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Friday, January 19, 2007

In November 2006 Pensacola, Florida evangelist Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, were found guilty on 58 federal counts of “willful failure” to payroll taxes, structuring bank withdrawals, and obstructing federal agents. On January 19, 2007 Hovind was given ten years in federal prison, ordered to pay $640,000 in owed funds to the Internal Revenue Service, pay prosecution’s court costs of $7,078, and serve three years parole once released. Originally in November, Hovind was ordered to forfeit $430,400 and faced a maximum of 288 years in prison.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Striking New York City transit workers will return to their jobs in 12-24 hours under an agreement reached today. While no final contract agreement has been reached, transit work will resume as negotiations continue. At 2:40 pm EST, the TWU board voted to end the strike. By 3:00 pm, the TWU Local 100 website had posted a notice to workers to return to work.

Mediator Richard Curreri announced the union is “taking steps” to immediately restore transportation to the city. “We have requested the leadership of the TWU to take the actions necessary to direct its membership to immediately return to work and they have agreed to take such actions,” Mr. Curreri told reporters.

Thirty-four thousand Transport Workers Union Local 100 members walked off the job December 20 after working months without a contract when negotiations broke down over disagreements concerning pensions, health benefits, and pay. Agreement had nearly been reached, but just a few hours before a strike deadline, the Metropolitan Transport Authority’s chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, made an unexpected demand, requiring that all new transit workers increase the contribution to pensions from the present 2 percent of their wages to 6 percent, which upset the union members. Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, stated “Were it not for the pension piece we would not be on strike.” and summed up the whole conflict as “a fight over dignity and respect on the job, a concept that is very alien to the MTA. Transit workers are tired of being underappreciated and disrespected.”

The strike has affected an estimated 7 million commuters in the city over three days, which is about 21 million person-days in total. New York’s 34,000 bus and subway workers are affected by the difficulty of their everyday working conditions and health standards for a total of about 10 million person-days per year.

Published:Wednesday, September 7, 2005Updated:Saturday, September 10, 2005 (Travolta, Preston, Moore, Stones, Three Doors Down, Johnson, Smith)

After Hurricane Katrina passed across the United States, various artists and media stars have leapt at a call to action.

John Travolta and wife Kelly Preston flew his private plane to deliver a load of supplies and tetanus vaccine to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Part of a Scientology project which has been using their non-massage “assists”, in an interview Preston mentioned that “auditing” had also been performed on victims.

Kevin Smith is holding an online auction on his Web site.

Sean Penn actually went to Louisiana. After loading down a small boat with his entourage, it was discovered one of them had neglected to seal a hole in the bottom. Penn was wearing a white vest rather than a life vest while bailing. After the motor wouldn’t start, the crew paddled down a flooded New Orleans street. Bystanders jeered at whether any victims could fit aboard the crowded craft. No report on rescue stunts. Local authorities had previously been criticized for not allowing volunteer boaters in to help.

Morgan Freeman, whose home fared well, is organizing an online auction of celebrity items at charityfolks.com, to benefit the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.

Curt Schilling opened his home to a family of nine driven out of their New Orleans home. The Schilling family will provide housing for the Fields for a year while their home in New Orleans is rebuilt and repaired.

Some celebrities “graced” disaster zones with their presence in the days following Katrina.

Singer Macy Gray and television personality Phil McGraw visited Houston’s Astrodome.

Celebrities visiting New Orleans include Michael Moore (opposite side of lake), singer Harry Connick, Jr., CNN’s Anderson Cooper, actor Jamie Foxx, singer Faith Hill, actor Matthew McConaughey, singer Lisa Marie Presley, comedian Chris Rock, and The Oprah Winfrey Show contributor Lisa Ling and interior decorator Nate Berkus.

Oprah Winfrey visited New Orleans, Houston, and Mississippi.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

While this wasn’t Interview with the Vampire, getting a live interview with Jimmy Wales of the Wikimedia Foundation is requiring more work and planning than ever. Four contributors to four different Wikinews language editions (with Swedish, Netherlands, and Polish) arranged to interview “Jimbo” in the Wikinews IRC channel, squeezed in before interviews with a periodical and a cable news source.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

A jury in New Jersey yesterday acquitted a Newark man of murdering five teens who vanished in the city in 1978. The prosecution had contended Lee Anthony Evans trapped the boys in an empty house before burning it down.

