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A recent court ruling lays out the facts of the case, and details the lengths the man went to to save money.
Court was told his wife feared for her life, and that the children had to sneak showers when their abusive father wasn’t home. Their 52-year-old father would only allow each child to use two litres of water, measured by a container in the shower. One litre for washing, one litre for rinsing.
He was so cheap his family testified he’d replace the few light bulbs they had with 40-watt bulbs to keep the hydro bill down. But he wouldn’t budge on the heat. They stopped asking him for permission to turn up the heat years ago. He’d tell them to layer up.
“We froze in the dark,” his wife testified at an Ontario Superior Court trial presided by Justice Charles Hackland.
Though his children ranged in age from 12 to 22, they all had the same bedtime. It was always lights out right after supper, when some of the older boys complained there wasn’t enough on their plate.
The biggest complaints about the lack of food came in 2011 when, court heard, the family began to rebel against their controlling father. The father denied that he was depriving his family of food, but court heard that the grocery bill was $1,000 less a month once he took over the shopping.
The two eldest sons were allowed to get part-time jobs but were not allowed to access their earnings, which were controlled by their father.
He biked to work and his wife biked to the grocery store. Because they had five kids, it meant she had to bike to the grocery store almost every day because there were only so many bags she could lug at one time.
Her husband didn’t want to buy a car because he wanted to save for a home. He scrutinized his wife’s every purchase.
His daughter testified she led a “lonely existence” in her high school years. Because her family didn’t spend money beyond basic needs, the children were already isolated.
The judge noted that the father was a “remarkable” saver, whose frugality ultimately broke up his family.
Incredibly, the father, the sole bread winner at $90,000 a year, managed to save enough money to buy a $210,000 townhouse in the suburbs with cash.
He never used credit cards and he certainly didn’t have cable. The townhome he bought in 2005 had three bedrooms. The four tall boys slept in one bedroom, his daughter had her own room and he and his wife shared the master bedroom. To stress his non-materialistic ways, he slept on a matt on the floor.
They kept the television in the master bedroom and the father decided what and when the children could watch. Another rule was that nobody could watch television if a member of the family was being disciplined, which ranged from beatings, to whippings to the silent treatment.
The judge noted in his guilty decision, dated Jan. 16, that the man’s wife had to sometimes witness the cruel punishments delivered to her two youngest boys.
The judge said that the man’s wife had endured a marriage, and life, that amounted to being the victim of criminal harassment. Some of her children were also deemed victims of harassment and assault.
The Ottawa man was arrested at his workplace in May 2011. He chose not to spend money on a lawyer and has remained in jail ever since.
“I am satisfied that Mrs. H. was forced to endure a thoroughly lonely and deprived existence for many years leading to the separation. She suffered deprivation in the basic amenities of life like heat and showers, spousal inequality, disrespect and minor physical and significant emotional abuse,” Justice Hackland said.
“She endured the heartache of seeing her children being subjected to the accused’s unfortunate and controlling parenting and his discipline methods of the children, which were abusive and unlawful,” the judge ruled.
The man is scheduled to be sentenced at the end of January. It is expected that his pre-sentence jail time will be considered at sentencing.
Two days after Google showed off a redesigned Glass for prescription glasses, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has released five mini games for its heads-up display.
The five mini-games make use of Glass’s sensors. A few, such as Balance and Clay Shooter, are hands-free, relying on voice commands, head motion, and balance. One game, Shape Splitter, requires users to wave their hands to slice objects a la Fruit Ninja.
The aim of these games is simplicity. “We intentionally wanted games that are quick to get into when you have a few, free minutes and just as easy to get out of when you want to turn your attention back to reality,” the company said on its Glass Developer site.
That said, spastic movements of the head and strange arm waving aren’t going to help Glass explorers escape the Glasshole image.
SAO PAULO, March 22 (Reuters) - Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA said on Friday it was spending $320 million on put options hedging part of its output at $60 per barrel considering Brent prices, in a move to lock in some of this year’s price gains.
“The strategy is to hedge the export operations expected for the year, that way partially protecting the company’s operational cash flow,” the company said in a securities filing. The options expire by the end of the year.
Brent crude futures hovered around $67 per barrel in international markets on Friday.
Oil futures for 2019 and 2020 have soared some 20 percent to their highest levels this year.
