Friday, October 5, 2007

The widow and five children of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet have been arrested in Chile on embezzlement charges. They are accused of illegally transferring USD27 million to foreign bank accounts during Pinochet’s rule from 1973 to 1990. Seventeen of Pinochet’s former associates, including his former personal secretary and three retired army generals, were also arrested.

Pinochet had been charged with tax evasion, fraud, and embezzlement following a 2004 U.S. Senate investigation. In December 2006, he died without having been brought to trial. However, Chilean Judge Carlos Cerda said there were “solid indications” that Pinochet’s family and associates had also “participated in the misuse of fiscal funds”.

Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch called the decision “an extremely important development for Chile’s democracy and the rule of law. Going after the relatives of the powerful and the fortunes they amassed used to be considered off limits,” he said.

Pinochet family lawyer Pablo Rodriguez said he was “astonished by this illegal and abusive decision by the judge”, and that he was “sure that it will be reversed by the Court of Appeals.”

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

North America’s largest outdoor dog festival came back to Toronto last weekend for its fifth year. It ran from the 9th of June to the 10th of June at Toronto’s historical St. Lawrence Market. A Wikinews reporter was there on Sunday to report on some of the events that happened on the last day.

The “Woofstock” dog festival attracted as many as 140,000 people with their dogs. The festival had tons of accessories, sold under tents, to buy for dogs; food, toys, designer clothes, and more. About 400 vendors and exhibitors were there to promote their products, which also gave private dog companies or groups a chance to show their new products. The local SPCA and some animal rescues were under tents answering questions from visitors. While walking, all visitors could see the CN Tower and other very tall buildings.

One of the local TV stations, Citytv, was there. They hosted a live event at the show which was broadcast on TV. People came up on the stage and asked questions regarding their dogs and the host and co-host answered them.

A man, who called himself the “Chalk Master”, drew two pictures on pavement with chalk. He did it for free but donations were welcome. One was a picture of a girl’s head beside a dog’s head, and another with a wolf.

“Hello Humans. I’ve been invited here to provide your eyeball(s), with some pretty colours. I don’t get paid as I work this weekend strictly for tips… so, if you like what you see please make a DONATION. If you don’t like it simply reach into the pocket of the person next to you and give me their money. CHALK MASTER.”

A contest called “Canada’s top dog” had its own tent with a professional photographer taking pictures of dogs behind a white screen; the winning photo is to be published on the cover of “Puppy and dog basics” magazine.

Large “Gourmet” dog bones were also served from a cart and table.

Next year’s festival is expected to be bigger and better with even more attractions.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

A man has been given a prison sentence of nine years for the manslaughter of his wife in Hampshire, England. 40-year-old Sally Sinclair was head of business analysis for mobile phone provider Vodafone and had been killed in August 2008 in her home in the village of Amport, after admitting to her husband that she had had an affair. When her body was found in the kitchen of the house, it was discovered that she had suffered a partially severed head and at least 40 stab wounds. Winchester Crown Court had heard during the trial that the attack was partly witnessed by children.

Alisdair Sinclair, who is 48 years old and caused the attack, was cleared of charges of murder, but was sentenced to nine years in prison for charges of manslaughter. Judge Guy Boney QC has been quoted as saying: “Your wife did everything she could to support and help you and indulge your eccentricities, including spending £100,000 (US$164,470) on three cars of the same model you hardly ever used.

“She wanted to make the marriage work and save it from collapse. These efforts cost her her life. Sally Sinclair appears to have coped with, and tolerated, your behaviour over a long period. When she could not take any more of your behaviour you exploded in a frenzy of brutality in reaction to certain information you forced out of her.”

Speaking about the case, Detective Sergeant Sarah Simpson from Hampshire Constabulary said outside of the courtroom: “A successful career woman had her life tragically and prematurely cut short and her family now have to lead their lives without her. Nothing can ever compensate for that.”

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.

Tuesday, May 2, 2006

An Armavia Airbus 320 passenger plane flying from Armenia‘s capital, Yerevan, to the city of Sochi in southern Russia has crashed into the Black Sea. The jet was found 6 km from the coast and carried a total of 113 people. Among the passengers were 8 crew and 6 children. Controllers lost contact with the plane at 0215 local time (Tuesday 2215 UTC).

Rescuers have found the corpses of a woman and a girl and another 12 body parts at the site of Wednesday’s crash of Armenia’s Airbus A-320 plane off Russia’s Black Sea coast, a spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office told Interfax. Other reports say that at least 25 bodies have been found.

