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Monday, June 12, 2006

Italy won its first World Cup match of the 2006 tournament after beating Ghana 2-0 in Hanover, Monday.

The match was notable for being the first time Ghana had played in the World Cup. At 25 years and two months Ghana also had the youngest team at the tournament. In the end the team’s inexperience showed in the result. File:Panorama AWD-Arenax.jpg

Italy responded to early Ghanian pressure with forceful passing and aggressive attacks through Luca Toni. At first this effected to keep the fearless Africans, always looking to attack themselves, on the back foot.

With Luca Toni Italy always looked dangerous going forward. On 25 minutes he evaded a defender and rasped a shot onto the underside of the crossbar. It missed going over the goaline by just a yard.

Ratomir Dujkovic’s side had the best chance to shock the Azzuri after half an hour. Emmanuel Pappoe had space in the box – but skied his attempt over the bar. For some time it seemed goals might go in at both ends, as action was at one end, then another. But with tiredness Ghana lost some discipline in defence and ran out of ideas in attack.

The challenge of the two superb Italian defenders, Fabio Cannavaro and Alessandro Nesta, proved too tough. The Italian penalty area was almost impermeable to the white shirts for long stretches.

Ghana found no good opportunities to test Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon partly because Ghana was unable to deliver crosses to target inside the box. Efforts on goal were restricted to shots from outside the box from Michael Essien.

Only four out of Ghana’s 14 shots were on target. In contrast Italy had 18 shots; 13 were on target. This tells the story of a game in which two teams attacked a lot, but a vastly superior defence won.

Andrea Pirlo scored the game-winner. On 39 minutes, he received a pass from a corner at the top of the area; in plenty of space, he curled it low and hard into bottom left corner of the net.

Richard Kingston made a number of good saves to keep the Italians ahead by just the one goal but could not do anything about Samuel Kaffour’s error on 83 minutes. Kaffour’s back pass was too short and Vincenzo Iaquinta rounded Kingston to score.

Earlier, as Ghana got desperate, Asamoah Gyan tried something to unlock the Italian defence: a solo run; powering past blue shirts he got as far as the penalty area. Then he appeared to be fouled by Daniele De Rossi; the referee did not blow his whistle.

Marcelo Lippi, the Italian coach, might feel this game, the second in Group E, was a good work out for the Italians who were just a bit too wise for the Ghana team on this occasion.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

At least fifteen people have been killed as the result of a landslide which occurred in Indonesia on Tuesday. According to BBC News Online, at least sixteen were killed. It is thought that up to seventy people were killed as a result of the landslide, which occurred in a village near to the city of Bandung.

At one point, villagers attempted to dig out surviving victims from the rocks and mud by using their bare hands, as rescue efforts were suspended temporarily due to heavy rain, before recommencing after lifting equipment arrived. At least sixteen dead bodies have been recovered by Wednesday. Roughly five hundred people are contributing to the search and rescue.

Priyadi Kardono, spokesperson for the Disaster Management Agency, stated: “We’ve found fifteen bodies so far and estimate that there are up to 70 people still missing.” He also commented that fifteen other people had been injured, of which two have been hospitalised.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

When the curtains were drawn and the anthem began, confusion flickered over the faces in the large hall which welcomed the NRA (National Rifle Association) to Houston. It was the sounds of rocker Ted Nugent’s rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. People didn’t know whether to put their hands over their heart, as was customary, or start clapping. According to reports, it was hard to determine what the “Motor City Madman” was doing.

That was the rowdy kick off Friday night of the convention expected to draw up to 60,000 people to the George R. Brown convention center for a weekend of guns, gun-politics, gun peripherals like scopes and carry bags, and stuffed trophy heads.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre told about 2000 listeners to “Let the enemies of freedom take notice, we in this room have beaten you…” He repeated it three times for effect.

