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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the $300 million Stata Center.

Stata Center Photo by jonas_k

The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

The suit says MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which cost $300 million to build. It houses labs, offices, classrooms and meeting rooms.

“Gehry breached its duties by providing deficient design services and drawings,” according to the suit, which also names New Jersey-based Beacon Skanska Construction Co., now known as Skanska USA Building Inc. The suit, filed Oct. 31, seeks unspecified damages.

An executive at Skanska’s Boston office said Gehry ignored warnings from Skanska and a consulting company before construction that there were flaws in the design. “This is not a construction issue, never has been,” said Paul Hewins, executive vice president and area general manager of Skanska USA.

Who is Frank Gehry?

Frank Owen Gehry (1929) is a Pritzker Prize winning architect based in Los Angeles, California.

His best known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of “paper architecture” before receiving major commissions in later years.

Frank Gehry House, Santa Monica by Greg Headley

The Dancing House by Purple Cloud

Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, by bohemiangrassi

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Crater of Diamonds State Park, Arkansas : Chad Johnson nearly threw away his largest find ever, 4.38 carat, tea-colored diamond.

Chad Johnson has found about 80 diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park, but on Monday he nearly threw away his largest find yet. A cube-shaped rock plucked out of his sifters turned out to be a 4.38-carat, tea-colored diamond.

Johnson, 36, made the dig Saturday at the park and left his equipment in a locker. When he came back Monday morning, he made the discovery.

Crater of Diamonds State Park, which opened in 1972, is the world’s only diamond-producing site open to the public, and visitors can keep the gems they unearth. The largest diamond found at the park was the 16.37-carat Amarillo Starlight, a white diamond found in 1975.

Johnson’s find is the second-largest diamond uncovered at the park this year. In June, a Louisiana man found a 4.8-carat stone. More than 700 diamonds have been found there this year.

Since moving to Arkansas from Iowa in February, Johnson said, he was living off money made by selling diamonds. He only recently took a job at a convenience store, partly because he “got tired of selling diamonds to make ends meet.”

Park officials declined to speculate how much money Johnson could get for the diamond. Johnson suggested he expects much more than what he is used to getting.

“If someone offers me that much money, it’s theirs,” Johnson said.

Where is Crater of Diamonds State Park?

The Crater of Diamonds State Park is an Arkansas State Park located near Murfreesboro in Pike County, Arkansas, USA containing the only diamond producing site in the world open to the public.

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Crater of Diamonds State Park
209 State Park Road
Murfreesboro, AR 71958
(870) 285-3113

Official Crater of Diamonds State Park web site: www.craterofdiamondsstatepark.com

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Indian Girl born with 8 limbs undergoes operations to remove extra limbs and organs from parasitic twin

A 2-year-old girl born with four arms and four legs was responding well Tuesday to the early stages of extensive surgery to remove the excess limbs, organs and other body parts of her “parasitic twin,” the lead surgeon said.

Lakshmi’s twin stopped developing in their mother’s womb. As the surviving fetus, Lakshmi absorbed the limbs, kidneys and other body parts of the undeveloped fetus. Her rare condition is called isciopagus.

The complications for Lakshmi’s surgery are myriad: the two spines are merged, she has four kidneys, entangled nerves, two stomach cavities and two chest cavities. She cannot stand up or walk. It’s an extremely rare and difficult procedure.

A team of neurosurgeons has separated the fused spines, and will next try to remove the extra limbs, then the rest of her “parasitic twin,” said Dr. Sharan Patil, the orthopedic surgeon heading the operation. The surgery began early Tuesday.

“The child has been responding very well,” Patil told reporters outside Sparsh Hospital in the southern city of Bangalore where Lakshmi is undergoing surgery, several hours into the surgery.

Patil warned that the surgeries would “take many, many hours on a continuous basis” - up to 40 hours - and involved 30 surgeons.

Before the operation began, he said there was a 20-25 percent chance Lakshmi would die during the operation.

“It’s a big team effort of a lot of skilled surgeons who will be putting their heart and soul into solving the problem of Lakshmi,” Patil said.

It wasn’t immediately clear if doctors expected her to ever be able to stand or walk - before the surgery, her limbs were severely atrophied.

Lakshmi is named for the four-armed Hindu goddess of wealth, and some in her poor village in the north Indian state of Bihar highly revere the little girl, her father, Shambhu, said.

