Monday, August 3, 2009

Since declaring victory over the self styled “Black Taliban” last week, new accusations of extra-judicial killings and summary executions have been leveled against the Nigerian authorities.

The allegations centre around the death of the charismatic leader Mohammed Yusuf of the Boko Haram sect and an unconfirmed number of his followers. Yusuf was captured after five days of violence which saw the shelling of the sect’s compound in Maiduguri and an extensive manhunt.

New pictures have been revealed of Yusuf showing him shortly after his capture from a hole in the ground at a property owned by the family of one of his four wives. Shortly after the photograph was taken the bullet ridden body of Yusuf was shown to a television crew who had been expecting to interview him. The Nigerian authorities seemed initially intent on humiliating Yusuf and using his capture to cow his remaining followers, as other footage shows Yusuf pleading not to be harmed.

The death of Yusuf has been condemned by human rights activists and although extra-judicial killing has been denied, the official line being Yusuf died while trying to escape custody, his death has been described by Information Minister Dora Akunyili as being “good for Nigeria”.

Despite the Nigerian military initially claiming that under 400 have been killed, with the majority being militants killed when the sect’s compound was shelled, the Red Cross claim that at least 780 have been killed in Maiduguri alone.

The deaths come in the wake of attacks by the Boko Haram sect over the arrest of its leaders. Arrests that came after it was feared that the sect was planning an armed uprising in an attempt to impose Sharia law in a nation that is half Christian. The sect centered on its heartland Maiduguri, targeted police stations and security personnel with everything from machetes to poison arrows.

Boko Haram is a fundamentalist group opposed to the west and western education, it considers the majority of Muslims in Nigeria to have been contaminated by western education and that the only true Muslims in Nigeria as one who pray at Boko Haram mosques and who adhere to its teachings.

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

At least one person is seriously wounded and one dead after a 17 year-old male opened fire and shot his ex-girlfriend, Jessica Forsyth, 17, four times outside the Herbert Henry Dow High School located in Midland, Michigan before turning the gun on himself. The shooter was pronounced dead on the scene and according to Midland Police Chief, James St. Louis, the shooter died in the parking lot of the school while the girl is in a local hospital. She is said to be in stable but serious condition at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan.

Chief St. Louis says that the boy pulled out a gun and began to shoot the girl after the two had a conversation. He then shot himself. St. Louis also said that the mother of the girl, who had dropped her daughter off at school for the day, tried to stop the incident from happening by driving her car in between the girl and boy, but was not successful. The boy, whose name is not known, apparently had stored the gun inside his backpack.

According to Midland Deputy Chief, Bob Lane, the boy was not a student at the school and was not granted access into the school. Lane also stated that the boy then placed a phone call to Forsyth telling her to meet him outside the school just before 11:00 a.m. [EST].

The school hosts nearly 1,500 students. The school was in lockdown, but according to a statement on the school’s website, the lockdown was cancelled.

“This morning a shooting incident took place at Dow High outside the building near the cafeteria. A Code Red lock-down was issued, but has been lifted,” said the statement.

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Two pilots are uninjured after a United States B-2 Spirit stealth bomber crashed at Andersen Air Force Base, a U.S. airbase on Guam. No one on the ground was injured as a result of the crash either.

According to a statement released by the U.S. Air Force, the two pilots from the 509th Bomb Wing were able to safely eject from the plane before it crashed into the ground at around 10:45 a.m. local time (00:45 GMT) and are said to be in good condition. Witnesses say a large plume of black smoke could be seen rising from the wreckage.

It is not yet known what caused the crash, but an investigation is ongoing.

The plane was making a visit to the island from Missouri’s Whiteman Air Force Base which is home to all of the U.S.’s 21 B-2 bombers. Each plane costs about 1.2 to 2 billion U.S. dollars to build. Some of the bombers along with B-1B‘s are sometimes switched from Guam to the AFB in a routine rotation.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The European Commission currently has proposals on the table to extend performers’ copyright terms. Described by Professor Martin Kretschmer as the “Beatles Extension Act”, the proposed measure would extend copyright from 50 to 95 years after recording. A vast number of classical tracks are at stake; the copyright on recordings from the fifties and early sixties is nearing its expiration date, after which it would normally enter the public domain or become ‘public property’. E.U. Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy is proposing this extension, and if the other relevant Directorate Generales (Information Society, Consumers, Culture, Trade, Competition, etc.) agree with the proposal, it will be sent to the European Parliament.

Wikinews contacted Erik Josefsson, European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.), who invited us to Brussels, the heart of E.U. policy making, to discuss this new proposal and its implications. Expecting an office interview, we arrived to discover that the event was a party and meetup conveniently coinciding with FOSDEM 2008 (the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The meetup was in a sprawling city centre apartment festooned with E.F.F. flags and looked to be a party that would go on into the early hours of the morning with copious food and drink on tap. As more people showed up for the event it turned out that it was a truly international crowd, with guests from all over Europe.

Eddan Katz, the new International Affairs Director of the E.F.F., had come over from the U.S. to connect to the European E.F.F. network, and he gladly took part in our interview. Eddan Katz explained that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is “A non-profit organisation working to protect civil liberties and freedoms online. The E.F.F. has fought for information privacy rights online, in relation to both the government and companies who, with insufficient transparency, collect, aggregate and make abuse of information about individuals.” Another major focus of their advocacy is intellectual property, said Eddan: “The E.F.F. represents what would be the public interest, those parts of society that don’t have a concentration of power, that the private interests do have in terms of lobbying.”

Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the U.K.’s Open Rights Group (O.R.G.), joined our discussion as well. “The goals of the Open Rights Group are very simple: we speak up whenever we see civil, consumer or human rights being affected by the poor implementation or the poor regulation of new technologies,” Becky summarised. “In that sense, people call us -I mean the E.F.F. has been around, in internet years, since the beginning of time- but the Open Rights Group is often called the British E.F.F.“

Thursday, November 8, 2007

What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White. His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism. It is not for the faint. He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother’s amorous pursuit.

The fact is, Edmund White exists. His life exists. To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950’s America and that White’s work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White’s enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.

Thursday, May 11, 2006

The Australian House of Representatives heard the traditional right-of-reply to the Budget released May 9, from the Australian Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley (Labor, Brand), plus Budget replies from minor parties in the Australian Senate.

While the Budget is politically popular, having as one of its main features significant tax reform, Beazley focused on the omissions in the Budget, such as the failure to address a skills shortage.