Saturday, August 25, 2007

Efforts to salvage the Indonesian naval vessel Arung Samudera from where she ran aground on the Sunshine Coast Queensland, have been delayed due to poor weather conditions.

The 35-metre, tri-masted vessel was originally grounded on August 23 in stormy weather at Inskip Point, near Rainbow Beach. A salvage contractor has being brought in to rescue the stricken vessel, her hull is intact and it is believed the ship is in no imminent danger of breaking apart.

However, the tall ship did drag its anchors and break its rudder and centreboard during the beaching.

Australian Navy Commander Forbes Peters says that although salvage has been postponed until early next week, the vessel will be surveyed today by the salvage firm.

“To develop a plan for how they would salvage the vessel of the beach, that’s going to involve a tugboat pulling the thing off the beach with a longline.

“The trouble with actually conducting the salvage will be the sea state… Until the weather abates there really will not be able to do much in terms of salvage,” he said.

The 18-man crew – six officers and 12 sailors – of the New Zealand-built vessel have managed to retrieve their belongings from the ship, and are now expected to be transported to temporary accommodation in local barracks in Bulimba, Brisbane.

It is still hoped the ship can be repaired in time for it to attend a summit next month in Sydney, but this to be unlikely. A decision on whether to take her to Brisbane or Gladstone for repairs is expected to be made on Monday.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Six people are confirmed dead after Tuesday’s heavy rains in Slovenia. Up to 300 mm of rain fell in just a few hours across the country, with swollen rivers, torrential streams and landslides sweeping away cars, houses, bridges, and whole sections of roads. In some areas, public services have not yet been restored, and healthcare and drinking water are being provided by mobile units. Some major roads are still closed. The damage includes the destruction of the resistance Hospital Franja, a museum site from the Second World war.

Worst hit was the valley town of Železniki, where three people died, 350 houses were flooded and over a hundred cars were swept away by the swollen river Sora. The dead included a woman who was swept away by the river in her car. The local health facilities and the elementary school are closed. Road communication to several surrounding villages was cut off by landslides. The flood also badly damaged local industry. The lower-lying town of Škofja Loka was also badly hit by the flood. A 31-year-old volunteer fire fighter was killed during the rescue effort in Cerklje.

Other badly affected areas include those along the rivers Sava, Savinja and Dravinja. All three rivers and many of their tributaries overflowed and flooded fields and towns. The low-lying parts of Celje, Laško and Nazarje were flooded by up to 2 meters of water. A 34-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman were killed in Podgorje near Braslov?e when their house was buried in a landslide. Two older people managed to leave the house unharmed.

Damage was widespread across the country and many roads were blocked by landslides. Velenje was cut off from the world for more than a day. The main road connecting the mountainous Bohinj valley to the central part of the country was closed, leaving only the mountain road to Tolmin.

Near the town of Cerkno, which was itself flooded, the museum site of Hospital Franja was nearly completely destroyed. The partisan resistance hospital from the Second World War, situated in a narrow mountain canyon above the town and named after the young doctor who worked at the site, treated hundreds of wounded resistance fighters and remained undiscovered by the Wehrmacht throughout the war. The hospital consisted of 12 wooden cabins and a miniature hydroelectric power plant. The power plant and all but one of the wooden cabins and were swept away by the swollen stream. Hundreds of exhibits, including medicine containers, locally produced medical equipment and an x-ray machine were lost or badly damaged.

The government of Slovenia directed €500,000 from the emergency fund to immediate rescue and repair operations, and has promised to help the affected municipalities and population with funds from the budget. The government has also pledged to rebuild the Hospital Franja museum site.

[edit]

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Lloyd Helferty is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the Thornhill riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Friday, July 17, 2009Following similar threats by workers at New Fabris and Nortel, workers at JLG in Tonneins, France, threatened to blow up several platform cranes. The JLG factory announced in April 2009 that it will fire 53 of its 163 workers by the end of 2009, while the remaining 110 jobs will not be secure over the next 2 years.

JLG Tonneins was acquired in 2006 with its parent JLG Industries, a maker of aerial work platforms, by the U.S.-based Oshkosh Corporation. Despite being hugely profitable in the past, production has been much reduced since 2008 with the contraction of the construction industry and lower demand for its products. Despite excellent past results the new American management demanded sweeping cuts at the company.

In the view of locals, “the company’s actions are a disgrace given the expensive perks, such as official cars, for its corporate fat cats, compared to the sacrifice, silence, and dignity demanded by the company of those it has made redundant.”

The management offered severance pay of € 3,000 (US $4,200), however the workers demanded a severance package commensurate with “the wealth that their labor has generated.” Worker’s delegates requested a “supra-legal” payment of € 30,000, on Thursday 16 of July the management responded with a counter offer of € 16,000. On Thursday night the worker’s actions secured the € 30,000 settlement initially demanded.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Google has confirmed that it has “received formal notification,” that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating its business practices. The acknowledgment was posted on the internet search engine company’s blog Friday. Google said it was unclear about the nature of the probe.

