Five police officers have been killed in the past 30 days, the deadliest in recent times. Myjoyonline.com recaps the tragedies that have hit the country within the Ghana Police Service. July 30, 2019: Corporal Agatha Nana Nabin with the Northern Regional Police Command was shot dead at a police checkpoint on the Tamale-Kumbungu road in the Sagnarigu District. The report is that armed and masked men in a grey saloon car discharged their weapons after being stopped at the check-point. The 30-year-old officer was shot at the back of the head with the bullet passing through the mouth and killing her instantly, media reports say. Her last words as she ran were ‘Jesus, Jesus’, media outlets have reported. Another female officer escaped death as she ran and stumbled. The killers took away two rifles belonging to the deceased and her colleague who escaped. August 19, 2019: Corporal Bernard Antwi, 37, was attached to Manso Nkwanta Divisional Command in the Ashanti region. He was found dead after working hours at Manso Abodom in the Amansie West District of the region. Photo: Corporal Bernard Antwi There are conflicting reports over how he was killed. Initial reports said he was shot but police sources say he may have been bludgeoned with a metal. He was reportedly seen with his suspected killers in a white pickup vehicle, registered AS 9116-15. The vehicle has been impounded. August 20, 2019: General Lance Corporal Alhassan Asare, 35yrs, was attached to the Akyem Swedru Police Station in the Eastern region. He was found dead at the Dukes fuel filling station Monday dawn while on duty. His rifle between his thighs while he sat in a chair with bullet wounds to his head which was slumped backward. Police have not ruled out suicide or that his weapon discharged accidentally while he slept. L/Cpl. Alhassan Asare is survived by a wife and two children who live at Akyem Swedru Police Barracks. August 28, 2019: Sergeant Michael Dzamesi and Lance Corporal Mohammed Awal were with the Kasoa Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD). During usual checks on the Buduburam stretch of the Accra-Winneba road, the team flagged a driver of an unregistered vehicle to stop. The driver set off a chase after refusing to stop. Armed men in the saloon car opened fire, hitting Sgt Micheal Dzamesi in the head. He took cover in a provision shop close by but collapsed in there and was rushed to the hospital. Lance Corporal Mohammed Awal was also hit in his lower pelvis and the left side of his back, Daily Graphic has reported. He died at the Police Hospital in Accra where he was receiving emergency care. Three suspects have been arrested.
Armed men kill 2 police officers at Buduburam
Two police officers are confirmed dead in a shooting incident that occurred Wednesday afternoon between the police and some unknown assailants around Buduburam, near Kasoa in the Central Region. The Central Regional Police Public Relations Officer, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Irene Oppong who confirmed the incident to Graphic Online said the incident happened around the Buduburam stretch of the Accra-Winneba road. She said it happened during the usual checks by the Kasoa Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) and that the police signalled an unregistered vehicle to stop but the driver refused to stop. She said the police gave the vehicle a chase but the occupants at a point began shooting at occupants of the police vehicle. One of the police officers was hit and died immediately while the other was rushed to the police hospital in critical condition but died later. Ms Oppong said the police mounted a search for the vehicle and its occupants. Killed officer identified Meanwhile, Graphic Online has gathered that one of the officers confirmed dead has been identified as Sergeant Michael Dzamesi. Sgt Dzamesi and his team are said to have stopped the vehicle but the driver failed to stop. They chased the recalcitrant driver, not knowing the said occupants of the vehicle were armed. They opened fire on the police vehicle and Sgt Dzamesi lost his life in the process with the other officer in critical condition. Sgt Dzamesi after he was hit in the head, is said to have run into a near provision shop, ostensibly to take cover, but collapsed on entering the facility. The other officer died later at the police hospital. The police have since arrested three suspects.
