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De marine heeft afgelopen zomer vier matrozen van boord van het marineschip Hr.Ms. Amsterdam gehaald, omdat zij bij wijze van grap martelingen in de beruchte Iraakse gevangenis Abu Ghraib hadden nagespeeld. Deze matrozen hadden zichzelf vrijwillig naakt op elkaar gestapeld, liet een woordvoerder van de Vakbond voor Defensiepersoneel VBM NOV vrijdag weten.

Ook verwijt de marine een vrouwelijke matroos dat zij in haar taak als ‘klassenoudste’ niet heeft ingegrepen. Een woordvoerder van de marine zegt niet specifiek op de gebeurtenissen te kunnen ingaan, maar erkent wel dat er destijds een ernstig incident is geweest, waarbij de betrokken marinemensen “het vertrouwen in de organisatie hebben geschaad”.

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A baby boy died after an untrained doctor pressed the wrong button on his bypass machine because it was a less “horrid” colour than the other, an inquest heard yesterday.

Four-month-old Thomas Smith was on a heart and lung bypass machine when Simon McGuirk, a cardiac surgical registrar, accidentally turned it off.

Mr McGuirk said that he did not know whether to press the orange or blue buttons to restart the machine, so opted for the blue. It sent the machine into reverse, sucking blood from Thomas’s body. He died a short time later.

[..]

The baby’s mother, Lisa Weale, 35, from Longbridge, Birmingham, said that after the bypass incident she was told that the duty doctor was not qualified to monitor the machine. She was further told that the hospital did not have the resources to ensure there was always somebody on duty who was.

“[The doctor] was unaware how to use the machinery, as were most of the team,” she said.

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Diebold, the electronic voting machine maker, suffered another sharp setback recently, when Maryland’s House of Delegates voted 137-to-0 to drop its machines and switch to paper ballots. The vote came in the same week that Texas held elections marred by electronic voting troubles. Maryland’s State Senate should join the House in voting to discontinue the use of the Diebold machines, and other states should follow Maryland’s lead.

Maryland was one of the first states to embrace Diebold. But Maryland voters and elected officials have grown increasingly disenchanted as evidence has mounted that the machines cannot be trusted. In 2004, security experts from RABA Technologies told the state legislature that they had been able to hack into the machines in a way that would make it possible to steal an election. Senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat, informed the State Board of Elections in 2004 that voters had complained to her that machines had mysteriously omitted the Senate race.