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Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Polish Prime Minister Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski has ordered the pharmaceutical company Jelfa to halt production following revelations that Jelfa had placed mislabelled medication on the market, whose use could be potentially fatal.

Jelfa distributed vials labelled as Corhydron, a hydrocortisone used to treat allergies and inflammation, but in fact containing Suxamethonium chloride, a drug normally used to cause muscle paralysis during emergency surgery.

The Health Ministry has appealed to people suffering from asthma or allergies to check their medication and return any Corhydron ampoules they possess to the pharmacy.

Polskie Radio reports that the mislabelling was discovered a month ago, but Jelfa and the Polish Health ministry did not inform of the problem.

Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski ordered Jelfa to halt production until it can assure the Polish Government that it can properly manage its production.

The Polish Outlook reports that that drug companies in Poland were operating unregulated since December, 2005 as the regulations has expired. The government was putting in place new regulations.

The owner of Jelfa is AB Sanitas, the largest drug producer in neighbouring Lithuania. The shut-down has been questioned by the Lithuanian Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas, who expressed concern over the situation and said that he wants to try to settle the issue diplomatically.

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.

Monday, September 12, 2005

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is being criticized for misallocation of personnel in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. FEMA representatives said they requested volunteers from fire departments around the U.S., to handle its community relations campaign. However, a document FEMA sent to local fire departments asked for firefighters with very specific skills and who were capable of working in “austere conditions”. Fire departments around the nation responded by sending crews to the FEMA staging ground in Atlanta. Some of these crews were unaware that they were only going to be used for public relations work. Others, however, merely hoped that FEMA would allocate them to rescue and damage control operations once it saw their qualifications.

The firefighter’s objections are particularly poignant as one of FEMA public relations training seminars coincided with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin plea for firefighters on national television, to relieve his own exhausted crews. It is unclear if FEMA’s request for firefighters prevented any municipalities from responding to Mayor Nagin’s request.

Some firefighters have objected to their use as FEMA public relations officers because their municipalities must bear the cost of their salaries, as well as endure reduced firefighting capacity. FEMA has stated that it sought to use firefighters to avoid background checks required of federal employees.

Firefighters began receiving their assignments Monday, September 5th. Among these was a crew of 50 assigned to tour the devastated areas with President Bush and the press.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Buffalo, New York —According to police in Buffalo, New York, no one was injured after a semi-trailer truck carrying paper from Ontario, Canada hit a railroad viaduct, tearing the truck in half.

At approximately 11:00 p.m. EDT (UTC-4) on April 21, an unidentified man driving the truck westbound on Walden Avenue between Wasmuth and Roetzer streets hit the viaduct which tore his truck in half sending debris and cargo over most of the road.

Police describe the truck’s cabin as a “can of sardines.”

“He made it all the way through, but his truck looks like a can of sardines,” said officers on police radio communications who were on scene.

The driver was given a traffic citation and admits he did not notice signs posted along Walden which state the bridge’s clearance.

The street and the viaduct remained closed into the early morning hours of Tuesday April 22. According to Don Poleto of the city’s Public Works office, the bridge was not damaged.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Wikinews has learned that according to an Internet posting made just over 24 hours ago, the Church of Scientology‘s website is being attacked by hackers, causing the site to shut down.

The attack was launched on Wednesday by a user labelled “Anonymous”, on the website “Insurgency Wiki”, a spinoff of 4chan. The “History” section of the site explains, in a satirical fashion, that the incident was prompted by the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove a promotional video featuring Scientologist Tom Cruise from YouTube. Though YouTube is complying with the Church of Scientology’s requests to take down the video, other sites such as Gawker.com have stated that they will keep hosting the video.

Writing in a blog post, Matthew Ingram of The Globe and Mail dubbed the ongoing conflict involving the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove the Cruise video from the Internet: “Scientology vs. the Internet, part XVII”. He characterized the conflict between the Church of Scientology and anonymous posters of the Cruise video as “another small skirmish in a war that Scientology has been waging for almost 15 years, since the early days of newsgroups such as alt.religion.scientology, which posted internal church documents in 1994. Lawsuits have been filed, mailing lists have been shut down, homes of discussion group participants have been raided and their computers seized — an all-out war.”