Another opening act was country singer Charlie Daniels whose rant against those on the left of the political spectrum included a characterization of them as “save the whales and kill the babies pantywaists.” He then pursed his lips and did his interpretation of a pantywaist, according to the Houston Chronicle: “’If we just leave the terrorists alone, they’d leave us alone.’”

Elsewhere, visitors were charmed by stuffed heads of dead deer. NRA staffer Monty Embrey, working the booth with the heads, said that although they looked like small moose, they were full-blooded deer with unusual antlers.

The exhibit is owned by the NRA and travels around the country. “People don’t get to see a collection of heads very often. It’s a big deal,” said Embrey.

Saturday’s keynote address will come from right wing congressional representative Tom DeLay of Sugarland, Texas, whose district includes much of Houston.

Just Friday, another of DeLay’s most conservative associates became the second House Republican to ask DeLay to consider yielding his leadership post because of the many ethics problems that have dogged him.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, (R-Colo) said, “If the majority leader were to temporarily step aside so that these trumped up charges can be dealt with in a less hostile environment, as they have proven to be an unnecessary distraction, it may be a productive move.”

These comments follow on the heels of similar statements by Rep. Chris Shays, a Republican moderate from Connecticut and Rick Santorum, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. All are concerned that the man in a political leadership position is a liability to their reelection bids, expected next year. He has not assuaged three charges against him by the Congressional Ethics Committee, comprised of half Republican and half Democratic members, except to blame his political opposition.

DeLay’s record keeping on millions of dollars was minimal and he has allegedly accepted money from Texas corporations in violation of the Texas law.

“A Travis County grand jury indicted DeLay political aide Jim Ellis, fundraiser Warren RoBold and John Colyandro, the executive director of DeLay’s political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, known as TRMPAC.The Washington Post reported in September that eight corporations also were indicted for illegal political contributions.”

The subject of DeLay’s speech was not known at press time.

The NRA now claims a membership of about 4 million.

Saturday, April 22, 2006

This week, the Public Broadcasting Service aired a NOVA program titled “Dimming the Earth”, which presented research by leading scientists on the complex systems of our global climate and human activity’s effect on it. One of the largest interactions (or “inputs”) humans have with the atmosphere is the ever-increasing use of fossil fuels. Consumption has risen 2% per year for this decade.

Fossil fuels burnt in factories and automobiles send their waste into our atmosphere in two forms. The first is CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, which have received substantial attention in the last few years because of the way they trap heat in the atmosphere. The second is the tiny particles of sulfur dioxide, soot and ash, which scientists call aerosols (basically smog). Research into understanding the negative health effects of air pollution has resulted in the development of catalytic converters for cars as well as devices to remove particulate solids from industrial waste before it reaches the air.

More recently, atmospheric scientists have come upon the phenomenon of the reduction of direct sunlight reaching Earth’s surface— observing a nearly a 5% decline between 1960 and 1990, with evidence of a recovery since then. This has been dubbed the “global dimming” effect, and is probably due to the way these aerosols act upon clouds. It is important to realise that this does not represent a net loss of this much sunshine to the climate system – if so, large temperature declines would have been observed. Instead, the sunshine is absorbed elsewhere in the system, with a much smaller net loss.

Clouds form when moisture gathers around airborne particles, such as pollen or dust. Clouds formed by the aerosol particles emitted by fossil fuel consumption are made of many more tiny droplets than “natural” clouds. These smog-created clouds have two notable effects: they shield sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface and, due to water’s reflective nature, the millions of tiny droplets suspended in them reflect light back into space, allowing even less light to reach Earth.

Many scientists now believe that global dimming caused by these pollutants has mitigated the temperature rises brought about by global warming. Over the last thirty years, Earth’s temperature has increased by about 0.5 oC.

In the absence of global dimming, however, the Earth might be 0.3 oC warmer than it currently is, suggesting that a “tug-of-war” exists between greenhouse gases and particulates released by burning fossil fuels. Efforts to mitigate the human health dangers of smog have allowed more heat into our atmosphere and brought about a sharper increase in global warming.

