Healing Health Wealth
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Friday, September 14, 2018
Boy, 11, is left with horrific G-force injuries suffered by ASTRONAUNTS after 'bullies' recreated 'Roundabout of Death' YouTube playground stunt
An 11-year-old boy has been left seriously ill with a horrific injury only seen in fighter pilots after being forced to recreate a YouTube stunt known as the 'Roundabout of Death.'
Tyler Broome was left with possible damage to his brain and vision and with bulging eyes after being found unconscious near a playground roundabout.
The young boy had been told to sit in the middle of the roundabout as it was spun at high speed using the rear wheel of a motorcycle by a group of youths.
It is believed he was seriously injured after being subjected to extreme levels of gravitational force - or g-force - normally only experienced by pilots and astronauts.
It is thought the g-force forced fluid and blood into the youngster's brain causing damage to his vision and giving him bulging eyes.
In shocking footage circulating online, Tyler appears to have passed out during the ride but the teens around him do not appear to realise, and continued to rev the engine.
Tyler was at a local park with his friend when the pair were approached by a group of older teenagers - one with a motorcycle, according to mum Dawn Hollingworth.
Dawn, 51, says the group tried to recreate the YouTube stunt in which the rear wheel of a motorbike is placed against the roundabout to spin it at high speed on Wednesday.
She says Tyler was encouraged to sit in the middle of the roundabout while it was sent spinning, subjecting the boy to enormous g-forces.
Dawn is now waiting by his bedside and hoping that the swelling on his brain will subside.
Dawn, of Tuxford, Nottinghamshire, said: "I don't recognise my child - he is on the verge of having a stoke.
"Tyler sat on the roundabout, and the boy who came over was about 17. Tyler doesn't know him, they are not friends.
"He puts his motorbike on the floor, gets the roundabout spinning at such a speed.
"When they all stopped, the group just cleared off - it is bullying."
Tyler had to be immediately rushed to the Queens Medical Centre, in Nottingham for treatment for severe injuries.
Dawn claims his injuries were so rare hospital staff had never witnessed this before and had to research it before they could treat him.
Dawn adds: "The injuries were so extreme he just looked like elephant man.
"They have never seen it before, they are going to make a medical report from it.
"His head has completely swelled up, his blood vessels have burst, his eyes look alien.
"His vision is blurry.
"You can manage a broken arm but this?
"He doesn't remember it, he doesn't remember the detail."
Tyler's mum said she believed the inspiration behind the prank stemmed from the roundabout of death video on YouTube, which has over seven million views on the website.
The video shows two people getting on a roundabout feature in a park, where another revs a motorbike, causing it to spin at an alarming rate of speed.
Dawn wrote on Facebook : "A decent young lad who I only know as Liam who lives in Tuxford who entered the park and saw my son laying on the ground ran and called an ambulance.
"My son remains in hospital with the threat of a stroke if his head swelling doesn't go down to release the pressure.
"I could of easily lost my son tonight and wouldn't want any parent going through what my family are tonight."
Dawn adds: "The bruises will take four to six weeks but doctors just don't know how long internal symptoms will take.
"We are just taking each day as it comes.
"I feel so frustrated that there is such a site like YouTube where bloggers get paid for putting such ideas and videos into young children's heads.
"There needs to be some discussion about banning these videos after what's happened to my son."
A Nottinghamshire Police spokesman said: "Police are investigating after a boy sustained serious head injuries at a park in Tuxford Wednesday (12 September).
"The boy fell off a roundabout in Ashvale Park after a moped is believed to have been used to spin it around.
"The boy remains at the QMC in a serious but stable condition. If anyone has any video footage of the incident, or was in the area at the time, please call us on 101, quoting incident number 62 of 13 September 2018."
Chinese restaurant staff 'offer to pay for pregnant woman's abortion' after she finds dead rat in soup
Restaurant staff in China offered to pay for a pregnant woman who found a dead rat in her food to have an abortion, her husband has claimed.
The man said he and his family were eating at a branch of Xiabu Xiabu in Weifang when his wife found the rodent in a bowl of hotpot.
Ma has alleged that one of the staff suggested his wife get an abortion if she was concerned for her unborn child’s health, according to local news outlet Kankan News.
