Dr. Jan Adams Shows Up To Court After Arrest Warrant Issued For Missing Hearing

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (November 16, 2007) – After a warrant for his arrest was issued earlier this morning, embattled surgeon Dr. Jan Adams showed up to court around 11:40AM, essentially turning himself in, Access Hollywood has learned.

As a result, the judge suspended his warrant for failure to appear at his morning hearing and the hearing has been rescheduled for 2PM today.

A spokesperson for Dr. Adams told Access Hollywood he missed his hearing this morning because Adams was “stuck in traffic.”

Earlier today, Dr. Adams, the surgeon who operated on Donda West prior to her death, failed to show up for a court hearing today, according to the LA Superior Court, and a judge issued a $30,000 warrant for his arrest.

This morning’s hearing was a “judgment debtor” examination, stemming from a $100,000 lawsuit brought by former patient Lori Ufondu, who claimed Dr. Adams left a sponge inside of her after a surgical procedure.

“It was quite large, quite large. It took up quite a bit of room in my breast,” Ufondu told Access Hollywood of the material left inside her body.

Ufondu said she went to see Dr. Adams in 1996 to fix a breast augmentation done by another doctor.

She says following the surgery performed by Dr. Adams, she was left with dents below both breasts.

However, it wasn’t until 2003 that Ufondu went to another doctor for reconstructive surgery to correct the problem and the new doctor discovered the sponge, or surgical gauze, that had been left inside for so many years.

“He said that when he opened it up, first of all the stench from the infected area, from the infection was really bad. He said his nurses started to cry. They couldn’t believe what they had seen,” Ufondu told Access Hollywood.

She sued Dr. Adams for medical malpractice and was awarded a default judgment of over $100,000. However, according to Lori, she has yet to receive a dime, thus the reason for Friday’s hearing.

Army desertion up 80 percent since Iraq war

Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. Army private who deserted to Canada because he opposed the war in Iraq, speaks at a rally in Toronto in March. Canada’s Supreme Court on Thursday ruled U.S. deserters do not qualify for refugee status.

WASHINGTON – Soldiers strained by six years at war are deserting their posts at the highest rate since 1980, with the number of Army deserters this year showing an 80 percent increase since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

While the totals are still far lower than they were during the Vietnam War, when the draft was in effect, they show a steady increase over the past four years and a 42 percent jump since last year.

“We’re asking a lot of soldiers these days,” said Roy Wallace, director of plans and resources for Army personnel. “They’re humans. They have all sorts of issues back home and other places like that. So, I’m sure it has to do with the stress of being a soldier.”

The Army defines a deserter as someone who has been absent without leave for longer than 30 days. The soldier is then discharged as a deserter.

According to the Army, about nine in every 1,000 soldiers deserted in fiscal year 2007, which ended Sept. 30, compared to nearly seven per 1,000 a year earlier. Overall, 4,698 soldiers deserted this year, compared to 3,301 last year.

The increase comes as the Army continues to bear the brunt of the war demands with many soldiers serving repeated, lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Military leaders — including Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey — have acknowledged that the Army has been stretched nearly to the breaking point by the combat. Efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps to lessen the burden and give troops more time off between deployments.

“We have been concentrating on this,” said Wallace. “The Army can’t afford to throw away good people. We have got to work with those individuals and try to help them become good soldiers.”

Still, he noted that “the military is not for everybody, not everybody can be a soldier.” And those who want to leave the service will find a way to do it, he said.

3 of 4 in first term
While the Army does not have an up-to-date profile of deserters, more than 75 percent of them are soldiers in their first term of enlistment. And most are male.

Soldiers can sign on initially for two to six years. Wallace said he did not know whether deserters were more likely to be those who enlisted for a short or long tour.

At the same time, he said that even as desertions have increased, the Army has seen some overall success in keeping first-term soldiers in the service.

There are four main ways that soldiers can leave the Army before their first enlistment contract is up:

• They are determined unable to meet physical fitness requirements.
• They are found to be unable to adapt to the military.
• They say they are gay and are required to leave under the so-called “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
• They go AWOL.

According to Wallace, in the summer of 2005, more than 18 percent of the soldiers in their first six months of service left under one of those four provisions. In June 2007, that number had dropped to about 7 percent.

The decline, he said, is largely due to a drop in the number of soldiers who leave due to physical fitness or health reasons.

Army desertion rates have fluctuated since the Vietnam War — when they peaked at 5 percent. In the 1970s they hovered between 1 and 3 percent, which is up to three out of every 100 soldiers. Those rates plunged in the 1980s and early 1990s to between 2 and 3 out of every 1,000 soldiers.

Desertions began to creep up in the late 1990s into the turn of the century, when the U.S. conducted an air war in Kosovo and later sent peacekeeping troops there.

