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A compilation of brief news reports for Wednesday, November 26, 2008.

Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a British political party, has expressed his concern over the lack of men in childcare. In a speech to the Daycare Trust, Clegg commented on the issue. “There is still a huge stigma attached to men wanting to work in childcare,” he said. “Even just for men who want to take a more hands-on role in providing care for their own children.”

“The Daycare Trust’s own research shows that one in four men would consider working in childcare,” he continued. “Sadly some worry that their motives would be viewed with suspicion.”

Sources

• “Concern on lack of men in childcare” — The Press Association, November 25, 2008
• Press Release: “Clegg: Lack of men in childcare denies young children role models” — Liberal Democrats, November 25, 2008

A Pakistani hacker group named the Pakistan Cyber Army has reportedly attacked the official website of an Indian public sector petroleum company called Oil and Natural Gas Corporation. The attack was in response to the attacking of the official website of Pakistan state corporation Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority by Indian hackers named HMG, who attacked the OGRA’s website on November 17, and left a message on front page of the website that they would hack any Pakistani website with poor security controls. However, OGRA’s spokesman said he has no information on the incident.

Sources

• “Pakistani hackers hack Indian website” — The News International, November 25, 2008
• Muhammad Ali Raza. “A Message from PCA (Pakistan Cyber Army)” — propakistani.com, November 24, 2008

Apple Inc. has been told by the British Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to stop showing its advertisement, which describes the internet connection on the iPhone 3G as “really fast,” while pictures on the screen showed pages loading in less than a second.

ASA stated that the ad is likely to “lead viewers to believe that the device actually operated at or near to the speeds shown in the ad,” which, according to the organisation, it does not. As a result, the ASA ruled that the ad “must not appear again in its current form.”

Sources

• “Apple made to drop iPhone advert” — BBC News Online, November 26, 2008
• Press Release: “ASA Adjudications” — Advertising Standards Authority, November 26, 2008

1903 UTC According to local reports, 10 people were left dead and others injured in the Indian city of Mumbai after gunmen opened fire there.

The police say that it appears to be a terrorist attack.

Gunmen started shooting at seven locations, including a crowded restaurant and a train station. There were also reports of shooting at a hospital and two hotels, as well as two explosions, which are believed to be grenade attacks.

Sources

• “Mumbai rocked by deadly shootings” — BBC News Online, November 26, 2008
• “Terror attacks in Mumbai; 10 dead, several injured” — The Times of India, November 26, 2008

Nigeria’s food and drug agency has said that 25 children, aged from 3 months to 4 years, have died after consuming a contaminated teething syrup. Ten others are reported to have been hospitalised.

The National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control said that the syrup, which goes under the name of “My Pikin”, had been tainted with diethylene glycol, a substance that is usually used in antifreeze and engine coolant.

The agency added that it has shut down Barewa Pharmaceuticals, the Lagos-based manufacturer of the syrup.

Sources

• “‘Bad syrup’ kills Nigerian babies” — BBC News Online, November 26, 2008
• “Nigeria bans teething drug after 25 children die” — guardian.co.uk, November 26, 2008

Wednesday, February 16, 2005According to computer security expert Bruce Schneier, a widely-used cryptography algorithm, known as SHA-1, has been broken by three researchers at Shandong University in China. Designed by the US intelligence agency NSA, SHA-1 has been adopted as an official US government standard and has become widely-used in security applications worldwide, notably digital signatures. The three female researchers, Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu, have reduced the amount of time needed to find two documents with the same signature by a factor of more than 2000.

The SHA-1 algorithm is used to compute a short string of numbers, known as a hash, for any digital document. The algorithm is constructed such that small changes in the document cause the hash to change drastically. By this means, the hash can be used to verify that a document has not been tampered with.

The attack that Schneier describes is a “collision attack,” rather than the more useful “pre-image” attack. In a pre-image attack, the codebreaker is able to find a document with different contents that matches an existing hash and so can claim an existing signature was on something else. In the somewhat less valuable “collision attack,” the codebreaker is able to devise two documents that both have some particular hash. A adversary might use this to claim that an altered document is the original on the grounds that they have the same hash. A crafty adversary might also be able to trick someone into signing an innocuous document, one of a pair from a collision. The other document, which might not be as harmless, would then also appear to have been signed by the same person. If collisions can be found for SHA-1, then digital signatures will no longer vouch for a document’s authenticity.