He said he was told by a member of staff: “If you are worried about the baby, then we’ll give you 20,000 yuan (£2,238) to abort it."
The restaurant offered Ms Ma compensation of 5,000 yuan (£559) after the wife had been checked in hospital and the baby was confirmed healthy.
Hotpot is a popular dish in China and seen as a social occasion where ingredients are cooked at the table by diners in a boiling broth.
The incident went viral on Chinese social media causing the company’s stock value to plummet by around £145 million.
Local authorities closed down the restaurant while an investigation was launched.
In a statement the company’s representative Catherine Gao, the chain is helping authorities with their investigation.
She said: “We have set up a special investigation team to gain an in-depth understanding of the incident and assist us in clarifying the truth through third-party authorities.”
Google employees quit over controversial China search engine project, report says
Seven Google employees have reportedly quit their jobs over the lack of accountability and transparency at the search giant over its controversial China search engine effort, codenamed Project Dragonfly.
The departures, first reported by BuzzFeed News, have not all been publicly identified. However, it largely consists of software engineers with varying degrees of experience, BuzzFeed reported, citing three sources familiar with the matter. One of the names said to be on the list is Google senior scientist Jack Poulson, who reportedly first learned of Project Dragonfly after The Intercept initially reported the story in August.
“It is our policy to not comment on individual employees," a Google spokesperson told Fox News.
Speaking with BuzzFeed, Poulson said he was "shocked" by the news. “If it was true, I was pretty sure immediately I couldn’t continue working there,” he told the news outlet.
Last month, Google was pressured by a consortium of human rights groups to abandon the search engine, which would be app-based and censored at the behest of the Chinese government. When Poulson saw that the company did not give any credence to the human rights organizations' concerns, he decided to go public with his concerns.
“I’m offended that no weight has been given to the human rights community having a consensus,” he added in the Buzzfeed interview. “If you have coalition letter from 14 human rights organizations, and that can’t even make it into the discussions on the ethics behind a decision, I’d rather stand with the human rights organizations in this dispute.”
News of the purported departures comes just days after the chief scientist of Google's cloud computing unit, Fei-Fei Li, resigned from the company over dustups related to Project Maven, the firm's controversial Pentagon AI program, according to the New York Post.
In June, Fox News reported that Google was set to end the program after it expires in 2019.
Human rights concerns
In August, more than a dozen human rights groups sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking him to explain what Google is doing to safeguard users from the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance.
It describes the company's secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship as representing "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights."
"The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities' repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China," the letter says.
In a statement to Fox News at the time of the letter, Google said it has "been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China."
The letter was signed by groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.
Discontent from Google employees
The letter from the human rights groups came just a few weeks after approximately 1,000 of Google's own employees asked Pichai and senior leadership to explain what it was doing with the search project.
The letter, obtained by BuzzFeed News, stated that the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant needs to have more transparency about how it operates and relay that to its employees. "Our industry has entered a new era of ethical responsibility: the choices we make matter on a global scale," the letter states, specifically referencing the Chinese search engine project, codenamed Dragonfly.
The letter, which was been signed by approximately 1,000 people at the company, according to The New York Times, also asks management to satisfy four conditions regarding ethics and transparency:
1. An ethics review structure that includes rank and file employee representatives
2. The appointment of ombudspeople with meaningful employee input into their selection
3. A clear plan for transparency sufficient to enable Googlers an individual ethical choice about what they work on; and
4. The publication of “ethical test cases”; an ethical assessment of Dragonfly, Maven, and Airgap GCP with respect to the AI principles; and regular, official, internally visible communication and assessments regarding any new areas of substantial ethical concern.
After the letter became public, Google held an internal meeting with its employees, where Pichai expressed the company was "not close" to launching a search product and it was "very unclear" whether it would or could, according to CNBC.
Google's rocky history in China
Rumors of the Chinese-based search engine have circulated over the past several weeks after The Intercept reported that it had seen leaked documents, suggesting the Sundar Pichai-led Google was planning to re-enter China, nearly 8 years after leaving the country.
The search engine, which would be app-based, would remove items that contain certain words or phrases and would apply to image search, suggested search features and automatic spell check. It would also “blacklist sensitive queries” so no results are shown when a person looks for a specific word or phrase, The Intercept added.
