Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A Scottish woman who set out before Christmas to purchase a turkey finally made it home on Monday, after being cut off by snow for a month. Kay Ure left the Lighthouse Keeper’s cottage on Cape Wrath, at the very northwest tip of Great Britain, in December. She was heading to Inverness on a shopping trip.

However on her return journey heavy snow and ice prevented her husband, John, from travelling the last 11 miles to pick her up. She was forced to wait a month in a friend’s caravan, before the weather improved and the couple could finally be reunited.

They were separated not just for Christmas and New Year, but also for Mr Ure’s 58th birthday. With no fresh supplies, he was reduced to celebrating with a tin of baked beans. He also ran out of coal, and had to feed the couple’s six springer spaniels on emergency army rations.

“It’s the first time we’ve been separated”, said Mr Ure in December. “We’ve been snowed in here for three weeks before, so we are well used to it and it’s quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet.”

Saturday, February 16, 2008

While nearly all coverage of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, there are small political parties offering candidates, and those who choose to run without a party behind them, independents.

Wikinews is interviewing some of these citizens who are looking to become the 43rd person elected to serve their nation from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

Our second interview is with Cincinnati, Ohio’s Steve Kissing, a divorced father of two who is a creative director at an advertising agency.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

One hundred and twenty detainees at an immigration removal centre in Oxford, UK, are on hunger strike. The protest started when some detainees refused breakfast on Wednesday 14th June 2006. A letter from the hunger strikers explaining why they are seeking to draw attention to their plight in this way has been reproduced in full below.

Those detained at the centre are mostly men who have sought asylum in the UK and whose asylum applications have been rejected. These people are then held without knowing how long they will be detained for – some end up being held for many years while awaiting deportation.

The removal centre, known as Campsfield, or Campsfield House is approximately 5 miles north of Oxford and has been in operation since 1993. It was managed on behalf of the UK Government by Global Solutions Limited, until may 2006 when it was taken on by GEO UK, the centre has a capacity of 198. Only males are detained at Campsfield.

According to the campaign group Barbed Wire Britain Over 2,600 individuals, mostly asylum seekers, are detained indefinitely in the UK without trial and with no automatic right to bail.

There have been reports in the UK press of the state taking people to detention centres without notice, in the early hours of the morning using excessively heavy handed tactics, taking children out of schools and separating families.

Many UK people and politicians express their disgust at the way detainees are treated, yet it continues. Perhaps this action by the detainees themselves will further highlight their plight and result in more UK electors writing to their MPs and demanding improvements to the way in which rejected asylum seekers are treated.

“We are detainees at Campsfield removal centre in Oxford. Most of us have been here for a long while now. There are people who have been detained for up to two years and down to three months. We are cramped in here like animals. We are treated like animals and moved around different detention centres like animals. The immigration service have taken husbands from their families and taken people who ran away from persecution in their various countries, and dumped everyone in here.

Once you are put in here the immigration service forget you. There are detainees who have applied to go back to their own countries that are still being held here for months without any news about their cases, just so that the private security companies get more money.

Detainees are asked to seek asylum and then refused. The immigration service also ask detainees to apply for bail. When you get a bail hearing date all of a sudden they serve you with removal papers that are not valid. There are many of these situations. In most cases the immigration service don’t take you to your court hearings. And then they tell the judges you refused to turn up, just so the hearing goes ahead in your absence. Many detainees have been served with removal papers and travel documents but nothing happens on the removal day.

Campsfield has become a slave house. We detainees are treated like slaves, to do odd jobs for officers. Detainees are handcuffed to see doctors or dentists in hospitals or clinic appointments. We have some racist security officers who make racist comments to detainees and go out of their way to make you feel like committing suicide. Detainees have to be at the point of death before they get to see the doctors.

The food is not worth eating. Even dogs would refuse to eat what we eat. But we don’t have a choice; every single day we eat the same food (the food we eat is rice, chicken, sandwiches, and left-over eggs)”.

• “120 Immigration Detainees on Hunger Strike at Campsfield IRC” — Oxford Indymedia, June 14, 2006
• UK Home Office webpage on Campsfield
• Close Campsfield Campaign
• “Dawn raid furore family deported” — BBC, September 29, 2005
• Barbed Wire Britain
• “Asylum seekers on hunger strike” — BBC, July 14, 2005
• “Construction/Building Press Releases” — PR Newswire, Oct 01, 2005

Friday, June 1, 2007

A former mailman who proposed to paint the town hall pink, turn the local town square into a nudist pool, and to plant a marijuana field in the local park has been elected to the Reus, Spain town council.

Ariel Santamaria promised to show up to the town’s council meetings dressed up as Elvis Presley if he was elected and kept his word at the town’s first meeting on Thursday.

Before being elected, Santamaria who is a member of the Reus Independent Coordination, had also promised the town’s 100,000 residents that he would install a GPS system at the police department that would allow officers to track people who are smoking marijuana and provide them with a light if they need one.

An unnamed media consultant who works for Santamaria set up a website for his campaign and followed Santamaria wherever he went, dressed as a pirate.

Saturday, April 2, 2005

Chicago city inspectors closed the landmark Lithuanian restaurant Healthy Food on Thursday, after finding mouse feces on the meat slicer and cutting board, and a dead mouse in the cooler.

