Archive for December, 2022

15
Dec

UK company “seriously considering” GPS tracking devices in school uniforms

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

The leading supplier of school uniforms in the United Kingdom, Lancashire-based manufacturer Trutex, has announced it is “seriously considering” including GPS tracking devices in future ranges of its uniform products after conducting an online survey of both parents and children.

“As a direct result of the survey, we are now seriously considering incorporating a [tracking] device into future ranges” said Trutex marketing director Clare Rix.

The survey questioned 809 parents and 444 children aged nine to 16. It showed that 44% of parents were worried about the safety of pre-teen children, and 59% wanted tracking devices installed in school apparel. 39% of children aged nine to 12 were prepared to wear clothing with tracking devices in them, while teenagers were notably less enthusiastic and more wary of what Trutex has admitted they see as a “big brother” concept.

However, Trutex has claimed the tracking devices would bring about worthwhile benefits, including being a valuable resource for parents who wanted to keep a close eye on where their children were at all times.

“As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels” says Rix.

Each year, Trutex supplies 1 million blouses, 1.1 million shirts, 250,000 pairs of trousers, 20,000 blazers, 60,000 skirts and 110,000 pieces of knitwear to the UK.

It is not the first company to manufacture school uniforms with a central focus on child safety; last week Essex firm BladeRunner revealed it was selling stab-proof school blazers to parents concerned about violence against their children. The blazers were outfitted with Kevlar, a synthetic fibre used in body armour. It has already received orders internationally, including Australia.

If the Trutex tracking devices go ahead, it is unclear where in the uniform they will be located.

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15
Dec

Butter sculpture returns to Canadian National Exhibition

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Wednesday, August 24, 2005

After not having the novel attraction of butter sculptures since the mid-1990s, the Canadian National Exhibition has revived the tradition in a limited fashion.

In the past, farming exhibits have displayed elaborate, lifesize sculptures of celebrities, animals, and objects at “the Ex”. Many best recall the sculpture of The Beatles, created in the 1970s.

For their current exhibit however, the sculptures are relatively small. None of the sculptures created as of Sunday, August 21 were over two feet tall, and cramped sculpting facilities did not appear to encourage such larger endeavours. Sculptures included a caricatured cowboy with large pants, a deer, and a woman’s face, neck and shoulders.

The sign promoting the attraction bills the event as Butter Sculpture “Artists” suggesting the organizers question the artistic merit of unusual mediums. Butter sculpture is a popular attraction at many fairs across North America.

The exhibit continues until the end of the CNE on Labour Day, in the Automotive Building’s “Farm, Food and Fun” displays. According to the CNE’s official website, the sculptures are being created by students from the Ontario College of Art.

This article features first-hand journalism by Wikinews members. See the collaboration page for more details.
This article features first-hand journalism by Wikinews members. See the collaboration page for more details.
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14
Dec

Wikimania jury chooses Alexandria for 2008 location

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, one of its projects, or people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

File:BACC.jpg

According to an official mailing list post from Wikimedia Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass, Wikimania 2008 will be held in Alexandria, Egypt.

The location was chosen because it is “particularly strong in the areas of reflecting the Wikimedia Foundation’s roots in geo-diversity and multi-lingualism”. According to the final tally, Alexandria placed first in the Funding, Location, Organizing Team, Rotation, Cost, and Venue. Alexandria had 3026 points total.

In second place with 2419 points was Atlanta, Georgia, United States. They placed first in Accommodation, Internet Access, Local Laws, Press, and Social Areas.

Finally, Cape Town, South Africa had 2003 points, placing first in Visas only.

The motto selected for Alexandria’s bid is “Let The Knowledge Be Free Everywhere”, Atlanta’s was “A new day for the New South”, and Cape Town’s was “Wikimania 2008. The International Wikimania Conference.”

According to the post, the Jury used 12 different categories including Accommodation, Funding, Internet Access, Press, Organizing Team, and Visas. Each member of the jury had 60 points to assign to the three proposed venues.

The decision has provoked some debate on the selection process; complaints have been raised about honour killings and gay rights within Egypt, with some asserting that the human rights record of the country should have factored more into the decision process. In reaction to this criticism Jimmy Wales has decided his talk at the conference will be entitled “Free knowledge and human rights“.

Karlsruhe, London, and Toronto submitted official bids, but later withdrew at various points throughout the process.

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13
Dec

U.S. soldiers engaged in gore-for-porn swap

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Saturday, September 24, 2005

An amateur pornographic website, NowThatsFuckedup.com, is giving free access to its content to American soldiers currently who post pictures of corpses from Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers can also send in pictures of themselves, their buddies, or their living quarters. The post on the website states “the kinda pictures you would be sending home to your family and friends”. Chris Wilson of Florida, the website administrator, says he started offering free memberships to soldiers in exchange for photographs from overseas after finding that many soldiers wanted to join the site, but could not due to issues with recognizing foreign addresses associated with credit cards held by overseas enlisted men.

“They wanted to join the site, the amateur wife and girlfriend site,” Wilson said. “But they couldn’t, because the addresses associated with their credit cards were Quackistan or something, they were in such a high-risk country, that the credit card companies wouldn’t approve the purchase.”

The soldiers caption the images themselves, such as one image of a woman’s whose leg had been amputated, with the caption “Nice puss -– bad foot.” in reference to her vagina also visible in the photo.

Response to the trading has been met with a certain level of ambivalence from military higher-ups; “There are policies in place that, on the one hand, safeguard sensitive and classified information, and on the other hand protects the First Amendment rights of servicemembers,” said Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway. “In plain English, if you’re on the job working for the Department of Defense, you shouldn’t be freelancing. You should be doing your duty.” However, Army Chief of Staff Peter Shoomaker warned that soldiers compromise “operational security” when they post photographs from Iraq on the internet in a memorandum issued in August.

