There is more change afoot but it should ultimately play into the hands of the better-capitalized companies.”
In that vein, William Hill has provisionally agreed a 485 million pound takeover of smaller rival Sportingbet, keen to get its hands on the company’s regulated Australian betting business.
“I think there is a lot more M&A activity to come,” said Batram.
(Additional reporting by Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by David Holmes)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
YORK, Maine (AP) — Sally Struthers has entered a not guilty plea on charges she drove drunk in Maine, where she was performing in a musical.
The Portland Press Herald (http://bit.ly/XleJBq) reports the 65-year-old Struthers did not appear in York District Court on Thursday, and entered the plea through her lawyer.
Police arrested Struthers on Sept. 12 on U.S. Route 1 in the resort town Ogunquit (oh-GUHNG’-kwit). She was charged with criminal operating under the influence.
Struthers is best known for her role as Gloria Stivic in the 1970s TV sitcom “All in the Family.” She had been performing at the Ogunquit Playhouse in the musical “9 to 5.”
Struthers is scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 13 for a bench trial.
___
Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com
Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News
A federal judge in Hartford has ordered a Connecticut nursing home chain to reinstate nearly 600 workers who have been on strike since July 3, and to rescind the pension and health care cuts it had imposed.
Judge Robert N. Chatigny of the United States District Court in Connecticut ruled on Tuesday night that the nursing homes’ owner, HealthBridge Management, had broken the law by refusing to bargain in good faith and by imposing the cuts before a true negotiating impasse had been reached.
Judge Chatigny issued an injunction that ordered HealthBridge to reinstate the workers by next Monday, even if it means ousting hundreds of the replacement workers hired to run the nursing homes after the strike began.
“Everybody is quite happy about the decision,” said Vern Scatliffe, a nurse’s aide, as he picketed outside Danbury Health Care Center, one of the five nursing homes — the others are in Milford, Newington, Stamford and Westport — where the workers walked out to protest the cuts HealthBridge had imposed. “The judge’s order is a big relief to me. I can now go back to work and earn my living again.”
Saying the company was disappointed by the judge’s decision, Lisa Crutchfield, a HealthBridge spokeswoman, said it had filed an appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to overturn the injunction.
“We are acting in the best interests of our residents — their well-being is paramount to us,” she said. Ms. Crutchfield said the order to reinstate the strikers would “expose residents to the very people who sought to do them harm” during the walkout. HealthBridge has accused the strikers of several acts of sabotage, including changing the names on several patients’ doors and wheelchairs and switching the names of some residents in Alzheimer’s units.
Deborah Chernoff, a spokeswoman for the strikers’ union, the New England Health Care Employees Union, said it had opposed any sabotage. She suggested that the allegations themselves were suspicious, noting that they were first made two weeks after the strike began.
The strike began after HealthBridge declared the negotiations deadlocked and then imposed changes that included freezing the workers’ pensions, requiring many to pay at least $6,000 more a year for family health coverage and eliminating six paid sick days and a week’s vacation for many workers.
Two weeks after the strike began, the striking employees, who belong to a branch of the Service Employees International Union, offered to return to work, but the company refused to take them back. Judge Chatigny said it was “just and proper” to reinstate them “because there is a pressing need to restore the status quo” from before the company made the changes, which he found to be illegal.
The judge acted only after the National Labor Relations Board’s office in Hartford sought an injunction.
David Pickus, president of the strikers’ union, said, “This ruling is a decisive victory for workers and a sign that HealthBridge cannot get away with its unfair and illegal treatment of its employees.”
Now, she's a "team member" at the Protein Bar in Chicago, where she makes $8.50 an hour, slightly more than minimum wage. It was the only job she could find after months of looking. Crawford, now 56, says she needed to take the job to stop the hemorrhaging of her retirement accounts.
In her spare time, Crawford works with a Chicago group called Action Now, which is staging protests to raise the minimum wage in a state where it hasn't been raised since 2006.
"Thousands of workers in Chicago, let alone in the rest of the country, deserve to have a livable wage, and I truly believe that when someone is given a livable wage, that is going to bolster growth in communities," she said.
