Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Yesterday, US-based entertainment company Disney announced its plans to shut down Blue Sky Studios, the animation studio behind the Ice Age movie franchise.

“Given the current economic realities, after much consideration and evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to close filmmaking operations at Blue Sky Studios”, Walt Disney Studios said in the statement. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio will cease producing a movie-adaptation of Nimona, which was scheduled to be released next year.

Based in Greenwich, Connecticut, Blue Sky Studios was founded in 1987, and was later acquired by 20th Century FOX in 1999. Blue Sky’s control went to Disney in 2019 when Disney bought assets of FOX Studios for around US$71 billion. Blue Sky had worked on Joe’s Apartment, A Simple Wish, Alien Resurrection, and Fight Club. The studio went on to produce five Ice Age films, two Rio movies, The Peanuts Movie as well as Ferdinand, which received an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature film.

Disney also owns two other significant animation studios, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney has closed Radio Disney and Radio Disney Country. Disney planned last year to lay off about 32 thousand employees, many from Disney’s theme parks. Disney also sold mobile video game unit FoxNext Games Los Angeles. Disney reported a US$2.8 billion net loss in the 2020 fiscal year.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia were just announced. Based on mythological characters, they are Miga, Quatchi and Sumi.

Miga, a sea bear who lives in the ocean with her family pod near Tofino, and Quatchi, a young sasquatch, represent the Olympics, while Sumi represents the Paralympics that follow afterward.

A sea bear is a First Nations creature, part killer whale, part Kermode spirit bear. While illustrated as being taller than the other characters, the mascot costume of Quatchi is the same height as the other two characters.

The third mascot, Sumi, an animal-guardian spirit, is a Thunderbird that wears the hat of an orca. Sumi will be the mascot of the Paralympics.

In 2004, the Times Colonist suggested a marmot might be a good mascot, except for their winter hibernation. The organizers still chose one, named Mukmuk, as their “virtual only” counterpart.

After the Olympic logo design was leaked the day before the 2005 announcement, organizers were extremely tight lipped until today’s news conference at a Surrey school. They apparently didn’t do any development on the characters on internet-enabled computers, to ensure the images or information wouldn’t slip out.

The characters were designed by the Vancouver and Los Angeles-based Meomi Design. Their characters have been used as part of iGoogle, a customizable homepage option from Google, as well as Electronic Arts, Girls Inc., Time Out Magazine, Cyworld, Nick Jr., Bang-on Clothing, and CBC4Kids.

The Vancouver organizers have a CDN$46-million merchandising program; previous Olympics have made as much as $100 million from mascot-related products.

René Fasel, Chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Coordination Commission commented that “The IOC welcomes these imaginative new additions to the Olympic Family as they take their place on the world stage today – a symbol of the Games and of Canada. We know that when Olympians, Paralympians and visitors from around the globe arrive in British Columbia at Games time, they will fall under the spell of these captivating characters.”

The characters first appearance will be at a Bay store in the Lower Mainland; HBC is a major sponsor of the Games. They will then make their way to schools, take a break through the Christmas season, and fly to Ottawa for the Winterlude festival.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

According to media reports, a Colombian air force AC-47 (registration FAC1670) spy plane carrying five people has crashed near the Colombian city of La Dorada, in the department of Caldas.

All on board the plane are believed to have been killed, according to Colombia Reports. Among the dead, according to Monsters and Critics, are two technicians, a major and two second lieutenants. ABS-CBN News reports that the dead included three high ranking officials and two lower ranking ones.

Jorge Ballesteros, a Colombian air force official, says that the plane took off from an air force base in the city of Puerto Salgar and was on an exercise mission when it crashed. He also states that although it was on a training exercise, the plane was carrying bombs and machine guns.

A military team has been dispatched to the area to investigate the incident, but they have already put the blame on mechanical failure. Ballestero noted that investigators have ruled out a rebel attack and terrorism as possible causes.

AC-47’s have been used by the Colombian air force for nearly 20 years, most of which were donated from the United States. They were provided to the country in an attempt to fight the illegal drug market and to defend citizens and the military against rebel attacks. They are also used to gather intelligence and come equipped with a state-of-the-art communications system, radar and infrared detection systems.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

On Friday, April 28, Wikinews interviewed Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that sending people with technical skills to developing countries for development projects. Ethan has also founded Global Voices Online and helped found Tripod.com, the free web-hosting company now owned by Lycos. He serves a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Tripod.

