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Thursday, October 9, 2008

London, England – The very first newscaster to ever appear on Sky News in the UK, and one of their primary anchors for almost 14 years, Bob Friend, has died at the age of 70.

Bob joined Sky News back in 1989 from the British Broadcasting Corporation, where he had been based for over 20 years and was a major face on the channel. He anchored their primetime evening news slots at 7 and 10pm, in partnership with his co-anchor Anna Botting.

He retired from Sky News through ill health, his last broadcast being in 2003. Bob’s death from a malignant brain tumour was announced this morning on Sky News’ website.

Leading the tributes, Rupert Murdoch, president of News Corporation and British Sky Broadcasting, owners of Sky News, said Bob was:

Monday, May 30, 2005

In what may possibly be the largest Gay Pride parade in the world, hundreds of thousands of people marched along the streets of São Paulo, Brazil today in the Parada do Orgulho GLBT de São Paulo. Many marchers were demanding the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Brazil is the largest Roman Catholic country on Earth, and the Roman Catholic Church has consistently opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage in the country. The National Congress of Brazil has debated legalization for 10 years, and such civil marriages are currently only legal in Rio Grande do Sul. The original bill was drafted by former mayor of São Paulo, Marta Suplicy. The proposed legislation, after being amended, is now in the hands of Roberto Jefferson. Protesters hope to collect a petition of 1.2 million signatures to present to the National Congress in November.

People carrying flags and banners, some dressed in lavish carnival costumes, walked and danced in the ninth annual Gay Pride parade, stretching for 3.5 kilometres along Avenida Paulista. Traffic was diverted throughout most of the city, and drinks and snacks vendors took advantage of the barriers across many streets. Prominent people joining the parade were the actor Sergio Mamberti, representing the Culture Minister Gilberto Gil, and senator Eduardo Suplicy.

Organizers stated that 2.5 million people attended, and police stated that there were 1.9 million — figures which would make the event the largest of its kind in the world — including 700,000 visitors from other cities and countries. This was an increase from 2004, when police stated that 1.5 million people attended.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Denunciations of corruption, bribe, collection of bribes from refugees [1] and of sexual scandal involving the peacekeepers [2], [3] threaten the Organization of the United Nations (UN).

The gravest denunciations involve the aid project to Iraq, called Oil-for-Food. Grave denunciations of bribe exist, superfluous accounting and collaboration with the ex-dictator Saddam Hussein, against staff of the UN, companies and politicians of several countries. Even the secretary of the UN, Kofi Annan was suspicious of participation in the plan of corruption. And also grave doubts still hover about his son, Kojo Annan.

The gravity of the denunciations threatens not only the credibility of the UN, but its existence.

Secretary Kofi Annan said that he is going to promote reforms in the organization. [4]

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Voters in the small Channel Island of Sark, a Crown dependency of the British Crown, have voted in their first democratic election, bringing an end to almost 4½ centuries of feudal rule.

Voting in the election opened at 10:00 local time (UTC) today, and closed at 18:00. The result is expected to be announced at 22:00.

57 candidates were competing for the votes of the 474 residents eligible to participate in the election, to win 28 seats.

Roger Olsen, the first person to vote in the election, commented on the transition to democracy. “Sark has an opportunity to express itself, to determine its own destiny,” he commented. “We like to make our own decisions. Now we’re set up to do exactly that,” he continued.

He also stated the he believed the island needed “fresh eyes, new blood and a new perspective”.

Suzie Thorpe, the next voter, commented on the issues which concerned her during this election. “We need a good sustainable economy. But we don’t want the island to change too much. We don’t want any helipads, thank you.”

Sark was the last feudal state remaining in the Western world, and the transition was forced by European human rights legislation that requires democratic governments.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Marion Schaffer is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the Oakville 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.

Saturday, December 16, 2006

A Toronto team of scientists have discovered a trigger for Type 1 diabetes, a breakthrough that could lead to the overall prevention of the common disease.

The team discovered that abnormal nerve endings in the pancreas’ insulin-producing cells (Islets of Langerhan) initiated a chain reaction that caused Type 1 diabetes in lab mice. However, when they removed the nerve cells, the mice did not develop the disorder.

According to Dr. Hans Michael Dosch, a senior scientist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and the study’s lead investigator, this indicates the diabetes may be a disease of the nervous system, not just an autoimmune disease.

Traditionally, research has primarily been concentrated on the immune system and the reasons why it attacks and destroys the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas, which are grouped in islets.

