Wednesday, January 19, 2005

A video provided by the American Enterprise Institute intends to show tortures committed by the soldiers of Saddam Hussein during his rule.

The film shows extremely graphic scenes and it is NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN. It depicts Iraqi soldiers singing and praising Saddam, beating prisoners and cutting prisoners’ fingers and hands off.

During Saddam Hussein’s regime, about a quarter of a million Iraqis were executed. Many individual Iraqis of all faiths and ethnicities were tortured and killed for real or perceived opposition to Iraq’s government. Torture during Saddam’s regime was characterized by: medical experiments, crucifixions, genital amputations, hot iron marking, tongue fixing with a nail, teeth extraction with pincers, public beheadings, etc.

The four minute video (27.4 MiB) can be downloaded from the AEI website.

This video was released in June 2004. Most of the American and international media didn’t show it until now, despite the fact that channels of mass communication regularly released Abu Ghraib’s torture photos.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

The Group of Ministers (GoM) set up by the union government has given the thumbs-up for community radio stations to operate in India. The GoM has proposed that universities, registered trusts, civil society bodies and NGOs be allowed to run such stations. It has also proposed a single window clearance system to authorise such networks, with the assurance that the requisite clearances will be provided within three months. The GoM has also proposed that community radios be allowed up to 5 minutes of commercial advertising for every hour of broadcast.

The possibility that the proposal may run into some trouble when put before the Cabinet does exist. Many private FM channels are supposedly displeased with the idea of having to face more competition. There are also concerns that community radios may be used by insurgent groups to compromise India’s internal security. Those in favour of the proposal, however, say that this concept will start a revolution and empower rural India.

Columnist, author and visiting professor at Centre for Policy Research, B G Verghese says, “This operates at the grassroot level and once people can have access to this kind of information, you can put across anything to them, whether it is education or health. It’s an absolute necessity. The twin towers have happened, there is no way you can stop it. They don’t need community radio to do that.”

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

A class-action suit has been filed with the Superior court of the state of California accusing Wal-Mart of failing to ensure their suppliers’ employees work in acceptable conditions.

The suit, representing workers from six countries across four continents, conceals the identities of 17 workers from China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Swaziland and Nicaragua in addition to four Californians cited as also representing others from the state.

The complaint accuses Wal-Mart of failing to adequately police garment suppliers and ensure that workers are not kept in sweatshop conditions, and that this is in breach of their own Code of Conduct for foreign suppliers. Wal-Mart counters that they have an extensive programme to ensure suppliers adhere to their Code of Conduct; that 200 full-time inspectors are employed to check supplier factories, and 108 factories have been permanently banned as suppliers. However, this is mainly for child labor violations.

This is part of an ongoing campaign against Wal-Mart by the International Labor Rights Fund [1]; a labor rights group opposed to many of the business practices of Wal-Mart that they claim encourage unacceptable working conditions and salaries in developing countries.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

On Thursday, five police officers were killed and seven were injured after a sniper attacked a public protest march in downtown Dallas, Texas. Sources indicate at least three other people were taken into custody for questioning relating to the attack. The march was held to protest the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota during engagements with police officers.

Police identified 25-year-old Micah Johnson as the suspect. Johnson had previously served in the US army, and police reported he said he wanted to exact revenge upon police officers after news of Sterling and Castile’s deaths. Ammunition and weapons were found inside Johnson’s home. Dallas Police reported the policemen were shot at from a height. Officials said two civilians were also injured in the attack.

Micah Johnson served for the United States Army Reserve from 2009 until early 2015, including a tour of Afghanistan. Johnson had no criminal record. His attack was reported to be a lone mission.

After the attack earlier on Thursday, police killed Micah Johnson in El Centro College’s parking lot by a bomb explosion.

Hillary Clinton, 2016 United States presidential election candidate and favorite for the Democratic nomination this July, said, “There is too much violence, too much hate, too much senseless killing, too many people dead who shouldn’t be. No-one has all the answers. We have to find them together.”

After Johnson was killed, Mike Rawlings, Dallas’ mayor, said “We believe now the city is safe”.

Thursday, March 24, 2005

San Jose, California — A woman eating a bowl of chili at a Wendy’s restaurant bit into a chewy bit that turned out to be a human finger. She immediately spat it out, warned other patrons to stop eating, and upon recognizing the object as a finger, vomited.

“I’m more of a Carl’s Jr. person,” the 39-year-old Las Vegas woman, Anna Ayala, told Knight Ridder. She said this incident was her first visit to a Wendy’s restaurant. Ayala described how she found the finger, “Suddenly something crunchy was in my mouth,” she continued, “and I spit it out.”

According to Devina Cordero, 20, after Ayala found the finger, she ran up to her and Cordero’s boyfriend and said, “Don’t eat it! Look, there’s a human finger in our chili.”

“We went up to the counter and they told us it was a vegetable,” Cordero continued. “The people from Wendy’s were poking it with a spoon.”

The restaurant is located at 1405 Monterey Highway, just south of downtown San Jose.

Wikinews reporter David Vasquez drove his car up to the drive-thru menu and found that chili was still on the menu, at a price of US$1.19 for a small serving. He also witnessed workers unloading supplies from a semi-trailer truck in the restaurant’s parking lot, and carting them into the back door of the establishment.

According to Ben Gale, director of environmental health for Santa Clara County, the finger did not come from any of the employees at the restaurant. “We asked everybody to show us they have 10 fingers and everything is OK there,” he said. The found portion of the finger likely belonged to a woman because of its long and manicured fingernail, also found in the food.