There were 77 Armenian citizens, 26 Russian citizens, 1 Ukrainian and 1 Georgian citizen on board of the Armenian air liner, Armenian Civil Aviation Department head Artyom Movsisian told on a news conference.

“Most of the Russian citizens are of Armenian origin,” Movsisian said.

“Rescue efforts are being hampered by deteriorating weather conditions, heavy rain and rough seas,” a spokesman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said.

“The fragments were found six km (3.7 miles) from the shore near the airport of Adler. The search operation continues,” said Beltsov. The location of the crash site has been ascertained by a numerous fragments and life vests, and a large oil slick.

“The only thing [we] know is that when the crew asked for permission to land, the air controller in Sochi responded that bad weather meant this was not yet possible,” Gayane Davtyan, head of Armenia’s civilian aviation authority said. “Contact with the crew was lost at 600 meters, when the plane went to circle for a second time.”

The cause of the tragedy remains unclear, but the investigators are pursuing two main versions: bad weather conditions and poor maintenance.

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office believes terrorism can be ruled out as a factor in the A-320 plane crash near the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday morning.

“We don’t have any information that could indicate a possible terrorist attack on board the plane,” Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel told Interfax on Wednesday.

An official from the regional department of the Emergency Situations Ministry in southern Russia said “apparently there were malfunctions on board, as the pilots were making another attempt to land at the Adler airport.”

“The plane was in an ideal technical condition, the crew was well qualified,” said the airline’s deputy commercial director, Andrei Aghajanov. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

In the area where the plane crashed, more rain is expected in the next hours and the water temperature is currently between 8 to 10 degrees celsius.

The Russian and Armenian presidents have announced on Wednesday that Friday, May 5th, would be a day of mourning in remembrance of the 113 people that died in the crash.

The worst crash involving an two-engine A-320, which was first built in 1984 and remains the most popular Airbus on the market, occurred in August 2000, when a Gulf Air plane crashed off Bahrain on a flight from Cairo, killing all 143 people on board. The Airbus A320 is a short-to-medium range commercial passenger aircraft and a total of 328 people have been killed in earlier A320 accidents.

About 20 boats and a Be-200 amphibious aircraft are involved in the recovery operation, emergency services said, adding that two more Be-200s would fly to the scene if necessary. A group of rescuers from the Russian emergency ministry is expected to fly to the crash site in the next few hours.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Few artists ever penetrate the subconscious level of American culture the way RuPaul Andre Charles did with the 1993 album Supermodel of the World. It was groundbreaking not only because in the midst of the Grunge phenomenon did Charles have a dance hit on MTV, but because he did it as RuPaul, formerly known as Starbooty, a supermodel drag queen with a message: love everyone. A duet with Elton John, an endorsement deal with MAC cosmetics, an eponymous talk show on VH-1 and roles in film propelled RuPaul into the new millennium.

In July, RuPaul’s movie Starrbooty began playing at film festivals and it is set to be released on DVD October 31st. Wikinews reporter David Shankbone recently spoke with RuPaul by telephone in Los Angeles, where she is to appear on stage for DIVAS Simply Singing!, a benefit for HIV-AIDS.

DS: How are you doing?

RP: Everything is great. I just settled into my new hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. I have never stayed downtown, so I wanted to try it out. L.A. is one of those traditional big cities where nobody goes downtown, but they are trying to change that.

DS: How do you like Los Angeles?

RP: I love L.A. I’m from San Diego, and I lived here for six years. It took me four years to fall in love with it and then those last two years I had fallen head over heels in love with it. Where are you from?

DS: Me? I’m from all over. I have lived in 17 cities, six states and three countries.

RP: Where were you when you were 15?

DS: Georgia, in a small town at the bottom of Fulton County called Palmetto.

RP: When I was in Georgia I went to South Fulton Technical School. The last high school I ever went to was…actually, I don’t remember the name of it.

DS: Do you miss Atlanta?

RP: I miss the Atlanta that I lived in. That Atlanta is long gone. It’s like a childhood friend who underwent head to toe plastic surgery and who I don’t recognize anymore. It’s not that I don’t like it; I do like it. It’s just not the Atlanta that I grew up with. It looks different because it went through that boomtown phase and so it has been transient. What made Georgia Georgia to me is gone. The last time I stayed in a hotel there my room was overlooking a construction site, and I realized the building that was torn down was a building that I had seen get built. And it had been torn down to build a new building. It was something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime.

DS: What did that signify to you?

RP: What it showed me is that the mentality in Atlanta is that much of their history means nothing. For so many years they did a good job preserving. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a preservationist. It’s just an interesting observation.

