This past Sunday, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a bill known as “Rocky’s Law” that requires Illinois high schools, through the local school district, to buy catastrophic injury insurance up to US$3 million or medical costs for up to five years, whichever one comes first, that covers student athletes. The insurance must cover student athletes while they are competing.
The legislation was named after Rasul “Rocky” Clark. In 2000, the Eisenhower High School football player became paralyzed from the waist down as a result of a tackle during a game. His school based health insurance covered the costs of his medical treatment. A legislator sponsoring the bill noted that the need for this type of insurance is rare. Clark’s mother attended the legislation signing. Her son died last year.
Before parents can claim money from school insurance, they first must pay out US$50,000. Schools have until January 1, 2014 to comply with the law. Schools cannot charge students more than US$5 to defray the cost of insurance. If a school district already requires student to be covered through private health insurance, they are exempted from this law.
The weather at Churchill Downs on May 5 was 84F/29C with humidity at 54 percent and a dry track.Image: Milk’s Favorite Cookie.Map of Louisville, Kentucky.
I’ll Have Another won the 138th Kentucky Derby as he slipped past Bodemeister near the end of the race to take first place Saturday at Churchill Downs with Dullahan following them for third place.
Mexican jockey Mario Gutierrez rode I’ll Have Another, who was (13-1 odds), past Bodemeister (6-1 odds) by 1 1/2 lengths. The finishing time was 2:01 4/5. Previously, the winning horse had a victory at the Santa Anita Derby at Santa Anita Park.
Bodemeister and Trinniberg sprinted out of the gate and were the early leaders throughout the race with Bodemeister leading for the majority of the race. Experts had thought that Trinniberg could cause some horses and riders to sprint with him at the beginning of the race.
Union Rags, who was the favorite, finished sixth in the field. Prior to the race, experts had ranked I’ll Have Another third.
According to NBC, the owner, trainer and jockey all won their first Kentucky Derby. The race was broadcast by the NBC network in the United States. The crowd at Churchill Downs for the 2012 race was 165,307.
The official Kentucky Derby website has tallied the picks from all of their experts into a single Power Ranking. These were the experts’ pick for the top five places in order of finish, as it appeared before the race.Union RagsCreative CauseI’ll Have AnotherGemologistHansen
THE HORSES
According to the official Kentucky Derby website, the horses that competed this year in the Kentucky Derby by starting position include:
1. Daddy Long Legs was the winner of the UAE Derby at Meydan. He is owned by the partnership of Derrick Smith, Mrs. John Magnier, and Michael Tabor. Daddy Long Legs is trained by Aidan O’Brien and the jockey was Colm O’Donoghue.
2. Optimizer is trained by D. Wayne Lukas, owned by tobbacoist Brad Kelley of Bluegrass Hall LLC and ridden by Jon Court.
3. Winner of the Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, Take Charge Indy, is owned by Chuck and Maribeth Sandford. He is trained by Patrick Byrne and his jockey was Calvin Borel. Borel had winning horses in 2009 and 2010.
4. Expert’s top pick, Union Rags, is owned by Chadds Ford Stable. He is trained by Michael Matz and was ridden by Julien Leparoux.
5. Dullahan is owned by Donegal Racing. His trainer is Dale Romans and his jockey was Kent Desormeaux. He raced the fastest time at the 2012 Blue Grass Stakes.
6. Bodemeister, winner of the Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park, is trained by Bob Baffert. He is owned by Zayat Stables in Cairo and his jockey was Mike Smith.
7. Rousing Sermon is owned by Larry and Marianne Williams, Tree Top Ranches. His jockey was Jose Lezcano and he is trained by Jerry Hollendorfer.
8. Creative Cause is owned by Heinz Steinmann and trained by Mike Harrington. His jockey was be Joel Rosario.
9. Trinniberg is trained by Bisnath Parboo from Tranidad and his son, Shivananda Parhboo, is the owner of Shivananda Racing and the horse. The jockey was Willie Martinez (jockey).
10. Daddy Nose Best was the winner of the Sunland Derby at Sunland Park and The El Camino Real Derby at Golden Gate. He is owned by Cathy and Bob Zollars, trained by Steve Asmussen, who is also training Sabercat, and his jockey was Garrett Gomez.
