Bret Michaels Rushed to ICU with Brain Hemorrhage

By Anne Marie Cruz

Bret Michaels's health has taken a turn for the worse, PEOPLE has learned: After an excruciating headache late Thursday night, the star was rushed to an undisclosed hospital where doctors discovered he suffered a massive subarachnoid hemorrhage (bleeding at the base of his brain stem), according to a source close to the situation. 

Michaels, 47, is currently in critical condition. "After several CAT scans, MRIs and an angiogram, [doctors] decided to keep Michaels in the ICU and are running several tests to determine the cause. [It] will be touch and go for the next few days while he is under intense observation," the source says. 

Reps confirm this report is accurate, and tell PEOPLE, "We will have no additional information until further testing is done".

The rocker's latest hospital visit follows his emergency appendectomy in San Antonio, Texas, on April 12. There is no word yet whether this new development is related to the rocker's recent appendectomy or to his diabetes. 

After his appendectomy, Michaels remained in the hospital under his doctors' care – then transferred to a rehab facility specializing in diabetic patients. 

As he was recovering, Michaels – who was still in the running to win this season of NBC's Celebrity Apprentice – seemed to be in good spirits and updated fans on his progress. 

"They told me that if I had gone on stage like I wanted to, [my appendix] likely would have ruptured and I could have died," he wrote in a note to his fans. "There is just no way around the fact that getting your appendix out HURTS. I have a pretty good threshold for pain, but this one hurts".

People

Three arrested for links with Rwandan opposition chief

KIGALI — Rwandan authorities announced Friday they had arrested three people said to be Hutu rebels and accomplices of an opposition leader accused of denying the 1994 genocide.

Attorney General Martin Ngoga said the three were members of the Rwandan Hutu Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) rebels operating in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

"The three FDLR officers told us they had colluded with Ingabire to cause insecurity in Rwanda and destabilise the country," Ngoga told AFP, referring to the opposition chief Victoire Ingabire who was conditionally freed Thursday, a day after being arrested.

The three FDLR members were Tharcisse Mbiturende, Noel Habiyakare and Jean Marie Karuta, Ngoga said, explaining that the first two were arrested in a neighbouring country while the third was seized in Rwanda.

Ngoga said they "acknowledged having met with Ingabire several times in Kinshasa and at times she helped them, especially with money".

They are to be taken to court next week.

Ingabire, a Hutu, was accused of denying the genocide and collaborating with a rebels group. The charges arise from her comments in January calling for the trial of those responsible for the death of Hutus in the 1994 massacre.

Some 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were slaughtered in the 100-day killing spree.

Ingabire was ordered to report before a judge every week and prevented from travelling outside the capital Kigali.

She has declared intention to run for presidential polls in August in which President Paul Kagame is expected to seek re-election.

AFP

'Holocaust' tax dodger jailed for hiding funds in UBS

A US watchmaker said he hid funds in a Swiss bank account because of "survival behaviour" learned from the Holocaust.

The 65 year-old watchmaker, Jack Barouh, argued his secretive behaviour was motivated by his fear as a Jew of persecution and sudden loss.

He is just one of many US citizens being tried for tax evasion who held secret accounts at the Swiss bank, UBS.

The bank last year admitted to the US government it had hundreds of such accounts.

Some of these may have aided US citizens avoid paying tax.

'Hide and hoard'

Mr Barouh had pleaded guilty in February to filing a false tax return which did not include his assets held in a range of non-US accounts.

Supported by a doctor's report, he argued he had developed a "hide and hoard" mentality, something often found in Holocaust survivors and their families.

Both Mr Barouh's parents survived the killing of Jews during the Second World War and fled Europe.

He admitted hiding about $10m (£6.5m) in bank accounts he controlled from 2002 to 2008, not only in Switzerland.

He, alongside hundreds of others, were caught after UBS last year admitted orchestrating tax evasion among rich US clients and paid a $780m fine.