If it seems that workers such as Crawford are more prevalent these days, protesting outside stores including Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Wendy's to call for higher wages, it may be because there are more workers in these jobs than there were a few years ago.
Quiz: How much do you know about the 'fiscal cliff'?
Of the 1.9 million jobs created during the recovery, 43% of them have been in the low-wage industries of retail, food services and employment services, whose workforces include temporary employees who often work part time and without benefits or health insurance, according to a study by Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project in New York.
At the same time, many workers such as Crawford who have been displaced from their jobs are experiencing significant earnings losses after getting a new job. About one-third of the 3 million workers displaced from their jobs from 2009 to 2011 and then reemployed said their earnings had dropped 20% or more, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"What these protests are signaling are that working families are at breaking point after three decades of rising inequality and stagnant wages," Bernhardt said.
The rise of low-paying jobs in the recovery, experts said, has cut the spending power of workers who once worked in middle-class occupations. Construction workers who made $30 an hour, for example, during the housing boom may now find themselves working on a temporary basis.
"You see workers trading down their living standards," said Joseph Brusuelas, a senior economist for Bloomberg who studies the U.S. economy.
Now, Brusuelas said, there's an oversupply of workers and they're willing to take any job in a sluggish economy, even if they're overqualified. That includes temporary jobs without benefits, and minimum wage positions such as the one Crawford took.
Although the 2012 election might have brought the idea of income inequality to the forefront of voters' minds, efforts to increase wages for these workers are sputtering in an era of austerity when businesses say they are barely hiring, much less paying workers more.
The New Jersey state legislature handed Gov. Chris Christie a bill to raise the state's minimum wage to $8.50 an hour from the federal minimum of $7.25 this month, but he hasn't signed it and has signaled he might not. An earlier effort in New Jersey to tie the minimum wage to the consumer price index was vetoed by the governor.
Democratic lawmakers in Illinois are also trying to push a bill that would increase the minimum wage — an earlier effort this year failed. The Legislature last voted to raise its minimum wage in 2006, before the recession, and the governor agreed.
"A higher minimum wage means a person has to pay more for each worker," said Ted Dabrowski, vice president of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, which opposes raising the minimum wage. "Companies have a few choices — increase prices, reduce the number of people they hire, cut employee hours or reduce benefits. When employees become too expensive, they have no choice but to reduce the number of workers."
The Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., however, says there is little indication from economic research that increases in the minimum wage lead to lower employment, and, because higher wages mean workers have more money to spend, employment can actually increase.
A bill to raise the federal minimum wage was introduced to the U.S. Senate by Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) in July and referred to committee, where it has sat ever since.
"Business lobbyists are aware of the campaign and are aggressively working to stop it," said Madeline Talbott, the former lead organizer of Chicago's Action Now. "We've had a hard time getting our legislature to approve it."
But Talbott and other advocates say that the protests that have spread throughout Illinois and the country in recent weeks might force the issue to its head.
"You saw it happening 18 months ago when Occupy started — workers are now realizing that they have rights too in the workplace," said Camille Rivera, executive director of United NY, one of the groups working to raise the minimum wage in New York. "It's a good time for us to be fighting these issues, when companies are making millions of dollars in profits."
The protests are bringing out people who might not usually participate, including Marcus Rose, 33. Rose, who has worked the grill at a Wendy's for 21/2 months, was marching outside that Wendy's in Brooklyn recently on a day of protests, responding as organizers shouted lines such as "Wendy's, Wendy's, can't you see, $7.25 is not for me."
"If you don't stand up for nothing, you can't fall for anything," he said.
Talbott, the Action Now organizer, says that people such as Rose may make a difference in whether lawmakers at the state and national level will listen to the protests. The Obama victory energized the working class to believe that they could fight against big-money interests and win, she said.