One poster admitted to being a part of the effort, writing in a blog post “I have myself, as per instructions, loaded up Gigaloader and started bombarding the Scientology homepage. Theres [sic] something in the hilarious anarchy of the net that produces these ‘events’ every now and again.” The poster wrote that “Prompted I think by the Tom Cruise video, a new obsession is taking hold on the internet. An insurgency against The Church of Scientology.”

“Someone emailed me earlier today talking about a tool a group’s been using to attack the scientology website. It’s an interesting tool, created to overload/create malformed strings and crash a website’s database,” said the post by an unknown author on pigmy.

The Church’s website is currently unreachable. Some individuals reported that when they are able to reach the site, all they get is a message stating, “The word scientology means search for truth…”. As of 15:11 GMT the site was accessible again, but only loads at relatively slow speeds, and by the end of the day Saturday the site was not loading at all.

Posts on the message board for the Scientology-critic site Operation Clambake from Friday theorized that a denial-of-service attack had occurred, and wrote that as of Friday the Scientology.org site was either not loading at all, or loading very slowly. Critics of Scientology at the Internet newsgroup alt.religion.scientology were critical of the attacks to the Church of Scientology website, with one poster writing “How can people look at both sides if one side is gone?”

Traffic to the Scientology website had already increased 18-fold prior to the attack, following increased attention after the Tom Cruise video appeared on the Internet. At that time, one in three visits to the site came from BBC News, and the website increased to number 3 in the company Hitwise UK’s Lifestyle-Religion category.

Monday, December 8, 2008

More details have emerged over the weekend after the surprise announcement last week of Honda‘s intention to sell its Formula One racing team, Honda Racing F1. The team management, Nick Fry and Ross Brawn, have already announced confidence in their ability not only to find a buyer for the team but also to deliver the performance expected of Honda’s 2009 car. Prices as low as £1 have been put forward as possible prices tags for the Northampton based team, with Honda CEO Takeo Fukui stating that “Just to make the team possible to exist, a small price tag is acceptable”.

On Saturday the Japanese car giant said that before selling the team it was going to offer British driver Jensen Button, who had given the Honda team its only victory, a way out of his recently signed multi-million pound contract with the team so he could try to get a drive with other teams. However, Ross Brawn appears eager to retain the Briton and either retain Brazilian Rubens Barrichello or sign GP2 driver Bruno Senna, nephew of legendary racer Ayrton Senna. At an industry awards dinner, Button indicated his desire for a buyer to be found for Honda, saying any buyer would get “… a great team with excellent facilities. And with the leadership of Ross Brawn, and the whole team as they are, we can come through this and be on the grid in 2009”. Button has also spoken of his shock and pain at Honda’s decision.

Ross Brawn, who was brought into the Honda team with much fan fare before the 2008 season, has spoken of his shock at finding out about the sale of the team. Brawn, who is credited with helping Michael Schumacher and Ferrari dominate Formula One for much of the last decade, indicated he was expected funding cuts and had prepared a reduced budget but hadn’t expected the full withdrawal of support that Honda announced. Brawn has also indicated understanding of Honda’s reasoning, with their sales down 40% in some markets and Honda F1’s £200m+ budget a cost they were unwilling to bear.

Though Honda has committed to providing a budget for the team until March, the budget is lower than that which had been expected and so the team has had to pull out of the crucial winter tests at Jerez. This has denied Formula One hopeful Bruno Senna another test with the team and has combined with the engine implications of Honda’s withdrawal to push the new car’s final testing from January to March, just weeks before the first Grand Prix in Australia. Ross Brawn however remains confident of competing with new Formula One frontrunners BMW Sauber and Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has tipped the team as a great buy, saying “I’ve no doubt Honda would have been in top four next year without any problems. They’ve spent a lot of money to put themselves in that position so if anyone does want to be in F1 this is a team they should look to buy. It’s a big opportunity for any company that’s run efficiently to benefit”.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Sweden’s first royal wedding since 1976 took place Saturday when Crown Princess Victoria, 32, married her long-time boyfriend and former personal trainer, Daniel Westling, 36. The ceremony took place at Stockholm Cathedral.