No excuse

The American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants rejected Mr Barouh's defence.

It told the Reuters news agency: "Holocaust survivors and their families reject the demeaning assertion that 'survival behaviour' learned from the Holocaust could justify illegal evasion of taxes".

Assistant US Attorney, Jeffrey Neiman, also said the Holocaust defence was no excuse: "It does not give this defendant a license to break the law. Tax fraud is tax fraud".

Mr Barouh was jailed for 10 months.

BBC News

Jack Straw resists wider vote reform

(Reuters) - Proportional voting is not the answer to an electoral quirk that could see Labour winning most seats in parliament but not most votes in next month's election, Justice Secretary Jack Straw said in an interview on Friday

He indicated he would personally oppose offering radical voting changes to woo the support of the Liberal Democrats in a hung parliament, saying the proportional representation desired by the opposition party had undesirable consequences.

"I'm not in favour of it," Straw, one of Labour's most senior politicians, told Reuters. "It can give small minorities disproportionate power, as we have seen in some other European countries".

He refused to be drawn on whether he could serve in a Labour cabinet that did offer proportional representation.

"I'm not going to take part in speculation about all the ifs, the if-whats. What we are all involved in is working very hard for a majority Labour government".

Other senior Labour politicians, like Home Secretary Alan Johnson, have said proportional representation would be a price worth paying to stop the return of a Conservative government.

The Lib Dems are likely to demand widescale voting reform in return for supporting a minority Labour administration if, as polls indicate, the May 6 election ends in a hung parliament with no party holding an outright majority.

The Lib Dems, now riding high in opinion polls, have long campaigned for reforms to make voting more proportionate. They gained less than 10 percent of parliament's seats at the last election in 2005, despite winning 22 percent of the vote.

Straw said Labour was already proposing changes to the electoral system that would address part of its failure to allocate parliamentary seats in line with the level of votes gained.

Support for the usually third-ranking Lib Dems has risen sharply since their leader Nick Clegg outshone Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Tory chief David Cameron in the first of three pre-election television debates last week.

Opinion polls now show Labour trailing while Lib Dems and the Conservatives are vying for first place.

But election experts say those levels of support would paradoxically result in Labour winning around 270 seats, the Conservatives 250 and the Lib Dems just 100, in a 650-seat parliament.

The disparity in part comes from the first-past-the-post voting system, where the winning candidate in each parliamentary seat only has to gain more votes than their immediate rival and not an overall majority.

Dating from a two-party era, it disfavours third parties such as the Lib Dems when their support is distributed evenly across the country.

To address this Labour is offering a referendum on a new voting system called Alternative Vote where candidates are ranked in order of preference.

"It is unquestionably fairer and produces greater legitimacy in a multiparty situation," said Straw.

Labour would also act to encourage more people to register to vote -- it is estimated that more than 3 million people eligible to vote are unregistered -- as well as consulting on how to improve the construction of electoral constituencies.

Labour currently needs fewer votes to win seats than the Conservatives because its support is concentrated in urban seats, where the electorate and turnout tends to be smaller than Tory strongholds in rural and leafy suburban areas.

Despite boundary changes introduced for this election, analysts say the Conservatives need to be at least 11 percent ahead in polls to be sure of winning a parliamentary majority.

"There is nothing inherent in favour of Labour (in the electoral system)," Straw said. "In the 1940s and 1950s it worked in favour of the Conservatives, when famously they got fewer votes than we did in the 1951 election but they got more seats and formed the government. It was then pretty neutral and it has now moved our way".

Editing by Peter Griffiths

Reuters

Man accused of beating NFL’s Javon Walker found guilty

By Cara McCoy

The man accused of beating and robbing former Oakland Raiders wide receiver Javon Walker was found guilty Friday on multiple felony counts.

Jurors began deliberating Friday morning. After 4½ hours, they found Deshawn Thomas, 42, guilty on counts of first-degree kidnapping, robbery, battery, conspiracy to commit kidnapping and conspiracy to commit robbery.

