Internet auction includes Yates items
Internet auctionincludes Yates items
HOUSTON -- A week after Andrea Yates was convicted of drowning her children in the family bathtub, documents related to the case were up for auction on the Internet.
A crime victims' advocate was successful in getting a medical record removed, but five other items remained on the eBay site Friday afternoon, including a copy of Yates' confession to police, made just hours after she killed her five young children.
Yates' discharge report from Devereux Texas Treatment Network was pulled at the request of Andy Kahan, the director of Houston's Crime Victims Assistance Center.
Texas law prohibits the sale of personal items related to murders, such as hair and correspondence of serial killers, but it doesn't include public documents.
EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said the company has discretion to remove any item it believes violates its guidelines. That could include medical records, he said. He said the guidelines also ban items graphically depicting violence, victims or notorious crime scenes.
In June, eBay stopped an auction of a Web address named for Yates after bidding topped $752,000.
Down syndrome report
LONDON -- Americans with Down syndrome are living twice as long as they did two decades ago, new U.S. research has found.
The findings of the study, the first of its kind to look at the Down syndrome population in the United States, are consistent with results from other countries. The research, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was reported Friday in The Lancet medical journal.
The scientists studied death records of 17,897 people diagnosed with the genetic condition who died between 1983 and 1997. They randomly selected 25 percent of all deaths in the United States during that period to compare people with Down syndrome to those in the general population.
The average age at which people with Down syndrome died rose from 25 in 1983 to 49 in 1997. The average age at which other Americans died rose from 73 to 76 in the same period.
Life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has increased dramatically worldwide in the last 50 years because of improvements in medical care and advances in surgery.
Paralyzed womanwins right to die
LONDON -- A paralyzed woman who wants doctors to remove the ventilator that keeps her alive has a right to die, a British judge ruled Friday.
The case was apparently the first in Britain in which a mentally competent patient had applied for the right to terminate life-sustaining treatment.
The High Court ruling was relayed by video link to the hospital bedside of the woman, identified only as B.
B was paralyzed from the neck down when a blood vessel ruptured in her neck a year ago, and is unable to breathe unaided. She told the court she fully understood the implications of being removed from the ventilator and wanted to die.
Her doctors argued that it would be unethical to switch off the ventilator.
The judge ruled that B had the necessary mental capacity to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining medical treatment, adding that for someone as severely disabled as the patient, "life in that condition may be worse than death."
Swiss authorities aidedHolocaust, report says
BERN, Switzerland -- Swiss authorities knowingly contributed to the Holocaust by turning Jewish refugees back to face their Nazi persecutors, a five-year study funded by the Swiss government concluded Friday.
"Large numbers of persons whose lives were in danger were turned away -- needlessly," said Jean-Francois Bergier, who led an international panel of historians given first-time access to government and company archives. "Others were welcomed in, yet their human dignity was not always respected."
The undertaking, which produced 26 volumes and cost about $13 million, confronted neutral Switzerland with unpleasant truths that historians, Jews and others have long known about its World War II balancing act next to Hitler's Germany.
Many of the hardest-hitting findings had already been released by the panel as they became available during its five years of research, which far exceeded in scope, financing and access to archives anything that had previously been attempted. But the research continued to make progress on such details as the actual number of refugees admitted and rejected.
Associated Press