Month: September 2016
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Indian-Origin Eye Specialist Jailed In UK For Negligence
An India-born woman optometrist in the UK was today handed down a two-year suspended jail term for failing to spot a life-threatening eye infection in an eight-year-old boy who later died.
Honey Rose, 35, a mother-of-three, had performed a routine eye test on Vincent Barker in February 2012 but failed to spot a life-threatening condition, resulting in his death five months later.
He had denied charges of gross negligence amounting to manslaughter but was found guilty after a trial at Ipswich Crown Court here.
The prosecution claimed her conduct had been so far below the expected standard it was “criminal”.
Sentencing Rose, Judge Jeremy Stuart-Smith said it was the first case of its type and ordered her to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and gave her a 24-month supervision order.
A suspended jail term in the UK refers to a deferred custodial sentence on strict conditions.
The judge told her, “You simply departed from your normal practice in a way that was completely untypical for you, a one-off, for no good reason”.
Detective Superintendent Tonya Antonis of Suffolk Police, said the sentence was “proportionate in the circumstances”.
“It was never the Barker family’s intention that Honey Rose should go to prison,” she said.
The victim’s mother Joanne Barker said the family had struggled to accept Vincent’s death and the impact on his siblings had been “immeasurable”.
“The knowledge our loss should have been prevented and Vinnie should have been saved is intolerable to live with,” Barker said in a statement.
The jury was told there were “obvious abnormalities” in both of Vinnie’s eyes visible during the examination. A build-up of fluid on the brain increased pressure in Vinnie’s skull and ultimately led to his death.
Rose had claimed her examination of Vinnie was tricky because he had closed his eyes to the light and looked away during the test.
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Indian-Origin Boy Devises Breast Cancer Treatment
London: A 16-year-old Indian-origin boy in the UK has claimed to have found a treatment for the most deadly form of breast cancer which is unresponsive to drugs.
Krtin Nithiyanandam, who moved to the UK from India with his parents, hopes he has found a way to turn so-called triple negative breast cancer into a kind which responds to drugs.
Many breast cancers are driven by oestrogen, progesterone or growth chemicals so drugs that can block those fuels, such as tamoxifen, make effective treatments.
However, triple negative breast cancer does not have receptors and it can only be treated with a combination of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy which lowers the chance of survival. “I’ve been basically trying to work out a way to change difficult-to-treat cancers into something that responds well to treatment. Most cancers have receptors on their surface which bind to drugs like Tamoxifen but triple negative don’t have receptors so the drugs don’t work,” Krtin was quoted as saying by The Sunday Telegraph.
“The prognosis for women with undifferentiated cancer isn’t very good so the goal is to turn the cancer back to a state where it can be treated. The ID4 protein actually stops undifferentiated stem cell cancers from differentiating so you have to block ID4 to allow the cancer to differentiate.”
“I have found a way to silence the genes that produce ID4 which turns cancer back into a less dangerous state,” Krtin added.
Some women with triple negative cancer respond very well to treatment while others quickly decline.
The problem lies in whether the cancer cells are “differentiated” or not.
Differentiated means they look more like healthy cells and they tend to grow and multiply quite slowly, and are less aggressive.
However, when cancer cells are “undifferentiated” they get stuck in a dangerous primitive form, never turning into recognisable breast tissue, and spreading quickly, leading to high grade tumours.
He has also discovered that upping the activity of a tumour suppressor gene called PTEN allows chemotherapy to work more effectively, so the dual treatment could prove far more effective than traditional drugs.
The therapy idea saw him shortlisted for the final of the UK-based young scientists programme titled The Big Bang Fair.
His efforts had hit the headlines last year when he won the Google Science Fair for creating a test which helps pick up the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially stop it spreading further.
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Hillary Clinton Aide Huma Abedin Dumps Husband Anthony Weiner Over New Scandal
New York: Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin is done playing the good wife to Anthony Weiner, announcing on Monday she is leaving the serially sexting ex-congressman after he was accused of sending raunchy photos and messages to yet another woman.
Abedin, who as vice chair of Clinton’s campaign is destined for big things if the Democrat is elected president, stayed with Weiner after a sexting scandal led him to resign from Congress in 2011 and after a new outbreak of online misbehavior wrecked his bid for New York mayor in 2013. She didn’t leave even when a recent documentary blew up tense moments in their marriage to big-screen proportions.
But on Monday, she effectively declared she had had enough.
“After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband,” she said in a statement issued by the campaign. “Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life.”
The New York Post published photos late on Sunday that it said Weiner had sent last year to a woman identified only as a “40-something divorcee” who lives in the West and supports Republican Donald Trump. The photos included two close-ups of Weiner’s bulging underpants.
In one of the pictures, Weiner is lying on a bed with his toddler son while texting the woman, according to the Post. The tabloid also ran sexually suggestive messages that it said the two exchanged.