The jury of six men and six women didn't find that the crimes committed caused Walker substantial bodily harm.

Thomas sat at the defendant’s table with his hands clasped and showed no emotion as the verdict was read.

Thomas could face life in prison. Prosecutors said they intend to argue for habitual criminal treatment because his record includes multiple felony convictions.

Prosecutors said Thomas targeted a visibly drunken Walker before beating him and robbing him of tens of thousands of dollars of cash and jewelry in a vacant condominium complex parking lot about a block away from the Las Vegas Strip.

Thomas’ attorneys argued that cell phone records put Thomas at a bar in the northwest valley at the time the attack would have happened and said the football player could have injured himself by falling down drunk. They said Walker blamed Thomas because he needed an excuse for allowing himself to become so intoxicated.

A sentencing date was set for June 23 in front of District Court Judge Doug Smith, who presided over the trial.

Thomas’ attorneys said they intend to file appeals and will move for a new trial.

“It was sort of a circus and I think that there’s going to be some issues later on,” said Betsy Allen, Thomas’ court-appointed attorney.

The motion for a new trial will be filed by next Friday, she said.

Allen and her co-counsel, Richard Ramos, criticized the use of a photograph by prosecutors in their closing arguments that they said showed their client – seen apparently throwing a punch at a casino gaming table – engaged in a prior bad act. After the photograph was shown to jurors on Thursday, Allen moved for a mistrial, saying the photo was inadmissible. Smith denied her motion.

Also on Thursday, Thomas was sentenced to two to five years in a separate larceny case in which he was found guilty of stealing a designer watch from a tourist. Prosecutors said the incident happened within weeks of the Walker assault.

Walker reported that a custom-made, jewel-encrusted watch was among the items stolen from him.

“We think the jury spent a lot of time thinking it through and came up with an appropriate verdict,” prosecutor Nell Keenan said after the hearing. “When we put everything together, in our opinion, there was no denying that we proved this beyond a reasonable doubt”.

She said she believed Walker would be pleased with the verdict.

Prosecutors said Thomas has another case pending in which he is accused of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl and bringing her to Las Vegas, where he allegedly pimped her out and prostituted her. In that case, which is set for trial in May, he’s facing charges of pimping, pandering, statutory sexual seduction and child abuse, Keenan said.

She said he was out on bail on that case when he robbed Walker.

A co-defendant in the Walker case, Arfat Fadel, pleaded guilty to reduced charges on the eve of trial and was a key witness in the case against Thomas. He’s facing a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

Fadel said he was driving his girlfriend’s black Range Rover and had come to the Hard Rock Hotel at the urging of Thomas, who had his eye on a drunken man wearing expensive jewelry. He said he didn’t know Walker was a famous football player at the time.

Fadel and Thomas followed Walker’s party from the Hard Rock back to the Bellagio, where he was staying with friends, and began befriending him in the hotel’s valet area, Fadel testified. The men first went into the casino, where Fadel had intended to go to the tables with Walker and gamble with his money. Plans changed and the trio left to go to Drai’s, an afterhours nightclub at nearby Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall.

Casino surveillance footage corroborates much of what Fadel told the jury.

Walker himself testified he was intoxicated after a night of partying at the Hard Rock Hotel, where he sprayed champagne at the crowd at the Body English nightclub and said he had fallen down drunk at a private party in a hotel suite. He said it was “bad judgment” that led him to get into the vehicle with two strangers.

Fadel testified that after the men got back into his vehicle, Thomas, who was sitting in the backseat, directed him to the vacant lot, where Thomas grabbed Walker from behind and demanded items, including a diamond and platinum necklace, a designer watch and a pair of 2-carat diamond stud earrings, as well as casino chips, cash and credit cards.

Fadel said that after Thomas took the items, he ordered Walker out of the car. Although Fadel said he couldn’t see what happened next, he said Thomas got back into the car and told Fadel to drive. He said Thomas told him he had hit Walker with a “two-piece,” meaning he had punched him twice.