"It comes down to the traditional situation — whether the power is in the hands of organized money or of organized people," she said. "The organized money side tends to win, but it doesn't have to win. The more people you are, the more chance you have against money."
alana.semuels@latimes.com
ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com
Semuels reported from New York and Lopez from Los Angeles
A man who fell down the smoke-stack at a downtown hotel has died.The man, 23, was trying to take a photo from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue. (WGN - Chicago)
It took rescue crews four hours to remove the 23-year-old man from Minnesota, at one point cutting through a wall and wedging boards in the chute to keep him from falling farther down.
Rescue crews responded to the hotel at 505 N. Michigan Ave. around 1:10 a.m. after someone called and reported that a person threatening to jump from the roof. Firefighters later learned the man fell down the smokestack, according to Fire Department spokeswoman Meg Ahlheim.
A "confined space rescue" was called, bringing 30 companies and about 125 firefighters and paramedics to the scene.
They discovered that the man had fallen 22 feet down a 6-foot wide smokestack and was wedged where the chute angled before dropping 42 floors, Ahlheim said. Crews cut into the wall and used wood boards to block the man from falling any farther, she said.
"We had to send members from the top down on ropes to assess his condition. The whole time we’re monitoring the situation for toxic gases," said Special Operations Chief Michael Fox. "We found the best way to get out him was to go about two floors below, and we had to cut the duct work for the chimney, which was made out of steel. And eventually we ended up sliding the victim down into the hole and removing him from the building."
The man was able to communicate with his girlfriend, either with phone calls or text messages, Ahlheim said, but firefighters lost contact with him around 3:15 a.m.
A representative of the hotel was not available for comment.
pnickeas@tribune.com
Twitter: @peternickeas
Smaller tablets in the 7-inch range have been on the market for more than two years now, but it looks like it took Apple (AAPL) just one month to vault to the top of the category. Mobile advertising firm Millennial Media recently published the findings of a study pitting the iPad mini against Amazon’s (AMZN) popular Kindle Fire, which has been an extremely popular iPad alternative since it first launched last year. According to Millennial, iPad mini usage grew about 50% faster during early November than the Kindle Fire did immediately following its successful launch last year, as measured by ad impressions served by the firm’s network.
Millennial found that impressions served to the iPad mini in early November grew at an average daily rate of 28%. In the weeks following the Kindle Fire’s launch last year, usage of Amazon’s tablet grew roughly 19% each day.
“In the first weeks after the iPad mini went on sale, we saw an average daily growth in impressions of 28 percent. Last holiday season, Amazon launched the Kindle Fire to much anticipation, Millennial Media’s Matt Mills wrote on the company’s blog. “As a comparison, we saw Kindle Fire impressions grow at an average daily rate of 19 percent in the first two weeks after it went on sale last year. So, by our math it looks like Apple could have itself another massive holiday season.”
Mills called the iPad mini a “game changer” and said he expects “a massive amount” of iPad mini tablets to be given as gifts this holiday season.
Get more from BGR.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook
Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LONDON (Reuters) – British television star Jimmy Savile is suspected of carrying out an unprecedented number of sex offences including 31 rapes, police said on Wednesday in their most comprehensive review of the scandal.
Revelations about Savile, who died last year, provoked outrage across Britain where he had been a household name since the 1960s.
News of Savile’s crimes threw his main employer the BBC into turmoil, led to resignation of the BBC’s director general just 54 days into his job and provoked awkward questions for his predecessor Mark Thompson, who recently took over as chief executive of the New York Times.
Detectives launched their inquiry 10 weeks ago following reports in a TV documentary that Savile had abused young girls on BBC premises and at hospitals where he did charity work.
Since then, 450 people had come forward with allegations about Savile, mostly dealing with sexual abuse, said police.
Savile was now a suspect in 199 crimes, the vast majority of them involving children or young people, the force added.
“These levels of reporting of sexual abuse against a single individual are unprecedented in the UK,” the police said in a statement.
Detectives have been examining three categories of alleged offences: those involving only Savile, which make up the majority of cases; those involving Savile and others; and those which had no direct link to Savile.
So far six men have been arrested and another questioned by London police.
