Sunday, March 30, 2008

While nearly all cover of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, the race for the White House also includes independents and third party candidates. These parties represent a variety of views that may not be acknowledged by the major party platforms.

As a non-partisan news source, Wikinews has impartially reached out to these candidates, who are looking to become the 43rd person elected to serve their nation from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Wikinews’ own Patrick Mannion corresponded with the Socialist Party USA nominee and candidate, Brian Moore via e-mail.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Some say history tends to repeat itself. Today marked a day in history, when 20 years ago, the United States Dow Jones Industrial Average market crashed, on what is known as ‘Black Monday‘. The crash sent the market tumbling down 508 points, losing nearly 24%. On Friday, the Dow Jones nearly broke that record when the market closed at -366.94 points, down almost three percent.

Several factors could be to blame for the loss, one being Turkey’s government approving a measure on October 18 to send Turkish troops into Iraq in an attempt to take out militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). This sent oil prices skyrocketing to the highest prices in history, with the highest record being just over US$89.00, which was set on October 18.

Fears that the housing market in the U.S. has come to a standstill has also lead Caterpillar Inc., which manufactures and sells construction equipment to issue a warning that the standstill would cause profits to drop, and the American economy to be severely hurt. On Friday their stocks lost nearly six percent to close at $73.57.

Investors and experts of the markets are disturbed by the losses calling the situation ugly.

“It’s pretty ugly. A company like Caterpillar should be a poster child for global growth and benefits of the weak dollar. It makes you question: Is global growth really that strong? Has the earnings kick from the weak dollar played itself out?” said Bell Curve Trading chief strategy expert, Bill Strazzullo.

Others believe that the losses were a way of emotionally responding to the events of ‘Black Monday.’

“Some of the earnings reports were a little disappointing but not that bad. I think we’re responding emotionally to the 20th anniversary of the October 1987 stock market crash. I’d like to laugh except it hurts,” said T Rowe Price Head trader, Andy Brooks.

The NASDAQ also took heavy losses to close down 74.15 points or -2.64%, closing at 2,725.16. The S&P 500 was also hit hard, losing 39.45 points, or -2.56%, closing at 1,500.63.

The time is 17:00 (UTC) on May 4th, 2006, and this is Audio Wikinews News Briefs.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Dollar General is the latest American company to recall unsafe Chinese-made products. All products affected by the recall contain “excessive amounts of lead” in the yellow paint.

The U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission has just recalled “pull and release” toy cars, as well as yellow children’s size sunglasses.

Products affected are:

• a four pack of Super Wheels (UPC #400016576344)
• a two pack of Super Racer cars (UPC # 883788965002, 380000)
• “Time to Play Every Day” Fashion Sunglasses (UPC #400007860896, 51,000 units)

The car toys were sold at the chain’s stores from April through October; the glasses were sold from March 25 through to October 2007.

Affected products should be taken from children immediately. Dollar General will provide full refunds on return.

The Goodlettsville, Tennessee-based price-point retailer chain had 8205 stores, as of June this year.

Friday, April 23, 2010

Ben Shephard has announced his departure from GMTV, the current television breakfast programme on ITV in the United Kingdom, having been a presenter on the programme for ten years. His current contract ends in April 2010, but he is expected to leave by the end of the Summer of 2010, according to the Press Association.

Initially, Shephard only presented an entertainment section of the television programme before being given a promotion to the sofa in 2005. He is the third presenter to leave GMTV within the last year, after the departures of Fiona Phillips and Penny Smith.

According to a statement released from Ben Shephard’s agent: “Ben’s two-year contract with GMTV is up at the end of April. Earlier this year, his management made it clear that he would not be renewing it, but would be happy to stay on temporarily during this transitional period. Ben is excited about moving on after 10 incredible years and will be focusing on a number of new projects with ITV and other channels.”

Adrian Chiles, who recently announced his departure from the BBC after modifications were made to The One Show — a show that he presented with Christine Bleakley — was recently reported to be appearing as a presenter on GMTV in the future.

