A South Carolina woman died 27 hours after she was hauled out of a hospital and taken to jail over unpaid court fines — and her family said she was denied water and medical care.

Joyce Curnell was found dead in her cell July 22, one day after she was arrested at Roper Hospital, where she had been treated for a stomach illness, and taken to the Charleston County Jail, reported The Post and Courier.

The 50-year-old Curnell became too ill to eat or call for help, according to court documents filed this week as part of a planned lawsuit.

Curnell had been taken by ambulance to Roper Hospital from her Edisto Island home after complaining of nausea and vomiting, and she was diagnosed with gastroenteritis in the emergency room. A bench warrant was discovered at some point during her hospital stay, and someone alerted law enforcement officers.

Curnell had been placed on a payment plan in April 2012 to pay $1,148.90 in fines related to a shoplifting case, but she apparently quit paying the following January and a warrant was issued in August 2014.

The newspaper reported Thursday afternoon that Curnell's son, who is planning the lawsuit, notified law enforcement of the open warrant. However, the newspaper did not report whether Javon Curnell was asked about his mother's criminal background — or why.

A local doctor told Curnell's family that her death could likely have been prevented if she had been properly treated for dehydration and the irritation of her stomach and intestines. Simply put: Ms. Curnell died because she was deprived of water," said Dr. Maria Gibson, of Medical University Hospital.

Millions of Iranians have been lining up at polling stations across the country to take part in elections. Control over the 290-seat parliament and 88-member Assembly of Experts, the body empowered to appoint and dismiss the supreme leader, is at stake.

The massive turnout has forced authorities to extend the voting by two hours to let everyone who wants cast their ballots do so.

"Anybody who loves Iran, anybody who loves the Islamic Republic and national dignity, grandeur and glory is advised to participate in the elections, which is both duty and right of the people," Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated after casting his ballot in the first polls since a nuclear deal last year finally led to the long-awaited lifting of the US and EU sanctions from Iran.

"All should participate in the elections in order to increase national prestige and dignity and disappoint the enemies," he added, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Apple has asked the court to reverse its order compelling the company to help the FBI hack an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. The motion argues the Justice Department and the FBI are seeking "a dangerous power."

"This is not a case about one isolated iPhone," Apple wrote in the motion filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California on Thursday, the latest salvo in a court battle that between national security and digital privacy.

"Rather, this case is about the Department of Justice and the FBI seeking through the courts a dangerous power that Congress and the American people have withheld: the ability to force companies like Apple to undermine the basic security and privacy interests of hundreds of millions of individuals around the globe," the Cupertino-based company argued.

Apple has said it wants to cooperate with law enforcement, but creating a backdoor that would allow the FBI to unlock the iPhone of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, would threaten the security of all its customers.

"The government says: 'Just this once' and 'Just this phone.' But the government knows those statements are not true," lawyers for Apple wrote in the motion submitted to Magistrate Sheri Pym.

In the United States, the Fourth Estate, also known as the Fourth Power or the fourth branch of government, has always been a popular label for the media's role in a free society. But in the state of Virginia, legislators want to remove that power from the press by shielding police officers from public scrutiny.

Senate Bill 552, which has already been approved by the Senate, hopes to classify the names of all local police officers and fire marshals as "personnel records," shielding these individuals from the responsibility of dealing with public backlash in the case that something goes awry.

With the Syrian ceasefire due to enter force on February 27, Sputnik's Arabic edition asked Syrians to give their thoughts on the matter.

Sputnik's Arabic edition asked Syrians to give their thoughts on a much-awaited ceasefire in their country, which is set to take effect on February 27. This is what they said.

Opposition activist Sinan Diyab welcomed the ceasefire decision, which he said greatly reduces the risk of civilians coming under fire during the fighting. Also, he said, the ceasefire will contribute to the peace process in Syria.

"This truce is being held for the sake of Syrians and for the sake of political settlement between Syrians," Diyab said.

America! Land of the free, home of the brave, and the greatest country on the face of the planet, right? A country with seemingly limitless natural resources, and according to many politicians, anointed by God herself to lead the world out of the wilderness and into a bright new age of liberty and justice for all. Too bad the road to that vision is pockmarked with so many potholes, because we haven't raised enough taxes on people who can afford to pay to fill them.