Walker was found unconscious in the early morning hours of June 16, 2008. He spent four days in a Las Vegas hospital and had two broken bones in his face. It took him more than two months to fully recover.

Walker, 31, had signed a lucrative contract with the Raiders in the months before the robbery. He was released from the team in March and is currently a free agent.

Las Vegas Sun

Ice-covered volcanoes may answer climate change questions

Eruptions from mountains such as Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull create rocks that offer scientists clues about global warming

By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

Ice-covered volcanoes like the one in Iceland that brought European air traffic to a standstill are the center of an emerging branch of volcano science that seeks to answer important questions about climate change.

Scientists believe the rocks created when volcanoes erupt beneath glaciers contain distinct chemical signatures that indicate the thickness of the ice that was above the volcanoes when they blew. By correlating the thickness with the age of the rocks, researchers can estimate the degree to which Earth was covered by glaciers thousands — or even millions — of years ago. That information is crucial to climatologists who want to understand how ice and temperature conspire to make the globe cool down or heat up.

"In the big global climate models that they run on supercomputers, ice cover on the Earth is very important," said Ian Skilling, a volcanologist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Paleoclimatologists already have a good idea about temperatures in the planet's distant past, thanks to sediment samples from the ocean floor. But ocean temperatures, though an important factor in understanding the history of the planet's climate, are only part of the story.

Scientists don't understand very well how changes in ocean temperature are linked with ice conditions on land, said Ben Edwards, a volcanologist at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Combining the ocean data with information from volcanic rocks "will give us a much better feel for how global climate changes in the course of time," he said.

The rocks formed by volcanoes covered by glaciers have some distinctive features. They have relatively smooth edges, on account of banging into ice on their way out of the crater. Those edges also have a glassy rind that forms because ice causes magma to cool extremely quickly.

The glass contains water, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. The concentration of water is determined in part by the pressure above the volcano before it erupts — an indication of the thickness of the ancient ice layer that covered it.

"Higher water content means higher pressure on that glass when it was forming," Skilling said. "It gives you some idea of just how far beneath the surface it was."

Ice thickness is important because it helps scientists figure out how long a glacier lasted in a particular place. It also gives scientists clues about how warm the air was, how much sunlight was reflected back into space, and how high sea levels were, Skilling said.

Edwards recently collected rocks from about 40 volcanoes in British Columbia that were covered by glaciers when they erupted. "We want to correlate when there were big ice sheets on land with the cold spells recorded in the ocean," he said.

But North American volcanoes erupt somewhat sporadically. To get a more continuous record of glacial conditions, the neighbors of the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano could be particularly helpful, he said.

Volcanologists have calculated glacier thickness for several times and places, and so far they match up with ocean temperatures from the same periods. Edwards said he expects to find many more matches.

Los Angeles Times

YouTube turns five years old

Connect the World

In only five years, video sharing site YouTube has become one of the most popular Web sites in the world and today the site gets more than one billion views each day.

The Web site was set up in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees by the names of Steve Chan, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.

Just a year and a half later, YouTube was sold to Google for an astounding $1.65 billion.

Currently, there is 1,700 year's worth of video on the site.

Here's our look at some of the most memorable YouTube clips of all time.

Lady Gaga's Bad Romance music video with more than 187 million hits.

Charlie bit my finger with an astounding 181 million hits.

Susan Boyle impresses on Britain's Got Talent and with the help of YouTube, launches her music career with 91 million hits.

David After the Dentist was another big hit with 57 million hits. Today, you can even buy your own "David after the dentist" t-shirts.

The Wedding Dance received 48 million hits and was even parodied in the American sitcom, "The Office".

Single Ladies was one of Beyonce's biggest songs of 2009, but it was this video that got all the attention.

Dancing Matt around the World received 28 million hits.

CNN