11. Alpha is a female owned by Godolphin in Dubai. She is trained by Kiaran McLaughlin and will be ridden by Rajiv Maragh.
12. Winner of Tampa Bay Derby, Prospective, is owned by John C. Oxley. He is trained by Mark Casse and his jockey is Luis Contreras.
13. Went The Day Well is owned by Team Valor International and is trained by H. Graham Motion. His jockey was John Velazquez. This team won last year’s race with Animal Kingdom
14. Hansen was the winner of the Breeder’s Cup Juvenile race at Churchill in November. He is owned by Dr. Kendall Hansen and Sky Chai Racing. His trainer is Mike Maker and he is ridden by Ramon Dominguez.
15. Trainer Todd Pletcher, who has previously won a Kentucky Derby, has two horses in the race. One is Gemologist. He is owned by WinStar Farm LLC. His jockey is Javier Castellano.
16. The other is El Padrino, owned by Let’s Go Stable, trained by Pletcher and ridden by Rafael Bejarano.
17. Done Talking, winner of the Illinois Derby at Hawthorne, is owned by Skeedattle Stables. He is trained by Hamilton Smith and his jockey was Sheldon Russell.
18. Son of Kentucky Derby 2006 runner-up Bluegrass Cat, Sabercat, is owned by Winchell Thoroughbreds. He is trained by Steve Asmussen and ridden by Corey Nakatani.
19. I’ll Have Another was the winner of the Santa Anita Derby at Santa Anita Park. He is owned by financier J. Paul Reddam, trained by Doug O’Neill and ridden by jockey is Mario Gutierrez.
20. Liaison is owned by Arnold Zetcher and trained by Bob Baffert. He was ridden by Martin Garcia.
On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. Christian Heritage Party candidate Pastor George D. Campbell is standing for election in the riding of Dartmouth—Cole Harbour.
Wikinews contacted John, 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.
Michael Savage of the Liberal Party won the riding’s first election in 2004, and serves as the Liberal critic for Human Resources Development. (Note that the riding, with different names and boundaries, has existed in some form since 1968. Its current size includes the Dartmouth and Cole Harbour areas of the Halifax Regional Municipality.) Along with Campbell, challengers for the riding include Brad Pye (NDP), Paul Shreenan (Green), and Wanda Webber (Conservative).
For more information, visit the campaign’s official website, listed below.
Ingrid Newkirk (with Little Man): “I want to more closely associate humans with the other animals, because if we took Biology 101 we know we are all animals. It’s just that we decide we’re gods, they’re trash. That’s just invalid, wrong from every point of perspective: scientific, moral and everything else. I want people to relate to the other animals.“Image: David Shankbone.
Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.
PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.
They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier‘s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.
The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.
David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.
Wikinews
This exclusive interview features first-hand journalism by a Wikinews reporter. See the collaboration page for more details.
Contents
1 The HBO film about her life
2 PETA, animal rights groups and the Animal Liberation Front
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter told Venezuelan newspaper El Tiempo that the United States was “likely behind” the failed 2002 coup that briefly unseated democratically elected president Hugo Chávez.
A coup by a civilian-military junta in 2002 removed president Chávez from office, but he quickly regained the position.
“I think there is no doubt that in 2002, the United States had at the very least full knowledge about the coup, and could even have been directly involved,” Carter told El Tiempo on Sunday. The Bush administration denied any involvement in the coup. Carter went on to say that it was understandable that Chávez still blames the U.S. for the coup.
Carter also stated his mixed feelings about Chávez, praising him for his social reforms but denouncing him for being uncooperative in making peace with the U.S.
County Hall, seat of Isle of Wight Council Image: Editor5807.
Vestas Wind Systems, whose closing wind turbine blade manufacturing centre in Newport, Isle of Wight, England remains the site of a occupation now in its 11th day, has suddenly announced that the consultation period preceding the closure of the plant has been extended, and that the plant will remain open until mid-August.
