Saturday, December 30, 2006

Around 9:00 a.m. local time (0800 UTC) today, an explosion occurred at Barajas International Airport, in Madrid, Spain.

A car bomb exploded in the Level-D Parking Garage of the recently completed Terminal 4. A Spanish official declared that the police first received a telephone call warning them about the bomb, and then a second call with the type of vehicle. The second caller claimed the attack for the Basque nationalist group ETA. Thanks to the telephone call, the police could evacuate most of the area. One man is reported missing after the explosion, and 26 people including two police officers were reported to be injured in the blast. The terminal sustained serious damage, and the situation in the airport became chaotic on one of the busiest days of the year.

Arnaldo Otegi, spokesman of ETA’s political wing Batasuna, did not condemn the attack, but said the peace talks are not interrupted by the explosion. The Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba condemned the attack, saying that it “breaks nine months without violence on the part of ETA, which breaks the permanent ceasefire.” Only in June, the Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced peace talks with ETA. But tonight, Zapatero ordered the suspension of all dialogue, because “with violence, there can be no kind of dialogue.”

Sunday, September 6, 2009

24-year-old Aman Kassaye, of no fixed abode, is to face a charge of attempted murder for his alleged role in an armed robbery that netted £40 million ($65 million) worth of jewelry from a London store.

Kassaye is the seventh man to be charged, and is also facing prosecution for conspiracy to rob the Graff store in New Bond Street, false imprisonment, and using a handgun to resist arrest. He will appear at Wimbledon magistrates court on Monday.

The other six men have already been remanded in custody until October 23, when they will appear at Kingston Crown Court. All are facing charges of conspiracy to rob, and two of them are also charged with a firearms offense.

43 diamond rings, watches, and bracelets were taken from the store. The theft occurred when two armed and suited men walked in and took an employee hostage. It has been reported they used prosthetic masks made from liquid latex but police have not confirmed this. Amateur footage also shows a shot was fired. No-one was injured.

The robbery is one of the biggest the United Kingdom has seen. After the crime a string of getaway vehicles was used, with police believing several more offenders assisted with this stage of the plan. Although The Telegraph claims no stolen property has yet been recovered, this is also unconfirmed by police.

Friday, November 9, 2018

In a report issued on Tuesday, the United Nations announced the discovery of more than 200 mass graves in territory previously under the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The sites were located in northwestern Iraq, in Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salah al-Din, and Anbar provinces. They were found by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) and contained from as few as eight, up to many thousands of sets of human remains.

According to the report, “These graves contain the remains of those mercilessly killed for not conforming to ISIL’s twisted ideology and rule, including ethnic and religious minorities […] Their families have the right to know what happened to their loved ones. Truth, justice and reparations are critical to ensuring a full reckoning for the atrocities committed by ISIL.”

In remarks to CNN, UNAMI director Suki Nagra said, “For us, the biggest issue is that the truth comes out of what actually happened — for the victims — and that the evidence from the results of the exhumations from these mass graves is actually used for criminal prosecutions”.

The report identified 202 grave sites, containing an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people, including those of children, the elderly, and the disabled. As many as 4,000 people may be buried in a single grave, one of the largest, a sinkhole south of Mosul.

The report proposes creation of a national registry for the recovered remains and gives recommendations on the use of evidence from the graves to investigate and prosecute those responsible.

The report also requested cooperation from the international community in exhuming and identifying victims. The report said the Mass Graves Directorate had, to that date, exhumed 1,258 victims.

From 2014 to 2017, ISIL controlled large portions of Iraq, often killing its opposition and harassing the public on accusations such as as political affiliation and sexual orientation in what the report describes as “a campaign of widespread violence and systematic violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.” Most of the organization in Iraq was defeated by a United States-led coalition allied with the Iraqi government, but pockets of activity remain.

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Alaskan U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, who turned 85 yesterday, narrowly lost his re-election bid to Mark Begich, the Democratic Mayor of Anchorage, Alaska.

Meanwhile, as Alaska’s counting of the November 4 election is almost complete, Democratic challenger for the US House of Representatives, Ethan Berkowitz, conceded to incumbent Don Young, the Republican Party nominee.

With this result, the Democrats are two seats away (assuming that independents Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman continue to caucus with them) from a filibuster-proof supermajority in the United States Senate, with two races (Minnesota and Georgia) as yet uncalled. That would allow the Democrats to invoke cloture, limiting filibusters to a further 30 hours, an ability last attained in the 95th Congress of 1977-79.