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13
Dec

Mass grave with 51 bodies from the Nazi era found in Germany

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Friday, October 6, 2006

The decomposed bodies of 22 children ranging from the ages of zero to seven and 29 adults have been found in a mass grave, believed to date back to the 1940s, in a Catholic church cemetery in Menden-Barge, a small village in Germany.

The buried are believed to be victims of Adolf Hitler’s program in which numerous disabled people were murdered.

“We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime,” state prosecutor Ulrich Maass stated.

At least three of the children’s skeletons’ show signs of being physically handicapped, further supporting the evidence that this was part of the euthanasia program.

While most of the bodies look like they were carelessly tossed in the ground, a few adults were placed in coffins.

Medical instruments were also found in the grave, supporting the possibility that the children were murdered by injections and drug overdoses.

Mr. Maass also noted that authorities would investigate the suspected murders and search for any witnesses. Already, a former church assistant said he saw a horse-drawn cart bring corpses to the mass grave.

Apparently, the town remained silent about the existence of a mass grave until about three years ago when investigations led by the local authorities gave evidence that a mass grave may exist in the cemetery.

Mr. Maass also admitted that, after 61 years from the end of World War II, bringing charges against someone would be a difficulty.

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12
Dec

Paris hotel fire kills 22

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Saturday, April 16, 2005

A Paris fire in a hotel killed 22 people, 10 of whom were children, while injuring 53 — 11 seriously. The hotel was an overcrowded, budget accommodation type of housing. Most of the inhabitants were African, many housed by social services, according to an Associated Press report.

The 32 room, six-story Paris Opera hotel, was made to house 61 guests, but 90 were staying at the time of the fire, with 84 of them placed by city or state social services.

The fire is thought to have started in the breakfast room at 2:20 am Friday, local time.

Along with the Africans, who were mostly refugees, others wounded included French, Senegalese, Portuguese, Americans, Ukrainians, and Tunisians, according to a report from Turkish Zaman.com. The hotel is situated near to La Galerie Lafayette, Printemps shopping center, and Paris Opera.

It took nearly 250 fire-fighters to control the fire, and the number of casualties was high because of the single exit.

“It’s hard in that kind of situation to tell people to calm down. They jumped. People on the first floor threw their children out the windows,” Alfred Millot, head of the fire service at the nearby upmarket Galeries Lafayette department store, told Agence France-Presse.

“With our own equipment, we started fighting the fire from the ground floor. I came running and people were already jumping through the windows,” said Millot.

His store warehouse was used as a temporary morgue. Families were counselled and assisted in re-uniting by the Red Cross.

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Friday, August 15, 2008

During a press conference in Palo Alto, California, hunters of the mythical creature Bigfoot claimed to have found a corpse of the creature. Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say that they were hunting for the creature in the forests of Northeastern Georgia in the United States when they came across the corpse of one of the alleged animals.

After finding the body, Whitton and Dyer allegedly took it home, where it is currently being stored in a freezer. Despite the possibility of the historic find, they will not say where they found the body.

“We have no intentions of revealing the location. We want to protect this [creature],” stated Whitton during the press conference. He also mentioned that an autopsy is going to be conducted on the body.

The two men had earlier claimed that DNA evidence, photos and video would be presented during the conference, but only one photo was shown. Whitton states that all evidence will be provided once the autopsy, scheduled for next week, is completed.

The single photo shown at the conference portrays a blurred black figure in the distance. Whitton claims the creature was walking “parallel” to them as they hauled out the corpse. Another photo on Whitton’s website www.searchingforbigfoot.com shows what is allegedly the corpse, decapitated and stuffed into a freezer.

Tom Biscardi, founder of the Great American Bigfoot Research Organization, joined Whitton and Dyer at the press conference. Biscardi has previously been caught in a hoax. In 2005, his organization claimed to have caught a live male Bigfoot.

Science website LiveScience, run by Imaginova, openly speculates that this is a hoax because of the involvement of Biscardi. It theorizes that this may be a marketing scheme to promote an upcoming film by Biscardi, entitled Bigfoot Lives.

At least one other person states that the group’s pronouncement is a hoax. Jerry Parrino, owner of TheHorrorDome.com, a website that sells Halloween costumes, was quoted as saying to Fox News that the photo appeared to resemble a costume that is being sold on his site.

“It definitely looks like our costume. This body has little to do with Bigfoot and everything to do with a Sasquatch costume that someone developed,” stated Parrino.

Despite the claim, the Fish and Wildlife Reserve refuses to investigate the alleged discovery because it does not appear on an endangered species list in either the state of Georgia or the U.S..

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8
Dec

Cleveland, Ohio clinic performs US’s first face transplant

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Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.

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6
Dec

CMHC: housing market in Canada ‘highly vulnerable’

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Sunday, October 29, 2017

In a quarterly news release on Thursday, state-owned Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said Canada’s housing market is highly vulnerable, especially in Toronto and Hamilton in Ontario, Vancouver and Victoria in British Columbia, and Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. It also identified a growing concern of overbuilding in Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta.

The release said Calgary and Edmonton, the largest and second largest cities in Alberta, have a large inventory of unsold homes. The CMHC expressed concern this may drive down prices of homes in the area.

Vancouver, which is now reportedly less affordable than Manhattan in the US; Toronto; Victoria; and Hamilton were all assessed by the CMHC’s quarterly report as highly overvaluated.

The housing markets of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Ottawa in Ontario, Montreal and Quebec in Quebec, Moncton in New Brunswick, Halifax in Nova Scotia, and St. John’s in Newfoundland, were all assessed as low or moderate risk.

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5
Dec

Wikinews Shorts: January 13, 2009

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A compilation of brief news reports for Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

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