“Everybody considers her a goddess at our village,” said Shambhu, who goes by one name.

He said the family feared people would try to make money from her and, after an unsuccessful attempt by a circus to buy her, they had kept her in hiding.

Dr. Patil Mamatha said the hospital’s foundation was paying for the surgeries because her family could not afford the medical bills.

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High-fat Atkins diet can cause long-term damage to blood vessels, as well as some of the inflammation linked with heart and artery disease.

In contrast, low-fat regimens such as the South Beach and Ornish diets lowered cholesterol and appeared to benefit artery function.

“It really is the Atkins diet that is the worst,” Dr. Michael Miller, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

“The Atkins diet caused the LDL levels to go up by about 7 percent, whereas in the Ornish and South Beach diets … they went down 7 to 10 percent.” Low density lipoprotein or LDL is the “bad” cholesterol that clogs blood vessels.

Various researchers have tested the benefits of the popular diets and reached wildly differing conclusions. Miller designed what he said was a unique approach — to see how people fared once they stopped losing weight on any of the diets.

Studies show that people usually lose weight rapidly on any diet if they follow it properly and the weight loss itself can cause cholesterol to plummet.

“When you lose weight everything looks good but after a while you plateau and you hit a maintenance stage,” said Miller, who presented his findings to a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

His team studied 18 people, each of whom completed a full month on each of the three diets. They were carefully monitored to ensure that they did not lose weight.

The Atkins diet was set to deliver 50 percent of calories as fat, the South Beach was 30 percent fat and the Ornish diet, designed by nutritionist Dr. Dean Ornish, was 10 percent fat.

The researchers used ultrasound scans to measure the flexibility and dilation of blood vessels and measured proteins in the blood that can indicate inflammation.

“Some markers of inflammation were increased by as much as 30 to 40 percent during the Atkins phase, whereas during the South Beach and Ornish phases, the markers either were stable or went down, some by as much as 15 to 20 percent,” Miller said.

Most studies have shown that diets that stress vegetables, low-fat sources of protein such as beans and legumes, and whole grains provide the best long-term weight loss. Many low-fat diets allow processed carbohydrates such as white flour, which have also been shown to be unhealthy, experts agree.

“We don’t recommend the Atkins diet,” Miller said. “Why not start out with a diet that will be healthier for you in the long run after weight loss?”

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Economic Factors at stake in the Writers Guild of America Strike against the film and television industry.

The Writers Guild of America strike against the film and television industry has idled the union’s 12,000 members and will throw some TV programs into immediate reruns, starting with some sitcoms and late-night talk shows.

The last major Hollywood strike was in 1988, when a 22-week walkout by the WGA delayed the start of that year’s fall television season and cost the entertainment industry an estimated $500 million.

Here are some economic factors at stake in the current labor dispute.

• Economists estimate a strike of the same duration as the 1988 walkout would result in at least $1 billion in losses.
• The U.S. film and television industry employs more than 200,000 people from actors and directors to hairstylists, electricians, truck drivers and clerks.
• The motion picture and TV industry generates $30 billion in annual economic activity for Los Angeles County alone.
• The writers’ demand for increased “residual” fees they earn on the reuse of their work in the form of Internet downloads. The union seeks 2.5 percent of gross revenues, the studios are offering 1.5 percent on just 20 percent of gross revenues as the same formula already applies for DVD residuals.
• The U.S. download-to-own market for movies and TV episodes — a small but growing chunk of entertainment revenues is expected to be $315 million this year and nearly $1.2 billion by 2011.
• The WGA has dropped its demand for higher residuals on DVD sales and rentals, which generated $24.4 billion last year.

Payments of all residuals to screenwriters are more than $100 million a year, according to industry figures. The union says such payments account for as much as half the income earned by “middle-class” writers who make up the bulk of the WGA’s membership.

Official WGA west web site: www.wga.org

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The Australian TEN TV Network Anchor Woman Charmaine Dragun, who took her own life on Friday, was planning to marry her long-term partner and start a family.

Friends of a TV newsreader whose body was found at a notorious suicide spot in Sydney have told of her “brave and private battle with depression”.

“The couple were planning on staging a surprise wedding at their joint 30th birthdays in March next year. The couple had also talked extensively about starting a family.”

Charmaine Dragun, 29, was “determined not to allow it to control her”, they wrote in a letter published in Monday’s edition of The Australian newspaper.