The filing confirmed a Reuters report this week that said Petrobras, as the company is known, was hedging oil at $60.
The put options give Petrobras the right to deliver oil at $60, but not the obligation to do so. If prices remain above that level, the company can let the options expire without exercising that right, although in that case they would lose the $320 million price they paid for the options.
Petrobras is spending less this year than it did in 2018 on hedging. Last year, the company had put options covering 128 million barrels, at an exercise price of $65 per barrel.
Thadeu Silva, an oil analyst at broker INTL FCStone, said Petrobras’ hedging strategy for this year is adequate.
“It is a cost that is worth it. The company is spending around 7 percent of the value of its oil exports to protect that value,” he said.
Some 9 million young Europeans were helped by an EU scheme aimed at getting them into work or into a traineeship since its launch three years ago, the European Commission said on Tuesday (4 October).
Since January 2014, 14 million young people registered in a national "youth guarantee" programmes, the EU executive said in a first progress report.
Under the programme, member states should come up with measures to give young people aged under 25 years a "good-quality" job offer, continued education, an apprenticeship, or a traineeship within four months of leaving school or becoming unemployed.
The scheme is supported by the Youth Employment Initiative, launched in 2013, to support areas that suffer from high youth unemployment. It initially had €6.4 billion of resources for 2014-2018.
The commission now wants to boost the funding with an additional €1 billion from the EU budget, and another €1 billion from the European Social Fund.
The EU executive hopes this would help an additional 1 million young Europeans on top of the 9 million by 2020.
"We can't have a whole generation left behind, we have to do everything to give them a chance," employment commissioner Marianne Thyssen told journalists on Tuesday in Strasbourg.
She added that the commission cannot do this on its own.
The impact of the programme is difficult to measure, as data provided by the commission itself shows.
It said that 40 percent of young people were in an ”unknown situation", with no data on whether they had entered the job market after participating in the scheme.
This is part of the reason why EU auditors criticised the programme last year , arguing it is not clear how many jobs were created and at what cost.
On Tuesday, ETUC, the European trade union confederation, while welcoming the additional funds proposed, also criticised the programme on that point.
"The commissioner talks up the slight decrease in youth unemployment, but the harsh reality is that long-term youth unemployment is on the rise. Emigration, traineeships leading nowhere and temporary contracts create youth unemployment figures that mask the true scale of the problem," it said in a statement.
According to data from member states collected by the commission, 35.5 percent of young people who participated in the scheme and left it in 2015 had entered employment or returned to education six months later.
Figures vary among member states because of the difference of quality of jobs on offer or the effectiveness of the local employment services.
The commission said 71.4 percent of people who took part in the programme in Ireland got some sort of a job or went into education, 64.1 percent in Italy, but only 37.7 percent in Spain, where youth unemployment is high, or in Hungary, where the "success rate" is 30.4 percent.
Thyssen said more efforts need to be made to reach out to those who are not registered with public employment services, are low skilled, or who have dropped out of school.
She added that the quality of services in member states could also be improved, but that while structural change in the employment services has begun, it will take a long time to bear fruit.
Youth unemployment has become an acute problem since the euro-crisis, especially in countries that struggled through the events. There were 46.2 percent of young Spaniards out of work in 2015, 49 percent young Greeks, and 39.9 percent Italians.
"The economic crisis … severely hit the young," the Eurostat, the bloc's statistical office said in its analysis.
Facing disillusioned voters across Europe, commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said in his state of the union speech in September that he would not accept that Europe remains the continent of youth unemployment.
"I cannot and will not accept that the millennials, Generation Y, might be the first generation in 70 years to be poorer than their parents," Juncker said.
The commission said that there are 1.4 million fewer young unemployed in Europe than three years ago, and that youth unemployment has declined from its peak of 24.4 percent in the beginning of 2013 with 19.3 million young people out of work to 18.9 percent in 2016.
The commission claimed that the EU scheme helped ease the unemployment rate.
The youth guarantee plan needs to be more specific about money and targets, says the EU's Court of Auditors.
A very contagious virus that causes diarrhea and vomiting has been found in seafood sold at markets in Ho Chi Minh City, news website Kienthuc quoted a survey as saying on December 14.
