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Sunday, October 4, 2015

Nine people were killed on Thursday by 26-year-old Chris Harper Mercer on the campus of Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. By various reports seven or nine people were also injured. Officials said Mercer killed himself during the subsequent shootout with police.

Mercer began the killing spree in a class where he was a student by shooting the class teacher, and killed eight students in that and at least one other classroom. In the next classroom, a student nurse unsuccessfully tried to save the life of her friend who was wounded by the gunman. Another student, ex-soldier Chris Mintz, was shot seven times after coming to help.

The reasons for the attack are not known but CNN reports he singled out people who identified themselves as Christian. The BBC noted Mercer may have revealed his plans via social media and possibly left a written statement. He briefly served in the US Army in 2008.

An ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) agent said authorities found six weapons at the college and a further seven weapons from the gunman’s home, including a shotgun, all of which appear to have been obtained lawfully by Mercer and members of his family. State laws permit people to carry concealed weapons in higher education institutions and at least one other person at the college was armed. Oregon recently passed a new gun law in response to a shooting incident in 2012, in which a man used a stolen rifle to murder two other people in a Portland shopping center.

Later on Thursday, President Barack Obama spoke for twelve minutes about the incident and called for stricter gun controls in line with other countries like Australia and the United Kingdom. Referring to earlier similar shootings, he said “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it. We have become numb to this”. This is reportedly the fifteenth occasion Obama has spoken out after such a killing spree. He expressed his belief that there would soon be a “press release” from the pro-gun lobby, who would call for a reduction of gun controls. He also predicted there would be criticism levelled at him about his politicization of the matter, but he said “this is something we should politicize.” Although no new initiative was outlined, Obama highlighted Congressional opposition which had stopped “the collection of data on shooting incidents” and stated “this is not something I can do myself.”

Thursday, August 21, 2008

August 21, 2008 is the 12th major day of the 2008 Olympic games. The below article lists some of the highlights.

Olga Kaniskina, who represents Russia, has set a new Olympic record in the women’s 20km walk with her time of 1 hour and 36 minutes. After the race Kaniskina said that the weather did not affect the record.

“I think my regular training is the most important factor contributing to my victory,” she said, explaining the factors that she believes led her to victory.

Britons Iain Percy and Andy Simptson won the gold medal in the star class sailing event after a successful performance in the final round, which took place today. The pair started today in silver medal position, and gained one place in the final round to win the gold medal.

Spanish Fernando Echavarri and Anton Paz won an Olympic gold medal in Sailing’s fast Tornado catamaran class. Darren Bundock and Glenn Ashby from Australia finished in second place and the Argentinean pair of Santiago Lange and Carlos Espinola won the bronze medal.

Maarten van der Weijden, a long distance swimmer from the Netherlands, beat the favorites in the men’s marathon 10 km swimming event to secure the gold medal with a time of 1:51:51.6. David Davies, who was one of the favourites to win the gold medal, was overtaken by Weijden in the final 500 metres of the race.

Davies finished 1.5 seconds behind Weijden.

Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh won the Olympic gold medal for the United States in the women’s beach volleyball competition by winning every set in the final against the Chinese Tian Jia and Wang Jie.

Both sets were won 21-18.

American LaShawn Merritt won the final of the Men’s 400 meters in an event which saw all three of the medals going to the American team.

Jamaican Veronica Campbell-Brown won the gold medal in the final of the women’s 200m sprint with a time of 21.74 seconds.

Allyson Felix, the defending Olympic champion, who was representing United States, won the silver medal, with her time being approximately 0.2 seconds behind the time of the winner.

Nelson Evora won the men’s triple jump at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Evora won the gold medal with a jump of 17.67 meters beating silver medalist Phillips Idowu of Great Britain by 5 centimeters (17.62 meters). Leevan Sanders of the Bahamas won the bronze medal with a triple jump of 17.59 meters. link Nelson Evora of Portugal Wins Men’s Triple Jump Gold Medal

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Billy Werber, third baseman in Major League Baseball, has died at the age of 100. Werber died of natural causes on Thursday, January 22, 2009 at an assisted living center in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was moved there after his health deteriorated a month ago.

His son said that when admitted, Werber refused to eat solid foods and would only drink liquids. “He just refused to eat and that was his plan,” Bill Werber Jr. told the Associated Press. He added that his father was “sharp up until four weeks ago”.

Born William Murray Werber on June 20, 1908 in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, he played for the New York Yankees from (1930, 1933), the Boston Red Sox from (1933-1936), the Philadelphia Athletics from (1937-1938), Cincinnati Reds from (1939-1941) and the New York Giants from (1942).

In 1934, Werber became the starting third baseman of the Red Sox. He responded with a career-high .321 batting average, including 200 hits; led the American League with 40 stolen bases, and posted double digits in doubles (41), triples (10) and home runs (11). He led the league in stolen bases in 1935 (29) and 1937 (35). Boston traded him to the Philadelphia Athletics for the 1937 season, and he joined the Cincinnati Reds in 1939.

In an 11-season career, Werber was a .271 hitter with 78 home runs and 539 RBI in 1,295 games. One of the most aggressive baserunners of the 1930s, probably the most aggressive next to Ben Chapman, he stole 215 bases. He was inducted into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame in 1961.

His wife Kathryn ‘Tat’ Werber died in 2000, after she and Werber had been married 70 years. Bill Werber Jr. says that his father is to be cremated and services, which will be open to the public, will be held on the weekend of January 31 through February 1.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Former US President Bill Clinton left New York Presbyterian Hospital on Friday after undergoing an hour-long operation to insert two stents into one of his coronary arteries the previous day. Clinton has had previous heart troubles. For instance, in 2004, the former president underwent quadruple bypass surgery in order to restore blood flow to four blocked arteries.

