Penny Lucas is running for the Progressive Conservative in the Ontario provincial election, in the Kenora-Rainy River riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed regarding her values, her experience, and her campaign.
Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.
Tuesday, April 5, 2005Terry Vo, the 10-year old Australian boy who had two hands and a foot reattached by surgeons after losing them in an accident, has had to have the foot re-amputated. He will be given a prosthetic foot in its place.
The operation to re-attach three limbs was thought to have been a first – but was ultimately unsuccessful, with the foot having died inside, and receiving insufficient blood supply following the surgery to reattach it.
“That would lead to the small muscles in the foot actually constricting, the toes bending over and a deformed …. foot that is sort of clawed over and doesn’t have good sensation,” said plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love today, on Australia’s ABC Radio.
“Even if you can get all of that to survive, he [would be] worse off than having had an amputation.”
“What is very disappointing is that for the first two days after [the operation] the foot looked absolutely magnificent,” he said.
Terry’s hands were healing well, said the surgeon. The prosthetic foot would allow him to walk normally, since his knee was intact.
Television producer and owner of the anti-Scientology website www.xenutv.com (XenuTV), Mark Bunker, also known as Wise Beard Man, chatted online with Wikinews for nearly three hours. More than 120 people followed the interview live (many from Project Chanology), which makes this exclusive Wikinews interview our most attended IRC interview to date.
Bunker started XenuTV in 1999 and began to make videos that he provided for the Lisa McPherson Trust. Bunker has been a critic of the Church of Scientology since 1997.
In 2006, he won a Regional Emmy Award after he and KUSI-TV news reporter Lena Lewis produced a documentary news video on the issues with the United States – Mexico border with San Diego, California.
Wikinews reporter Iain Macdonald has performed an interview with Dr Isabella Margara, a London-based member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). In the interview Margara sets out the communist response to current events in Greece as well as discussing the viability of a communist economy for the nation. She also hit back at Petros Tzomakas, a member of another Greek far-left party which criticised KKE in a previous interview.
The interview comes amid tensions in cash-strapped Greece, where the government is introducing controversial austerity measures to try to ease the nation’s debt-problem. An international rescue package has been prepared by European Union member states and the International Monetary Fund – should Greece require a bailout; protests have been held against government attempts to manage the economic situation.
Top-seeded Glenbard East High School was expected to win the Class 4A Neuqua Valley High School Sectional championship on Friday night. Yet with a lot of determination and a strong defense, the Benet Academy varsity boys basketball team defeated the Rams 68–54.
The game marks Benet’s sixteenth straight victory this season, giving the Redwings a 26–3 overall record. It is also their first sectional championship since the 1982–1983 season, which was the last time Benet advanced to the Class AA state tournament; there they lost to Thornton Township High School in the quarterfinals.
The Redwings’ aggressive man-to-man defense certainly kept the Rams out of their comfort zone amidst the crowds in the sold-out Neuqua gym. As Benet forward Mike Runger said, “We made them play to their weaknesses instead of letting them get comfortable doing what they want to do.”
Benet scored 71 percent of its shots in the first half, while Glenbard East scored only 27. While the Rams led twice in the first few minutes (3–0 and 7–5), the Redwings led 12–7 after the first quarter. A three-point shot made by Dave Sobolewski two seconds before the buzzer gave Benet a 27–16 lead at the end of the first half.
Glenbard East desperately attempted a comeback in the second half, but Benet maintained a lead ranging from 10 to 18 points. Rams guard made four three-pointers in the fourth quarter, but to no avail. As Benet coach Gene Heidkamp said, “…we knew they were going to come at us and give us a ton of pressure. We were a long, long way from being comfortable at halftime.”
On Tuesday, the Euro fell to a new record low in relation to the Swiss Franc, and to multi-month lows against the U.S. Dollar and Japanese yen; all considered by investors to be safe currencies during times of economic turmoil.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that recent comments from the newly installed head of the International Monetary Fund, France’s Christine Lagarde, resulted in a sell-off of the Euro. At a roundtable discussion in Washington, Lagarde noted that the IMF had not yet reached discussion of terms and conditions of a second Greek bailout plan. In fact, a representative from the IMF is currently meeting with Eurozone policymakers to draft such a new proposal. The yield differential between Italian bonds and German bonds has spread to more than 300 basis points, something not seen in over a decade and evidence of investors’ concern.