The announcement, which was reported not by Vestas but by the RMT, was described by RMT General Secretary Bob Crow as “another significant milestone in the fight to save the factory and 625 skilled manufacturing jobs in green energy.” The plant had been due to close today.
News of the delay comes hours after confused reports that Vestas was withholding redundancy payment for at least 525 of the workers whose jobs were lost. According to a report by the local newspaper the Isle of Wight County Press, cheques which employees had been expecting today did not arrive; instead, workers who contacted Vestas management were told they would not receive payment until an interview process had been completed, and that if they began new jobs before the interview process was over they would not receive their money. However, according to Ventnorblog, a local Isle of Wight blog which has been following the Vestas closure closely, the layoff process was being delayed because a majority of the Vestas employees were refusing to agree to the management’s redundancy plan.
The delay of the closure allows more time for the negotiation of potential solutions for the Newport plant to remain open. The Vestas occupiers and labour groups continue to favour nationalisation of the plant, with Socialist Party spokesman Nick Chaffey saying:
The courageous stand of the Vestas occupation and the huge support that stands alongside it from Vestas workers and beyond has rocked management and the government. With the vital support of the RMT and wider support from the trade union movement including PCS, POA and FBU, the workers’ demand for nationalisation is the only way to resolve this crisis.
In addition to the Vestas occupiers’ proposal that the factory be nationalised, Caroline Lucas, the MEP for South East England and a member of the Green Party, has proposed that Vestas employees should form a workers’ co-operative with government aid in order to keep the plant running. The Tory-dominated Isle of Wight Council has unanimously endorsed a resolution saying that the plant should stay open, and has called for new investors to take the Vestas plant over, as was done at a smaller Vestas plant in Scotland recently.
The news of the delay comes as workers at the plant accused Vestas management of harassing the families of the 24 remaining occupiers of the plant. Families of some occupiers were served with legal papers at their homes. One of the occupiers, Luke Paxton, left the factory on Thursday night in order to be re-united with his family; Paxton was checked for malnutrition and low blood sugar by paramedics but was not hospitalized, instead opting to go home. Paxton complained that Vestas management, while now providing hot food to the occupiers, were still under-feeding them; the RMT, which is providing legal aid to the Vestas workers, has accused Vestas management of violating the Human Rights Act by attempting to “starve the workers at Vestas into submission”.
Protesters in fancy dress were successful in sending food into the plant yesterday. Protesters dressed as a fantasy wizard and can-can dancers distracted police and company security guarding the fence which has been erected around the site while other protesters flung a bag of food and an electric kettle onto the balcony outside the office which has served as the occupiers’ home base inside the factory. No arrests were made but the protesters were removed from the factory grounds.
Requests for comment from Vestas management received no reply.
Tampa, Florida —Frank Ford, an honorably discharged U.S. veteran sergeant who works as a California state prison guard has reported witnessing torture in Iraq and the cover-upactivities of his commanding officers: December 8, 2004, Veteran sergeant accounts US torture coverup. Ford says he was hustled out of Iraq for psychological evaluations at military hospitals in Germany and USA as part of an Army cover-up strategy. David DeBatto, who wrote the original article about Frank Ford states that every doctor that evaluated Ford found him to be completely normal, with absolutely no psychological or mental health issues. However according to VeriSEAL, which claims to provide independent and no-cost verification of Special Operations Forces personnel backgrounds, the cover-up accusations are being made by a fake SEAL member.
Ford has already made several unsubstantiated claims including being a member of President Nixon’s security detail, a medical doctor, a nobleman with a castle in Europe, a Navy SEAL and knowing the exact location of Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid known as “Chemical Ali”. Also Ford has said he has saved the life of a soldier in Iraq, but according to the sources familiar with the incident—doctors and other witness—his claims were exaggerated and he did nothing more than hold the wounded soldier’s IV bag. The name of Ford is listed at the Identified SEAL Impostors page from VeriSEAL.
When inquired about some of the Ford’s exaggerated stories, David DeBatto said:Ford IS an inveterate braggart. This is beyond question as far as I am concerned. However, although that trait may make him unpopular with some, it does not make him a liar. Some people seem to have a hard time separating the two.
