Radio station reprimanded for Obama sketch
Radio station reprimanded for Obama sketch
MONTREAL — A broadcast industry council slammed Canada’s French-language radio broadcaster for airing a comedy sketch that suggested that Barack Obama would be easy to assassinate because the first black American president would stand out against the White House.
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council issued a public reprimand of Radio-Canada on Monday, after the government’s regulatory agency asked the private industry council to look into the matter before it begins its own investigation.
Canada’s broadcast regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, received 210 complaints about Radio-Canada’s controversial “Bye Bye 2008” New Year’s Eve sketch.
“The panel finds nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American president should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the color of the president’s skin,” the council said in its decision.
“It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment.”
O.J. appeals to high court
LAS VEGAS — O.J. Simpson’s attorneys appealed the fallen football star’s armed robbery and kidnapping conviction to Nevada’s highest court Tuesday, arguing that the judge behaved improperly, the largely white jury lacked diversity and the overall trial was “fundamentally unfair.”
“Any one of the errors discussed would warrant reversal, taken as a whole they mandate it,” Simpson attorneys Yale Galanter and Malcolm LaVergne wrote in their brief to the Nevada Supreme Court.
Simpson, 61, was sentenced in December to up to 33 years in prison for leading a ragtag group in robbing two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room. The six-minute incident’s planning, execution and aftermath were captured in audio recordings that Simpson’s cohorts made surreptitiously.
Medicine causes man to lose fingerprints
LONDON — When a cancer patient from Singapore traveled to the United States last year, he discovered an unusual side effect of his medication: missing fingerprints.
The 62-year-old man was taking capecitabine, or Xeloda, to treat head and neck cancer. Upon arriving in the U.S., immigration officials asked him for his fingerprints. But the drug had caused so much redness and peeling to his fingers that the patient, identified only as Mr. S., had none.
Customs officials held Mr. S. for four hours before deciding he was not a security threat, according to the case published today in a letter to the Annals of Oncology journal.
Capecitabine is a common cancer drug, routinely given to patients with head, neck and kidney cancers as well as lymphomas and leukemias. Doctors said very few patients temporarily lose their fingerprints while on Xeloda, but it does happen.
2 deaths tied to swine flu
NEW YORK — The deaths of two more New Yorkers were linked to swine flu Tuesday as the city struggled to contain the outbreak of the virus in its sprawling school system. Twenty schools reopened, including one whose assistant principal was the first person in New York City to die of swine flu. But five additional schools were closed, and the confirmation that two people who died Friday had swine flu brings the number of deaths possibly caused by the virus to four.
Search ends for passenger
TAMPA, Fla. — The Coast Guard ended its search Tuesday night for an 18-year-old from Louisiana who fell overboard during a cruise to celebrate his high-school graduation.
The Coast Guard said Bruce O’Krepki went over the rails of the Carnival Fantasy on Sunday night about 150 miles southwest of Tampa. Boats and aircraft searched an area of nearly 5,300 square miles.
O’Krepki graduated with honors from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Hammond, La., where he ran track and played soccer.
Tyson’s daughter dies
PHOENIX — The 4-year-old daughter of boxer Mike Tyson died at a hospital Tuesday, a day after her neck apparently got caught in a treadmill cord at her Phoenix home, police said.
Exodus Tyson was pronounced dead just before noon, police Sgt. Andy Hill said. She had been on life support, and police have said their investigation showed her injury Monday was a “tragic accident.”
“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Exodus,” the family said in a statement. “We ask you now to please respect our need at this very difficult time for privacy to grieve and try to help each other heal.”
Combined dispatches