Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death recounted by cameraman

The Associated Press Posted: Mar 12, 2014 9:51 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 9:51 AM ET

Australia's famed Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin knew he was dying after a massive stingray stabbed him in the chest hundreds of times, the only witness to the fatal 2006 attack said in his first detailed public account of the beloved conservationist's death.

"We're saying to him things like, 'Think of your kids, Steve — hang on, hang on, hang on,'" Justin Lyons, Irwin's longtime cameraman, told Australia's Studio 10 morning show this week.

"And he just sort of calmly looked up at me and said, `I'm dying.' And that was the last thing he said."

In the nearly eight years since Irwin's death, Lyons has said little publicly about how the fatal encounter with the stingray unfolded. Now, he said, he wants to clarify exactly how Irwin died, including dismissing reports that his friend pulled the stingray's barb out of his own chest.

"The stories at the time of Steve's death — none of them were accurate because no one else was there," Lyons said in an interview Wednesday.

"And that always bothered me."

Lyons is also speaking out now because he has just finished producing a documentary, E-Motion, which examines the impact that repressing negative emotions can have on the body.

"I thought that it was a great way to illustrate my experience with Steve; holding onto these traumatic events can be very, very bad," he said Wednesday.

"I'm happy that I've finally spoken about it publicly. It has been, I guess, a weight on my shoulders."

Lyons still vividly remembers the day he lost his friend, who rose to fame via his TV series, The Crocodile Hunter. The two were shooting a wildlife documentary in the Great Barrier Reef when they spotted a nearly 2.5 metre-wide stingray.

They had been filming the creature for several minutes in chest-deep water and decided to try and get one final shot of the stingray swimming away. Suddenly, the animal began wildly stabbing Irwin with the barb on its tail — hundreds of strikes within seconds, Lyons said. The barb went through his chest "like a hot knife through butter," piercing his heart, Lyons said.

"It probably thought that Steve's shadow was a tiger shark, which feeds on them very regularly," Lyons told Studio 10.

"I didn't even know it had caused any damage. It wasn't until I panned the camera back that Steve was standing in a huge pool of blood that I realized something had gone wrong."

Lyons and his crew threw him into their boat and put pressure on the gash over Irwin's heart, which was seeping blood, and Lyons performed CPR. But the damage was too severe.

The 44-year-old died later that day, leaving behind his wife, Terri, and two young children.

The fact that Irwin — who was notorious for his extremely close encounters with crocodiles, sharks and other potentially lethal animals — died after a run-in with a normally docile creature shocked the public. But Lyons said he always had a sense his friend would meet an unusual end.

"It was never going to be a croc or a shark," he said Wednesday. "He was so good with animals."

The amazing life of Alice Herz-Sommer Mar. 12, 2014 6:31 PM Montreal-based director Malcolm Clarke speaks about his Oscar-winning short documentary The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life.

View the original article here

Web inventor calls for global internet freedom bill

Thomson Reuters Posted: Mar 12, 2014 9:22 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 8:33 PM ET

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" asks Tim Berners-Lee, seen here in a 2013 photo. (Jean-Christophe Bott, Keystone/Associated Press)

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, called on Wednesday for bill of rights to protect freedom of speech on the internet and users' rights after leaks about government surveillance of online activity.

Exactly 25 years since the London-born computer scientist invented the web, Berners-Lee said there was a need for a charter like England's historic Magna Carta to help guarantee fundamental principles online.

Web privacy and freedom have come under scrutiny since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year leaked a raft of secret documents revealing a vast U.S. government system for monitoring phone and Internet data.

Accusations that NSA was mining personal data of users of Google, Facebook, Skype and other U.S. companies prompted President Barack Obama to announce reforms in January to scale back the NSA programme and ban eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of the United States.

Berners-Lee said it was time for a communal decision as he warned that growing surveillance and censorship, in countries such as China, threatened the future of democracy.

"Are we going to continue on the road and just allow the governments to do more and more and more control - more and more surveillance?" he told BBC Radio on Wednesday.

"Or are we going to set up something like a Magna Carta for the world wide web and say, actually, now it's so important, so much part of our lives, that it becomes on a level with human rights?" he said, referring to the 1215 English charter.

The Magna Carta, signed between England's King John and feudal barons, regulated feudal customs and the justice system to "limit despotic behaviour by the king," according to the British Library. It is most famous for a clause that guarantees that no "free man" will be stripped of rights or property, imprisoned or exiled "except by the lawful judgment of his equals."