A broad FTC investigation would cause the company be tied up in defending itself for years, and according to Bloomberg, might well be the government’s biggest antitrust case since the Microsoft probe.

The FTC will likely launch an anti-trust investigation, as the company has been the target of many past smaller ones, according to CNN.

Mercury News reported Friday morning that the FTC review will probably focus on whether Google is using its dominance in the internet search business to promote its own products and services. Google’s rivals say Google unfairly profits from its monopoly in the search engine business by using its search services to point users of its internet search engine to its own sites and services while hiding links to its competitors.

The FCC probe is expected to determine if Google abuses it market dominance to promote moneymaking online marketing, such as its mapping, comparison shopping and travel services. According to CNN, “Google dominates search in the United States, controlling about two-thirds of the market, according to comScore. It also licenses the world’s largest smartphone operating system, and its share of U.S. display advertising revenue recently eclipsed long-time leader Yahoo.”

Google’s response is that most complaints of anticompetitive behavior come from companies who are displeased with their ranking in Google’s search engine. However, Joshua Wright, law professor at George Mason University said the FTC will be looking at possible harm to users and not complaints by Google’s competitors.

Melissa Maxman, co-chair of a Washington-based, antitrust practice group, said the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection unit will almost certainly be involved to see if Google deceives search engine users by screening search results to profit its own services. She said she would be “shocked” if the consumer protection unit was not involved.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal said in the post, “We respect the FTC’s process and will be working with them (as we have with other agencies) over the coming months to answer questions about Google and our services.” But Singhal acknowledged, “It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand. Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow.”

Bloomberg reported Friday: “Google has set aside $500 million for a U.S. government investigation into online pharmacy ads the company accepted that may have violated the law.”

Google’s efforts to improve privacy policies after last years’ determination that its social-networking service Google Buzz used deceptive tactics, are currently being overseen by the FTC.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample.

If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it may lead the way for the use of robotic surgery in even more delicate procedures, such as heart surgery. Note that this is not a fully automated system, as a human doctor controls the operation via remote control. Laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery is a treatment for obesity.

There were concerns that doctors, in the future, might only be trained in the remote control procedure. Ronald G. Latimer, M.D., of Santa Barbara, CA, warned “The fact that surgeons may have to open the patient or might actually need to revert to standard laparoscopic techniques demands that this basic training be a requirement before a robot is purchased. Robots do malfunction, so a backup system is imperative. We should not be seduced to buy this instrument to train surgeons if they are not able to do the primary operations themselves.”

There are precedents for just such a problem occurring. A previous “new technology”, the electrocardiogram (ECG), has lead to a lack of basic education on the older technology, the stethoscope. As a result, many heart conditions now go undiagnosed, especially in children and others who rarely undergo an ECG procedure.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Macomb, New York Councilman Steve Burke took some time to speak with Wikinews about his campaign for the U.S. Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Burke, an insurance adjuster and farmer, was elected councilman in Brookhaven, New York in 1979. He left the town after being accused and found not guilty of bribery in the 1980s. Since 1987 he has served as Macomb councilman off-and-on and currently holds the post. From 1993 to 1996 and 1999 to 2002 he worked as chairman of the Democratic Party of St. Lawrence County, New York. Among his many political campaigns, Burke unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1992 and recently attempted to run for U.S. Congress in 2014 but too many of his ballot petition signatures were found invalid. Burke filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the 2016 election on September 18, 2015 and has qualified for the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary.

With Wikinews reporter William S. Saturn?, Burke discusses his political background, his 2016 presidential campaign, and his policy proposals.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White. His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism. It is not for the faint. He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother’s amorous pursuit.

The fact is, Edmund White exists. His life exists. To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950’s America and that White’s work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White’s enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

During the fourth day of the 2008 Taipei Game Show, held at the Taipei World Trade Center, visitors voted for their favourite participating companies and games at the “Popular Game Voting” competition.

According to the organizer Taipei Computer Association (TCA), this is the first-ever vote. It has two main categories, quality of the game itself and quality of the presentation at the convention. In the game section there were four categories: leisure game, PC console game, online RPG, and upcoming games. Balancing the vote, booth setup and stage activity were included. If a company won an award in this category, its notoriety is expected to rise and the company could see a great deal of opportunities to market games or its brand to the world.

Aside from the presentation class, winners from the game class were decided by votes from on-site, local gaming magazines, and the official website.

In the end, Microsoft Taiwan won all of the categories of the popular presentation class. In the game voting class, International Games Systems Inc. (IGS) won both popular leisure and upcoming game categories. Soft-World and Softstar Corp. respectively won popular online RPG and PC console game categories.

• International Games Systems, Inc. won most of the awards in the “Popular Game Voting” competition.

• Microsoft Taiwan won the “Popular Exhibitor Voting” with their presentations.