Dr. James E. Hansen, professor at Columbia University and the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies [1], believes that if we continue on our current pattern, this warming could be as much as five degrees in the next thirty years and ten to fourteen degrees over the course of the century. Such a temperature rise would devastate life on Earth, likely bringing on a cascade of self-reinforcing warming effects. Earth’s forests drying and burning, a steady thawing of the Greenland and arctic ice sheets, and, most dangerous of all, a release of the methane hydrates that are now frozen at the bottom of the oceans, could remake the planet into something inhospitable to human life. Dr. Hansen warns that, according to his research, man has just 10 years to reduce greenhouse gases before global warming and other responses to human activity by Earth’s climate reach a “tipping point”, becoming unstoppable.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

The United States Missile Defense Agency have announced that their airborne laser system has successfully shot down a ballistic missile for the first time. In a test on Thursday the “Airborne Laser Testbed” (ALTB), a modified Boeing 747-400F, detected a boosting short-range missile and tracked it using a low-energy laser. A second low-energy laser was used to measure and compensate for atmospheric disturbance, before the aircraft’s High Energy Laser was used to destroy the target.

The missile was liquid-fuelled and said to be “threat-representative”, possibly similar to a Scud. It was launched from sea, and shot down by the ALTB within two minutes. In a second test less than an hour later, a solid-fuel missile launched from a ground location was also successfully hit by the High Energy Laser, but deliberately not destroyed. A similar missile was destroyed on February 3.

In a press release announcing the successful tests the Missile Defense Agency said: “The revolutionary use of directed energy is very attractive for missile defense, with the potential to attack multiple targets at the speed of light, at a range of hundreds of kilometers, and at a low cost per intercept attempt compared to current technologies.”

The ALTB is described as a “pathfinder” for the use of directed energy in missile defense. It is designed to operate at high altitudes above the clouds, and to detect and destroy ballistic missiles soon after launch whilst they are still in their boosting phase. The aircraft is provided by Boeing, the main laser by Northrop Grumman, and the control systems by Lockheed Martin.

“Through its hard work and technical ingenuity, the government-industry team has produced a breakthrough with incredible potential,” stated Greg Hyslop, vice president of Boeing Missile Defense Systems. He said that the experiment had “made history”.

The US has been working on the program since 1996, and has faced numerous problems in that time. The megawatt-class High Energy Laser is known as the chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL), and consists of six modules, each as large as an SUV. The sheer weight of chemicals needed was almost too much for the 747 jet. The laser also had problems with accuracy due to atmospheric conditions.

February’s tests were originally scheduled to be carried out in 2002. The amount spent getting the project to this stage has also risen from a planned US$1 billion to $7.3 billion. Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cut the program back to a single jet for research, suggesting it would not see actual deployment.

“The reality is that you would need a laser something like 20 to 30 times more powerful than the chemical laser in the plane right now to be able to get any distance from the launch site to fire,” Gates told Congress. “So, right now the [jet] would have to orbit inside the borders of Iran in order to be able to try and use its laser to shoot down that missile in the boost phase.”

Gates also raised concerns at the large number of planes that would be required, and the ensuing cost. However, he said that directed energy weapons still had potential for missile defense.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Lai Changxing, dubbed the Bandit King, has been given a life sentence for years of smuggling and corruption that added up to billions of US dollars or Pounds sterling. The Chinese court described the values as “massive”.

Lai smuggled goods worth more than £2 billion into Xiamen, bypassing more than £1 billion in import duty. He paid 64 local officials a total of almost £4 million in bribes, giving him effective control of the city from 1995 to 1999. He fled China after becoming a wanted man in 1999 and went to Canada via Hong Kong; the following year, Premier Zhu Rongji said “If Lai was executed three times over, it would not be too much”.