Adding to the Euro’s woes is the upcoming release of the bank stress tests on Friday. The European Bankers Association said that they expect the data release to shed new light on the Eurozone’s banking situation. Representatives of several of the Eurozone’s governments, including Germany, have requested that the association consider releasing fewer specific details for fear that investor panic will ensue. The inadequacy of the capitalization rates has been an issue with the European Central Bank, whose president recently called upon Eurozone banks to make every effort to put their balance sheets in order.
For the time being at least, an unsubstantiated rumor reported by the Wall Street Journal states that the Eurozone’s central banks’ purchase of periphery debt has helped to quell the downward momentum of the Euro.
Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists.
Johnston worked extensively with his best friend Frank Thomas, a fellow “old man” who died in 2004. The pair met at Stanford University in the 1930s and worked together until Thomas’ death. They retired from animation in 1978, but remained popular speakers and authors about Disney and animation.
“Ollie was part of an amazing generation of artists, one of the real pioneers of our art, one of the major participants in the blossoming of animation into the art form we know today,” said Roy E. Disney.
Johnston devoted much of his retirement to writing and lecturing, but perhaps even more to model trains, a field in which he became considered one of the world’s foremost experts.
Ollie Johnston’s last film was The Fox and the Hound (1981) on which he worked as a supervisor.
At 9:00 p.m. PDT Monday (0400 UTC Tuesday), Microsoft rolled out the first stable Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) release, available in 39 languages, for Windows Vista and Windows 7. Internet Explorer is the most used web browser, responsible for 56% of webpage hits. The new version adds support for new technologies with relation to the HTML5 specification and several feature changes. The browser was released as a beta with a campaign promoting the benefits of HTML5.
It includes support for SVG and the HTML5 canvas, audio, and video tags. It has a failing Acid3 score of 95/100, below Mozilla Firefox 4.0’s 97/100, rating and the 100/100 in Google Chrome 10. The program is the first of its series not to run on Microsoft Windows XP. It includes a redesigned layout of the address bar and the ability to pin sites to the taskbar on Windows 7, along with several minor improvements.
The browser received mixed reviews. “IE9 as a Consumer Browser — Not Worth It,” Jason Mick, DailyTech, concluded. A study by Which? on Tuesday showed that IE9’s Tracking Protection Lists, an optional anti-tracking feature, may mislead users. “We’re disappointed with the way these lists work, and feel consumers who install multiple lists could be left with a false sense of security.” Dr. Rob Reid, Which? Policy senior advisor, said.
In a more positive review, a PC Magazine reviewer said that the positives of the new browser outweighed the negatives, and it is “a major improvement over its predecessor.”
The announcement comes after the company launched a campaign to get Internet Explorer 6 usage down to 1%. Microsoft delayed the Japanese release “to reduce load on network bandwidth at such a critical time” with reference to the earthquake and tsunami in Japan this past Friday.
Correction — March 19, 2008 The next protest is scheduled for April 12, 2008. The article below states April 18 which is incorrect.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
The Internet group Anonymous today held further protests critical of the Church of Scientology.
The global protests started in Australia where several hundred protesters gathered at different locations for peaceful protests.
In a global speech, the Internet protest movement said Scientology “betrayed the trust of its members, [had] taken their money, their rights, and at times their very lives.” The protesters welcomed the public interest their protests have led to, and claimed they witnessed “an unprecedented flood of Scientologists [joining] us across the world to testify about these abuses.” The group said it would continue with monthly actions.
In a press statement from its European headquarters, Scientology accused the anonymous protesters of “hate speech and hate crimes”, alleging that security measures were necessary because of death threats and bomb threats. This also makes the Church want to “identify members” of the group it brands as “cyber-terrorists”.
Wikinews had correspondents in a number of protest locations to report on the events.
Anonymous states that the next protest is scheduled to take place on April 18, which happens to be the birthday of Suri, the daughter of Tom and Katie Cruise.
This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation, one of its projects, or people related to it. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Yesterday, a chilly Amsterdam hosted the Wikimedia Conference Netherlands 2007. Held at the Aristo centre in a suburb of the city and run by Wikimedia Netherlands, the conference was a short train ride from Amsterdam Centraal railway station. The topic, Wikis and Education (Wiki’s en Educatie in Dutch). This was an opportunity for Wikimedians and people in education to come together and see how collaboration could help both.
Wikinews freelance reporter Brian McNeil caught a train from Brussels in Belgium and attended, making an impression on the Wikimedia Foundation chair, Florence Devouard, by spilling her coffee over the first two speakers approximately three minutes before they were supposed to officially open the conference.