While acknowledging the state needed the power to tackle criminals using the internet, Berners-Lee has called for greater oversight over spy agencies such Britain's GCHQ and the NSA, and over any organizations collecting data on private individuals.

He has previously spoken in support of Snowden, saying his actions were "in the public interest".

Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium, a global community with a mission to lead the web to its full potential, have launched a year of action for a campaign called the Web We Want, urging people to push for an Internet "bill of rights" for every country.

"Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it. So I want to use the 25th anniversary for us all to do that, to take the web back into our own hands and define the web we want for the next 25 years," he told the Guardian newspaper.

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

View the original article here

Canadians aim to make $20 tablet computer

The Canadian Press Posted: Mar 12, 2014 3:35 PM ET Last Updated: Mar 12, 2014 4:03 PM ET

The Canadian makers of the "world's lowest cost tablet," the UbiSlate 7Ci, think $37.99 still isn't cheap enough.

They figure there's still room to knock about 50 per cent off its price and make tablet ownership possible for anyone and everyone.

"This idea is to bridge the digital divide, it's really that simple, the idea is to overcome the affordability barrier," says Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli during an interview at his Toronto-area office, one of five the company has in Canada, England, Germany and India.

"We think as the Scandinavians do that (internet access) is a fundamental human right."

On the second floor of an unassuming strip mall — strategically located within spitting distance of Toronto's Pearson airport, where Tuli says he's coming from or going to a few times a week — the Datawind team is working on its strategy to sell cut-rate "good enough" tablets.

Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli says the company's founders think internet access is a fundamental human right. (Parivartan Sharma/Reuters)

The company is best known for its work with the Indian government, which it supplied with low-cost tablets for a program to get technology into the hands of students.

Datawind was recently named one of the world's 50 smartest companies by the MIT Technology Review magazine for launching those tablets, branded under the Aakash name.

While India's government is considering proposals from Datawind and other vendors to make the next version of the Aakash, the company has turned its attention to North America and the U.K. to sell its tablets directly to consumers under the UbiSlate brand.

The cheapest version of the seven-inch tablet, the UbiSlate 7Ci, has a not-too-sharp screen resolution of 800 by 480 pixels, four gigabytes of memory, half a gigabyte of RAM, runs a current version of Google's Android operating system and can only get online with WiFi. It sells online for $37.99 plus taxes and shipping. The next model up, the UbiSlate 7C+, costs an additional $42 to gain access to EDGE mobile networks. The most expensive model, the UbiSlate 3G7 at $129.99 plus taxes and shipping, has a better screen and processor and can also access HSDPA 3G mobile networks.

Tuli says the company can sell the tablets so inexpensively because of the scale of its production runs and the fact that it makes its own screens, which helps boost profit margins. A preloaded web browser also displays ads that generate additional revenue for Datawind — although users can choose to download another ad-free browser — and the company monetizes some downloads of apps.

Datawind has also kept its prices down by selling directly to consumers through its website and not seeking retail partners.

"Something that costs $50 to make ends up at $150 easily at retail," he says.

"In our case, something that costs $32 to make ends up at $38 in the consumers' hands."

Tuli says he envisions the price of Datawind's lower-end tablet slipping below $20 "within the next year or two," especially if revenues from ads and apps grow.

"We think pricing will continue coming down and we think features will continue going up. We will keep our high end between $100 to $150, we don't see ourselves going up anything higher than that, but we'll continue pushing the barriers on the lower end," he says.

While he insists that Canadian consumers won't find the tablets lacking, the reviews for Datawind's tablets in India were far from positive. And anyone who has used an iPad or a higher-end Android tablet will notice a major difference in performance.

But he believes there is a strong market of consumers who are willing to trade performance for a low price.

"What we tried to focus on was realizing that for our customer, price is the most important feature and starting with that element we said, 'What can we bundle in to provide a performance experience that would be good enough for them?"' Tuli says.

"You want something for your kids to take to school.... Kids are going to lose them or break them and you want something that you're not worried (about)."

March 15: Beyond Antibiotics Mar. 12, 2014 12:06 PM This week on Quirks & Quarks, we look at the threat of a post-antibiotic world, and what new strategies researchers are looking at to cope with a world where antibiotics no longer work.

View the original article here