Alvin Turner, 16; Melvin Pittman, 17; Randy Johnson, 16; Ernest Taylor, 17; and Michael McDowell, 16 disappeared on August 20, 1978. Recently homicide detectives got involved and in March last year they arrested Evans and his co-accused Philander Hampton. Hampton, Evans’s cousin, had told police in 2008 that the pair were behind the teens’ deaths and, although witnesses placed the boys in Evans’s pickup truck, his testimony alone linked Evans to the mystery.

Evans represented himself through the majority of the case, although he did get his court-appointed lawyer, Olubukola Adetula, to take control of much of the trial’s latter stages. The case has been on trial since October 28. It was Adetula who cross-examined Hampton.

The defense noted the poor record of drug dealer and user Hampton, who has spent time in jail for crimes including theft. He confessed in a plea deal that sees him sentenced to ten years in prison in exchange for his testimony, but will be eligible for parole within months as he has already served most of the two years required by 1978 guidelines.

Hampton testified Evans, who is now 58, burned the quintet alive in revenge after discovering they had broken into his property and stolen a pound of cannabis. Evans often offered odd jobs to the teens and Hampton said Evans brought the youths in two trips to the vacant Camden Street house on the pretense of helping move boxes.

Hampton, who is set to be paid $15,000 by the state to assist his relocation for his safety, testified he acted as a guard for the first two youngsters whilst Evans brought the second group; he claimed to have believed all that was planned was a stunt to scare the five. He further told the court that Evans imprisoned all five in a cupboard sealed by a solitary nail, pouring gasoline (petrol) onto the building’s floors. Hampton said he gave Evans a match, who then set the house alight.

Other witnesses described seeing the boys in the back of Evans’s truck, and friends of the missing told the court the five had previously broken into Evans’s home to steal the drug. All five had small quantities of cannabis in their rooms when they vanished. However, testimony was inconsistent; the time of the final drug theft was in dispute, and Evans made a point of inconsistencies in testimony about the last known sightings of the boys, claiming accounts of them in his vehicle had changed over time.

The house in question was destroyed by fire. Specially trained dogs and sonar equipment both failed to show any trace of bodies at the site and the defense pointed out police searched a second site, which they said implied Hampton’s account was not fully believed. It took thirteen hours of questioning before Hampton volunteered his claims, and police spent a year attempting to find evidence to reinforce them without success.

The jury has been deciding its verdict since Friday and spent roughly twelve hours deliberating. Victims’ relatives wept as the foreman read out the verdicts, and Michael McDowell’s sister Terry Lawson insisted “not guilty does not mean innocent. Mr. Evans may have escaped the law but never the lord.” She nonetheless expressed gratitude the case went to trial. Multiple family members, including Lawson, have previously expressed confidence Evans killed their loved ones.

Evans sobbed after leaving court, after asking Judge Patricia K. Costello to tell him “You’re dismissed”. “Man, you won,” a friend told him, but Evans said he did not feel a winner although he was glad of the result. “That was the jury that wasn’t the people… It’s like someone put you in the oven and burned you up. You can’t undo that.”

He went on to claim Essex County officials and Newark mayor Cory Booker engaged in a corrupt conspiracy against him, with Brooker using the arrests to aid his re-election campaign; Evans claims the timing was no coincidence. Brooker denies the allegations. Evans contends he should never have been prosecuted.

Costello has promised to later deal with what she called “astonishing” behavior by assistant prosecutor Peter Guarino. Retrials were twice sought by the defense and denied; once, he asked a witness if they knew of an unrelated murder by the accused’s late brother. The other time a police officer appearing for Guarino as a witness mentioned a statement that two men were seen fleeing the fire; Costello had already said this was inadmissible evidence because the person behind the claim had since died. These incidents led to discussions without the jury present.

“[W]e are of course disappointed in the verdict, but respect the jury’s process,” said Essex County Acting Prosecutor Carolyn Murray. To answer a press question, she added “with respect to this case criminally, this case is closed.”

Sunday, July 19, 2015

French Formula One (F1) driver Jules Bianchi died on Friday night at age 25, nine months after his serious accident at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix. News of his death was announced by his family the following morning:

This is the first F1 race-related driver death since the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, when Ayrton Senna was killed.

On October 5, 2014, at the late portion of the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka Circuit, Bianchi collided with a tractor crane that had been attending to the crashed car of Adrian Sutil. Bianchi’s helmet became wedged underneath the tractor, causing a diffuse axonal injury, and he fell into a coma. After being treated at a Japanese medical centre, he was moved about two months after the accident to a hospital in Nice. Placed in the intensive care unit, in December he began rehabilitation therapy. Bianchi’s father, Philippe, described his non-progress as a “daily torture”.