The survey, conducted by the HCMC Institute of Hygiene and Public Health and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, found that 30 percent of 40 samples were contaminated with one of the five types of noroviruses, according to the news report.
Oysters had the highest rate of contamination with four out of five samples tested containing the virus, including one that had two types of the virus, it said. Researchers took five samples for each of eight species, including clams and blood cockles, it added.
Speaking to Kienthuc, Dr. Pham Hung Van from the university said noroviruses are the main cause of acute gastroenteritis among adults and children with symptoms such as stomach pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
It can be transmitted through food, drink, air and from human to human, he said, adding that even though seafood is cooked, one can become infected with the virus, if bowls and cookers are not hygienic.
In fact, the virus is an "important" reason for diarrhea outbreaks, said Dr. Nguyen Van Trang, representative of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology. But, she also stressed that it could hardly be considered an epidemic.
Adults will recover after one or two days, but affected children can die if they are not given enough water to rehydrate them, Trang said.
According to Kienthuc, its survey at two markets in District 1 and Go Vap District found that oysters and clams that are usually eaten raw like blood cockles are consumed a lot there, especially during weekends.
Another survey at some residential areas in Go Vap and District 12 found that up to 97 percent of interviewees said they prefer seafood to meat, and 55 percent of the seafood lovers said they love eating it raw, the news report said.
Every year more than 267 million people are affected by noroviruses across the world, it quoted the HCMC Institute of Hygiene and Public Health as saying.
In the US, over 20 million cases of acute gastroenteritis caused by the viruses are reported each year, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on its website. It is also estimated to result in over 70,000 hospitalizations and 800 deaths annually in that country.
Build your Dream Home on this Beautiful waterfront lot - Easy access to the Jordan River and minutes away from the Bay of St Louis! Area has upscaled waterfront homes. Former seller docked a 23' sailboat at this property. Take a look!
If you’re active in Colorado’s world of tech startups, you know New Tech Colorado and its monthly meetups in Boulder and Denver. The grassroots organization is almost 10,000 members strong, and a few hundred tech companies—ranging from Google to Backflip Studios to Techstars companies to brand-new startups—have presented at its gatherings.
You also know Robert Reich, the local serial entrepreneur who organized the first Boulder-Denver New Tech meetup. Reich remains the Boulder event’s ringmaster and is the primary organizer of New Tech Colorado.
So it’s probably hard to imagine that seven years ago, Reich was new in town and hardly knew anyone. Like any entrepreneur who has just relocated, Reich wanted to build his personal network and get a sense of what was going on around him.
Reich’s informal get-together has become one of the leading institutions in Colorado’s burgeoning tech scene. Not bad for someone who describes himself as “a fairly shy person” who wanted to avoid the stress of typical networking events.
While the first events had a handful of regular attendees, the meetups grew and became one of the best ways to connect with people, find jobs or employees, and learn about the newest companies.
“It was really to meet like minded people like myself, and it quickly evolved from there as a way to not just meet people but to find out what everybody was doing,” Reich said.
Needless to say, forming an organization that will host the governor on Sept. 19 at the 1,870-seat Paramount Theater in Denver wasn’t in Reich’s plan. The event, which is part of Denver Startup Week, is a special edition of the Denver meetup and will celebrate New Tech Colorado’s 10,000th member.
Neither was spinning off meetups in Denver, Fort Collins, and possibly Colorado Springs.
We’ll talk more about Reich’s future goals for New Tech Colorado tomorrow. But despite its growth and several recent new directions, the goal remains the same—create a community, get people talking, and help entrepreneurs build their startups.
“It’s been fun to help those companies navigate into the community and providing a place for them,” Reich said.
Sometimes the help can be in the form of tough love from the audience. The Boulder meetups take place at the University of Colorado Law School, and sometimes entrepreneurs must feel like they’re getting grilled on the witness stand. The crowds aren’t hostile, but they ask tough questions about business models and revenue streams that startups might not be ready to answer.
The best presenters go into depth about their companies, Reich said. One of his favorite examples is Backflip Studio’s co-founder and CEO Julian Farrior’s presentation. Farrior outlined his company’s method of distributing its games and building a fan base. The plan helped make Backflip, the creator of DragonVale, one of the leading developers of mobile games and successful enough to lead Hasbro to buy a 70 percent stake in it for $112 million.