As head of the Yuanhua Group, Lai smuggled in cars, chemicals, oil, cigarettes, and other goods. He distributed bundles of cash to the poor, owned and played for his local football team, built stadia, owned a bulletproof Mercedes that once belonged to President Jiang Zemin, and attempted to construct a tower that would have been the nation’s tallest building. He attained local popularity for funding construction projects including schools, hundreds of tower blocks, and the local airport.

As well as money, officials were offered alcohol and prostitutes. Many were offered time at Lai’s seven-storey brothel, the Red Mansion, and feasted at a replica of the Forbidden City.

State TV has broadcast footage depicting a banquet table with a tiger skin laid upon it, cars given to officials, a young woman alleged to have been donated as a lover, and a sackful of gold rings. The case’s prominence was such that Liu Liying, boss of the national Central Discipline Inspection Committee, took charge of bringing Lai down.

Subsequent investigations have examined more than 1,000 suspects with police at one stage turning over an entire hotel to the probe, filling rooms with suspects. National newspaper The People’s Daily has suggested it is the most serious economic crime in modern Chinese history. He was the nation’s top car importer and one of the main traders in oil and imported cigarettes.

Hundreds of officials have been convicted and it is estimated hundreds more remain. Fellow life-sentence prisoners from the case include the city’s deputy mayor and its head of customs. The nation’s former vice-minister for security, Li Jizhou, has a suspended death sentence. Other suspects have killed themselves.

Upon his escape from the nation Lai became China’s most-wanted fugitive. Twelve years of negotiations ended with a Chinese promise Lai would be spared the death penalty, and Canada extradited him last year. Numerous lower-ranking members of Lai’s empire have already been given life imprisonment or death sentences. With execution off the table, the court gave Lai the highest sentence possible: in addition to the life term, he received fifteen years for bribery and had all his possessions confiscated.

The court justified the “double sentence” on the grounds “the sums involved are unusually large, and the details are extraordinarily serious”. “The crimes involve massive sums and particularly serious circumstances,” court officials told Xinhua. Lai had denied corruption at his trial, although he accepted exploiting loopholes to avoid import duty.

“I don’t have a good family background,” Lai said previously in a press interview. “I have to do things step by step by myself. That’s how people came to respect me. I never fussed about big money.” Lai was born as one of eight siblings in the midst of famine.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Virginia – Joshua Brady, a former Sprint Nextel customer, has had his cellular phone account shut off, but not because he wasn’t paying the phone bill, or even because he was late on payments, but because a customer service representative who assisted him, began to call him outside of her job, and make death threats to him in September of 2006. She was never fired for her actions, Brady says.

Brady has agreed to be interviewed by Wikinews to tell his story. All information and claims have been logged with Brady’s attorney and federal authorities.

The representative from Sprint Nextel, who for safety reasons is only being identified as Jessica, was working at the company’s call center in Ontario, Canada where Brady’s call to customer service was directed. According to Brady, Jessica then began to call him outside of her job duties at the call center after their first contact.

Brady called the center around 6:00 p.m. (eastern time) on a Saturday and attempted to receive help on a billing question and to find a way to stop prank calls. Brady requested a “soc code”, a code placed into the phone, that would allow for the number that was pranking him to be blocked. Unfortunately, Jessica did not know what that was, but tried unsuccessfully to find it. According to Brady, the only thing she could find was “the ANI feature call centers have.”

Brady then described to Jessica the billing issue he was having. He was being charged “for text messages I was not making”, even though he had unlimited text messaging with his billing plan. Meanwhile, Jessica called for a supervisor to help locate the code. As this customer service request over the phone was taking quite a bit of time, the two of them then started to discuss what two people would normally discuss if just chatting; sports, the weather, movies and music and if Virginia was a nice place to go on vacation. The supervisor then came by Jessica’s station with no luck on finding a code.

Later that night, around 10:30 p.m., Brady received a call. He answered it and much to his surprise, it was Jessica. He answered the phone with the usual “hello” and the voice on the other end answered with “hello Josh.” Brady was “surprised” that she had not said “hello Mr. Brady.”

