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Tuesday, July 1, 2008

According to Polish radio station, RMF FM, almost half a million Polish z?oty (almost US$ 235,000) vanished from the bank account of Lech Wa??sa, a former President of Poland and the original leader of Solidarno?? (Solidarity). The case is already under investigation by the public prosecutor in Gda?sk.

The radio station identified the suspect as a former employee of Millennium Bank and the son of a former co-worker of Wa??sa. The Prokuratura alleges that Micha? L. stole about 870,000 z?oty (about US$408,000) from two bank accounts, one of which belongs to Wa??sa. The bank has already returned all the money.

Lech Wa??sa downplayed the situation. “I have all the money I had. I can show you I haven’t lost even a grosz“, he said in a interview with RMF FM.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Some of the notable pieces from the gold and silver hoard which was found in a private field in Staffordshire, England by a metal-detector user have been put on display in the British Museum in the city of London.

Approximately 1,500 pieces were found in July of this year; the discovery was reported by news sources in September. The value of the hoard itself is still being checked. 18 of the pieces have now gone on display in the museum in London, England, and can be seen by members of the public.

Fred Johnson, who is the owner of the land in which the hoard was found, said: “It’s been an incredible experience. I’m overwhelmed by it all. They say this will change the history books; it’s a strange thought that came from something lying in my field all this time. I’m trying to keep a level head about it. I’m trying not to think at all about the value of it.” Johnson will share the sum of the value of the hoard with Terry Herbert, who found the pieces. The hoard is believed to date back to the 7th century.

“People laugh at metal detectorists,” Herbert said in late September. “I’ve had people go past and go ‘beep beep, he’s after pennies’. Well no, we are out there to find this kind of stuff and it is out there.”

Michael Lewis is the deputy head of the Department of Portable Antiquities in the British Museum. Speaking to BBC News about this event, he said: “The view is that it was probably in some sort of container but that has not survived and it was deliberately hoarded, put into the ground, what is unclear is why, and I suppose what we find is they would have been objects that had been stripped from the enemies’ weapons.

“What is interesting about the hoard as a whole is all the objects are associated with war to some or a greater extent. What the hoard consists of is mainly gold objects, there are some silver ones, basically they have been stripped from whatever they were on for instance sword fittings. What it demonstrates is that the Anglo-Saxons as a people were very able to do amazing things with objects and I reckon people nowadays attempting to make these objects would have great difficulty in doing so.”

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.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

A lawsuit filed by a former employee of Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children (now Sunrise Children’s Services) and four other tax-payers, has shed light on the possibility of religious coercion by the organization. The lawsuit challenges the faith-based agency’s eligibility for state funds.

Specifically, interviews of children conducted by the state of Kentucky have revealed complaints from some of the children. Mainly, children who said they were Catholic, Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witnesses or atheist voiced complaints in the interviews.

“They tried to more [or] less force me to become a Christian,” said one child in an exit interview. “I just felt I was being pressured into giving up my religion.”

Another child reported s/he was “not allowed to choose when or when not to attend a religious service,” per the interview, and was told “‘to do’ some type of Bible study during that time or get consequences.”

Both the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Sunrise say there is a strict policy against proselytizing in the program and that it does not prevent children from practising their individual faiths.

They also stress that these complaints number merely a “handful” among the approximately 1,500 children that are served by the faith-based agency.

“If a child says, ‘I don’t want to go to the Baptist church,’ then the child does not go,” Jonathan Goldberg, the state’s attorney, said. Some children might have mistankenly believed they were forced to go, he added.

The plaintiffs are seeking to have the interviews unsealed, at least in the cases where the child is now 18 years of age or older. The state and Sunrise argue they need to be kept confidential.

The lawsuit originated with Alicia Pedreira, who was fired in 2000. She alleges her firing was direct result of Sunrise (then Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children) finding out she is a lesbian.

Sunrise Children’s Services provides residential programs and foster care homes for children that have suffered abuse or neglect. Since 2001, Kentucky has paid Sunrise US$61 million to provide the services for children who would otherwise be in direct state custody.

In 2001, the state did find cause for action against one of Sunrise’s homes to fix “a coercive religious environment” where staff members confirmed that church attendance was required.

With accusations of undue pressure by a Christian agency funded by the state, the Sunrise case bears some similitude to the lawsuit against Iowa for paying Chuck Colson’s evangelical agency to run part of its prison.

Last June, U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt strongly reprimanded and ruled against Iowa’s use of a Christian social service agency to administer its prison. Judge Pratt stated: “For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions… There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

The Iowa ruling is pending appeal.

Critics point to both of these cases as failures of George W. Bush’s faith-based services initiative. The program is often seen as conflicting with the tradition of separation of church and state in the United States.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Zork Hun is running for the Libertarian party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Parkdale-High Park riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his 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.

Friday, March 9, 2007

IBM and Cisco have announced the development of a new platform, based on Eclipse and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), which should unite all communication and collaboration software developers under a single platform.

Before the UC2 (Unified Communication and Collaboration) the unified communication has suffered because of a lack of a platform to be used by all software developers, rather than a series of them and, moreover, provided by different vendors. According to Adam Gartenberg from IBM Lotus Software Group this was the main cause for this partial stagnation.

However, the UC2 is meant to ease the work of software developers. Gartenberg stated that this platform is very flexible and will certainly draw much attention form programmers. They will be able to create different plug-ins and small applications to remotely control other, major application.

The companies have also unveiled a series of their other joint projects. These project will be based on a set of application programming interface from Lotus (SameTime) and Cisco.

The add-ons planned are integration of a series of additional functions and features into the SameTime software from Lotus. Thus, in a few months, the SameTime users will benefit from such functions as click-to-call and voicemail. This will enable easier instant messaging inside the Cisco’s Unified IP phones’ system.

The fact that the platform will be based on Eclipse will make the numerous developers create many communications services, mainly for remote users to benefit from a series of new functions of ERP and CRM applications.

Nortel Networks – a partner of Microsoft since last year and Cisco’s rival in the area – didn’t have much success in the communication services field.

As for Microsoft, the experts are waiting for the reaction of the Bill Gates’ company on the ideas and offers made by IBM and Cisco for enterprise communications and collaboration solutions.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Canada has a budget surplus of CA$13.8 billion for the 2006–2007 fiscal year, totaling 1% of Canada’s gross domestic product (GDP), Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced today. The record surplus was boosted by revenue from government corporations to $14.2 billion, far exceeding the government’s projections of $9.2 billion and surpassing the record set by the previous year’s $13.2 billion surplus.

By federal law, all surplus must be used to pay down Canada’s debt, and is not available for spending. $90 billion in debt payments over the last ten years have reduced its debt to $467 billion or 32.3% of national GDP, its lowest level in a quarter century. The announced debt payment is the largest in Canadian history.

The payment also reduced Canada’s annual interest payments by $725 million, which the government pledged to pass on to taxpayers through tax returns and reduced income taxes. The Conservative’s “Tax Back Guarantee”, proposed in the March budget, promises that money saved on interest payments will be deducted from Canadians’ taxes. The Globe and Mail predicts the tax returns will be 30–40 dollars per taxpayer.

Canada has posted ten consecutive budget surpluses in the last decade. The Canadian economy, the 8^th largest in the world, has benefited from rising global demand for its export commodities, particularly oil and copper, as well as record corporate profits. This surplus was further increased by a $700 million drop from expected government spending.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper cautioned that the Canadian economy is still facing “tough times” in its forestry, manufacturing, and some export industries. Critics point out that the Conservative government had said Canadians were overtaxed when they took office, and had vowed to eliminate “surplus surprises”.