Over 1,200 guests, including many rulers, politicians, royals and other dignitaries from across the world, attended the wedding, which cost an estimated 20 million Swedish kronor. Victoria wore a wedding dress with five-metre long train designed by Pär Engsheden. She wore the same crown that her mother, Queen Silvia, wore on her wedding day 34 years previously, also on June 19. Victoria’s father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, walked Victoria down the aisle, which was deemed untraditional by many. In Sweden, the bride and groom usually walk down the aisle together, emphasising the country’s views on equality. Victoria met with Daniel half-way to the altar, where they exchanged brief kisses, and, to the sounds of the wedding march, made their way to the the silver altar. She was followed by ten bridesmaids. The couple both had tears in their eyes as they said their vows, and apart from fumbling when they exchanged rings, the ceremony went smoothly.

Following the ceremony, the couple headed a fast-paced procession through central Stockholm on a horse-drawn carriage, flanked by police and security. Up to 500,000 people are thought to have lined the streets. They then boarded the Vasaorden, the same royal barge Victoria’s parents used in their wedding, and traveled through Stockholm’s waters, accompanied by flyover of 18 fighter jets near the end of the procession. A wedding banquet followed in the in the Hall of State of the Royal Palace.

Controversy has surrounded the engagement and wedding between the Crown Princess and Westling, a “commoner”. Victoria met Westling as she was recovering from bulemia in 2002. He owned a chain of gymnasiums and was brought in to help bring Victoria back to full health. Westling was raised in a middle-class family in Ockelbo, in central Sweden. His father managed a social services centre, and his mother worked in a post office. When the relationship was made public, Westling was mocked as an outsider and the king was reportedly horrified at the thought of his daughter marrying a “commoner”, even though he did so when he married Silvia. Last year, Westling underwent transplant surgery for a congenital kidney disorder. The Swedish public have been assured that he will be able to have children and that his illness will not be passed on to his offspring.

Westling underwent years of training to prepare for his new role in the royal family, including lessons in etiquette, elocution, and multi-lingual small talk; and a makeover that saw his hair being cropped short, and his plain-looking glasses and clothes being replaced by designer-wear.

Upon marrying the Crown Princess, Westling took his wife’s ducal title and is granted the style “His Royal Highness”. He is now known as HRH Prince Daniel, Duke of Västergötland. He also has his own coat-of-arms and monogram. When Victoria assumes the throne and becomes Queen, Daniel will not become King, but assume a supportive role, similar to that of Prince Phillip, the husband of the United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

One of the world’s most advanced earthquake warning systems in Japan has been found to have some practical use problems. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) apologized on Tuesday for erroneously issuing an “earthquake early warning for advanced users”, with regards to an earthquake which occurred on the Monday night at sea off Ibaraki Prefecture, eastern Japan. There was, in fact, no possibility of huge tremors. The root cause was a simple human mistake that happened while setting a single seismograph with a criterion. The accidental release of the warning also revealed that some receiver devices could not handle warnings properly under certain conditions.

JMA operates a system called “Earthquake Early Warning” (EEW). It is designed to analyze seismic waves as soon as possible after an earthquake is detected, and issue a warning if large tremors are expected to happen. Its purpose is to minimize the damage caused by seismic tremors. Two EEW schemes were put into practical use in 2006 and 2007.

The warning was released by the EEW scheme for advanced users such as railway operators, workers in factories, managers at some offices and schools, and some local cable TV broadcasters. Another EEW scheme for the general public, which is utilized by nationwide broadcasting networks such as NHK, was not involved in this incident.

All four subway lines operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau were suspended in response to the first false warning, even though it was corrected within 11 seconds. At a private railway company, an EEW receiving system crashed, apparently because of the wrong data. East Japan Railway Company, which has its own earthquake observation network, judged the warning to be an error and didn’t take a real reaction in its railway operation.