The attack, for now, is more of a theoretical than a practical kind: it would currently take thousands of years on a modern personal computer, and would still be slow even if a large number of computers were used in parallel.

Xiaoyun Wang is currently a professor at Shandong University, while Hongbo Yu is a doctoral candidate at the same institution. Yiqun Lisa Yin is currently a visiting researcher at the Princeton Architecture Laboratory for Multimedia and Security (PALMS). Last year, Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu also took part in breaking a series of similar algorithms, including the widely used MD5 hash, as documented in their paper presented at the Crypto 2004 conference.

Officials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently recommended dropping SHA-1 in favor of stronger, slower algorithms, such as SHA-256, Federal Computer Week reported on February 7, 2005, just 7 days before Schneier announced the SHA-1 break. Despite deprecating SHA-1, William Burr, the head of NIST’s security technology group, said that “SHA-1 is not broken, and there is not much reason to suspect that it will be soon.”

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Wikinews held an exclusive interview with Wayne Allyn Root, one of the candidates for the Libertarian Party nomination for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Root is the founder and chairman of Winning Edge International Inc., a sports handicapping company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition, he is an author and a television producer, as well as an on-screen personality both as host and guest on several talk shows.

Root, a long-time Republican, declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party on May 4, 2007.

He says he is concerned about the qualities of many who run for president, and fears that they do not know the needs of American citizens. He also says that they cater to big businesses instead of small ones.

He has goals of limiting the federal government and believes that the US went into Iraq for wrong reasons. A strong supporter of the War on Terror, he feels that it was mishandled. He has conservative values and came from a blue collar family in New York. He graduated from Columbia University with fellow presidential hopeful Barack Obama in 1983.

Root believes that America is in trouble and hopes to change that if elected.

Monday, October 17, 2011

The Huffington Post reported Friday that U.S. presidential candidate Buddy Roemer received a $25 campaign donation from an individual listed as ‘Homer Simpson’; the same name as the main character of the long running animated television series The Simpsons. Along with the name, the donor also shares the cartoon character’s place of residence and employment. He claims to live at 742 Evergreen Terrace, and to work as Safety Inspector at Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

The Huff Post discovered the July 31 donation while analyzing Roemer’s Federal Election Commission records. After being notified, Roemer’s campaign manager, Carlos Sierra, responded “Oh my God. That is too funny”. He added that the campaign uses “one of the best accountants in the business,” and that he would personally find out who actually made the donation. Sierra noted that “we do not accept anonymous donations”.

Roemer, who previously served as a member of the House of Representatives (1981–1988) and Governor of Louisiana (1988–1992), has been running for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination since earlier this year. However, he has failed to receive invitations to any presidential debates.

Roemer, who recently expressed his support for the Occupy Wall Street protests, has focused his campaign on finance reform, and has limited individual contributions to $100. In the third quarter of 2011, he raised $138,000.

Wikinews contacted Carlos Sierra yesterday for an update on the matter. He explained, “I reached out to the individual and he was very apologetic. I have the correct information now and will turn it over to our compliance officer.”

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Seeking to stave off the forest fires that have blanketed five Southeast Asian countries with choking haze for the past two years, Indonesian environmental and forestry officials said yesterday they would be able to reduce the number of hot spots this year by more than half.

Meeting in Jambi, Sumatra, cabinet ministers from Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand heard what Indonesia plans to do this year to combat the illegal forest fires, which start each year during the August-November dry season.

“We are targeting a drop of about 50 percent in forest fires but we are entering the dry season between July and August so we have to increase our alertness,” Indonesian deputy environment minister Masnellyarti Hilman was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. “We explained the efforts that we’ve taken to prevent a repeat of the choking haze…and they praised our efforts,” he said.

A statement issued by the ministers after the meeting said Indonesia’s efforts would reduce the number of hot spots by 58 percent from the previous year.