Weiner told the Post that he and the woman “have been friends for some time.”
“She has asked me not to comment except to say that our conversations were private, often included pictures of her nieces and nephews and my son and were always appropriate,” the 51-year-old Democrat told the newspaper.
Weiner didn’t return a call, text or email from The Associated Press. He deleted his Twitter account Monday.
The Post didn’t say how it obtained the photographs and messages.
Abedin, 41, is a longtime Clinton aide and confidante who is often referred to as the candidate’s second daughter.Trump immediately seized on the aide’s marital split to accuse Clinton of “bad judgment.” He suggested that Weiner might have compromised national security, but offered no evidence to support the allegation.
“I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information,” Trump said in a statement. “Who knows what he learned and who he told?”
Abedin has been under scrutiny during the probe into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Federal prosecutors declined to file charges in the investigation, but FBI Director James Comey said Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information.
Abedin began working for the former first lady as a White House intern and became a trusted aide as Clinton won a seat in the Senate representing New York in 2000, ran for president in 2008 and served as President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. Former President Bill Clinton officiated when Abedin and Weiner married in 2010.
The marriage would provide years of fodder for political commentators, armchair psychologists and spouses all over America who wondered: How could she stay with him?
Abedin was pregnant with the couple’s son, Jordan, when a photo of a man’s bulging underpants appeared on Weiner’s Twitter account in 2011. After initially claiming his account was hacked, Weiner acknowledged inappropriate online communication with several women.Two years later, Abedin was all in for her husband’s mayoral bid, raising money, appearing on the campaign trail and participating in interviews in which the couple talked about rebuilding their trust and marriage. Then a new series of sexually explicit pictures and messages emerged, and Weiner was forced to acknowledge he kept sexting after he had resigned from Congress.
Still, Abedin said, “I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him, and … we are moving forward.”
Voters weren’t ready to forgive, however. Weiner lost the Democratic primary.
Weiner has since remained in the public eye, commenting on politics on cable news shows. “Weiner,” the documentary offering a cringe-inducing inside view of his mayoral campaign and its unraveling, played in theaters earlier this year and is set to air on Showtime this fall.
He recently refused to answer when asked whether he was still sexting, telling The New York Times Magazine in an interview published August 16: “I’m not going to go down the path of talking about any of that.”
Some psychology experts, while cautioning they haven’t treated him, suggested his behavior smacks of extreme impulsiveness, compulsion or addiction.
“Impulsivity is something that a lot of people really struggle with,” said Jeannette Stern, a New York therapist. While there are various approaches people can try to change such behavior, she noted, “they have to really be willing to stop.”
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RBI LETS BANKS ISSUE MASALA BONDS, TO ACCEPT CORPORATE BONDS IN LAF
MUMBAI (TIP): Reserve Bank on Thursday announced a slew of changes in fixed income and currency markets such as allowing lenders to issue ‘masala bonds’ and to accept corporate bonds under the liquidity adjustment facility (LAF).
“These measures are intended to further deepen market development, enhance participation, facilitate greater market liquidity and improve communication,” an RBI release said.
To encourage overseas rupee bonds market, banks are being permitted to issue rupee-denominated bonds overseas (masala bonds) for their capital requirements and for financing infrastructure and affordable housing.
Currently, masala bonds can be issued only by corporates and non-banking lenders like, HFCs and large NBFCs. Masala bonds are instruments through which Indian entities can raise funds by accessing overseas capital markets, while the bond Investors hold the currency risk.
These will constitute for additional tier-I and tier-II capital for the lenders, it said, adding such overseas bonds can also be issued to finance infrastructure and affordable housing under a current dispensation which applies for foreign currency bond raising.
It can be noted that so far two Indian corporates — HDFC and NTPC — have made use of this facility to raise over Rs 5,000 crore, but the segment was not open to banks.
The RBI will be seeking amendments to enable the central bank to accept corporate bonds under the LAF which is used to bridge temporary liquidity issues by lenders, it said.
Outgoing Governor Raghuram Rajan had earlier said RBI would be announcing a series of measures aimed at bonds and currency markets by end of the month. Rajan, whose tenure ends on September 4, is likely to handover charge to Governor designate Urjit Patel on September 6.
Stating the absence of an overarching ceiling on total borrowing by a corporate entity from the banking system has resulted in banks collectively having very high exposures to some of the large corporates, the RBI will be coming out with draft guidelines on the ‘large exposure framework’, it said.
To give an impetus to the corporate bonds market, RBI has also decided to expand limit of partial credit enhancement (PCE) provided by banks.
“The aggregate PCE that may be provided by the financial system for a given bond issue will be increased from the present 20 per cent to 50 per cent of the bond issue size subject to the PCE provided by any single bank not exceeding 20 per cent of the bond issue size and the extant exposure limits,” the RBI said.
RBI has constituted a working group to review the guidelines for hedging of commodity price risks by resident investors in the overseas markets.