The interview was held publicly in a dedicated IRC channel.

• What insipred you to get behind Geekcorps, and has there been a big Geekcorps mission, yet?

I got interested in Geekcorps because I’d lived in Ghana as a student in 1993 and 1994While over there, I was amazed at just how little internet connectivity was availableI did a bit of volunteer work helping wire an environmental organization, but basically the only people who had regular net access were US embassy employees.So I was fascinated to learn that my friends in Ghana were getting online in the late 1990s, and I wondered whether anyone would start building net-based businesses, as people were doing in the USMy wife and I went back to Ghana to visit friends and found that there was a huge deal of enthusiasm about the web and the potential it represented, but almost no expertisepeople were really desperate to learn, but very few people were able to teach at the same time, I was ready to step down from Tripod, and I knew a lot of burned out geeksI started wondering whether some of my friends would be interested in sharing their skills in the developing world and whether that would be a useful thing to dolots of international development folks seemed to think it was a good cause, so I started working on it fulltime.We ended up sending about 100 people overseas over the four years I was involved with the projectwe usually sent about 6-8 to a country at a time, working with a variety of businesses, NGOs and government agencies biggest projects were in Ghana, Mali, Mongolia, Senegal.

• With Geekcorps you pushed the idea that newly tech-savvy citizens of developing countries could start online businesses to do digital work for the developed world. But from an American perspective, that’s outsourcing, the bane of US workers. How do you justify working towards a goal that might cost Americans their jobs?

Basically, I’m concerned about the ability of people all over the world to make a good living, send their children to school, build nice houses, have enough food and clean water, etc there’s clearly something of a tradeoff offered by all sorts of globalization – as millions of Chinese are lifted out of rural povery, industrial manufacturing jobs in the US disappear but the US has a pretty good history of innovating and creating new jobs in fields that require a lot of intellectual endeavor the US continues to found interesting software companies, pioneer new net services and generally do a lot of the interesting development on the cutting edge of tech I think a lot of routine coding jobs are up for outsourcing, but I don’t think that people who design software – or who manage the outsourcing and software development process – are going away any time soon it’s very hard to outsource creative activities – it’s somewhat easier to outsource repetitive processes.I think we need to worry less about individual job loss and more about the ability to continue creating new projects. at the same time, I’m very excited to see companies in the developing world moving up the value chain as well, starting to innovate and create new projects as well…

• Lately you’ve been involved with projects including Global Voices and Worldchanging. Where and how do the two dovetail, and where and how do they differ? What are the strengths of each?

They’re very different projects and communities, WC is a magazine -it’s a chance for a small group of smart people to write original content on green issues it’s a lot less global than GV – perhaps overly focused on the US and Europe – and has a tight subject focus GV is an edited aggregator People are not so much writing original, opinionated content on GV as they are linking to other content indeed, we ask people to try very hard not to be especially opinionated on GV. Not NPOV, but a similar perspective – you point, you don’t advocate<ethanz> also GVO is huge – 10 regional editors, about 60 regular contributors, a network of about a thousand blogs we regularly link to the community has a very different feeling – much more international, more 24/7. both are fascinating projects, successes in their own ways, but quite different on the tech issues, a little – in both cases, we’re taking very simple weblog tools and asking them to support very large communities. And a little bit on the issue of how they interface with mainstream media in both cases, we’re interested in amplifying memes and getting them picked up by popular press as well as on the web.

• Isn’t that a contradiction? you’re asking people to be “less” opinionated, but not asking them to be unopinionated?

Blogs are essentially about opinion, asking for NPOV in the blog space misses the point – we want to know what opinions people in Syria have but we want our middle east editor to try to fairly represent the different opinions taking place in that space that said, he’s got an opinion as well so asking for NPOV isn’t the right thing to do – asking him to point to a diversity of opinions is, in our case

Geekcorps can be found online at www.geekcorps.org and Global Voices Online is at www.globalvoicesonline.org.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Chemotherapy is usually associated with a collection of side effects ranging from digestive problems to hair loss, but a study published this week in Human Reproduction demonstrated that female cancer patients may find they have something in common with much younger women in one specific area — their ovaries.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh examined donated ovarian tissue from fourteen female cancer patients, most of whom had Hodgkin lymphoma, and compared it to tissue from healthy women. They found the samples from women who had been treated with a specific chemotherapeutic regimen known as ABVD not only contained greater numbers of dormant ova — egg cells — than those from women treated with harsher regimens but also more than samples from healthy women. ABVD is named for combining several drugs known as adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine.

