Saturday, March 25, 2006

In the latest attempt to evict Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ahead of next week’s election, tens of thousands of protesters have rallied in Bangkok, Thailand. Officials say as many as 10,000 police have been mobilised for the protest against the Thai PM. Another 10,000 officers are on standby. Police estimated the crowd at 30,000 people.

Organisers had hoped the rally would draw one million people, but officials said about the same number of monks were chanting prayers for peace and unity nearby – far fewer than the 100,000 that attended earlier demonstrations.

Thaskin has called a snap election three years early in hopes of ending the crisis. There have been chants of “Thaksin, get out”. There are reports of bands playing music near the Prime Minister’s offices. A sign written in English has been posted on the fence of Government House reading “For Rent”.

A poll released this week showed Bangkok people are becoming fed up after weeks of rallying. Today’s rally was a “united call” on King Bhumibol Adulyadej to replace Thaksin. The palace reports that the king is following events closely but says there are no signs he will act against Thaksin. The monarch has intervened publicly twice in his 60-year reign. The campaigners want the king to appoint a neutral government to carry out political reforms.

The three main opposition parties are boycotting the election, declaring the electoral process “unfair” as Thaksin has taken over the independent institutions. Thaksin, once the richest man in Thailand, transferred ownership of his companies to family members and employees prior to becoming Prime Minister.

The weekly rallies in Bangkok, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, make the movement to depose the troubled Thaksin the “largest massing of public dissent since 1992,” when huge demonstrations and the army’s subsequent massacre of protesters culminated in the end of military rule in Thailand.

The latest rally on Saturday launched a series of protests due to continue with a march through the main shopping district. The protestors will converge on police headquarters on Monday to demand criminal charges be brought against the prime minister.

Police would be stationed at the rally site, near his office, and at other key government offices, national police spokesman General Achirawit Suphanaphesat said. Thaksin, who has been accused of clamping down on dissent and stifling freedom of the press, vowed to call a state of emergency if protests turn violent.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh yesterday conceded defeat to now-President Elect Adama Barrow.

Jammeh, 51, took power 22 years ago in a bloodless coup. He had claimed a billion-year mandate. Barrow, 51, is a property developer without political experience. According to the electoral commission yesterday, he won 263,515 votes, equating to 45.5%, while Jammeh won 36.7%, 212,099 votes. A third candidate accounted for 17.8%.

Jammeh is the nation’s second president since independence in 1965. In a public broadcast he hailed “the most transparent election in the whole world,” and congratulated Barrow on “a clear victory[…] You Gambians have decided.”

Born in Basse in 1965, Barrow spent several years working as a security guard in London. He returned home in 2006 and began property development, which he still does. He expressed disappointment he did not win by a larger margin.

Barrow represents a coalition of parties in an unprecedented co-operation. He said his first priority is to pick his cabinet, and has proposed a presidential two-term limit and promised financial stimulation. “It’s the people who have spoken. He cannot hang on,” he said. “We won the election clearly so there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Jammeh refused international observations of the election, banned protests following the result, and switched off the nation’s Internet access on the day of the vote. He pledged to work with Barrow and hand over power in January.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

A small, “nicely trained” Jack Russell Terrier gave his life to help save a group of five children from two aggressive pitbulls last Sunday in Manaia, Taranaki, New Zealand.

The dog named George is being described as a hero, gathering a huge amount of international media interest in the process.

The dog suffered massive injuries that the vet had never seen to that extent before, which resulted in 69-year-old Alan Gay, the dog’s owner, allowing George to be put down. He now regrets this decision.

The two pitbulls rushed at the group of children that George was following to the dairy, including a four-year-old. George then started barking loudly at the pair of dogs, and put himself between the dogs and the children. Mr Gay told Fox News, “If it wasn’t for George, those kids would have copped it.”

Despite having received offers of new dogs, Mr Gay has said that he will wait a while before getting another Jack Russell Terrier, as he is afraid it could happen again.

It is also believed that the two attacking dogs, which have been destroyed, were bred to be aggressive, including being fed the drug methamphetamine, commonly referred to as “P” in New Zealand.

Mr Gay has said that Manaia has had a problem with stray dogs before, but he never expected that George would become a victim.

One story ran in USA Today, which prompted over 120 comments, and one reader to personally call Alan Gay expressing their condolences.

Responding to the huge amount of media interest, Mr Gay said, “This really surprises me, and it’s marvellous. I never expected this … I’m surprised it got around the world as it did.” He says he has been getting a huge amount of phone calls from the media and the public. “The phone has been going since about half past seven this morning. Every time I hang up it rings again. It’s worn out; I might have to get a new one.”

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Nearly two feet of the rail route in Kashmir, India was blown up by militants near the Pulwama district, affecting train services from north to south Kashmir. The blast came a few days after militants fought with the Indian army in the area, thereby killing fourteen people.