Innocent man jailed for 82 days and loses jobs for bringing three jars of honey back to US
Leon Haughton likes honey in his tea. Which is why during his Christmas visit to relatives in Jamaica, he made his regular stop and bought three bottles from a favourite roadside stand before heading home to Maryland. It was a routine purchase for him until he landed at the airport in Baltimore. US customs officers detained Mr Haughton and police arrested him, accusing him of smuggling in not honey, but liquid methamphetamine. Leon Haughton, pictured, was jailed for 82 days after customs officials alleged that three jars of honey he had brought to the United States from Jamaica contained liquid methamphetamine: Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post Mr Haughton spent nearly three months in jail before all charges were dropped and two rounds of law enforcement lab tests showed no controlled substances in the bottles. By then, Mr Haughton, who according to his lawyer had no criminal record, had lost both of his jobs as a cleaner and a construction worker. “They messed up my life,” Mr Haughton said. “I want the world to know that the system is not right. If I didn’t have strong people around me, they would probably leave me in jail. You’re lost in the system.” Months after his release, he is only now fully rebuilding his life after the setback devastated him and his family of six children. Mr Haughton’s status as a legal permanent resident with a green card complicated his case. Because he was arrested at an airport for alleged drug felonies, his case triggered a federal detention order that extended his time in jail, court testimony shows. Twenty days after his arrest, a state police lab test looking for drugs in the bottles came up negative. Yet the 45-year-old father sat behind bars for two more months before the last of the charges were dropped after a second all-clear in a federal lab test. “Someone dropped the ball somewhere,” Mr Haughton’s lawyer Terry Morris said. “An innocent man spent 82 days in jail for bringing honey into the United States.” After landing at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport on 29 December at around 10pm, US Customs and Border Protection detained Mr Haughton for more than two hours before Maryland Transportation Authority Police put him in handcuffs, according to charging documents. The bottles with gold-coloured screw tops labelled “honey” in his bag, they told him, had tested positive in a drug field test for methamphetamine. Mr Haughton fainted. Police took him to a hospital. Then they took him to jail. ‘When he tweets about infestation, it’s about black and brown people’ CNN anchor gets upset over Trump’s latest Tweets Every year for the nearly 10 years since Mr Haughton has been living in Prince George’s County, the native of Jamaica travels to the island in December to visit his mother. The green card holder never had any problem returning to Maryland until last year, when a police dog unit started sniffing around his bag. Mr Haughton thought the dog was interested in his leftover chicken. But Mr Haughton said he quickly noticed agents and officers whispering to one another before disappearing behind a screen. When they returned, a man took Mr Haughton away. His bag didn’t come with him. Police in charging documents said a dog named Beny conducted a “random scan” and alerted to possible drugs. “Inside the bag were three large plastic bottles labelled as ‘honey’ of suspected liquid methamphetamine,” charging documents said. Mr Haughton and Mr Morris contend he was stereotyped because of his race. Authorities, Mr Haughton’s lawyer said, questioned him about “a big Jamaican gang and drug-dealing conspiracy”. “I’m 100 per cent sure I don’t have drugs,” Mr Haughton recalled telling the agents. “I only have honey.” Mr Haughton had given up sugar years ago but drinks honey with his tea. He prefers honey from a particular bee farm in Jamaica because it is cheaper and “more pure” and always asks friends visiting the island to bring him back some. Carey Phillips, Mr Haughton’s girlfriend, said that when he didn’t come home from his Jamaica trip, she assumed he had extended his stay as he had done in the past and couldn’t get in touch with her. But days later she got a letter from the Anne Arundel County detention centre from Mr Haughton. Democrat senator Kamala Harris faces backlash after ‘comparing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the KKK’ “I was shocked,” Ms Phillips said. “It seems unreal to me. If someone does a crime, you understand, but if there’s nothing, that time is wasted.” Mr Haughton – facing at least 25 years in jail – appeared in court for a bail review two days after his arrest. A public defender at the hearing said Mr Haughton had no prior convictions and had lived in the area for the past nine years. A judge agreed to let him go on work release, court files