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Monday, November 2, 2020

The following is the sixth and final edition of a monthly series chronicling the 2020 United States presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

This month’s spotlight on the campaign trail: the Free and Equal Elections Foundation holds two presidential debates, three candidates who did not participate in those debates give their final pleas to voters, and three political pundits give their predictions on the outcome of the election.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Chief Executive of Volkswagen Martin Winterkorn issued on Sunday a public apology and announced an outside inquiry would be carried out, after the company became engulfed in a scandal about diesel emissions tests.

Over the weekend there were damaging revelations that the car manufacturer has been using illegal software to enable diesel cars to cheat on mandatory emissions tests.

An investigation into alleged breaches of environmental law was originally initiated on the advice of the International Council on Clean Transportation, a European NGO. The United States Environmental Protection Agency requested tests be carried out by West Virginia University, where the secret software was discovered.

Volkswagen has suffered a significant drop of almost a fifth in the value of its shares. There have been knock-on effects for other car manufacturers who have also seen their share values fall after suggestions that the scandal could extend much further than just Volkswagen.

The company will have to foot the bill for the recall of close to 500,000 VW and Audi cars. There is also the possibility of paying federal fines of up to US$18 billion dollars because the US Clean Air Act sets a maximum fine of US$37,500 for each vehicle that contravenes the requirements of the Act.

The software, known as a “defeat device”, enabled cars to identify when they were being tested and to switch on the emission control system. The devices may have been adding urea to the car exhaust because that would reduce the amount of nitrogen dioxide. The car would release a fraction of the nitrogen oxide compared to when they were being driven normally. Emissions of nitrogen oxide contribute to smog and are thought to have caused a rise in respiratory illnesses like asthma.

Monday, April 4, 2022

On Friday, a fire broke out in the Waheen Market in the capital of Somaliland, Hargeisa. 28 people have been injured, but no deaths were reported.

The fire began at around 20:00 EAT (1700 UTC). Firefighters had difficulty accessing the site, with firefighters bringing the situation under control by early yesterday. The cause is not yet known. President of Somaliland Muse Bihi Abdi has visited the market, pledging USD1 million in aid. He estimated that fire-related damages would run into millions of dollars.

Waheen Market has over 2,000 stores and makes up 40-50% of the Hargeisa economy, according to Hargeisa chamber of commerce chairman Jamal Aideed. The city of 1.2 million people was preparing for extra activity as Friday was the first day of Ramadan.

The President of Somalia, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, telephoned Abdi to offer sympathy. Prime Ministers Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom have also expressed their support.

Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia in 1991 and operates as an autonomous state, though it has not yet achieved international recognition.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Ten billion songs have been downloaded from the iTunes Store, an online digital media store which is owned by Apple Incorporated. Louie Sulcer, of Woodstock in Georgia, downloaded “Guess Things Happen That Way” by American musician, Johnny Cash, which became the ten billionth song downloaded from iTunes. Sulcer won an iTunes gift card worth US$10,000 (approximately £6,550 or €7,380), after purchasing a song on the iTunes Store to win the prize.

Beforehand, Apple had launched a competition entitled “Countdown to 10 Billion Song Downloads”, where the person to make the ten billionth “entry” of a song from the iTunes Store would win the gift card. An “entry” could be created by either downloading a song from the iTunes store, or by filling in a form on the Apple website.

The rules of the competition stated that “the downloading of the 10 billionth song is considered to be either the downloading of the 10 billionth song from iTunes or the receipt of the non-purchase entry after the download of the 9,999,999,999th song, whichever comes first.” Below is a table of the twenty most downloaded songs of all time from Apple’s iTunes Store. The list was initially placed on the website.

Friday, February 17, 2006

Ex-CIA agent Ray McGovern, of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, has called for people with inside information on the alleged US-Israeli threats to launch an attack on Iran to become whistleblowers by revealing this information. McGovern is strongly critical of the George W. Bush administration of the US.

He claims that he personally had missed a chance to try to stop the Vietnam War by failing to whistleblow about a cable sent by General Abrams on August 20, 1967 regarding a significant underestimate of Vietnamese troop numbers.He called for “shedding light on what the Bush administration is up to beneath the spin” and asked that “Those of you clued into Israeli plans and U.S. intelligence support for them might clue us in too.”

McGovern alleges that an attack on Iran is likely to happen in March, saying “Anyone who has been near a TV in recent weeks has heard the drumbeat for war on Iran. The best guess for timing is next month.”

He recommended from his personal experience “Don’t bother this time with the once-independent congressional oversight committees… Nor should you bother with the once-independent New York Times. Find some other way. … just be sure you get the truth out – information that will provide the oxygen for democracy.”

McGovern also claims that whistleblowing could have stopped the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, saying “Any number of people would have had a good chance of stopping the Iraq war, had they the courage to disclose publicly what they knew BEFORE it was launched.” Just five days before the attack on Iraq officially started, McGovern and his colleagues called for whistleblowing and claimed that the Bush administration was misrepresenting the case for an attack on Iraq. McGovern described the administration’s information on March 15, 2003, saying “It’s been cooked to a recipe, and the recipe is high policy.”

In September 2004, McGovern along with Daniel Ellsberg, who had precipitated a national uproar in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, the US military’s account of activities during the Vietnam War, to The New York Times, along with several other colleagues had already announced that they would form a whistleblowers’ support network for revealing possibly classified information regarding the conduct of the occupation of Iraq.

Friday, September 26, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. New Democratic Party candidate Don Davies is standing for election in the riding of Vancouver Kingsway.

A lawyer, he has spent the last 25 years fighting for human rights. A two-time student government representative, Davies was involved in the anti-apartheid, third world and peace movements. Admitted to the Alberta Bar in 1989, Davies and family moved to Vancouver in 1991, where he became the Director of Legal Resources for Teamsters Canada (Local 31), the next year. He is a long-time volunteer for children’s charity Variety, is Chair of the Parent Advisory Council at Mount Pleasant school, and a Director of the Meridian Cultural Society, among other things.

Wikinews contacted Don Davies, 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 riding is vacant, after Conservative Minister of International Trade David Emerson’s resignation. Emerson was elected in 2004 as a Liberal, serving as the Minister of Industry. Two weeks after re-election in 2006, he crossed the floor to join then-new Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had won a minority government. Emerson was the first MP in Canadian history to cross the floor before a new government was sworn in. He has stepped down, after pressure from other parties.

Besides Davies, major party candidates include Liberal Wendy Yuan, Conservative Salomon Rayek, and Green Doug Warkentin. Also putting their hat in the ring are Matt Kadioglu (Libertarian), Kimball Cariou (Communist), and Donna Peterson (Marxist-Leninist).

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

This Saturday at 11 am, Davies will host NDP leader Jack Layton in the Commodore Ballroom at “rally4change”.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The name Robert Cailliau may not ring a bell to the general public, but his invention is the reason why you are reading this: Dr. Cailliau together with his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, making the internet accessible so it could grow from an academic tool to a mass communication medium. Last January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged.

Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.

Wikinews: At the start of this interview, we would like to offer you a fresh pint on a terrace, but since this is an e-mail interview, we will limit ourselves to a virtual beer, which you can enjoy here.

Robert Cailliau: Yes, I myself once (at the 2nd international WWW Conference, Chicago) said that there is no such thing as a virtual beer: people will still want to sit together. Anyway, here we go.