Officials seized the food supply at the restaurant and are tracing it back to the manufacturer, where they believe the finger may have gotten mixed in with the raw ingredients used to prepare the chili. The restaurant’s operators were later permitted to re-open after preparing new chili prepared from fresh ingredients.

As this story was filed, there was no mention of the incident on the Wendy’s corporate web site. Wendy’s issued a statement through a spokesman.

“Food safety is of utmost importance to us,” said Wendy’s spokesman Joe Desmond. He referred to the incident as an “unsubstantiated claim.”

“We are cooperating fully with the local police and health departments with their investigation. It’s important not to jump to conclusions. Here at Wendy’s we plan to do right by our customers,” Desmond said.

According to county health officials, the unfortunate woman who bit into the finger is doing fine, despite her initial reaction. Officials also noted that the finger would have been cooked at a high enough temperature to destroy any viruses.

The Santa Clara county medical examiner reported that the finger had a solid fingerprint, although investigators did not say if a search of fingerprint databases would be performed to find the owner of the finger.

Saturday, September 9, 2006

A garbage truck in downtown Toronto crashed in a sink hole next to a construction site. The truck sank beneath a roadway Friday morning after the pavement gave way into a large sink hole.

The driver is safe, suffering only from a sudden fright. The truck went down so quickly that the driver was forced to jump out about seven feet as the rear end of his vehicle crashed through at an angle.

“He was very frightened, he was distressed, definitely,” said a police officer at the scene shortly after the accident. “He said it sank quite rapidly in the beginning and it is actually continuing to sink.”

Engineers had to wait more than 12-hours to give approval to tow the truck out. “From what we can tell there isn’t a water main at this location,” city engineer Maurizio Barbon said.

Engineers described a hole similar in size to a small backyard swimming pool.

It will take a few more days to find out what caused the sink hole.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

A new search engine that was announced yesterday finds articles and links within the English Wikipedia. Wikiseek, run by a California based startup company called “searchme”, is a website which aims to be “A better way to search Wikipedia.”

Although most keywords work without problems, Digg users have found search terms that the site does not recognize. If you enter “Chicago” for example, it shows no Wikipedia articles at all, and clicking “Chicago, Illinois” leads to an article on West Chicago, Illinois and other related articles to the subject. Similarly, entering “Christmas“, “United States” or “PlayStation 3” only provides links to related articles on Wikipedia, although they are in the top 10 of most viewed articles in the English Wikipedia. Searching “porn” comes up with commercial websites linked from Wikipedia, but not the relevant articles in the free encyclopedia. For most articles however, the relevant Wikipedia article is the first result or among the results.

The site says that “The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.” The site also offers a Toolbar plugin and a Firefox extension to add a Wikiseek search button inside of Wikipedia pages.

Danny Sullivan at the Search Engine Land blog found Wikiseek’s results inferior compared to the results from established search engines. SearchMe CEO Randy Adams stressed that Wikiseek is still in a beta phase. He pointed out that they welcome feedback more than the average search engine, which can be posted on their company wiki.

Searchme put a button on their main page, encouraging beta testers to instantly promote the site on Digg. In August 2006, Digg had half a million registered users.

Some media outlets have reported that Wikiseek was created by either the Wikimedia Foundation which runs Wikipedia, or private corporation Wikia, which hosts a collection of wiki communities. Both rumors are untrue, says Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia and chair of the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikiseek is an independent project with no affiliation with either Wikia or the Wikimedia Foundation.”

The Wikiseek site says they contribute the majority of its revenue from advertisement to the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising effort.

Thursday, December 31, 2015

The Financial Conduct Authority, one of Britain’s banking sector regulators, indicated it has decided to drop an inquiry into banking culture, including practices and payment of banking staff. The inquiry was intended to review “whether culture change programmes in retail and wholesale banks are driving the right behaviour, in particular focusing on remuneration, appraisal and promotion decisions of middle management, as well as how concerns are reported and acted on”.

A spokesman for the Financial Conduct Authority stated: “A focus on the culture in financial services firms remains a priority for the FCA[…] There is currently extensive ongoing work in this area within firms and externally. We have decided that the best way to support these efforts is to engage individually with firms to encourage their delivery of cultural change as well as supporting the other initiatives outside the FCA.”

The Shadow Chancellor, Labour’s John McDonnell, said shutting down the inquiry would be a “dangerous and costly mistake” and said: “This will be a huge blow to customers and taxpayers who are all still paying the price for the failed culture in the banking sector that’s been widely attributed to be among the main causes of the crash and the scandals over Libor and price-fixing”.

Members of the Treasury Select Committee have also been critical of the cancellation of the review. On Twitter, Labour MP John Mann stated the “FCA surrender to big banks today is entirely from pressure from Treasury and Osborne”. Conservative MP Mark Garnier, told the BBC: “There has always been this great argument that perhaps the Treasury is having more influence over the regulator than perhaps it ought to and certainly, if I was looking for a Machiavellian plot behind what’s happened here and the tone of the regulator, then I suppose I would start looking at the Treasury.”

Richard Lloyd from the consumer group Which? expressed disappointment at the cancellation of the report: “It’s disappointing that the regulator has decided against publishing this report on the culture of banking. Cultural change doesn’t happen overnight, so despite signs of improvement, the FCA must not take their eye off the ball and should continue to clean up the industry”

The FCA has had no leader since Martin Wheatley resigned in July following an expression of no confidence by George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.