But Dosch, working alongside colleagues at Sick Kids, the University of Calgary in Alberta and Maine’s Jackson Laboratory, identified a control circuit between islet cells and their associated sensory nerves.

Disruption of this circuit led to inflammation around the islets and eventually to their destruction. Without these cells, the mice were unable to produce insulin.

“This control circuit is the real cause of diabetes,” Dosch said.

Experts agree the findings, reported yesterday in the journal Cell, will dramatically change the foundations of diabetes research.

“It really is a breakthrough for the diabetes community,” said Pam Ohashi, a professor of immunology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Campbell Family Institute for Breast Cancer Research.

Dosch plans to move quickly in transferring his tests on lab mice to human subjects. He plans to launch a clinical trial in January to figure out if human patients who have a high risk of Type 1 diabetes have the same sensory nerve abnormalities displayed by the mice.

“If they do, then we have fantastic new therapeutic strategies,” said Dosch, who is also a professor of pediatrics and immunology at U of T (University of Toronto).

Michelle Wing knows the toll diabetes takes on a family. Her 8-year-old daughter Marielle has the disorder, and her two young sons, ages 4 and 18 months, are considered high risk for developing it. Diabetes runs every aspect of their lives, she said, explaining how the family is bound by an extensive and relentless routine of blood tests, insulin injections and strict meal times. Dosch plans to invite the family to participate in the clinical trial.

Wing said she was moved to tears when she learned that researchers may have found a way to one day prevent Type 1 diabetes.

“Seeing what Marielle goes through every day of her life, to prevent other children from going through that,” Wing said. “To prevent other parents in the middle of the night worrying their child will go into a diabetic coma,” she mused. “It’s fantastic that there could be a prevention of this for other children.”

More than 200,000 Canadians suffer from Type 1 diabetes, which mostly develops in childhood or in the teen years. It is not to be confused with the more common Type 2 diabetes, where the body doesn’t make enough insulin or use the existing insulin efficiently.

Insulin is a hormone produced by the islet cells that stabilizes blood sugar levels in the body. Sufferers of Type 1 diabetes have to take regimented daily insulin injections and continuously monitor their blood sugars. The injections are not a cure, and many patients still develop side-effects of the disease like stroke, blindness, heart attack, and kidney failure.

More research will be put in motion quickly to see if the same treatment applied to the lab mice will be effective in humans for preventing Type 1 diabetes, or better still, if it will shed new light on treatment methods for Type 2 sufferers, according to Dosch.

Also, in a surprising twist, the researchers also found that injecting substance P, a chemical secreted by nerve cells, into the mice who had damaged or inflamed islet cells, not only eliminated the inflammation process, but reversed it.

“The blood glucose normalizes overnight and it stays low for weeks to months — this is with a single shot,” Dosch said.

“We now have 4-month-old mice that are non-diabetic that used to be diabetic,” he added.Dr. Ehud Ur, professor of medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and chair of the clinical and scientific division of the Canadian Diabetes Association cautioned that the research is still in its early days. Like some other experts, he is skeptical about whether diabetes can be cured, noting that these findings have no relevance to people who already have Type 1 diabetes.

“We have a whole new target for therapy,” he said. “It’s always been the pancreas or the immune system. Now we have a new player.”

Still, he knows that the discovery of nerves controlling pancreatic functions is a major step towards developing more efficient treatment for the millions affected worldwide.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

A 182-page report issued September 1 by the United States National Research Council warns that the amount of debris in space is reaching “a tipping point”, and could cause damage to satellites or spacecraft. The report calls for regulations to reduce the amount of debris, and suggests that scientists increase research into methods to remove some of the debris from orbit, though it makes no recommendations about how to do so.

NASA sponsored the study.

A statement released along with the report warns that, according to some computer models, the debris “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures”. According to the Satellite Industry Association, there are now about 1,000 working satellites in Earth orbit, and industry revenues last year were US$168 billion (£104.33 billion,€119.01 billion).

The debris consists of various objects, such as decommissioned satellites and exhausted boosters, but the vast majority of the particles are less than one centimetre across. 16,094 pieces of debris were being tracked as of July, although estimates put the current number at over 22,000. The total number of fragments is thought to be as high as tens of millions. While most of the debris is very small, some of it is travelling at speeds as high as 17,500 mi h^-1 (28,164 km h^-1; 7,823.3 m s^-1).

The International Space Station sometimes has to dodge larger fragments, and in June its crew was forced to prepare to evacuate due to a close encounter with debris.

