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Sunday, February 4, 2007

Fourteen houses have been destroyed and another 3 damaged by a bush fire burning in Jarrah forests and farmland near the historical timber town of Dwellingup 70km south east of Perth, Western Australia.

The fire has also destroyed approximately 100 power poles, leading to a loss of telecommunication services to the town and affecting water supplies. Mobile generators have been installed for emergency power.

Steve Slavin, spokesman for Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC), said that 250 fire-fighters are containing the fire with crews concentrating on the southern front, which is now within 3 km of the town.

Mr Slavin said “Our concern is that winds this afternoon will be swinging around to the south and increasing in intensity.” “It’s making us nervous. The advice we’re giving to people in Dwellingup is if they’ve decided that they will leave, this would be a good time to do it”

In separate fires near North Yunderup, Greenfields and Parkland have affected transmission lines supplying power to approximately 56,000 properties.

Additional fires are burning near Toodyay 85km north east of Perth, Another fire is burning near Williams approximately 160 south east of Perth and 90Km east of Dwellingup. And in the southern rural suburb of Forrestdale. These fires are reported to be under control.

Western Australian Police Arson squad are investigating these fires as some appear to be deliberately lit. The Police are also investigating the death of a women in her mid 20’s who died on Saturday after her car rolled while fleeing the fire near Toodyay.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Top broker and Wall Street adviser Bernard L. Madoff, aged 70, was arrested and charged by the FBI on Thursday with a single count of securities fraud, also known as stock fraud and investment fraud. He allegedly told senior employees of his firm on Wednesday that his $50 billion business “is all just one big lie” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme (since at least 2005).” Mr. Madoff faces up to 20 years imprisonment and a fine of up to $5 million. FBI agent Theodore Cacioppi said Mr. Madoff’s investment advisory business had “deceived investors by operating a securities business in which he traded and lost investor money, and then paid certain investors purported returns on investment with the principal received from other, different investors, which resulted in investors’ losses of approximately $50 billion dollars.”

The former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market is also the founder and primary owner of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, the closely-held market-making firm he launched in 1960. The firm is one of the top market maker firms on Wall Street. He founded his family firm with an initial investment of $5,000, after attending Hofstra University Law School. He saved the money earned from a job lifeguarding at Rockaway Beach in Queens and a part time job installing underground sprinkler systems.

A force in Wall Street trading for nearly 50 years, he has been active in the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), a self-regulatory organization for the U.S. securities industry. His firm was one of the five most active firms in the development of the NASDAQ, having been known for “paying for order flow,” in other word paying a broker to execute a customer’s order through Madoff. He argued that the payment to the broker did not alter the price that the customer received. He ran the investment advisory as a secretive business, however.

Dan Horwitz, counsel of Mr. Madoff, in an interview, said that “he is a longstanding leader in the financial-services industry with an unblemished record; he is a person of integrity; he intends to fight to get through this unfortunate event.” Mr. Madoff was released on his own recognizance on the same day of his arrest, after his 2 sons turned him in, and posting $10 million bail secured by his Manhattan apartment. Without entering any plea, the Court set the preliminary hearing for January 12.

Madoff’s hedge fund scheme may rank among the biggest fraud in history. When former energy trading giant Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001, one of the largest at the time, it had $63.4 billion in assets. The scheme would dwarf past Ponzis, and it would further be nearly five times the telecommunication company WorldCom fraud and bankruptcy proceedings in 2002.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a separate civil suit on Thursday against Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities and its eponymous founder Mr. Madoff. It was docketed as “U.S. v. Madoff,” 08-MAG-02735, by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). SEC, New York associate director of enforcement, Andrew M. Calamari, asked the judge to issue seizure orders on the firm and its assets, and appoint a receiver. The SEC pleads, among others, that “it was an ongoing $50 billion swindle; our complaint alleges a stunning fraud that appears to be of epic proportions.” It further accused the defendant of “paying returns to certain investors out of the principal received from other, different investors” for years. Madoff’s hedge fund business had previously claimed to have served between 11 and 25 clients and had $17.1 billion in assets under management. But virtually all of the assets were missing.

United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Louis L. Stanton on Thursday appointed Lee Richards, a Manhattan lawyer, as the firm’s receiver. A hearing is set for Friday, for a ruling on the SEC’s petition to grant plenary powers to the receiver over the entire firm, and an absolute asset sequestration.

Doug Kass, president of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management said that “this is a major blow to confidence that is already shattered — anyone on the fence will probably try to take their money out.”

Saturday, September 27, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. Liberal candidate Susan Kadis is standing for re-election in the riding of Thornhill.

During the recently disbanded session of Parliament, Mrs. Kadis was the Official Opposition Critic for National Revenue. She served as a member of the Caucus Committee on Economic Prosperity and a member of the Standing Committee on Health. She was elected as Chair of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Liberal Caucus. The former publisher of The Thornhill Times community newspaper, she has served as a school trustee and City Councillor. She has served on the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation’s Board of Directors, being a survivor herself.

Wikinews contacted Susan, to talk about the issues facing Canadians, and what they and their party would do to address them. Wikinews is in the process of contacting every candidate, in every riding across the country, no matter their political stripe. All interviews are conducted over e-mail, and interviews are published unedited, allowing candidates to impart their full message to our readers, uninterrupted.

The incumbent in the riding, Kadis faces three challengers: former broadcaster Peter Kent (Conservative), Norbert Koehl (Green), and Simon Strelchik (NDP). The riding of Thornhill includes the part of the City of Vaughan that is east of Highway 400 and south of Rutherford Road, and the part of the Town of Markham west of Highway 404. The previous MP in the riding was also Liberal, Elinor Caplan, who was the Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and later Minister of National Revenue.

