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Tuesday, August 6, 2013

This past Sunday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill known as “Rocky’s Law” that requires Illinois high schools, through the local school district, to buy catastrophic injury insurance up to US$3 million or medical costs for up to five years, whichever one comes first, that covers student athletes. The insurance must cover student athletes while they are competing.

The legislation was named after Rasul “Rocky” Clark. In 2000, the Eisenhower High School football player became paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a tackle during a game. His school based health insurance covered the costs of his medical treatment. A legislator sponsoring the bill noted that the need for this type of insurance is rare. Clark’s mother attended the legislation signing. Her son died last year.

Before parents can claim money from school insurance, they first must pay out US$50,000. Schools have until January 1, 2014 to comply with the law. Schools cannot charge students more than US$5 to defray the cost of insurance. If a school district already requires student to be covered through private health insurance, they are exempted from this law.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Viktor Schreckengost, the father of industrial design and creator of the Jazz Bowl, an iconic piece of Jazz Age art designed for Eleanor Roosevelt during his association with Cowan Pottery died yesterday. He was 101.

Schreckengost was born on June 26, 1906 in Sebring, Ohio, United States.

Schreckengost’s peers included the far more famous designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes.

In 2000, the Cleveland Museum of Art curated the first ever retrospective of Schreckengost’s work. Stunning in scope, the exhibition included sculpture, pottery, dinnerware, drawings, and paintings.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.

Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.

Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.

Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.

Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.

Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Administrators PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) have announced that the British car company MG Rover and its engine manufacturer Powertrain Ltd has been sold to Chinese company Nanjing Automobile for an unknown sum of money. The company beat bids from Shanghai Automotive (SAIC), despite being the smaller of the two.

MG Rover collapsed this Spring, after struggling to make a profit for several years.

SAIC had tried to buy only the engine plant and then transfer it to China, but in June Nanjing Automobile approached PWC with a combined bid for both the car manufacturing company and Powertrain. This Monday SAIC bid for both but the offer was inferior to Nanjing’s.

Nanjing has indicated that it too will move the engine production plant to China, along with some car manufacturing. However it also intends to continue building cars in Britain, and establish an engineering research and design centre there in an effort to expand its sales globally. Nanjing intends to start hiring at once.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Beijing (??; pinyin: B?ij?ng) —Chinese President Hu Jintao is stepping up a government campaign to eradicate illegal gambling in China, detaining over 4,000 gamblers in an effort to clean up the public image of the Communist party.

Cadres and officials within the party have been caught using illicit funds, sometimes embezzled from local, state-run organizations, to gamble at casinos set up in border-towns within North Korea, in Macau, and in other popular gambling resorts outside of the direct control of the mainland government.

To assuage any fears that this latest campaign extends to ordinary working-class citizens, Deputy Public Security Minister Bu Jingfu has announced that ordinary citizens need not worry about being prosecuted for “friendly” games of mahjong. He did not specifically address whether mainland citizens should reconsider visiting the numerous mahjong gaming parlors which dot urban centers throughout the country.

“The whip that is used to beat wolves should not be used to beat sheep,” stated Bu Jingfu.

China allows a “social welfare” lottery, for which citizens can purchase tickets that help to fund social programs. However, this legal form of gambling is mostly favored by lower-income players who don’t have the opportunity to travel to the lavish gaming casinos frequented by the wealthier class of businessmen and party officials who can travel across the border on easily obtained one or two-day visas.

Despite relatively harsh penalties for those who are caught participating in illegal gambling operations, a number of provinces are well-known for hosting high-stakes gamblers in illegal, underground operations that are run on the mainland under the noses of local authorities. To combat these operations on a national level, the Public Security Ministry has sent 13 “inspection teams” to these provinces in an attempt to crack down on these operations.

One historian believes that China’s government, which in its various forms has tried to stop avid gamblers for thousands of years, will have no better luck with its current campaign, than it has in the past.

“It is really hard to get rid of gambling,” said Guo Shuanglin, a professor of history at People’s University in Beijing.

Guo explained, “There were strict laws against gambling in almost every dynasty in China. Take the Song Dynasty, for example, when gamblers were sentenced to death. In the Ming Dynasty, gamblers’ hands were chopped off. Even in the period of the Republic of China, they had a very strict anti-gambling law.”

As far away as Las Vegas, casino operators are seeing a shift in demographics for their most elite players, called “whales”, who are known to bet upwards of US$50,000 a hand. Since the 1980s, Las Vegas has seen a shift from Japanese businessmen to Chinese players, who now make up over 50% of the high-end clientele at some Las Vegas casinos.

Shen Mingming, a Beijing University expert on Chinese gambling, is skeptical that China’s government can sustain a long-term campaign against gambling.

“It means long hours for the police, and it cannot be sustained,” he said. “When the campaign is over, these organizations just quietly come back to life. Can you keep doing these campaigns every few months?”

However, this time China’s government has set up a special telephone number, to encourage citizens to turn in government officials who are embezzling government funds for illicit gambling runs.