Those quizzed include Max Clifford, Britain’s most high-profile celebrity publicist, former BBC radio DJ Dave Lee Travis and former glam-rock singer Gary Glitter.
They have all denied any wrongdoing.
“Our officers will continue to investigate allegations made against those who potentially can be brought to justice,” the police statement said. “More arrests nationally will be forthcoming.”
A one-time professional wrestler with a penchant for garish outfits, Savile became famous as a pioneering DJ in the 1960s before hosting prime-time TV shows until the 1990s.
He ran about 200 marathons for charity, raising tens of millions of pounds for hospitals, leading some to give him keys to rooms where victims now allege they were abused.
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
James Edward Bates for The New York Times
Sarah Kavanagh, 15, of Hattiesburg, Miss., started an online petition asking PepsiCo to change Gatorade’s formula.
Sarah Kavanagh and her little brother were looking forward to the bottles of Gatorade they had put in the refrigerator after playing outdoors one hot, humid afternoon last month in Hattiesburg, Miss.
But before she took a sip, Sarah, a dedicated vegetarian, did what she often does and checked the label to make sure no animal products were in the drink. One ingredient, brominated vegetable oil, caught her eye.
“I knew it probably wasn’t from an animal because it had vegetable in the name, but I still wanted to know what it was, so I Googled it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “A page popped up with a long list of possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones. I didn’t expect that.”
She threw the product away and started a petition on Change.org, a nonprofit Web site, that has almost 200,000 signatures. Ms. Kavanagh, 15, hopes her campaign will persuade PepsiCo, Gatorade’s maker, to consider changing the drink’s formulation.
Jeff Dahncke, a spokesman for PepsiCo, noted that brominated vegetable oil had been deemed safe for consumption by federal regulators. “As standard practice, we constantly evaluate our formulas and ingredients to ensure they comply with federal regulations and meet the high quality standards our consumers and athletes expect — from functionality to great taste,” he said in an e-mail.
In fact, about 10 percent of drinks sold in the United States contain brominated vegetable oil, including Mountain Dew, also made by PepsiCo; Powerade, Fanta Orange and Fresca from Coca-Cola; and Squirt and Sunkist Peach Soda, made by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.
The ingredient is added often to citrus drinks to help keep the fruit flavoring evenly distributed; without it, the flavoring would separate.
Use of the substance in the United States has been debated for more than three decades, so Ms. Kavanagh’s campaign most likely is quixotic. But the European Union has long banned the substance from foods, requiring use of other ingredients. Japan recently moved to do the same.
“B.V.O. is banned other places in the world, so these companies already have a replacement for it,” Ms. Kavanagh said. “I don’t see why they don’t just make the switch.” To that, companies say the switch would be too costly.
The renewed debate, which has brought attention to the arcane world of additive regulation, comes as consumers show increasing interest in food ingredients and have new tools to learn about them. Walmart’s app, for instance, allows access to lists of ingredients in foods in its stores.
Brominated vegetable oil contains bromine, the element found in brominated flame retardants, used in things like upholstered furniture and children’s products. Research has found brominate flame retardants building up in the body and breast milk, and animal and some human studies have linked them to neurological impairment, reduced fertility, changes in thyroid hormones and puberty at an earlier age.
Limited studies of the effects of brominated vegetable oil in animals and in humans found buildups of bromine in fatty tissues. Rats that ingested large quantities of the substance in their diets developed heart lesions.
Its use in foods dates to the 1930s, well before Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to add regulation of new food additives to the responsibilities of the Food and Drug Administration. But Congress exempted two groups of additives, those already sanctioned by the F.D.A. or the Department of Agriculture, or those experts deemed “generally recognized as safe.”
The second exemption created what Tom Neltner, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ food additives project, a three-year investigation into how food additives are regulated, calls “the loophole that swallowed the law.” A company can create a new additive, publish safety data about it on its Web site and pay a law firm or consulting firm to vet it to establish it as “generally recognized as safe” — without ever notifying the F.D.A., Mr. Neltner said.
Copyright © News Rustel. All rights reserved.
Design 
And Business Directories