and recordings of the hearing show. But more than three weeks later, Mr Haughton was still behind bars. The drug charges triggered detention orders from customs officials, Mr Haughton’s lawyer said. Although the Maryland State Police lab returned test results on the bottles that indicated “No CDS detected” on 17 January, and although prosecutors had dropped the three felony drug counts on 23 January, Mr Haughton was still facing a misdemeanour charge for possession of a controlled dangerous substance, or CDS. Mike Pence visits migrant detention centres at the US-Mexico border Mr Haughton asked to be released on 24 January at his second bail review, but Anne Arundel County District Court judge Laura Robinson worried he would not appear for trial. “The problem is I can’t let him go to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] because he would be deported potentially,” the judge said, according to a recording of the hearing. “Even if I released you, you still wouldn’t necessarily be released. You would go into federal detention.” Mr Haughton was sent back to jail, appearing in court for a third bail review on 5 February. Mr Morris, Mr Haughton’s lawyer,
Britain sends another warship to Gulf
London (AFP) – A third British warship is heading to the Gulf, the Royal Navy announced Saturday, amid heightened tensions in the region. Britain has already sent the HMS Kent to cover for frigate HMS Montrose while it undergoes maintenance in nearby Bahrain, and is now redirecting the Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender from its mission to the Pacific. “Wherever the red ensign flies around the world, the UK stands by to protect freedom of navigation whenever is it tested,” said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Britain outraged Iran by seizing one of its tankers — the Grace 1 — on July 4 on suspicion it was carrying oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions. The HMS Montrose then warned off three Iranian gunboats that UK officials said were trying to “impede” the progress of a British supertanker through the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf on July 11. Iranian Revolutionary Guards stormed and detained the UK-flagged Stena Impero and its 23 crew as they sailed through the Strait of Hormuz on July 20. The British government subsequently raised the alert level for ships travelling through Iranian waters to three on a three-point scale, indicating a “critical” threat. Tensions have been escalating in the region, with US President Donald Trump in June calling off at the last minute an air strike on Iran over its downing of a US spy drone. The HMS Defender sailed from Portsmouth on August 12, alongside HMS Kent, which was also heading to the Gulf to replace the HMS Duncan. HMS Defender’s commanding officer Richard Hewitt said his boat would “play her part alongside other Royal Navy warships in keeping these essential trade routes secure.” Source: https://news.yahoo.com
Seven dead in Majorca air crash as sightseeing helicopter collides with ultralight plane
Seven people, including two children, died when a sightseeing helicopter and an ultralight aircraft crashed in mid-air over Majorca. The helicopter had three adults and two children on board, all of whom were killed. According to the Balearic Islands government it was believed they were all German. However, a local report suggested one of them may have been Italian. Two men in the ultralight, who were local to Majorca, also died. An ultralight is a form of small aircraft with only one or two seats. Both aircraft were in private use, according to the Diario de Mallorca newspaper. Emergency services were called to the crash at 1.35pm local time, and the mid-air collision happened over the Inca Hospital, in the municipality of Inca, in the north of the island Wreckage from both aircraft was strewn across parts of the town and rural areas. Photographs circulated on social media showed one section landed on fire on what appeared to be a garden wall. A tail section from one of the aircraft came down on a road, and another section crashed into a farm field. Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s caretaker prime minister, sent his sympathies to the families of the dead. He wrote on Twitter: “My solidarity and love for the families of the victims that lost their lives in this tragic accident,” The Balearic islands government said an investigation into the cause of the tragedy had been launched. More than nine million holidaymakers visit Majorca annually. Of those, more than two million are British. As many as 500 cruise ships now dock in Palma each year, depositing up to 22,000 passengers a day.
Video: 2 women accused of shoplifting strollers and accidentally leaving their baby behind
Two women were arrested for allegedly shoplifting baby strollers and accidentally leaving their own baby behind as they tried to get away.