Stevens is entitled to request a recount at his campaign’s expense, and has not yet made a statement. After the completion of counting yesterday, Begich had defeated Stevens by 3,724 votes, a margin of over one percent. 2,500 special absentee and postal ballots remain to be counted on November 25.

Begich released a statement on his win saying, “I am humbled and honored to serve Alaska in the United States Senate. It’s been an incredible journey getting to this point, and I appreciate the support and commitment of the thousands of Alaskans who have brought us to this day.”

Young won his race by 16,280 votes, a margin of five percent.

Stevens recently became a convicted felon on seven counts for lying on Senate disclosure forms about accepting $250,000 in gifts and home renovations from VECO, an oil services company. He has asked President George W. Bush not to grant him a presidential pardon.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

The new “coffee table book” The Top 100 Canadian Albums has been released. Bob Mersereau, a reporter for CBC New Brunswick, wrote the book filled with albums from year’s including 1967, the 1980s, and modern day.

The book is selling for CAD$35 and is 200 pages. It also contains in-depth interviews, photographs, facts, and descriptions on all the albums that were included in the list.

Harvest by legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young claimed number one. While Blue by Joni Mitchell came in second.

“There really isn’t a good reference for Canadian albums. You look at the Rolling Stone book, and there’s Neil, Joni, Leonard (Cohen), the Band and Alanis, and that’s it. And there’s so many more that only we get, as Canadians. Outside of Canada, Gordon Lightfoot gets trashed as this MOR singer, and they don’t get why we’d want to hear someone sing about pussy willows, cattails, soft winds and roses,” Mersereau commented.

Mersereau will write about his book tour on his publisher Goose Lane Editions‘ blog. He says he would be “shocked if there wasn’t complaints and arguments and debates.”

“It’s all subjective, but that’s part of the fun. Everybody has a complaint about the list, and there’s this ongoing debate, but the fact is they’re talking about it and thinking about it and going, ‘Gee, I wish . . .'”

About 600 people from all over Canada who are interested in music, are music journalists, work in the music business, or are musicians themselves and more voted for the one’s they thought were the best.

“The important part is to talk about Canadian music and enjoy it.”

Monday, October 14, 2013

Half-a-million people have fled their homes in and around the Indian state of Orissa after Cyclone Phailin made landfall.

Wikinews interviewed specialists in meteorology about the devastation the cyclone has caused.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Owsley Stanley, mass-producer of LSD, the drug underlying much of the culture of the 1960s California hippie era, died Sunday in a car accident in Australia at the age of 76, his family announced on Tuesday.

According to The New York Times, “Mr. Stanley lent the ’60s a great deal of its color — like White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer, the varieties of his LSD that were among the most popular.”

Stanley, a talented, self-taught chemist who was known for the purity of his LSD, supplied the drug to such music groups as the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix, and provided the acid for Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, whose antics were recorded by Tom Wolfe in the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The Rolling Stones once called his acid “the best LSD in the world … the genuine Owsley.”

He was also an early sound engineer and designed the high-fidelity sound system for the live rock concerts of the Grateful Dead, known as the “wall of sound”. It was essentially a massive public address system made up of 600 speakers that enabled musicians to mix their sound from the stage and reduce distortion. His recordings of Grateful Dead live performances, some having been commercially released, are valued as a documentary of their early music.

Sam Cutler, formerly the tour manager of the Rolling Stones, said of Stanley: “He was a very sophisticated man, an amalgam of scientist and engineer, chemist and artist.”

Stanley was born in Kentucky and studied engineering briefly at the University of Virginia before dropping out and joining the Air Force. In 1958, he moved to California and worked at a wide variety of jobs, before enrolling at the UC at Berkeley in 1963, at a time when drug use was pervasive. He got his first taste of LSD in April 1964 which transformed him. “I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside, and the cars were kissing the parking meters,” he said in an interview with the Rolling Stone Magazine in 2007.

Deciding to provide his own LSD to ensure its quality, Stanley created his own lab to produce it. According to The Washington Post, “Working at first from a makeshift bathroom laboratory in Berkeley, Mr. Stanley produced at least 1 million doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967.” His LSD was widely distributed. The lab was raided and he spent two years in prison.

Stanley moved to Australia in the 1980s when he become convinced the Northern Hemisphere would be destroyed in the coming of a new ice age. He lived in the Australian bush near Cairns, Queensland.