“There were no casualties, as no trains were running when the militants set off a powerful bomb on the railway track,” said Aijaz Ahmad, a local police official. He added that train services have been temporarily suspended.

According to police, the attackers detonated an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) near Galbug at about 10 PM local time (4:30 PM UTC), Thursday night. Two feet of the rail track on the Qazigund-Baramulla area was damaged. This track was developed two years ago, police sources stated. The attack came just before senior officers were supposed to inspect ongoing works in the Kashmiri railways.

The track was repaired on Friday morning and train services resumed in the region. Kamal Saine, Deputy Inspector General of Police, south Kashmir, told the Press Trust of India agency that the damage to the track was not significant and it took a short time to mend it.

Saturday, November 4, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Don Valley East (Ward 33). One candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Zane Caplan, Shelley Carroll (incumbent), Jim Conlon, Sarah Tsang-Fahey, and Anderson Tung.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Ford Motors Co., the automobile manufacturing firm, has posted an annual profit for the last year of US$2.7 billion, the first gain for four years.

The statistics are an improvement from 2008, when the car company posted a loss of close to $15 billion. For the final quarter of 2009, Ford says it made profits of $868 million, and expects to continue to be profitable this year. The company had cut its costs to $118.3 billion last year, $19.8 billion than the year previous. Ford had a $34.3 billion debt at the end of 2009.

In the fourth quarter, Ford brand sales were up thirteen percent compared to the same time in 2008 in the US, and obtained 15.3% of the automobile market in the country.

The firm’s president and chief executive, Alan Mulally, commented on the profits. “While we still face significant challenges ahead, 2009 was a pivotal year for Ford and the strongest proof yet that our One Ford plan is working and that we are forging a path toward profitable growth,” he said, adding that “global economic conditions are reviving but remain fragile.”

Saturday, February 5, 2005

A collaboratively-developed operating system kernel known as GNU Hurd has been made bootable using the L4 microkernel, which provides room for significant speed improvements over an existing implementation using the Mach microkernel. The newer architecture also has a more lively developer community.

Developer Marcus Brinkmann made the historic step and finished the process initialization code, which enabled him to execute the first software on Hurd-L4. In a message to the L4 port of GNU Hurd mailing list, Brinkmann wrote, “We can now easily explore and develop the system in any way we want. The dinner is prepared!”. [1] However, the kernel’s current feature set is very limited. “With my glibc port, I can already build simple applications, but most won’t run because they need a filesystem or other gimmicks (like, uhm, fork and exec), and I only have stubs (dummy functions which always return an error) for that now,” he added in a later posting. [2]

Compared with Linux and BSD Unix’s monolithic kernel architecture, a microkernel based operating system provides developers greater modularity and isolation from hardware, a big win with L4 already being available for a large number of hardware varieties.

There is a cost in speed for such abstraction, and this cost was higher on Mach, at around 15%, compared with only around 5% on L4 and it’s predecessor L3, both developed by Dr. Jochen Liedtke. [3]

The greater modularity and abstraction of a microkernel approach means that the microkernel itself does not need constant modification as is seen in the Linux kernel today, since it provides only the very minimum of services, and does so very carefully. Thus, the fact that L4 was developed in 1996 is seen as exemplifying this stability — rather than showing its age — since few, if any, improvements in approach have been imagined in the meantime.

However, the Mach kernel first developed ten years earlier at Carnegie Mellon University is seen as a flawed first implementation, with the lessons learned being implemented in microkernels like L4, known as second-generation microkernels.

The GNU Hurd forms the base of the GNU operating system, much of which has been widely adopted by users of other Unix-like operating systems, including Linux. The GNU Project has been developing the Hurd since 1983. In 1990, the GNU Project decided to use the Mach kernel, rather than writing their own. [4] The Hurd is released as free software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The Hurd kernel is an experiment which aims to surpass existing Unix kernels in functionality, security, and stability, while remaining largely compatible with them. It currently runs on Intel IA32 machines. According to the GNU Hurd project, “The Hurd should, and probably will, be ported to other hardware architectures or other microkernels in the future” [5].

`Hurd’ stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons’. And, then, `Hird’ stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth’ – perhaps the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.

A limited port of Linux already runs on L4, known as L4Linux.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

A ban on smoking in public places has gone into force in Spain today. Bars, restaurants, and nightclubs will now be smoke-free across the country.

The Spanish government had introduced voluntary regulations on smoking in 2006 which allowed for venues to ban smoking, but few chose to do so. The 2006 law also banned smoking at workplaces.

Spain now joins Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy in banning smoking in enclosed public places.

Leire Pajin, the Spanish health minister, said the law marked “a decisive step in the defence of the health of the Spanish people”, but some industry representatives have expressed concern that business will go down following the ban.