Poisoned Lottery Winner's Wife Seeks 'Truth'

The wife of a $1 million Chicago lottery winner who died of cyanide poisoning told ABC News that she was shocked to learn the true cause of his death and is cooperating with an ongoing homicide investigation.

"I want the truth to come out in the investigation, the sooner the better," said Shabana Ansari, 32, the wife of Urooj Khan, 46. "Who could be that person who hurt him?

"It has been incredibly hard time," she added. "We went from being the happiest the day we got the check. It was the best sleep I've had. And then the next day, everything was gone."

Ansari, Khan's second wife, told the Chicago Sun-Times that she prepared what would be her husband's last meal the night before Khan died unexpectedly on July 20. It was a traditional beef-curry dinner attended by the married couple and their family, including Khan's 17-year-old daughter from a prior marriage, Jasmeen, and Ansari's father. Not feeling well, Khan retired early, Ansari told the paper, falling asleep in a chair, waking up in agony, then collapsing in the middle of the night. She called 911.

Khan, an immigrant from India who owned three dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago, won $1 million in a scratch-off Illinois Lottery game in June and said he planned to use the money to pay off his bills and mortgage, and make a contribution to St. Jude Children's Research Center.

"Him winning the lottery was just his luck," Ansari told ABC News. "He had already worked hard to be a millionaire before it."

Illinois Lottery/AP Photo

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Jimmy Goreel, who worked at the 7-Eleven store where Khan bought the winning ticket, described him to The Associated Press as a "regular customer ... very friendly, good sense of humor, working type of guy."

In Photos: Biggest Lotto Jackpot Winners

Khan's unexpected death the month after his lottery win raised the suspicions of the Cook County medical examiner. There were no signs of foul play or trauma so the death initially was attributed to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which covers heart attacks, stroke or ruptured aneurysms. The medical examiner based the conclusion on an external exam -- not an autopsy -- and toxicology reports that indicated no presence of drugs or carbon monoxide.

Khan was buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.

However, several days after a death certificate was issued, a family member requested that the medical examiner's office look further into Khan's death, Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina said. The office did so by retesting fluid samples that had been taken from Khan's body, including tests for cyanide and strychnine.

When the final toxicology results came back in late November, they showed a lethal level of cyanide, which led to the homicide investigation, Cina said. His office planned to exhume Khan's body within the next two weeks as part of the investigation.

Melissa Stratton, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, confirmed it has been working closely with the medical examiner's office. The police have not said whether or not they believe Khan's lottery winnings played a part in the homicide.

Khan had elected to receive the lump sum payout of $425,000, but had not yet received it when he died, Ansari told the AP, adding that the winnings now are tied up as a probate matter.

"I am cooperating with the investigation," Ansari told ABC News. "I want the truth to come out."

Authorities also have not revealed the identity of the relative who suggested the deeper look into Khan's death. Ansari said it was not her, though she told the AP she has subsequently spoken with investigators.

"This is been a shock for me," she told ABC News. "This has been an utter shock for me, and my husband was such a goodhearted person who would do anything for anyone. Who would do something like this to him?

"We were married 12 years [and] he treated me like a princess," she said. "He showered his love on me and now it's gone."

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Into thin air: Storage salvation for green energy

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Asian startups tap on crowd funding for capital

SINGAPORE: Asia-focused private equity raised roughly US$30 billion in 2011 according to a report last year by Private Equity International.

However, with more than half of that goes into China and India, startups in the rest of Asia are left with fewer funding options.

According to experts, most Asian startups rely on traditional funding sources like government grants and loans from family and friends.

But some said crowd funding, or sourcing for investment through the internet, could be a solution.

Three-year-old tech startup Gametize helps businesses reach out to consumers through interactive game concepts.

These games can be as simple as a fun pop quiz or one that requires the consumer to complete tasks and upload pictures.

Based in Singapore, the firm includes MySpace founder Brad Greenspan's Social Slingshot Fund among its investors.

And although it is not actively raising funds, it is looking to tap on crowd funding in the next few months.

"Instead of relying on just one investor, one or two, you're relying on maybe, 10,000 less wealthy individuals - the amount raised will still be pretty much the same," said Keith Ng, co-founder & CEO of Gametize.

He added: "And as far as I understand, crowd funding (investors) don't take equity into the company, so that might be more preferable to the company."