“I then asked who it was, and she said Jessica. She told me about her day, and hoped that I did not mind her calling.” Then according to Brady, she started to describe how much she hated working in a call center, and how the job “pays the bills”, and asked if she could “come visit me sometime”. Brady said that he “immediately started to record” the call. Brady also stated that Jessica was not aware she was being recorded, and that further conversations were recorded without her knowing.

The call lasted about 15 minutes, but Brady said she “spoke so fast and moved along through things” that he “didn’t have a chance to talk if I wanted to. It [the call] ended with me interrupting her and telling her I had to go to dinner with a friend.”

Brady immediately called customer care back and reported Jessica’s actions to a supervisor (Jason), and the Floor Manager (Also named Jessica) at the Coos Bay call center, which is where his call happened to be directed. The advice he received was to “play along” and continue to report her actions until they could locate someone “better equipped” to handle the situation.

Jessica then began to call “about every other day or so” which turned out to be almost 30 calls, according to Brady who reported each call she made to Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Nextel then told Jessica to cease and desist all contact with Brady, but that didn’t stop Jessica from contacting him. She somehow found out the screen-name of his AOL Instant Messenger account, and left messages threatening to kill him. Brady logged the messages and faxed them to Sprint, who about a week later sent Brady a letter, saying that his accounts have been terminated.

“The purpose of this letter is to inform our that our office has received a complaint regarding your recent questionable interactions with our customer care group. Recent interactions with our company have prompted us to formally contact you. Sprint Nextel terms and conditions state that “termination of services. consistent with this agreement…”, said the letter from Sprint Nextel.

Brady states that Jessica is still employed with Sprint Nextel, despite the fact that all instant messages left by Jessica were forwarded to Sprint Nextel.

As recently as July 10, 2007, as many as 1,000 accounts were terminated by Sprint Nextel because customers were complaining too much and asking too many questions about billing.

“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,” said one letter to a sprint customer as recent as June 29, 2007. The letter states that the service will be terminated just one day after the letter was written despite saying they “understand switching to a new carrier causes an inconvenience.”

Two weeks ago, Sprint addressed the media about the mass-cancellations. “These accounts have been researched very carefully,” Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton said. “We feel strongly that the decisions we made, we stand by them. These decisions weren’t made lightly.”

“If the average person is calling less than once per month and these people are calling 40 or 50 times more, that takes away from customer service,” Singleton said. “Our priority is to improve the customer experience.”

Wikinews sent e-mails to Sprint Nextel on July 20 regarding the Brady incident; to date no response has been received.

Update: On July 23, 2007, Wikinews received an email response from a Sprint representative, going to some length to explain the termination of the customers who were calling up to hundreds of times a month. No information was given on the Brady case covered in this article; “customer privacy considerations” were cited as the reason and “no comment” was Sprint’s reply.

Sunday, May 8, 2005

In order to save the lives of seabirds, the government of New Zealand has ordered the recall from sub-Antarctic waters of the entire fleet of New Zealand’s 35 squid fishing boats. Once at port, the boats are to take on independent observers to ensure that they follow codes of practice. Violators of the new rules face a fine of up to NZ$100,000.

Fisheries Minister David Benson-Pope said that “blatant bad behaviour” on the part of the boats, flouting a voluntary code of practice set up a year ago, demanded immediate action.

An Air Force aeroplane was sent on a tour of inspection last month. Benson-Pope reported that observations from the inspection revealed that, contrary to the agreed code of practice:

• 46% of the fishing fleet were not using equipment to scare sea birds away from vessels, with a further 8% only using it intermittently.
• 30% of the fishing fleet were discharging offal (which attracts seabirds) while trawling or hauling nets, with a further 25% doing so intermittently.
• Only 30% of the fishing fleet actually complied with both mitigation and offal management requirements.

Mr Benson-Pope referred to a voluntary code of practice adopted in the tuna fishing industry which he said had reduced death of seabirds by 95%.