The numbers declined in 2003 and 2004, in the early years of the Iraq war, but then began to increase steadily.

In contrast, the Navy has seen a steady decline in deserters since 2001, going from 3,665 that year to 1,129 in 2007.

The Marine Corps, meanwhile, has seen the number of deserters stay fairly stable over that timeframe — with about 1,000 deserters a year. During 2003 and 2004 — the first two years of the Iraq war — the number of deserters fell to 877 and 744, respectively.

Fewest in Air Force
The Air Force can tout the fewest number of deserters — with no more than 56 bolting in each of the past five years. The low was in fiscal 2007, with just 16 deserters.

Despite the continued increase in Army desertions, however, an Associated Press examination of Pentagon figures earlier this year showed that the military does little to find those who bolt, and rarely prosecutes the ones they find. Some are allowed to simply return to their units, while most are given less-than-honorable discharges.

“My personal opinion is the only way to stop desertions is to change the climate … how they are living and doing what they need to do,” said Wallace, adding that good officers and more attention from Army leaders could “go a long way to stemming desertions.”

Unlike those in the Vietnam era, deserters from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may not find Canada a safe haven.

Just this week, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear the appeals of two Army deserters who sought refugee status to avoid the war in Iraq. The ruling left them without a legal basis to stay in Canada and dealt a blow to other Americans in similar circumstances.

The court, as is usual, did not provide a reason for the decision.

Climate change report to warn of potentially ‘irreversible’ impacts

VALENCIA, Spain (AFP) – Less than three weeks before a crucial conference on climate change, UN experts agreed Friday on a draft report that warns global warming may have far-reaching and irreversible consequences.The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is designed to guide policymakers for the next five years.

Delegates to the Nobel-winning scientific authority agreed the draft after night-long negotiations, chief French delegate Marc Gillet told AFP.

Human activities “could lead to abrupt or irreversible climate changes and impacts,” the agreed text said.

The report will be officially adopted on Saturday, followed by a press conference attended by United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon.

It summarises three massive documents issued this year covering the evidence for climate change; the present and possible future impacts of it; and the options for tackling the peril.

After Saturday, attention shifts to a key meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where governments must set down a “roadmap” for negotiations culminating in a deal to slash carbon emissions and help developing nations cope with climate change.

The IPCC experts agreed that the rise in Earth’s temperature observed in the past few decades was principally due to human causes, not natural ones, as “climate sceptics” often aver.

The impacts of climate change are already visible, in the form of retreating glaciers and snow loss in alpine regions, thinning Arctic summer sea ice and thawing permafrost, according to the three IPCC reports issued earlier this year.

But sometimes sharp disagreement emerged during the five days of negotiations in Valencia to hammer out the summary, even though the main findings remained untouched.

US delegates in particular said references to “irreversible” climate change and impacts were imprecise.

They argued, for example, that the melting of glaciers or ice sheets — which could raise ocean levels by several meters (a dozen feet) — was not “irreversible” as ice could eventually reform.

“But we are not dealing with geological time scales of tens of thousands of years,” said one delegate, irked by this reasoning. “We are talking about dire consequences to humans and the environment in the coming decades.”

By 2100, global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1.1 C (1.98 F) and 6.4 C (11.52 F) compared to 1980-99 levels, while sea levels will rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres (7.2 and 23.2 inches), according to the IPCC’s forecast.

Heatwaves, rainstorms, drought, tropical cyclones and surges in sea level are among the events expected to become more frequent, more widespread and/or more intense this century.

As a result, water shortages, hunger, flooding and damage to homes will be a heightened threat.

“All countries” will be affected, according to the IPCC. Those bearing the brunt, though, will be poor countries which incidentally bear the least responsibility for creating the problem.

Green groups applauded the provisional report, saying it hiked pressure on world leaders to curb greenhouse gases.

“The result appears to be much better than we had expected going into the meeting,” said Stephanie Tunmore of Greenpeace, which along with the WWF is an official observer at IPCC meetings.

“It could be a groundbreaking document to pave the way for deep emissions cuts by developed countries,” said WWF’s Stephan Singer.

Belgian IPCC delegate Jean-Pascal van Ypersele said his concerns that the synthesis would only be a “cut-and-paste” rather than a coherent summary proved unfounded.

He pointed to a draft section on “key vulnerabilities” that distilled the main reasons for concern about global warming.

Despite sharp challenges, especially from the US, the text remained intact, making “the problems more prominent,” he said.

The IPCC won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize alongside climate campaigner and former US vice president Al Gore.

The December 3-14 conference in Bali aims at deepening and accelerating cuts in greenhouse-gas pollution after 2012, when current pledges under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol expire.

There is now broad agreement on the amplifying scale of the problem, but countries remain sharply divided on how to tackle it, fearing economic costs and loss of competitive advantage.