The app will also identify topics and websites that are blocked by China's Great Firewall, according to the documents. According to The Intercept, examples that will be censored include British broadcaster BBC and Wikipedia.
In 2010, Google famously announced it was leaving China, specifically mentioning China's censorship tactics as a reason for pulling out of the country.
However, Pichai has said he wants Google to be in China serving its internet users. Pichai became Google's CEO in 2015, taking over from co-founder Larry Page who became CEO of Alphabet, the holding company that owns Google.
'Stunned, shocked': Insurance company stopped pay-outs to woman with cancer
One of Australia’s biggest life insurance companies abruptly stopped insurance pay-outs to a woman with cervical cancer because it discovered she had sought help for mental health years before her diagnosis.
TAL Life Limited began investigating the woman’s medical history because she’d taken out income protection insurance four months before her cancer diagnosis in December 2013, and after finding she’d sought help for mental health between 2007 and 2009, avoided her contract of insurance claiming she had failed to disclose a prior history of depression.
It stopped paying her $5,000 a month, which it had done between January 2014 and May 2014, and told her it wouldn’t have offered her cover if it had known about her alleged depression, even though it was unrelated to her cancer.
The woman, a self-employed health professional, was taken aback by the news, telling a TAL employee she was “stunned, shocked, incredibly sad and distressed”.
She took the matter to the financial ombudsman service in 2014.
The banking royal commission heard on Friday that TAL deliberately delayed its dealings with the ombudsman.
The commission heard that in mid-March 2015, TAL had another look at the woman’s medical history to see if blood tests she had taken for gynaecological issues, which she had disclosed in her application, could be classified as non-disclosure.
When TAL sought a retrospective underwriting opinion, the general manager of claims in TAL told the retail claims manager she couldn’t help feeling that TAL was “trying to make retrospective decisions when the facts at the time were different”.
The commission also heard that a couple of weeks before TAL was due to hold a conciliation meeting with the ombudsman, its claims decision committee said it had found additional medical evidence about the woman showing she had experienced “recent deteriorating weight loss, mood change, and fatigue” and her insurance would have been declined on that information.
But TAL waited for two weeks until the day before the conciliation meeting to tell the ombudsman it would be using that additional information as evidence to support its reason to avoid the woman’s insurance contract.
Senior counsel assisting the royal commission, Rowena Orr QC, asked if TAL had withheld that information until the last moment because it wanted to use the information to its “strategic advantage”.
Loraine van Eeden, from TAL Life Limited, replied: “I don’t know.”
Orr said: “It was part of a broader pattern of delay in the dealings with the ombudsman in this matter, wasn’t it?”
Eeden replied: “Yes.”
TAL eventually settled the matter with the ombudsman. It agreed to waive its right to recover the $25,000 it had already paid the woman, and then paid her another $25,000.
Eeden conceded to the banking royal commission that it was wrong to avoid the woman’s insurance contract.
She agreed the woman had made an innocent non-disclosure of an unrelated condition when she applied for income protection insurance. She said policies should only be avoided if there is fraudulent non-disclosure of unrelated conditions – such as someone claiming they are working when they are not – but not when there has been innocent non-disclosure of unrelated conditions.
The commission heard that TAL is now in the process of changing its controls and risk management of disputed claims, so disputed claims are not remitted back to original case managers but to separate case managers.
Also on Friday, the corporate regulator began civil proceedings against ANZ Bank over allegations ANZ failed to tell shareholders that the investment banks it hired to sell $2.5bn of its shares in 2015 bought $791m worth of shares themselves.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Asic) has alleged that when ANZ tried to raise $2.5bn in 2015, the share sale did not attract the anticipated level of interest from institutional investors, so the investment banks running the share sale – JP Morgan Australia, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank – had to purchase the leftover shares.
Asic alleges ANZ failed to tell the stock market about the purchase of the leftover shares before the market opened the next day.
It says more than $1.1bn of ANZ shares were traded the next day, and traders may have acted differently if they had all relevant information.
ANZ has said it will defend the allegations, saying it is not aware of any precedent for an ASX-listed company to disclose if shares had been bought by investment banks running a major share sale.
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