Bianchi, the 2007 French Formula Renault and 2009 Formula 3 Euro Series champion, was the inaugural member of the Ferrari Driver Academy. He joined F1 team Force India in 2012. In 2013, he joined Marussia F1; the following year, at the 2014 Monaco Grand Prix, he scored his and Marussia’s first points with a ninth-place finish.

After the accident, the FIA, which sanctions Formula One racing, formed a panel to investigate the crash. Afterwards, the group revealed its findings: as Bianchi entered the run-off area of the track, he disabled the failsafe mechanism by “[applying] both throttle and brake together, using both feet”, while his front wheels were locked; the panel also stated he did not slow down enough to control his car. Eventually, F1 mandated the use of the “virtual safety car”, which requires drivers to enter the pit lane at slower speeds instead of proceeding around the track.

This is the Bianchi family’s second driver death. Lucien Bianchi, the 1968 24 Hours of Le Mans winner and Jules’s great uncle, was killed in 1969 during testing at Circuit de la Sarthe, where the 24 Hours of Le Mans race is held.

Upon the news of his death, many drivers sent their condolences through social media. Bianchi’s Marussia team mate Max Chilton tweeted, “No words can describe what his family and the sport have lost. All I can say [is] it was a pleasure knowing and racing you.”

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

An Oklahoma police officer is on paid administrative leave, following an altercation with ambulance personnel while they were transporting a patient to the hospital. Trooper Daniel Martin, a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP), was caught on video by his police vehicle’s dashboard-camera in a physical struggle with paramedic Maurice White, Jr. after Martin pulled the ambulance over. Martin had previously passed the ambulance while en route to another call, but came back and pulled over the ambulance. The incident occurred on May 24, and footage from the police dash-cam was released following a tort claim filed by paramedic White.

It has also been suggested that the previous call had in-fact been to pick up his wife from a police station who was then present in the car during the incident between Martin and the ambulance.

Footage by the OHP released Friday shows the ambulance personnel repeatedly informing Trooper Martin that they have a patient in the back of the ambulance that they are in the midst of transporting to the hospital. Martin yells at the ambulance driver for making what he claims was an obscene gesture – the ambulance driver asserts he raised both hands signalling confusion at the police officer’s actions. Trooper Martin can be heard telling the ambulance driver “I’m going to give you a ticket for failure to yield, and when I go by you saying ‘What’s going on?’ you don’t need to give me no hand gestures now, I ain’t going to put up with that [expletive], do you understand me?”

The video from the police dash-cam is eight minutes long, and paramedic White can be seen twice being pushed up against his ambulance by Trooper Martin. In one instance, Martin shoves White up against the ambulance while gripping his neck tightly with his other hand. In a written statement, paramedic White described the hold placed on him by the Trooper, stating “he engaged my trachea in a claw-like grip digging his nail into my neck while partially shutting off my air supply.”

The sister of the patient in the ambulance, Clara Harper, was following the ambulance and witnessed the incident. Harper later viewed the footage from the police dash-cam, and she stated to Tulsa World paramedic White “never once became aggressive to that trooper.” She asserted that “He did nothing wrong.” After the ambulance was allowed to continue transporting the patient to the hospital, Harper got into the ambulance to be with her sister. “She was scared, and I was trying to calm her down and telling her everything was going to be all right,” said Harper.

Paramedic White was interviewed by KOKI-TV, and recounted his thoughts as the incident was taking place. He stated his main concern was for his ambulance patient: “It was surrealistic because I’ve never had such an experience. My biggest concern was for the patient. If there’s any nightmare from this, it’s because of what that mother, that patient, had to go through.” White’s attorney told KOKI-TV that if White deemed the arrest to be unlawful, he had the right to resist it. White is a paramedic for Creek Nation Emergency Medical Services in Oklahoma. He told FOX News he was surprised at the actions of the police trooper. “He’s taken an oath, just as I have, to protect and serve. I could not believe that this was happening,” said White.

The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety decided to release the police dash-cam video publicly after amateur video of the incident was posted to the video-sharing website YouTube. Captain Chris West, spokesman for the OHP, explained why the video was not released earlier. “We’ve been well aware of the fact that this incident has drawn enormous attention, but made the decision to protect the integrity of the investigation, any and all relevant evidence, as well as the rights of the department employees,” said West. Prior to the release of the dash-cam video, a relative of the patient had posted video of the incident to YouTube. The son of the ambulance patient can be seen in a video stating to the camera “Highway patrolman pulled over my mom’s ambulance because he’s mad we didn’t pull over, and he tried to arrest … the EMT from taking my mother to the hospital.”