According to Ford he attended a discontinued BUD/S program for Navy corpsmen during 1980’s as a doctor assigned to a Navy SEAL team. However Navy records do not list Ford among the program graduates. About this DeBatto said: he called himself “Doc” when I met him too at Fort Bragg in February 2003. However, I asked him right away if he was an MD or PhD. and he told me no, he was just a medic, but he has always been referred to as “Doc” since becoming a Navy medic over 30 years ago. It just kind of stuck he said. He also said he was in some kind of medical school or internship, which, upon later research, turned out to be true. It ain’t Harvard, but it is a legitimate medical school. Actually Frank Ford is a “Doctor of Naturopathy” by the Clayton School of Natural Healing in Alabama.
According to Col. C. Tsai, a military psychiatrist who examined Ford at the Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, Tsai had found nothing at all unstable about Ford.” Tsai was also interviewed by Speigel Television in Germany on this issue. According to Capitain Vic Artiga, Ford’s company commander, who Ford implicates, he was evacuated for “combat stress” behavioal problems.
In a interview to Los Angeles Times reporter, Lt. Col. Timothy J. Ryan, Ford’s commander, said: all allegations of prisoner abuse in Samarra were investigated immediately and no wrongdoing was ever found. Lt. Col. Timothy J. Ryan is also implicated by Ford’s testimony.
Ford said that Artiga accused him of being “delusional” and gave him “30 seconds to retract or face psychiatric referral”. Artiga, who is a police officer in Redwood City as civilian, denied Ford claims:That’s just laughable. In my years as a policeman, I’ve done hundreds of investigations. I can tell yoou that the investigation we did was as thorough as they come.
According to Sergeant First Class Michael Marciello, an alleged witness, when Captain Vic Artiga saw an initial psychiatrist’s report, Artiga was, “livid”. He “stormed” back to the psychiatrist and “browbeat” her to change her report to read that Ford was mentally unstable, and ordered her to have Ford shipped out of the country. Ford was later strapped to a medical gurney and medvac’d out of Iraq. He was initially sent to Kuwait and eventually to Landstuhl, Germany. Ford then underwent psychological evaluation in Germany and also two bases in the United States for approximately 8 months.
The Ford accusation was reported by David DeBatto and the article can be seen at Salon News. The case is under investigation.
Eben Moglen, Columbia University Law Professor, will head the newSoftware Freedom Law Center (SFLC). An initial 4 million dollars has been provided by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to fund the project.
The law center will provide free legal service for open source projects and developers. In 2004 OSDL established a separate $10 million Linux Legal Defense Fund providing legal support for Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator and end user companies subjected to Linux-related litigation by the SCO Group. The new law center will not be affiliated with the OSDL.
“This is about taking care of the goose that laid the golden egg and not letting wolves come in the middle of the night and steal it away,” Moglen said during a press conference. “This is a legal firm not involved so much in litigating and defending as it will be for counseling and advising and nurturing non-profits and to prevent millions of dollars in litigation.”
Moglen will serve as chairman and director-counsel of the non-profit organization. Also on board as directors are: Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School; Daniel Weitzner, director of the World Wide Web Consortium‘s technology and society activities; and Diane Peters, general counsel at the OSDL. Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, will help manage as legal director.
Moglen, one of the world.s leading experts on copyright law as applied to software, will run the new Law Center from its headquarters in New York City. The Law Center will initially have two full-time intellectual property attorneys on staff and expects to expand to four attorneys later this year. Initial clients for the Law Center include the Free Software Foundation and the Samba Project.
Other services provided by the SFLC include: asset stewardship, to avoid intellectual property claim conflict; license review and compatibility analysis; legal consulting and lawyer training.
A Catholic school in Michigan, United States was evacuated today after several students became sick during a church service.
Bloomfield Hills Public Safety Director Rick Matott said St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School evacuated its 860 students around 9 a.m. EDT today. At least three children had passed out during the church service. Two children reportedly had to be taken to area hospitals.
Medical crews and hazardous material experts responded to the school to determine the cause of the illness. However, it is still not known what caused the students to become sick.
Students walked to the nearby Oakland Community College campus while they waited for their parents to pick them up.
St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School is about 15 miles northwest of Detroit.