Presenters “are sharing information, and it’s usually not information you’d expect them to share,” Reich said.
The meetups also host experts, like a securities lawyer who discussed the ins and outs of crowdfunding.
A few years ago, Reich took the show down the road to Denver. The Denver version has grown in size to rival the original, and a meetup in Fort Collins also is gaining traction.
Reich has since passed organizational duties for the Denver event to Andrei Taraschuk. The meetup is developing its own flavor, but the vision remains the same.
The starting point is always entrepreneurs and technology, but the hosts try to keep things accessible for everyone.
“We are focused on tech startups but we try to make our meetings interesting to everyone in the startup ecosystem, in other words you don’t have to be a tech-geek to enjoy the meetup. This format attracts a diverse audience and keeps things interesting for everyone,” Taraschuk wrote in an e-mail.
“The meetup has grown from less than 20 monthly attendees to more than 200 and at times we’ve seen as many as 300 attendees. We’ve outgrown two of our previous locations and are now enjoying a larger space at Galvanize. If the current trend continues we might have to look for a larger venue once again,” Taraschuk said.
Check back here tomorrow for part two of this story, which is on New Tech’s new additions and future plans.
The RSPCA has a number of medium/large-sized pups looking for homes this week. There are three eight-week-old German kooli-cross border collies – two males, one female – all with short coats. There is an eight-week-old male kelpie cross with a medium-length coat that will need grooming; and there is a litter of nine-week-old mastiff crosses –four females and three males – with various coat colours. Plus there is a special three-month-old deaf great Dane-cross male that needs a loving family. These pups will all need ongoing training and families who can handle loads of mischievous adventures. They will need toys to chew on and play with so they don’t become bored while you’re away from home. Each pup is desexed, micro-chipped, vet checked, vaccinated, flea treated, wormed, heartworm treated and will cost $370. ROOSTERS The RSPCA also has two bantam roosters in need of new homes. You can’t have one in town, but will make great alarm clocks on your property. If you don’t have hens these boys do get along and would be just as happy sharing a coop together. These roosters are $5 each to adopt. All pets are located at the RSPCA shelter at 10 Karungi Crescent. It is open six days a week from 10am until 3.30pm and is closed on Tuesdays and public holidays, or call 6581 0380. All RSPCA animals can be viewed on adoptapet.com.au and click on the Port Macquarie site.
So cute: Meet Peter, one of many puppies the RSPCA Port Macquarie shelter has available for adoption. Can you give him a home?
The RSPCA has a number of medium/large-sized pups looking for homes this week. There are three eight-week-old German kooli-cross border collies – two males, one female – all with short coats. There is an eight-week-old male kelpie cross with a medium-length coat that will need grooming; and there is a litter of nine-week-old mastiff crosses –four females and three males – with various coat colours. Plus there is a special three-month-old deaf great Dane-cross male that needs a loving family.
These pups will all need ongoing training and families who can handle loads of mischievous adventures. They will need toys to chew on and play with so they don’t become bored while you’re away from home. Each pup is desexed, micro-chipped, vet checked, vaccinated, flea treated, wormed, heartworm treated and will cost $370.
The RSPCA also has two bantam roosters in need of new homes. You can’t have one in town, but will make great alarm clocks on your property. If you don’t have hens these boys do get along and would be just as happy sharing a coop together. These roosters are $5 each to adopt.
All pets are located at the RSPCA shelter at 10 Karungi Crescent. It is open six days a week from 10am until 3.30pm and is closed on Tuesdays and public holidays, or call 6581 0380. All RSPCA animals can be viewed on adoptapet.com.au and click on the Port Macquarie site.
Discuss "Who can resist the face of a puppy?"
Continuing medical education (CME) activities are designed to foster and promote the University of Rochester Medical Center’s mission “to improve health through caring, discovery, teaching and learning”. Under the guidance of course directors, and across potentially all content areas served by our faculty, CME activities address the interdisciplinary needs of clinicians, primary care physicians, specialists, clinical sub-specialists and other health care professionals. Activities are designed to enhance professional performance, impart new knowledge, teach new skills, and develop appropriate physician-patient relations thereby serving the needs of the patient and improving the quality of health care.
The University of Rochester Medical Center is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians.
WebRounds enable you to view live and archived Grand Rounds from selected clinical departments at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

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