Richard O’Carroll, the lawyer for paramedic White, said that Trooper Martin abused his authority as a police officer. “Everything on this needs to relate back to why are we here? One man is there protecting a patient and one man is there abusing his authority and throwing his weight around,” said O’Carroll. White’s attorney filed a tort claim on behalf of his client in order to get the video of the police vehicle’s dash-cam released. Trooper Martin’s lawyer says he did not realize a patient was in the ambulance at the time of the incident.

O’Carroll explained the decision of paramedic White not to use sirens while transporting his patient to the hospital: “There was a reason he wasn’t running sirens. There was a suggestion of chest pains and a heart condition and sirens aggravate these conditions by increasing the blood pressure.” However the attorney for Trooper Martin, Gary James, said that the ambulance was not exempt from regulations because it did not have its sirens on. “If they’re not running their sirens or lights, they don’t get afforded any emergency vehicle exemptions,” said James. The OHP chief is handling an internal review into the incident. As of June 1, Trooper Martin has been on paid administrative leave.

Monday, December 14, 2020

On Tuesday, US-based software company Red Hat announced their plans to shift their focus away from CentOS in favour of CentOS Stream.

In the blog post Chris Wright, the Chief Technological Officer of Red Hat said Red Hat had informed the CentOS governing board that Red Hat was “shifting our investment fully from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream”. At least five of the nine CentOS Governing Board listed on the project are Red Hat employees.

Started in 2004, CentOS has been a free-of-cost free/libre open source software which provided binary-code compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) — Red Hat’s GNU General Public Licensed paid operating system. CentOS was absorbed into Red Hat in 2014, with Red Hat gaining the trademark rights of “CentOS”.

Red Hat also sponsors the Fedora operating system. Red Hat even gives the software engineering interns laptops with Fedora on it. Till now, software development took place on Fedora, which was later adopted in RHEL, which the Red Hat maintained and provided support for, for those customers who had RHEL subscription. CentOS would then follow RHEL to provide the same features free of cost, but without the support.

Stream was announced in September 2019, just two months after Red Hat was acquired by IBM. CentOS Stream’s development cycle had new features added to it before the features became a part of RHEL. Stream receives more frequent updates, however, it does not follow RHEL’s release cycle.

With CentOS Stream, developments from the community and the Red Hat emplyees would take place beforehand on both Fedora, and Stream as a rolling release, before those features are absorbed into RHEL. CentOS followed the release cycle of RHEL and therefore it was a stable distribution. Features available in CentOS were tried and tested by Fedora, and then RHEL maintainers. Stream, on the other hand, has features added to it before those features become a part of RHEL. That implies Stream would be ahead of RHEL’s development, containing new features which are not yet tried and tested by RHEL developers, and not be binary code-compatible with RHEL.

Writing “The future of CentOS Linux is CentOS Stream”, Wright further wrote in the announcement, CentOS Stream “provides a platform for rapid innovation at the community level but with a stable enough base to understand production dynamics.” Wright also said, “CentOS Stream isn’t a replacement for CentOS Linux; rather, it’s a natural, inevitable next step intended to fulfill the project’s goal of furthering enterprise Linux innovation.”

Since the announcement was made, many people expressed their anger on Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Reddit and CentOS project’s mailing list. CentOS 8’s End of Life (EOL) has been moved up from May 2029 to December 31, 2021, while CentOS 7 is expected to receive maintenance updates through June 2024, outliving CentOS 8.

Gregory Kurtzer, who had started the CentOS project, announced a new operating system, Rocky Linux. Rocky Linux describes itself as “a community enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux”. The project said “Rocky Linux aims to function as a downstream build as CentOS had done previously, building releases after they have been added to the upstream vendor, not before.” The project maintainers have not decided a date for when the operating system will be released.

Kurtzer explained the reason to call the OS as Rocky Linux: “Thinking back to early CentOS days… My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T [hat tip] to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you…Rocky Linux”.

Wikinews reached out to the members of the CentOS project, Pablo Greco and Rich Bowen, to discuss this move, its implications as well as the future of CentOS. Greco is a maintainer of armhfp (32-bit processors) and is a part of the CentOS’ quality assurance team. Bowen — who unlike Greco, works for Red Hat — is the community manager of the CentOS project.