Still, some experts are skeptical about crowd funding sites such as China's Dreamore, FundersClub in the US and Cliquefund in Singapore.

They said the collective wisdom of the crowd may not necessarily help to select the best startups to fund.

Bernard Lee, CEO of HedgeSPA, said: "Some of these websites - the things that they end up identifying would be what we call easy revenue ideas, things that has to do with retail, like fashion, because they tend to be a lot more comprehensible, versus if it is a very specialised medical innovation."

And if all else fails, Gametize said the startup will just have seize on every opportunity to sell itself.

And one way it drummed up publicity was by appearing in a reality TV programme Angel's Gate, which was produced by Channel News Asia, with support from Singapore's Media Development Authority.

The TV show featured entrepreneurs who had to pitch and be grilled by a panel of investors.

- CNA/fa

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New 27-inch iMacs won't ship until next month

Those of you who order one of Apple's new 27-inch iMacs will have to wait until next month before it arrives at your door.

The latest forecast calls for a ship time of three to four weeks from now, zeroing in around early/mid February. In early December, the estimate provided a vague timeframe of January. So buyers who ordered at that time hopefully will receive their computers by the end of the month.

The new 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs popped up for sale at Apple's Web site on November 30. The 27 incher offered an initial ship time of two to three weeks, but that jumped to three to four weeks after just a few hours.

At Apple's fourth-quarter earnings call on October 25, CEO Tim Cook cautioned that supplies of the iMac would be "constrained" the rest of 2012, leading to a "signficant shortage."

Consumers eyeing the the 21.5-inch model face a wait time of only 7 to 10 business Apple
iMac (27in, 2.9GHz, fall 2012)days.

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Giffords, Kelly Launch Initiative to Curb Gun Violence

After she was gravely wounded by gunfire two years ago in Tucson, Ariz., former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, imagined a life out of the public eye, where she would continue therapy surrounded by the friends, family and the Arizona desert she loves so much.

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly Speak Exclusively to Diane Sawyer

But after the slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last month, Giffords and Kelly knew they couldn't stay silent.

"Enough," Giffords said.

The couple marked the second anniversary of the Tucson shooting by sitting down with Diane Sawyer to discuss their recent visit to Newtown and their new initiative to curb gun violence, "Americans for Responsible Solutions."

"After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora," Colo., Kelly said. "I'm hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders' being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody."

Rep. Gabby Giffords on Meeting Newtown, Conn. Shooting Victims Watch Video

Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly Speak Exclusively to Diane Sawyer Watch Video

Gabrielle Giffords: Pledge of Allegiance at DNC Watch Video

Full Coverage: Gabrielle Giffords

During their trip to Newtown, Giffords and Kelly met with families directly affected by the tragedy.

"[The] first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture," Kelly said. "It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago."

Full Coverage: Tragedy in Newtown

"Strength," Giffords said she told the families in Newtown.

"Gabby often told them, 'You got to have strength. You got to fight for something,'" Kelly said.

The innocent faces of the children whose lives were abruptly taken reminded the couple, they said, of 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, the youngest victim to die in the Tucson shooting at a Giffords constituent event.

"I think we all need to try to do something about [gun violence]," Kelly said. "It's obvious to everybody we have a problem. And problems can be solved."

Giffords, Kelly Call for 'Common Sense' Solutions

Giffords, 42, and Kelly, 48, are both gun owners and supporters of the 2nd Amendment, but Kelly had strong words for the National Rifle Association after the group suggested the only way to stop gun violence is to have a "good guy with a gun."

There was a good guy with a gun, Kelly said, the day Jared Loughner shot Giffords and 18 other people, six fatally, at her "Congress on Your Corner" event.

"[A man came out] of the store next door and nearly shot the man who took down Jared Loughner," Kelly said. "The one who eventually wrestled [Loughner] to the ground was almost killed himself by a good guy with a gun, so I don't really buy that argument."

Instead, Giffords and Kelly are proposing "common sense" changes through "Americans for Responsible Solutions."

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Chad's 'mountains of hunger' as rendered by Turner

Joanna Carver, reporter

(Image: ESA/Envisat)

IT LOOKS like brushstrokes - it could almost be a Turner - but this is actually nature at its most dramatic. This snapshot from the European Space Agency's MERIS satellite shows the Tibesti mountains that straddle northern Chad and southern Libya - though a picture like this makes it easy to forget that borders exist.