Americans, maybe more than anyone on Earth, are guilty of the sin of hubris and excessive pride. As the great Greek poets of the ancient world have taught us, hubris can lead to some really bad outcomes.The reality is that a good portion of the rest of the world has far outpaced the United States in things like healthcare. While the U.S. has painstakingly cobbled together a convoluted insurance-friendly monster called Obamacare (remarkable mostly for how much better it is than what we had), the rest of the developed world enjoys one-payer government healthcare that outperforms the U.S. in both cost and quality of care. The proof is in the pudding; they live longer than Americans.

But healthcare is not the only way America lags behind the rest of the world. Here are 11 things other countries do better than us.

Global leaders ought to overcome political dissent and close the ranks in fighting international terrorism as the challenge to mankind at large, the chief foreign spokesman of the Russian Orthodox Church told the media.

The unprecedented meeting of the head of the Church, Patriarch Kirill, with his Roman Catholic counterpart Pope Francis in Havana on February 12 is going to have "far-reaching consequences," the head of the Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion, told TASS in an exclusive interview. "The word of the pope and the patriarch is addressed to men of all conditions, including political leaders the future of humankind depends upon," the Metropolitan said.

"We expect the message of peace to be heard. That instead of creating various anti-terrorist coalitions, alienated with deep-rooted contradictions and fraught with unpredictable consequences, there would be only one such alliance," he noted.

Metropolitan Hilarion emphasized that such coalition could not be made up only of politicians. "Spiritual leaders and other people of good will should go into it." The first-ever face-to-face talk between two of the major leaders of the Christian world does not mean that the dialogue has just started, Metropolitan Hilarion stressed. "It means the dialogue has entered a new stage of augmented intensity."

Despite all the existing theological disagreements, there is a clear understanding on both sides that "the situation in the world urges immediate collaborative action," as it was put in the final joint declaration of the heads of churches. "The meeting was necessary to coordinate our actions in the first place." It was important that leaders of world's two largest Christian churches spoke with a single voice. "So they did," Metropolitan Hilarion said.

France's top health authority has recommended extending the country's ban on e-cigarettes to include restaurants, cafes and nightclubs, saying there is a risk the devices could act as a "gateway" to smoking.

The vapes are already prohibited in France in areas where children are present, as well as on public transport and in enclosed workplaces.

France's High Council for Public Health (HCSP) hopes the increased ban will help avoid "renormalizing" the habit and tackle high smoking rates among under-16s, according to the agency's report.

The health authority released its notice on Thursday, saying that while e-cigarette can be seen as an aid to help break the smoking habit, their presence in public places may convey a positive image or "gateway" to smoking.

The HSCP went on to say vaping should be banned "even if the risks of passive smoking are zero or extremely limited".

Interprofessional Federation of Vape (FIVAPE) responded to the HSCP notice immediately by saying that such a ban would give the impression that vapes were just as harmful as regular cigarettes, Le Figaro reports.

Noam Chomsky said the social conditions that are driving voters to Donald Trump also explain the rise of fascist leaders such as Adolf Hitler.

The famed linguist and political scientist discussed the presidential election in a recent interview with Alternet, where he was asked to explain Trump's growing popularity with Republican voters.

"Fear, along with the breakdown of society during the neoliberal period," Chomsky said. "People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence."

Media accounts of the Kalamazoo murder rampage have focused heavily on the fact that suspect Jason Brian Dalton was employed as an Uber driver. Scant attention has been paid to the fact that Dalton had aspired to become a law enforcement officer. According to CNN, Dalton earned an associate's degree in law enforcement from Kalamazoo Valley Community College in 1992.

The New York Daily News, typifying much press coverage of the killing spree, reported that Dalton had been hired as an Uber driver despite having "at least nine driving violations in his past - but they may not have come up in the ride-share company's background check." Those violations, which involved routine offenses, such as speeding or failing to provide license and registration - were scattered over a 16-year period that began in 1990. Over the past decade, the paper grudgingly acknowledges, Dalton "kept a clean record."

The reader is invited to believe that Uber failed to perform due diligence in vetting Dalton. His unremarkable history of traffic violations, however, would not have disqualified him to attend the police academy: While traffic violations would have been reviewed as part of an assessment of his "moral character," Dalton had no felony convictions or comparable offenses in his record.

The KVCC Police Academy boasts that ninety-two percent of its alumni "work in law enforcement — the highest in the state...." As an academy graduate, Dalton could have obtained a peace officer certification, and then be deployed on the streets in uniform, carrying a gun, invested with lethal discretion and "qualified immunity" in the exercise of deadly force. Rather than being an Uber driver, "Officer Dalton" would have been behind the wheel of a patrol car, and since he would possess state-granted powers of arrest, he would have been able to detain victims on his own initiative, rather than waiting for them to come to him.