DS: In 2004 when you released your third album, Red Hot, it received a good deal of play in the clubs and on dance radio, but very little press coverage. On your blog you discussed how you felt betrayed by the entertainment industry and, in particular, the gay press. What happened?

RP: Well, betrayed might be the wrong word. ‘Betrayed’ alludes to an idea that there was some kind of a promise made to me, and there never was. More so, I was disappointed. I don’t feel like it was a betrayal. Nobody promises anything in show business and you understand that from day one.

But, I don’t know what happened. It seemed I couldn’t get press on my album unless I was willing to play into the role that the mainstream press has assigned to gay people, which is as servants of straight ideals.

DS: Do you mean as court jesters?

RP: Not court jesters, because that also plays into that mentality. We as humans find it easy to categorize people so that we know how to feel comfortable with them; so that we don’t feel threatened. If someone falls outside of that categorization, we feel threatened and we search our psyche to put them into a category that we feel comfortable with. The mainstream media and the gay press find it hard to accept me as…just…

DS: Everything you are?

RP: Everything that I am.

DS: It seems like years ago, and my recollection might be fuzzy, but it seems like I read a mainstream media piece that talked about how you wanted to break out of the RuPaul ‘character’ and be seen as more than just RuPaul.

RP: Well, RuPaul is my real name and that’s who I am and who I have always been. There’s the product RuPaul that I have sold in business. Does the product feel like it’s been put into a box? Could you be more clear? It’s a hard question to answer.

DS: That you wanted to be seen as more than just RuPaul the drag queen, but also for the man and versatile artist that you are.

RP: That’s not on target. What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn’t change what I decide to do. I don’t choose projects so people don’t see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system. A friend of mine recently did the Oprah show about transgendered youth. It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American baseball league and the National baseball league, when they are both so similar. We’ll learn the difference to that. One of my hobbies is to research and go underneath ideas to discover why certain ones stay in place while others do not. Like Adam and Eve, which is a flimsy fairytale story, yet it is something that people believe; what, exactly, keeps it in place?

DS: What keeps people from knowing the difference between what is real and important, and what is not?

RP: Our belief systems. If you are a Christian then your belief system doesn’t allow for transgender or any of those things, and you then are going to have a vested interest in not understanding that. Why? Because if one peg in your belief system doesn’t work or doesn’t fit, the whole thing will crumble. So some people won’t understand the difference between a transvestite and transsexual. They will not understand that no matter how hard you force them to because it will mean deconstructing their whole belief system. If they understand Adam and Eve is a parable or fairytale, they then have to rethink their entire belief system.

As to me being seen as whatever, I was more likely commenting on the phenomenon of our culture. I am creative, and I am all of those things you mention, and doing one thing out there and people seeing it, it doesn’t matter if people know all that about me or not.

DS: Recently I interviewed Natasha Khan of the band Bat for Lashes, and she is considered by many to be one of the real up-and-coming artists in music today. Her band was up for the Mercury Prize in England. When I asked her where she drew inspiration from, she mentioned what really got her recently was the 1960’s and 70’s psychedelic drag queen performance art, such as seen in Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What do you think when you hear an artist in her twenties looking to that era of drag performance art for inspiration?

RP: The first thing I think of when I hear that is that young kids are always looking for the ‘rock and roll’ answer to give. It’s very clever to give that answer. She’s asked that a lot: “Where do you get your inspiration?” And what she gave you is the best sound bite she could; it’s a really a good sound bite. I don’t know about Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, but I know about The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What I think about when I hear that is there are all these art school kids and when they get an understanding of how the press works, and how your sound bite will affect the interview, they go for the best.

DS: You think her answer was contrived?

RP: I think all answers are really contrived. Everything is contrived; the whole world is an illusion. Coming up and seeing kids dressed in Goth or hip hop clothes, when you go beneath all that, you have to ask: what is that really? You understand they are affected, pretentious. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s how we see things. I love Paris Is Burning.

DS: Has the Iraq War affected you at all?

RP: Absolutely. It’s not good, I don’t like it, and it makes me want to enjoy this moment a lot more and be very appreciative. Like when I’m on a hike in a canyon and it smells good and there aren’t bombs dropping.

DS: Do you think there is a lot of apathy in the culture?

RP: There’s apathy, and there’s a lot of anti-depressants and that probably lends a big contribution to the apathy. We have iPods and GPS systems and all these things to distract us.

DS: Do you ever work the current political culture into your art?

RP: No, I don’t. Every time I bat my eyelashes it’s a political statement. The drag I come from has always been a critique of our society, so the act is defiant in and of itself in a patriarchal society such as ours. It’s an act of treason.