The founding family you’ve never heard of: The black Tuckers of Hampton, Virginia
HAMPTON, Va. – As Walter Jones walks his family’s ancient cemetery, shovel in hand, he wonders about those who rest there. The gravestones date back as far as the 1800s. Some bear the names of folks Walter knew; some have faded to illegibility; some are in pieces. And, under the brush he’s cleared away and the ground he’s leveled, there are burial sites unmarked by any stone. The cemetery means so much to Walter because his extended family – the Tuckers of Tidewater, Virginia – believe they are as much an American founding family as any from the Mayflower. They have a widely recognized but possibly unprovable claim: that they are directly descended from the first identified African American people born on the mainland of English America, an infant baptized “William” around 1624. It’s been 400 years this August since William’s parents arrived in the Virginia colony. The Tuckers, like many African Americans, struggle to trace their roots. They have no genealogical or DNA evidence linking them to those first Africans, but they have oral history and family lore. And they have the cemetery, a repository of what unites them and what baffles them. This graveyard, Walter says, is “the only thing you can actually put your hands on, put your eyes on.’’ He’s thinking of that July day two years ago. He was leveling earth when the blade of his shovel hit something solid. He looked down. A round, gray object seemed to have emerged from the dirt. He dug under it a little and lifted it up. It looked like a section of a bowl. He moved more dirt and spotted something else round and gray. He brushed it off and held it against the first object to see if they fit together. He didn’t realize it at first, but he was holding a human skull. Researchers would conclude that it belonged to an African American woman who was about 60 when she died – roughly Walter’s age. But they couldn’t say when. That night, the woman was all Walter could think about. She embodied every question, every possibility, about his family’s origins. And he’d held her in his bare hands. Sourc: https://www.usatoday.com
As Deep Learning Comes For Medicine How Do We Work Around Its Brittleness?
Deep learning is revolutionizing medicine. Algorithms are increasingly doing everything from triaging medical imagery to predicting treatment outcomes. Yet as hospitals undergo the same AI revolution affecting other fields, the dangers of AI bias and errors and the life-or-death consequences of medicine lends unique risk to these experiments, suggesting caution. One of the fastest-growing uses of AI in medicine today is the analysis of medical imagery. Human analysis of imagery is slow, difficult to scale and error-prone. Replacing or augmenting human analysis with algorithmic analysis could even eventually allow medical imaging devices to diagnose patients in real-time as they are being imaged and direct technicians to collect additional imagery to narrow the diagnosis while the patient is still lying the imaging system. The problem is that today’s correlative deep learning systemsrequire vast amounts of extremely diverse training imagery, which can be hard to acquire in hospital settings where there may be more uniformity in patient conditions, demographics and imaging systems. Most dangerously, AI algorithms can easily learn characteristics unrelated to the actual disease itself, lending to false positives and negatives that can cause adverse patient outcomes or even death. Driverless cars are able to use simulators to generate the vast reams of scenarios they are unlikely to experience in real life, but to date medical systems have largely been trained on real-world data rather than imaging simulations. Deep learning algorithms today are incredibly brittle black boxes, with little insight into the reasons they are making their decisions. Most importantly, it is nearly impossible to determine the boundaries of their learning and the edge conditions under which they will fail. This means there is little for doctors to go on in terms of estimating whether a given automated diagnosis is solidly within the algorithm’s learned sweet spot or if it is on the edge of its abilities and at greater risk of error. Today’s automated assessment experiments are just that: experiments. Using AI algorithms to assess medical imagery is still performed primarily in a research context, with the machine’s diagnoses used only to evaluate its performance, rather than augment or replace human experts. Over time, however, these algorithms will find increasing use in production scenarios. Early adoption of these algorithms will almost certainly involve human augmentation, in which the machine merely provides suggestions for human review. Unfortunately, such systems typically rapidly devolve. In augmentation workflows the human analysts typically begin to trust their automated counterparts more than they trust themselves. While at first they may closely scrutinize the automated results more than they would check even a human colleague, over time they become complacent. Cautious verification is replaced by casual scrutiny and then by brief randomized spot checks. As the machines yield a high success rate and scrutiny and caution lessens, human analysts will be assigned an ever-greater volume of content to verify, giving them less and less time to check each individual image. The overworked analysts will default to assume the machine is right, stopping to check only extreme cases. Most dangerously, over time those human analysts will begin to trust the machine over their own experience and intuition when there are disagreements. Confronted with an edge case where the result is unclear, humans are more likely to defer to the algorithm under the false assumption that its computerized precision has allowed it to see a pattern or artifact invisible to the human eye. While there are myriad ways to counter these effects, such as inserting randomized images to test inter- and intra-coder reliability over time, the simple fact is that over time more and more of the medical diagnostic world will be turned over to brittle and unpredictable machines that work flawlessly until they fail in the most unexpected ways, typically with severe harm or even death to the human patient. Driverless cars have adopted a hybrid approach in which real-world training data is augmented with simulator-derived examples that generate coverage of the scenarios unlikely to have sufficient physical instantiations. Yet even all of this data is ultimately coupled with hand-coded rulesets that govern the most important life-and-death situations like stopping at stop signs. That deep learning algorithms are still wrapped within hand-coded rulesets to ensure the reliability of their most important behaviors reminds us that for all its hype and hyperbole, deep learning is still in its infancy and is not mature enough to take over such tasks in their entirety with sufficient robustness when lives are on the line. Putting this all together, the future of medicine will be increasingly automated. The only question is how to address the severe weaknesses of today’s correlative deep learning algorithmswhen it comes to the life-and-death scenarios of medicine. In the end, an AI algorithm that makes a bad prediction of what movie we should stream next has little consequence. An AI algorithm that recommends what treatment we should receive has our life resting on its accuracy.