The mountains, in blue and black at the centre, are a range of volcanoes. The grey and black peak in the bottom right is Emi Koussi, the tallest mountain in Chad at 3415 metres high. There aren't any recorded instances of any of the Tibesti volcanoes erupting, though Toussid‚, the black spot on the far left, does have a reputation for spewing gases and creating hot springs in its crater floor. The white regions are accumulations of carbonate salts, while the orange is desert.

For all their beauty from overhead, plant life is sparse on these mountains, known locally as the "Mountains of Hunger" because they feed so few people. The semi-nomadic Toubou people inhabit the region as salt miners and date and grain farmers, while some cheetahs, gazelles and sheep do roam the region.

Life expectancy in Chad is the lowest in the world at 48 years. An estimated 210,000 people are living with HIV and AIDS - 3.4 per cent of the population - while malaria, typhoid fever and hepatitis A are all major health problems. Thirty-four per cent of under-5s are underweight, and it has the worst maternal mortality rate of any nation. It's also home to 280,000 refugees from the Darfur conflict across the border in Sudan.

Rebellions frequently flare up in Chad, the most recent resulting in a four-year civil war that ended in 2010. Violent conflicts with Libya and Sudan have also plagued an already crippled country. Only from orbit do the borders not seem to matter.

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Football: Sturridge hopes Mansfield goal is just the start

LIVERPOOL: Daniel Sturridge has insisted Liverpool fans have still to see the best of him despite taking only seven minutes to score on debut in Sunday's 2-1 FA Cup third round win at Mansfield.

The 23-year-old, signed from European champions and FA Cup holders Chelsea last week, got on the end of fellow England international Jonjo Shelvey's through-ball to give Liverpool an early lead at Field Mill.

But Sturridge - who last played a senior match in November - missed further chances before he was replaced by Luis Suarez, with the Uruguay forward making it 2-0 thanks to a controversial 59th minute goal that saw the ball hit his arm in the build-up.

Mansfield's Matt Green pulled a goal back 11 minutes from time to ensure a nervous finish for Premier League Liverpool.

"I haven't had much training," Sturridge told Monday's Liverpool Echo.

"I've only had three sessions with the lads and then a light session on Saturday before the game.

"I am lacking sharpness in front of goal. I missed a few chances but hopefully once I get my fitness those ones that I missed will go in.

"It was a great pass from Jonjo - the vision and the weight of the pass for the goal was perfect. He made it quite easy for me to take the shot first time.

"We haven't had much time to work on stuff but we were both on the same wavelength. We get on well on and off the field.

"All the lads have been great with me and they've made it easy for me to settle in over the past few days.

"I want to say thank you to them for making me feel so welcome. I look forward to playing with them for many years to come."

- AFP/de

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Ideo's David Kelley talks design, Steve Jobs

Design guru David Kelley tells Charlie Rose about one of Ideo's bright ideas: An iPhone application that allows children to receive calls from Sesame Street character Elmo about topics their parents select.

(Credit:
CBS)

Meet one of the most innovative thinkers of our time. He is a man who has had an enormous impact on our everyday lives.

David Kelley is the founder of the Silicon Valley global design firm Ideo. His company has created thousands of breakthrough inventions, including the first computer mouse for Apple, the standup toothpaste tube, and a better Pringle for Procter & Gamble. Ideo may be the most influential product design company in the world.

Kelley was a longtime friend and colleague of Steve Jobs -- "He made Ideo," Kelley tells Rose -- and he is a pioneer in something known as "design thinking," an innovative approach that incorporates human behavior into design.

David Kelley: "The big thing about design thinking is it allows people to build on the ideas of others. Instead of just having that one thread, you think about it, I come up with an idea, and then somebody from somewhere else says, 'Oh that makes me think we should do this,' and then we could do that. And then you get to a place that you just can't get to in one mind."

If you follow David Kelley around Ideo, you can see how he has infused that thinking into the legendary Palo Alto firm he founded more than 20 years ago. Breakthrough ideas happen every day here.

Read more
of "How to design breakthrough inventions" at CBSNews.com.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

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  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











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  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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