The restaurant has operated at 3236 S. Halsted, on the south side of the city in the Bridgeport neighborhood, since the 1930s.

Wikinews reporter David Vasquez placed a call to the restaurant to inquire if they were open. The call was answered by a woman who said, “No, we’re closed. There’s some technical difficulties. I’m sorry. Thank you for calling.” A second phone could be heard ringing in the background.

Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith told the Chicago Sun-Times, “To reopen, they’re going to have to present us with a revamped game plan for not only rodent control but also housekeeping, they’ll have to make all the corrections that our inspectors point out,” he continued, “and pass a very stringent follow-up inspection.”

Patrons have praised the restaurant’s sauerkraut soup and other dishes over the years. Before it was closed, the restaurant had a lot of traffic from the nearby Cook County Circuit Court. The restaurant was once voted “Best Ethnic Eastern European Restaurant in Chicago”, according to New City.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

At 8:34 pm Indian time Friday night (1504 UTC), India became the fourth country to land its flag on the Moon.

The unmanned lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 ejected its Moon Impact Probe (MIP), which hurtled across the surface of the Moon at 1.5 kilometres per second (3000 miles per hour), and successfully crash landed near the Moon’s south pole.Besides carrying three important scientific instruments, the lunar probe also carried the image of the Indian national flag, painted on all sides.

Chandrayaan-1 (meaning ‘Moon craft’ in Sanskrit) reached its target lunar orbit on Wednesday. The orbiter will remain in a circular orbit 102 kilometres above the Moon’s surface for two years. Its instruments will be gradually commissioned over the next few days.

With this landing, India became both the fourth country to place a flag on the Moon and the fifth group to send a spacecraft to the Moon. The other countries which have sent spacecraft to the Moon are the United States, the former Soviet Union, Japan, and China, along with the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries. Japan and China currently each have scientific satellites orbiting the Moon, though China has not yet put a spacecraft on the moon’s surface.

The MIP has a mass of 29 kg, is about the size of a microwave oven, and was designed and assembled in India.After the orbiter ejected it, the probe took about 25 minutes to reach the Moon’s surface. On-board digital cameras made a high resolution movie of the surface during descent, and scientists also conducted measurements with the probe’s mass spectrometer and radar altimeter.Data was beamed back to India via the orbiter, and it is currently being processed and analysed.

Data from the altimeter experiments will be used to refine the instrument in order to control the soft landing of a future probe. Plans are already being prepared for the Chandrayaan-2 to be launched by 2012.

India’s first lunar mission was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the Andhra Pradesh coast on October 22.The launch vehicle was an Indian designed and built rocket that had been previously proven by carrying scientific and commercial payloads to earth orbit, including weather and communications satellites.The cost of this mission is estimated at 340 crore (3.4 billion) rupees (US$78 million). The mission carries five scientific instruments built by India’s technology sector, and six developed cooperatively with foreign nations.

Goals for the orbiter include making a detailed map of the Moon’s chemical make-up and mineral resources, as well as a three-dimensional digital map of the entire surface. The mission will examine the surface for sources of water, and take comparison photos of the light side and dark sides of the surface.

Monday, March 21, 2005

US particle physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York have created a fireball in a particle accelerator that bears a striking similarity to a black hole. It was generated at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) by smashing beams of gold nuclei together at almost the speed of light.

The collision produces a ball of plasma which is about 300 million times hotter that the surface of the Sun. The fireball can be detected because it absorbs jets of particles produced by the collision, but in this case 10 times as many jets were being absorbed as had been predicted by calculations.

Physicist Horatiu Nastase of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island says that the calculations show that the fireball has properties similar to that of a black hole. Nastase says this could help explain why so few jets are seen coming out of the fireball. He thinks the particles are being absorbed into the core and reappearing as thermal (Hawking) radiation, just like theory predicts happens in a black hole.

Other physicists have pointed out possible holes in Nastase’s calculations. Carlos Nunez of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts said, “I wouldn’t say his model is wrong, but it’s clearly under construction.”

Even if Nastase turns out to be right, the black holes created pose no danger. At this scale gravity is not the dominant force in a black hole and they quickly evaporate away – this one lasted a mere 10^-23 seconds, that is 10 million, billion, billionths of a second.

Monday, October 26, 2009

According to the Zimbabwean finance minister, a building belonging to Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party was raided by police on Friday. The police had reportedly been searching for weapons.

The MDC secretary-general, Tendai Biti, said that the house, located in a suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital Harare, was “ransacked” by several dozen armed policemen after dark on Friday. One of the rooms in the building had been searched, and police confiscated what Biti called “valuable party documents”.

The secretary-general accused President Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party of being behind the raid, wanting the country’s unity government to fail, describing it as “provocation”. “They are behind this attack. Our decision of pulling out of the inclusive government infuriated ZANU-PF and this is the price we now pay for that decision,” he said.

The police have not yet released a statement regarding the raid.

Tsvangirai and his MDC party had pulled out of the coalition government last week, accusing Mugabe’s party of not complying with the unity government deal made last year, and oppressing opponents. Mugabe, however, dismissed the boycott, calling it a “non-event”, and said that his party would not alter its plans or agree to the MDC’s demands.