China has recently conducted a series of high-profile arrests of corrupt officials who are caught gambling with public funds, two of whom used tens of millions of dollars to fund their gambling lifestyle.

The government has also made one special arrest to show that even high-level officials are not immune to prosecution due to their party position. Cai Haowen, who had been groomed by former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, was arrested this month on an overnight train in Jilin (??; pinyin: Jílín) province, while fleeing authorities for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars and losing it all while gambling.

Finally, China is starting to crack down on the easy visa programs which have permitted so much traffic to gambling emporiums outside of mainland government control. The new visa program requires that records be kept of the identity of the visa holder. This new visa requirement has started to have a noticeable effect on some border-town casinos, leaving a number of properties with idle employees and few Chinese customers.

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Esteban Ruiz Santiago, 26, appeared in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Broward County, Florida this Monday. Santiago stands accused of a shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Friday at 12:55 p.m. local time (1755 UTC) at the lower level baggage claim area in Terminal 2 of the airport. The incident killed five people and injured six, with roughly another 40 people injured in the crowd while hastily evacuating from the scene.

Police drove Santiago from the Broward County main jail to the court building in the morning. At the hearing, Santiago attended handcuffed and also cuffed at the ankles, guarded by at least eight police officers. The Magistrate, Judge Alicia Valle, questioned Santiago on his finances. The prosecutor also sought a detention order for public safety and flight risk. The hearing took about 20 minutes. The Judge ordered Santiago a public defender, and set a detention hearing for January 17, and the arraignment hearing for January 23. After the hearing, the police returned Santiago to the Broward County main jail.

At the hearing, Santiago had admitted to earning US$2,100 a month as a security guard in Alaska, while only having about US$10 of savings in a bank, and no other property. The Judge also informed Santiago of the penalties that may be imposed on him in the case he was convicted.

On Friday, authorities said, Santiago arrived from Anchorage, Alaska with only one baggage item — a suitcase with an unloaded Glock 9 mm semi-automatic handgun. Upon arriving at the airport, he picked up the suitcase at the baggage claim carousel and loaded it in a nearby bathroom. Then he walked out and started shooting people, at random according to a witness. People started to run and hide, and Santiago continued to shoot. Then Santiago stopped shooting, witnesses claiming he ran out of ammunition. The police arrested him. He did not resist the arrest.

According to officials, Santiago received a mental health evaluation in November, after he traveled to an FBI office and walked in alleging his head was controlled by the government and he heard voices urging him to watch ISIS propaganda. At the time of that incident he left his infant son and a gun in a car, and the infant was given to mother’s care. His gun was seized at the time of that incident, but Santiago was given it back on December 8.

Santiago traveled from Anchorage, Alaska to Minneapolis to Fort Lauderdale Airport on a Delta Airlines flight. Investigations were ongoing to determine the motivation for the incident. No evidence was found of Santiago communicating with any other individual in relation to the incident; he seemed to be acting alone. In an interview, Santiago admitted to having planned the shooting in advance when purchasing the airline ticket. According to CNN, Esteban Santiago previously belonged to the Alaska Army National Guard, including a ten-month stint in Iraq where he was given a combat action badge. According to Santiago’s family, his mental health issues started after his ten-month tour in Iraq, after which he began to tell them about auditory hallucinations.

All flights to and from Fort Lauderdale Airport were suspended by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) until Saturday morning, and roads in and out of the airport closed.

Santiago was born in New Jersey. He spent his childhood in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated US territory in the northeastern Caribbean Sea.

At the time of the incident, it was legal in the US to transport guns in a hard-sided and locked container by air. In Florida, it was also legal to carry a gun in an airport terminal without removing the gun from its case.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

On Friday, all six major American television networks; ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, WB, and UPN, along with most PBS stations, united in a rare show of solidarity to air a one hour charity concert called Shelter from the Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast.

The concert aired live at 8pm in the Eastern time zone and 7pm in the Central time zone and on tape-delay in the Mountain and Pacific time zones. It was also shown on the Internet and many cable networks such as USA, Bravo and G4.

The show was produced by Joel Gallen, the same man behind the September 11th tribute concert America: A Tribute to Heroes. The show was not censored for political statements but was for obscenities. Gallen did not expect any political statements. Last week, rapper Kayne West made a remark on an NBC charity show A Concert for Hurricane Relief, in which West claimed that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”, which caused controversy.

The concert began with Randy Newman singing “Louisana 1927.” Throughout the concert there were notable acts, such U2 performing “One” with Mary. J Blige. Another moment was Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood and the house band from The Late Show with David Letterman doing a cover of John Fogerty’s “Who’ll Stop The Rain”.

Donations were being solicited for the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

Telecom company AT&T provided toll-free calling and 10 call centers for the event and MCI provided volunteers from their call centers.

BET also held a charity concert called S.O.S (Saving OurSelves), a half-hour before cutting to the main one.

MTV, MTV Overdrive, VH1 and CMT will air a charity show Saturday called ReAct Now: Music & Relief.