The UK Space Agency told Wikinews that space flight “is likely to be made more difficult” by the debris. However, communications will “[n]ot directly” be affected, “but if the GEO ring became unusable, there is no other altitude at which objects appear [‘]geo-stationary[‘] and so all antennas on the ground would then have to move in order to track the motion of the satellites”.

Donald J. Kessler, the lead researcher and former head of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, said that “[t]he current space environment is growing increasingly hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts,” and suggested that “NASA needs to determine the best path forward for tackling the multifaceted problems caused by meteoroids and orbital debris that put human and robotic space operations at risk.”

Two events are thought to be the largest individual sources of space debris. Kessler said that “[t]hose two single events doubled the amount of fragments in Earth orbit and completely wiped out what we had done in the last 25 years”.

The first of these was a controversial 2007 Chinese anti-satellite weapon test, which smashed the decommissioned weather satellite Fengyun-1C into approximately 150,000 fragments over a centimetre in size—making up roughly twenty percent of all tracked objects—537 miles above the Earth’s surface.

The Chinese government has so far failed to respond to Wikinews’s queries regarding the incident.

The other is a 2009 collision between twelve-year-old active satellite Iridium 33 and the defunct Russian Strela-2M satellite Kosmos-2251—both weighing in excess of 1,000 lbs (454 kg)—that occurred 490 miles over Siberia, the first such collision. The Iridium satellite was replaced within 22 days, according to Iridium Communications, who operated it.

In a statement released to Wikinews, Iridium Communications said that they “received no warning of the impending collision. Although commercial projections of close encounters (commonly called conjunctions) were available, the accuracy of those projections was not sufficient to allow collision avoidance action to be taken.” They also made the assurance that the Air Force Space Command and United States Strategic Command now provide them with information through the Joint Space Operations Center, and that “when necessary, [they] maneuver [their] satellites based on this information to avoid potential collisions. [They] believe this is a substantial first step in better information sharing between the government and industry and support even more robust interaction which can provide better and more efficient constellation operation.”

Iridium expressed their support for “[l]ong-term investment to improve Space Situational Awareness” and “[i]mproved information sharing between industry and the U.S. government”, as well as more “[g]overnment support for policy and processes which would permit sharing of high-accuracy data as required to allow reliable assessment and warning” and “[i]ncreased cooperation between the government and U.S. and foreign commercial operators.”

They maintained that “the Iridium constellation is uniquely designed to withstand such an event. Because of the resilient and distributed nature of the Iridium constellation, the effects of the loss of a single satellite were relatively minor”, and that “any other system, commercial or military, which experienced the loss of a satellite, would have suffered significant operational degradation for a period of months if not years.” Nonetheless, the company is “concerned over the increasing level of risk to operations resulting from the debris in space.”

The report makes more than thirty findings, and more than twenty recommendations to NASA. None of the recommendations regard how to clean up the debris. However, it does cite a report by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which suggested various possible techniques for catching and removing space debris, such as magnetic nets.

However, international law does not allow one country to collect another’s debris. George J. Gleghorn, vice chair of the committee, observed that “[t]he Cold War is over, but the acute sensitivity regarding satellite technology remains”.

The debris will, in time, be pulled into the earth’s atmosphere—where it will burn up—by gravity, but more debris is being created faster than this can happen.

The report recommends collaborating with the United States Department of State on “economic, technological, political, and legal considerations.” As already mentioned, international law does not allow one country to collect another’s debris.

According to the report, “[t]he problem of space debris is similar to a host of other environmental problems and public concerns characterized by possibly significant differences between the short- and long-run damage accruing to society … Each has small short-run effects but, if left unaddressed, will have much larger impacts on society in the future.”

A spokesperson for the UK Space Agency told Wikinews that the organisation “does not have any plans to get directly involved with [the clean-up] initiative but through its involvement with NASA in the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, it is conducting studies to identify which objects present the biggest hazard and how many objects may need to be removed and from where.” It says that the viability of such an operation is “a question of treating the symptom or the cause of the problem. Building more physical protection is costly and if the environment deteriorates too far, becomes unviable. It is best to treat the root cause, the presence of debris in orbit, and remove the large objects before they can break up into many thousands of uncontrolled fragments capable of destroying a satellite on impact.”

The spokesperson also pointed out that “[u]nder current licensing regimes (such as in the UK), countries are now obliging operators to remove satellites from crowded regions of space at the end of operational life”.