Dr. Allen Schwartz, the chief of cardiology at the hospital, publicly stated that there was “no evidence of [a] heart attack or [of] damage to [Clinton’s] heart,” and that what occurred was “not a result of either his lifestyle or diet, both of which have been excellent.”

According to a statement from a personal assistant to Clinton, he is currently convalescing at his home in Chappaqua, New York.

Those close to the family subsequently speculated that Clinton’s “punishing schedule” could possibly have caused these problems. Some of his recent work has included being a United Nations special envoy to Haiti, having previously visited the country twice since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, which struck the island nation on January 12 2010.

Clinton is now said to be in “good spirts” as having resumed much of his normal work.

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Australia –James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, said last week that he believes Microsoft is wrong in its decision to support C and C++ programming languages in the common language runtime in Microsoft .NET. According to him, this decision may lead to severe security flaws in .NET. Gosling is currently in Australia, giving talks and visiting friends.

According to Gosling, the problem lies with the programming languages and some of their characteristics: “C++ allowed you to do arbitrary casting, arbitrary adding of images and pointers, and converting them back and forth between pointers in a very, very unstructured way.”

The Java language was developed due to limitations of C++. Gosling began using C++ for the former Sun Microsystems‘s star-seven project. At that time Gosling concluded C++ was inadequate and created the Oak language. The Oak language would become the language known today as Java. The former star-seven project shares its defining characteristics with networked software applications today: safety and portability.

Gosling continues: “If you look at the security model in Java and the reliability model, and a lot of things in the exception handling, they depend really critically on the fact that there is some integrity to the properties of objects. So if somebody gives you an object and says ‘This is an image’, then it is an image. It’s not like a pointer to a stream, where it just casts an image.”

Charles Sterling, a Microsoft developer and product manager of the .NET framework, didn’t entirely disagree with Gosling’s thoughts. But he said that .NET defines different types of code. And there is the code which is managed by the .NET framework. All new Microsoft languages, such as C# and Visual Basic.NET, produce only code managed by the .NET framework, so they are safe.

A key idea that has not shown up in Gosling’s talk is that Java itself allows a very similar process to occur. Java’s JNI (Java Native Interface) allows the integration of the same unsafe code that prompted Gosling’s central thesis.

However, Gosling says languages like C and C++ can still produce unsafe code which would not follow the rules of safety of .NET. This sort of code, usually found in old software applications, requires additional .NET permissions to execute. Sterling says it is up to developers to decide whether or not to use unsafe code in their .NET applications.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Saeb Erekat, head of the Palestinian Negotiation Group, delivered to the UN Security Council on Tuesday a letter from the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, urging the UN to tend to the issue of Palestinian administrative detainees in Israeli prisons who have gone on a hunger strike. He further noted that a new Israeli bill, allowing to force feed hunger strikers, undermines international conventions.

The reportedly longest group hunger strike in Palestinian history is currently taking place. It was initiated in April by 125 Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli prisons, in a protest against Israel’s detention policy, which allows imprisonment without trial or conviction. Since the beginning of the hunger strike, about 80 of them are being treated in hospitals, some facing severe health risks. Some striking prisoners have told Egyptian paper Al-Masry Al-Youm they are determined and will not cease until they win or die a martyr’s death. They have also told the paper they had sent letters to the Egyptian leadership, asking it to tend to their situation and put an end to administrative detentions.

With the ongoing hunger strike, an Israeli bill has been drafted, allowing force-feeding of hunger striking prisoners, and use of extra force if needed. Arab Organization for Human Rights prisoners affairs committee manager Janan Abdu said, in communication with Al-Masry Al-Youm, “After the success of individual hunger strikes by Khader Adnan, Hana Shalabi, and Samer al-Issawi and others, Israel is trying to apply a law on forced feeding, which is internationally forbidden and which violates international human rights and the Fourth Geneva Convention, to break the will of prisoners”.

Aviation articles by Wikinewsie Iain Macdonald.

This Category ‘sub-page’ will display up to 500 articles which one of the project’s contributors has written on a specific topic.

Friday, March 30, 2007

At Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, students are finding that popular MP3 players, such as Apple’s iPod, are very convenient devices for listening to music at the gym, while traveling on foot, and in the car.

In a recent ad-hoc survey conducted by Wikinews contributor Darren Mar, 150 students were randomly pulled aside in the hallways of the university, and asked if they own an MP3 player. 94 of the 150 students (62.66%) did in fact own MP3 devices, most of who were found to be carrying it on them when questioned. There was one simple follow up question for those who had a player: “If it were possible to have complete and safe control of the device on the steering wheel of a car, would you rather listen to your device, or the radio?” There were three answers possible, yes, no or both. Of the 94, 78 (82.98%) said yes, eleven (11.70%) said no, and five (5.32%) said both. The reporting took place primarily on March 16, 2007. The reasons for those who would listen to their device were commercial free music, personalized choice of music, and complete control of what you are listening to.

This study was motivated by the new design of 2006+ model cars. Many are being built with auxiliary jacks for the stock radio, allowing the driver to easily connect any audio playing device to the car’s sound system with a simple 3.5mm plug. What’s more, cars in the upper price echelon are being built with (1) a custom made area in the dash for MP3 players (iPod’s being the most popular), and (2) implementing audio device control right onto the steering wheel. A good example of this is the Ford Fusion or the 2007 Lexus IS250: “The centre console input port allows an iPod, MP3 or Windows Media Audio player to be plugged into the IS audio system.”