DS: What do you think of young performance artists working in drag today?

RP: I don’t know of any. I don’t know of any. Because the gay culture is obsessed with everything straight and femininity has been under attack for so many years, there aren’t any up and coming drag artists. Gay culture isn’t paying attention to it, and straight people don’t either. There aren’t any drag clubs to go to in New York. I see more drag clubs in Los Angeles than in New York, which is so odd because L.A. has never been about club culture.

DS: Michael Musto told me something that was opposite of what you said. He said he felt that the younger gays, the ones who are up-and-coming, are over the body fascism and more willing to embrace their feminine sides.

RP: I think they are redefining what femininity is, but I still think there is a lot of negativity associated with true femininity. Do boys wear eyeliner and dress in skinny jeans now? Yes, they do. But it’s still a heavily patriarchal culture and you never see two men in Star magazine, or the Queer Eye guys at a premiere, the way you see Ellen and her girlfriend—where they are all, ‘Oh, look how cute’—without a negative connotation to it. There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palette; their emotional palette, their physical palette. Is that changing? It’s changing in ways that don’t advance the cause of femininity. I’m not talking frilly-laced pink things or Hello Kitty stuff. I’m talking about goddess energy, intuition and feelings. That is still under attack, and it has gotten worse. That’s why you wouldn’t get someone covering the RuPaul album, or why they say people aren’t tuning into the Katie Couric show. Sure, they can say ‘Oh, RuPaul’s album sucks’ and ‘Katie Couric is awful’; but that’s not really true. It’s about what our culture finds important, and what’s important are things that support patriarchal power. The only feminine thing supported in this struggle is Pamela Anderson and Jessica Simpson, things that support our patriarchal culture.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Bruce, Canberra — This past week, an overstocked Australian Opals, the women’s national basketball team, prepared for the 2012 Olympic Games in London with a weeklong training camp at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) to be used to help narrow the nineteen member Opals squad down to the twelve that go to the Games, and provide players who rarely play together an extended period of time to play together in order to improve on court dynamics.

Camp started on Sunday, with players arriving from hometowns around Australia including Cairns, MacKay, Gladstone, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Melbourne.

The defending champions, the United States women’s national basketball team, are perceived as the Australian Opals’ main competitors. In the last three Olympic Games the Opals got silver medals. In each of these cases the United States got first place. Coach Carrie Graf said “thinking about the US too soon in inappropriate”, “Our focus is first and foremost, game by game winning our pool”. Amongst the Australian Opals’ competitors in the pool are Brazil, Russia, and Great Britain. Carrie Graf said Great Britain “will put up a fight on home turf” but there is a “world class [AIS] facility” and “world class medical support staff” supporting the team.

Australian Opal player Penny Taylor recently suffered injury from a torn anterior cruciate ligament, meaning she cannot play Olympics this year. In regards to the situation player Lauren Jackson, who is going into her fourth Olympics, said “you would never wish that upon anybody.” She says as a team they have to “move on, move through that” and “come together” to pick up their offence and defense. Despite the loss of one of their key players she says “we definitely have the talent there” and the team is all “on the same page.” She feels “pretty confident” and speaks of “very exciting” times ahead. Jenna O’Hea is going into her first Olympics with the team. She is still “pinching” herself and says she is taking it “day by day”.

A typical day at the camp might start with a 7.00am – 8.30am breakfast at the AIS Dining hall, before one and a half or two hours of court, gym, or swimming training. The middle of each day might consist of media meetings, medical checks, team meetings, and time to practise shooting. Around 12.00pm, the players meet to eat lunch and recover from the morning. The afternoon typically consists of more training, and some scrimmage games. Players usually finish around 7.00pm for dinner, and perhaps a massage.

The nineteen players in attendance this week at training camp were Suzy Batkovic, Abby Bishop, Elizabeth Cambage, Rohanee Cox, Cayla Francis, Kristi Harrower, Laura Hodges, Natalie Hurst, Lauren Jackson, Rachel Jarry, Kathleen MacLeod, Jenna O’Hea, Samantha Richards, Jennifer Screen, Belinda Snell, Marianna Tolo, Kristen Veal, Carly Wilson, and Hanna Zavecz. Basketball Australia has named fifteen players that are to attend the second phase of the camp: Suzy Batkovic, Abby Bishop, Elizabeth Cambage, Kristi Harrower, Laura Hodges, Lauren Jackson, Rachel Jarry, Kathleen MacLeod, Jenna O’Hea, Erin Phillips, Samantha Richards, Jennifer Screen, Belinda Snell, Marianna Tolo, and Hanna Zavecz.