These reproductive cells were not merely more plentiful in ABVD patients. They also appeared immature, “new” in the words of lead researcher Evelyn Telfer. This challenges the conventional belief that girls are born with all the ova they will ever have and the numbers can only go down as the cells are either used up by the reproductive cycle or succumb to damage or natural aging. However, further research is needed to confirm this. The study covered relatively few patients by scientific standards, and David Albertini of the Center for Human Reproduction in New York has suggested the cells may not actually be freshly grown. Instead, they may have always been there and were merely rendered more detectable by ABVD treatment.

The ability to grow new egg cells may have significant implications for women in Western societies, many of whom postpone childbearing to establish careers, sometimes into their late thirties or forties. However, Telfer warns against making use of these findings too soon: “There’s so much we don’t know about the ovary. We have to be very cautious about jumping to clinical applications.”

The experiments had been discussed earlier this year at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Friday, October 17, 2014

At about 5.00 a.m. today local time (2100 yesterday UTC), police in Hong Kong moved to clear obstacles to traffic at the intersection of Argyle Street and Nathan Road in Mong Kok, Hong Kong. For weeks the normally busy crossroads has been occupied by pro-democracy protesters and closed to traffic.

Police in riot gear cordoned off the roads and alleyways that surround the intersection, before moving in with trucks equipped with mechanical grabs to clear the roads of makeshift barricades. Also removed were tents, personal belongings, bedding and any other material protesters couldn’t retrieve in time. Many of the protesters were asleep when the police action began.

The police said they were acting to reopen the roads to traffic, not to forcibly clear the site of protesters, however the protestors were also urged to peaceably leave the site.

The police action effectively dispersed the majority of the protesters from the site. Protesters were moved onto the sidewalk by the police; when they could no longer be accommodated on the sidewalk they spilled into the alleyways, and down Nathan Road towards Tsim Sha Tsui. Once they had crossed the police cordon they were not allowed to return to the intersection. A small number of protesters remained on the pavements surrounding the intersection.

Protesters interviewed by local television station TVB said they felt the police had misled them; some said they would join protesters on Hong Kong Island, while others said they wished to remain in Mong Kok to maintain the pressure on the government.

The Mong Kok site is one of the three main protest sites of the wider 2014 Hong Kong protests. Protesters have been demonstrating in a bid for the right by the public at large to have a role in the nomination of candidates to stand for the post of Chief Executive of the territory.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

On Thursday, United States President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, a USD 1.9 trillion stimulus relief package that provides a maximum of $1400 in direct payments to individuals making no more than $75 thousand annually. The bill was passed in the United States House of Representatives with a 220–211 vote on Wednesday and in the United States Senate with a 50–49 vote along party lines through budget reconciliation.

The bill includes $300 billion in unemployment benefits through September and expands the tax credit per child to $3600. The bill also supplies $350 billion to state as well as local governments and $14 billion for distributing vaccines. The bill offers a funding of $130 billion in schools, which would help them reopen safely. Small businesses will get $50 billion, and the Paycheck Protection Program will get $7 billion. Small and mid-sized restaurants, which have been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, will be given $25 billion in relief.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said US citizens will begin receiving a first round of direct deposits in their bank accounts by the weekend. Additionally, Biden gave a primetime address to discuss how the country will continue fighting COVID-19 after it was proclaimed as a pandemic by the World Health Organization the previous year. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are to travel Atlanta, Georgia and promote the legislation across the country on Friday.

Friday, December 14, 2007

Reggie Bibbs is a 43-year-old-man living in Houston, Texas. Mr Bibbs was born with a genetic disease called neurofibromatosis (NF), which causes him to develop tumors on his body (see infobox on the right). NF can be a subtle disease, but in Bibbs’ case it has left him with a disfigured face and deformed leg. But he is happy with the way he looks, and doesn’t want to change his appearance to please other people. He has launched a successful campaign entitled “Just Ask”, and that’s just what Wikinews did in a video-interview.

The interview was prepared by Wikinews reporter Michaël Laurent with the help of Bertalan Meskó (who has a popular genetics and web 2.0 blog). Their questions were sent to a close friend of Mr. Bibbs, Lou Congelio, who kindly conducted the interview.