In addition to troubling railway companies, the warning also caused confusion among people. Some commercially-sold receiver devices failed to handle the warning appropriately. Some of them, adapted by an information distributor company for its service, displayed an incredible magnitude of 12.7, while the warning didn’t include a datum of the JMA magnitude. One device at a junior high school boarding house in Aichi Prefecture called an alert as if the seismic intensity could have reached to the Scale 6 Lower (the third highest of 10 JMA scales), causing some girl students to cry. The device didn’t say that the students were far away from the focus.

Such failures show that recipients of an “EEW for advanced users” are not always trained well enough to react appropriately. Ironically, in the JMA building a similar case was also confirmed. A receiver device displayed a Scale 7 alert, the highest of JMA scales.

According to JMA’s announcement on the same night and news conference on the following morning, one seismograph was incorrectly set with the criterion of acceleration at 10 gals. (Correctly the criterion is at 100 gals.) This mistake resulted in the first (false) warning, which was soon corrected by the second warning. The JMA confessed that the seismograph has not undergone a check since it was installed in December, 2003.

The EEW scheme for advanced users is designed to put priority on calling alerts, so it releases a warning even if data from only one observation point is known. The same simple human mistakes were not committed at other points, according to JMA. In the parallel EEW scheme for the general public, the same mistake would not cause the same error, because it releases a warning based on data from multiple observation points, not depending on the criterion of acceleration.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Marija Minic is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the York Centre riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed her 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.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

NASA is beginning the final preparations for next Wednesday’s launch of the Dawn probe, aboard a Delta II rocket. The Dawn probe, costing over US$250 million, will visit the dwarf planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta. The launch was originally planned for mid-June, however due to a damaged crate, shipping delays, and a damaged solar panel, NASA chose to delay it until now. Last week the spacecraft was delivered to the launch pad, and engineers performed tests to ensure that it is ready for launch. Today, the payload fairings were installed, and the probe is ready for its launch next week onto its 5 billion kilometer (3.2 billion mile) mission.

As the Delta II launches, three stages of rockets will propel the probe towards its first target. With the help of ion thrusters, it will reach Mars in mid-2009. Using Mars’ gravity, the probe will speed up and proceed towards the first asteroid, Vesta, in late 2011. After orbiting for seven months, it will leave Vesta in mid-2012, and arrive at Ceres in 2015. After making scans of Ceres, it will enter an orbit around Ceres that will ensure that it does not impact the asteroid for half a century. This is required due to the United Nations’ “Outer Space Treaty”, which states that “harmful contamination” of these asteroids must be avoided.

The targets of this mission, Ceres and Vesta, couldn’t be less alike. Ceres (diameter 975 km, 600 miles) is larger than Vesta (578 km, 350 miles). This makes Ceres approximately the size of Texas. NASA believes Ceres could contain water beneath its outer crust because, like Earth, its inner layers are heavier than the outer layers, and Ceres’ outer layer is lighter than water. Vesta, on the other hand, is the size of Arizona, and has a surface of volcanic rock, which astronomers believe came from its hot inner layers. Vesta also has a large crater – almost 500 km (300 miles) across – on its southern pole. The collision that caused this likely blasted enough rock into space to fill a container 160 by 160 by 80 km (100 by 100 by 50 miles).

The probe will make several observations of these asteroids: it will compare the makeup, shape, size, and densities, analyze craters, and determine mass, gravity, rotation. To determine the makeup, the probe carries a mapping spectrometer, and tools to map emissions of neutrons and gamma rays. Using this information, NASA can compare the formation of these bodies to learn more about our solar system, for example, to test a theory which states that a number of stony meteorites may be debris from Vesta.

There’s one more piece of equipment aboard the probe: A small silicon chip containing the names of 350,000 people who submitted their names to the “Send Your Name to the Asteroid Belt” campaign. After next week’s launch, the spacecraft will deploy its solar panels and undergo two months of testing before it begins the cruise to Mars.