For more information, visit the campaign’s official website, listed below.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

The Australian House of Representatives heard the traditional right-of-reply to the Budget released May 9, from the Australian Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley (Labor, Brand), plus Budget replies from minor parties in the Australian Senate.

While the Budget is politically popular, having as one of its main features significant tax reform, Beazley focused on the omissions in the Budget, such as the failure to address a skills shortage.

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.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

A robotic system at Stanford Medical Center was used to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery successfully with a theoretically similar rate of complications to that seen in standard operations. However, as there were only 10 people in the experimental group (and another 10 in the control group), this is not a statistically significant sample.

If this surgical procedure is as successful in large-scale studies, it may lead the way for the use of robotic surgery in even more delicate procedures, such as heart surgery. Note that this is not a fully automated system, as a human doctor controls the operation via remote control. Laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery is a treatment for obesity.

There were concerns that doctors, in the future, might only be trained in the remote control procedure. Ronald G. Latimer, M.D., of Santa Barbara, CA, warned “The fact that surgeons may have to open the patient or might actually need to revert to standard laparoscopic techniques demands that this basic training be a requirement before a robot is purchased. Robots do malfunction, so a backup system is imperative. We should not be seduced to buy this instrument to train surgeons if they are not able to do the primary operations themselves.”

There are precedents for just such a problem occurring. A previous “new technology”, the electrocardiogram (ECG), has lead to a lack of basic education on the older technology, the stethoscope. As a result, many heart conditions now go undiagnosed, especially in children and others who rarely undergo an ECG procedure.

Saturday, April 9, 2005

Following a Senate hearing in which the Bush administration’s nominee for EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, stoutly defended his plan to pay parents to document the effects on infants of insecticide use in the home, he reversed course and stopped the program.

Among the original requirements for the 60 families requested to be participants in the “Children’s Health Environmental Exposure Research Study” (CHEERS) study according to EPA were that they must:

• Live in Duval County, Florida
• Be a parent of a child under the age of 13 months
• Spray or apply or have pesticides sprayed or applied inside your home on a routine basis (You do not need to change your regular household routine for the study.)

This original version of the requirements can be viewed in the Internet Archive, a free online repository that creates copies of websites on a regular basis. The third requirement was reworded by November 2004, according to the Internet Archive: “Maintain your normal pesticide or non-pesticide use patterns for your household. We will not ask any parent to apply pesticides in their home to be a part of this study.”

According to the above document, the area of Jacksonville/Duval County was chosen for reasons of existing year-round high usage of pesticides and other household chemicals within the home, as well as relevant data from existing prior studies. The study involved researchers visiting the home of participants, parents videotaping their children’s activities with a supplied camcorder, children wearing a small “activity sensor”, and parents collecting food and urine samples for detailed analysis of the effects of chemical exposure to common commercially available chemicals, primarily pesticides, on which “current information… is very limited” [1].

Selection for the study began in fall 2004. As incentives for their participation in the planned two-year study, parents were to be given $970, a t-shirt, and other gifts, and would have kept the video camera at its conclusion.

Complaining that the study was necessary, Johnson yielded to two Democratic Senators who had threatened to block him, using all means available, from officially taking the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency, of which he is the acting head. The block on his nomination was lifted afterwards although some Democratic Senators would not say how they would vote on the final nomination.

Under his guidance, the EPA agreed to accept $2 million for the controversial $9 million CHEERS study from an industry trade group, the American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical insecticide manufacturers. The study was to be conducted with the cooperation of the Duval County Health Department, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta.

Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bill Nelson, (D-FLA), demanded the cancellation of the study as proof of Johnson’s acknowledgement of what she called a “gross error in judgment”.

“The CHEERS program was a reprehensible idea that never should have made it out of the boardroom, and I am just happy that it was stopped before any children were put in harms way,” Boxer said. She added that testing on humans should not be a part of any United States environmental policy.

“I am very pleased that Mr. Johnson has recognized the gross error in judgment the EPA made when they concocted this immoral program to test pesticides on children,” Boxer said.

Work on the study was halted last November by Johnson while an independent review of the study’s design was conducted at his request. Part of the reason for the study’s current cancellation was what the EPA in its press release has termed “mischaracterization” of the nature of the study as though children were being deliberately sprayed with pesticides.

Johnson defended his approach, “I have concluded that the study cannot go forward, regardless of the outcome of the independent review. EPA must conduct quality, credible research in an atmosphere absent of gross misrepresentation and controversy. I am committed to ensuring that EPA’s research is based on sound science with the highest ethical standards.”

In November 2004, William Farland, an administrator with the EPA’s research department, told The Oregonian, “There’s no suggestion that we are asking them to use pesticides. We simply want them to continue to carry out their day-to-day activities.”

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Wikinews held an exclusive interview with Wayne Allyn Root, one of the candidates for the Libertarian Party nomination for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Root is the founder and chairman of Winning Edge International Inc., a sports handicapping company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition, he is an author and a television producer, as well as an on-screen personality both as host and guest on several talk shows.

Root, a long-time Republican, declared his candidacy for the Libertarian Party on May 4, 2007.

He says he is concerned about the qualities of many who run for president, and fears that they do not know the needs of American citizens. He also says that they cater to big businesses instead of small ones.

He has goals of limiting the federal government and believes that the US went into Iraq for wrong reasons. A strong supporter of the War on Terror, he feels that it was mishandled. He has conservative values and came from a blue collar family in New York. He graduated from Columbia University with fellow presidential hopeful Barack Obama in 1983.

Root believes that America is in trouble and hopes to change that if elected.