Overstressing yourself can kill you – Medical doctor warns
Head of Emergency Department at the Tema General Hospital (TGH), Dr Lawrence Ofori-Boadu, has advised the public especially those aged 35 years and above not to overly stress themselves. Dr Ofori-Boadu warns that over-stressing oneself during that age gap could result in being hypertensive and acquiring its related sicknesses including stroke. He gave the advice on Sunday when he educated members of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG) Redemption Congregation at Tema Community Nine, on hypertension and diabetes as the church marked its annual ‘Health Sunday’ service. He noted that it was unfortunate that people aged between 35 to 45 years were overstressing themselves over meeting personal high targets such as building houses, acquiring cars, and paying huge school fees. According to him, due to such targets, people overworked themselves without resting increasing their stress level, adding that “over-stressing ourselves can kill us”. He revealed that stress was the leading cause of stroke among young adults stressing that “when you cross 35 to 40, you don’t have to stress yourself again, leave the stress for the younger ones, they can withstand it”. Dr Ofori-Boadu, who is also the Session Clerk of the Church, reminded the public that the aged had a higher chance of surviving stroke but the younger ones often die when attacked by stroke. He explained that the aged often had the strokes associated with clotting in the brain which can easily be corrected but most of the time, the younger ones suffer from a hemorrhagic stroke which is caused by the rupture of a blood vessel inside the brain. He further stated that other risk factors of stroke included high cholesterol, smoking, consuming fatty foods, diabetes, and alcohol consumption. He advised the public to regularly check their blood pressure, weight, blood level, sugar level among others, highlighting that the elderly must have checkups at least every three months while the younger ones should do same at least every six months. The TGH Emergency head also reiterated the need to desist from the consumption of fatty and junk foods but rather take in more fruits, vegetables, water and green leafy foods, as well as exercise daily for at least 30 minutes. Touching on diabetes, he said children can develop juvenile diabetes when they put on too much weight reminding parents that when children take in too much sugar, it accumulates fat in the body which when not burnt can lead to excess weight gain. He mentioned that some of the symptoms of diabetes included extreme hunger, increased thirst, frequent urination, blurred vision, fatigue, and sores that does not heal, among others. Dr Ofori-Boadu reminded Ghanaians that diabetes and hypertension were very common in Africa, therefore, the need to check and change the negative lifestyles that expose them to attracting such diseases. Mrs Florence Akrofi, Senior Presbyter of the Church, said PCG deemed it fit to have a health Sunday to promote good health practices among the congregation adding that it was their wish that Christians would be in good health just as they grew spiritually. Mrs Akrofi added that the church would subsequently organize frequent free health screening for members to check their health status. GNA | Source: https://www.myjoyonline.com
Africa is on the verge of being declared polio-free
Eradicating polio is hard. It is even harder when politicians and imams fan the conspiracy theory that the polio vaccine is part of a Western plot to sterilise Muslims, as happened for several years in northern Nigeria. So in 2015 Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, decided to set an example. He gave the vaccine to one of his grandchildren on television, before rallying politicians and tribal leaders to join the campaign. His efforts, and those of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, have paid off. On August 21st Nigeria marked three years since its last documented case of wild polio. That means the country is set to be declared polio-free by the World Health Organisation-backed Global Polio Eradication Initiative. If that happens, probably next year, all of Africa will be officially free of the virus. Polio will remain in only Afghanistan and Pakistan; and one day it will be completely eradicated, like smallpox was in 1980. Source: https://www.economist.com