Saturday, November 25, 2006

With the hopes of funding the creation of a statue in northern India that would end up dwarfing the Statue of Liberty, an unprecedented collection of Buddhist artifacts continue crisscrossing American, Europe, and Asia in three different, but related collections.

The Maitreya Project, the brainchild of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, seeks to build a monument and development dedicated to Buddhism at Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh in northern India. The centerpiece of this massive development will be a 152m (500 ft) bronze statue of the Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha of the future.

Buddhist belief says that there have been Buddhas in the distant past and there will be Buddhas in the distant future. The historical Buddha, the one who was born in India about 2500 years ago, is known as Shakyamuni Buddha. Buddhist belief says that sometime in the distant future the teachings that Shakyamuni Buddha brought to Earth will fade away. At that point the Maitreya Buddha will be born and gain enlightenment in order to refresh and renew Buddhist teachings.

Along with the statue, the development is also planned to include temples, exhibition halls, parks, a museum, library, and a theater as well as a hospital and educational center.

In order to move forward with this project the Maitreya Project has created collections of artifacts that are touring the world. Once the statue is built these artifacts will be housed in it for viewing.

Buddhist artifacts are usually associated with the body of the person involved. While they can be such things as bone and teeth, usually they are pearl-like objects that are found and collected after the enlightened person is creamated. These pearl-like objects are called ringsel.

There are three collections of artifacts currently touring American, Europe, and East Asia. They include relics from the immediate past Buddha, called Kasyapa, the historical Buddha, five of his original disciples, several Tibetan and Zen masters, and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

Wikinews reporter Richard Kinne spent three days with the relics when the North American tour came to Ithaca, NY a few weeks ago. The relics travel with two caretakers, one of whom is always in close proximity to the relics. Setup for the relics display can take about four hours depending on the venue. Taking it down takes a bit under two hours.

Each morning of the tour the relics are taken out of their padded case and placed in clear plexiglass display cases. The relics are displayed individually in small containers called stupas. Some containers appear very full, while others contian just one very small object. Each evening the process is reversed and the padded case stays with the relic caretakers.

Between the morning and the evening people from all walks of life come to see the relics – believers, people who are curious, academics, Buddhist monks and nuns, both older folks and small children. While the Heart Relic Tour just does deals with displaying the relics, the sponsoring venue can add to the display in various ways such as lectures, meditation classes and demonstrations, or various other rituals.

The tour in North America reaches Jacksonville, FL during the first weekend of December. From there it will go to Miami between the 9th to the 11th, and then to Phoenix, AZ between the 15th to the 17th. In Asia the tour spends time in Malaysia in the first part of December.

Friday, October 12, 2007

The Internet is very much present at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2007, not just, like in previous years, as a means for the journalists who have 80 workplaces for their own notebooks to report on the fair, but like before as a chance – and as a threat for rights-owners of digital media.

After a marginal existence in the previous year, bloggers have got their own “living room 2.0” at the fair, furnished with everything a blogger needs, including media attention. Every day from Wednesday October 10 to Sunday October 14 they will write and podcast about the big names to meet, the events not to be missed and their very personal experiences and thoughts. Three of the bloggers write in English, two English language podcasts are done, to widen the reach of the Book Fair 2.0. The blog entries and podcasts will be available until after the book fair at http://www.book-fair.com/en/wordpress/ and the bloggers themselves can be visited on the weekend at hall 4.2, Q411, though until now it is more the media and less the visitors of the fair, the bloggers come in contact with.

Digitalization and digital media, especially books and magazines offered digitally, are a hot topic at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, as more and more publishers want to see the digital counterparts of their traditional media not just as a field to be present in, but as a possible profit center. With scientific books, this move already was quite successful: Publishing house Springer for example, offering over 40,000 ebooks and over 1700 electronic magazines, of which over 1200 are still actively continued with Springer, nowadays does an ebook-variant of every traditional scientific book they print – and already has the largest part of their cash-flow from digital media.