Her death on Friday had left “a gaping hole”, they added. “Not a day will go by where she won’t be truly missed.”

Numerous tributes have been paid by fans of Network Ten’s rising star.

Her death was “a sad and tragic loss - so heartbreaking”, wrote one person on Vogue’s website. “I will miss her sweet smile and voice.”

Another, on the Australian Media site, said: “What a shock - so young and had a bright future as a newsreader.”

Dragun’s parents Michael and Estelle said they hoped she would be “remembered as an angel” who had “brought joy and light to everyone she met”. They thanked well-wishers “during this challenging time”.

The presenter’s death was announced shortly after her body was discovered at the bottom of cliffs at The Gap in the Watsons Bay area of Sydney.

Police said they were not treating her death as suspicious, a statement which suggested she had committed suicide.

Dragun was based at Network Ten’s studios in Sydney, from where she presented news bulletins shown in her native Western Australia.

The letter to The Australian said that “while her death was defined by depression, her life was defined by love”.

“She was making plans with her future husband Simon, whom she had been with since the age of 16,” it read.

Those who wrote the letter told of how Dragun “did find it difficult living away from her family in Perth”, but said she was surrounded by “a tight-knit group of supportive friends in Sydney”.

“Her optimism was evident in the plans she was making for the future,” they added. “A lover of music, she had bought concert tickets to Bjork on the morning of the day she died.”

Compilation clips of her work were posted as tributes on the MySpace and YouTube websites.

More than 110 people had joined a Facebook group called “Charmaine Dragun Rest in Peace”.

On the Vogue website, one comment said: “How sad that another young life ends too soon. Her mum taught at my high school.”

“I really loved her reading the local news here in Perth,” a post on the TVAus forum read. “She was the best one on that network.”

And on the Yahoo message board, one person said Dragun was “such a beautiful person, lost to us all”.

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108 cars and 18 big rig trucks collided in the fog on Highway 99 near Fresno, California on Saturday November 3, 2007

108 car crash pile up in Fresno involving 18 big rig trucks is one of the worst in terms of numbers of vehicles involved, in U.S. history in terms of the number of vehicles.

The first impact happened just before 8 a.m. in the northbound lanes just south of American Avenue. Even as rescuers worked to help the injured, more cars and trucks crashed into the growing pileup.

“Our firefighters could hear other crashes happening in the distance,” said Cal Fire/Fresno County Fire Capt. Mike Bowman. “It definitely affects the psyche of the firefighters.”

By the time it was over, the wreckage extended from American Avenue about a mile south toward Clovis Avenue, investigators said.

18 big rig trucks were also damaged in the vehicle crash, which occurred on northbound Highway 99 just south of Fresno in deep fog. Witnesses states that the fog made it hard to see and that may have added to the increase in the accident occurring. This is verified by the CHP.

“It looked like something out of a movie, walking up and seeing all the cars mangled and crushed,” according to CHP Officer Paul Solorzano Jr.

“There was probably 2-foot visibility in the fog when I got here. It was really bad,” “It looked like chaos.” “Cars were backed up on top of each other”, according to Mike Bowman, who is a spokesperson for California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

First responders extracted many from their cars and trucks. The ambulances transported at least three dozen wounded to the emergency room with injuries, according toKen Shockley, a Fresno Fire Department spokesperson.

“Everybody was trying to miss everybody, but it was impossible not to get hit,” according to Cindy Ramirez, who is 21 years old.
The freeway’s northbound lanes were shut down and accident reconstructionists are at work trying to determine fault. Traffic was backed up for many miles just south of the crash site but the Southbound lanes did not close.

This type thick seasonal fog is called “Tule fog” and is common in Central California during the winter and fall months. Recently another part of the highway just due south of this wreck was the accident site of a 74-car chain collision in autumn. That was about ten years ago and two people died in that one.

The most deadly, weather-related accident happened the day after Thanksgiving in 1991. Fierce winds stirred up a huge dust storm that reduced visibility on Interstate 5 in western Fresno County to zero. Five pileups involving 127 vehicles left 17 people dead.

Traffic was backed up for miles on the highway, a major north-south connector through the Central Valley. But late Saturday, authorities said they hoped to have the northbound lanes reopened by 9 p.m. By 6 p.m., all but four vehicles had either been towed from the scene or driven away. By 9:30 p.m. the lanes were reopened.

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