Caused by slash-and-burn cultivation on palm oil and timber plantations on Borneo and Sumatra, the haze has covered parts of the affected countries for the past two years. It was first problematic in 1997, due to the El Niño weather pattern.

Friday, February 18, 2022

Findings published Monday by a team composed mostly of University of Washington Center for Forensic Science researchers in Nature Human Behaviour report using a form of DNA analysis techniques originally designed for human teeth to track ivory poached from African elephants.

The scientists, in collaboration with the United States Department of Homeland Security, identified the criminal networks that killed the endangered animals and smuggled their valuable tusks across national borders.

The scientists took DNA samples from 4,320 tusks taken from both African bush (Loxodonta africana) and African forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) elephants that were confiscated from 49 separate ivory smuggling events in twelve countries from 2002 to 2019. The scientists found that teeth from the closely related elephants, or even two tusks from the same individual, often surfaced in different shipments that transited through the same ports. The data also showed when criminal networks shifted their operations from between port cities. They inferred poachers were making kills, then separating the tusks at some point along the smuggling route.

The team had been studying DNA analysis on poached tusks for years: in 2018, they found two tusks from different shipments had come from the same animal, which indicated both shipments were from the same kill and transited by the same criminal network. This is the first report of DNA identification tusks that came from elephants in the same families.

Lead author Dr Samuel Wasser said: “Identifying close relatives indicates that poachers are likely going back to the same populations repeatedly — year after year — and tusks are then acquired and smuggled out of Africa on container ships by the same criminal network.” He added: “This criminal strategy makes it much harder for authorities to track and seize these shipments because of the immense pressure they are under to move large volumes of containers quickly through ports.”

Wasser said similar studies will provide law enforcement groups access to a greater range of evidence with which to prosecute poachers and their criminal partners by providing verifiable links between different caches of captured ivory. The researchers concluded in their paper that law enforcement could use their information to discern the ways in which poachers are collaborating.

Humans have used the ivory from elephant tusks to make art, decorations, and tools since prehistory. Many countries have since outlawed the sale of ivory, but poachers continue to kill tens of thousands of elephants each year.

The paper’s authors were from the University of Washington, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Kenyan-based organisation SeeJ-Africa, the Kenya Wildlife Service, and Singapore’s National Parks Board.

Monday, September 7, 2015

The US economy added 173,000 jobs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday. The unemployment rate fell from 5.3 to 5.1 percent, the lowest since April 2008.

Although August job gains were lower than most economists forecast, job growth numbers for June and July were revised upwards by a combined 44,000. Average job gains over the past three months stand at 221,000, compared to March-May’s 189,000 monthly average. Over the past twelve months, job growth has averaged 247,000 per month.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent, or 8 cents, marking the largest increase in earnings in seven months. Hourly earnings had risen by 6 cents in July. Wages have risen by 2.2 percent over the past year.

Job growth in August was primarily concentrated in the health care and social assistance, financial activities, and professional and business services sectors. Those three areas of the economy added a combined 108,000 jobs. Food service and drinking places employment increased by 26,000 over the month, and other economic sectors saw employment hold steady. Manufacturing, on the other hand, saw employment decline by 17,000 in August. A stronger dollar and worldwide economic weakness make US exports less desirable, leading to a flattening in manufacturing employment so far this year after steadily rising in the early years of the US economic recovery.

The solid overall job gains led analysts to slightly raise expectations for a decision by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this month. Investors raised the likelihood of a September rate increase from 26 percent before the jobs report to 30 percent, and stocks dropped by over one percent on Friday. “The payrolls data is certainly good enough to allow for a Fed rate hike in September,” said Deutsche Bank’s head of currency strategy, Alan Ruskin. “The big question is still whether financial market volatility will scupper the plans.”

“This is the first time the market has looked at a Fed meeting and really has no idea what the Fed is going to do,” said Mark Kepner, a New Jersey equity trader with Themis Trading. “Right now you’re looking at the overall uncertainty and that’s what’s hanging on the market. I don’t think this number in and of itself changes how somebody’s going to vote.”