This is harder for fiction publishing houses as the Pabel Möwig group (VPM), which has become active early. They do offer the digitized new adventures of – say, the outer-space-hero Perry Rhodan -, but the turnover is still only a small addition to the print and other media versions. Readers become readier to read on a screen, but their readiness is still growing slowly. Since a new generation of readers is growing up using the internet as a reference work – especially Google and Wikipedia – it will become more and more natural in the future.

A growing number of service companies in the publishing sector therefore offers re-digitalization apart from increasingly effective content management systems, with which new forms of media can easily be compiled from the contents of a data base.

Older works, of which the publishing house owns the rights, but for which a reprint might not be profitable, are scanned, divided into content sections and tagged. When the original type face isn’t good enough, books are typewritten in third world countries two or three times which are corrected and merged into a final version. Once in the system, digitalized books can be at disposal as MobiPocket ebooks or Print On Demand (POD) and with aid of the Amazon BookSurge program remain available, possibly even within 24 hours.

Digital content can also be used as a marketing-tool with the “Search Inside” from Amazon.com, where the full text of a book is visible but only small parts of the book are shown at a time.

Right after Amazon, Google also presented their own projects for the digitalization of books, where publishers have the option of just sending a box or container full of their books in printed form and leave the job of digitalization to Google, where afterwards their content will be findable with Google Book Search. The difference between those two internet services was obvious, though: Amazon wants to earn money with books, while Google’s business is advertising, their revenue model is AdSense and AdWords, targeted as perfect as possible with full text search. Both services had to answer questions as to how they will protect the content from unpaid exploitation, as probably fewer and fewer users will be willing to pay for a digital eBook when they can read the content for free, up to twenty pages at a time. The freeloader mentality of many Internet users was seen as a threat by many of the publishers.

Friday, October 12, 2007

New Zealand state-owned enterprise (SOE), Kordia published its annual report a few days ago for the financial year ending June 30, 2007.

Formerly known as Broadcast Communications Ltd (BCL) prior to the name change in November 2006, the Crown-owned company offers contracting, consulting, and networking services. They operate a national communication network and provides network feeds and broadcast services for the major television and radio networks in New Zealand.

The annual report shows Kordia Group Limited’s net profit, after tax, at NZ$11.9 million, the 2006 result was $9.8 million. Revenue was up from $201 million in the 2006 financial year to $264 million this year; a 31% increase. Chairman of Kordia, Wayne Brown, described this financial year as “solid achievement” while being “on track to record further growth in the exciting fields in which it operates.”

These increases is despite the major acquisition of Orcon Internet Limited, an ISP (Internet service provider). Kordia will use Orcon, acquired on 2 July, 2007, to invest and deliver the possibilities of the current progress of local loop unbundling, new Wi-Fi zones, and WiMAX technology. CEO of Kordia, Geoff Hunt, said, “Orcon will soon offer a complete range of Voice over IP products”. Orcon is being operated at arms-length to the rest of the company.

Other areas where Kordia is advancing itself is mobile television transmission where they are already prepared to start services once content providers have been secured. Hunt said, “Spectrum is available, so all we need are the content providers and some good consumer demand. Then we’ll be ready to roll.”

Kordia is also immersing itself further in the television sector as well as its mobile television service. Other advances includes New Zealand’s new digital television service, Freeview with it set to start terrestrial transmission next year.

Parliament TV also began this year in July. All House proceedings are available via the Parliament website and a broadcast quality feed is provided to all broadcasters, with full coverage being televised by Freeview and Sky Network Television. The manager of Kordia’s Transmission Control Centre, Merv Brooks, said, “This is another example of people and technology coming together to deliver a truly unique product to New Zealanders.”

Being a SOE, Kordia is required to give the Government a dividend. The Government will receive a total dividend of $8.4 million; $6.8 million in 2006. A $3 million dividend had already been received by the Government so a payment of only $5.4 million was made.