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Saturday, November 4, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Don Valley East (Ward 33). One candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Zane Caplan, Shelley Carroll (incumbent), Jim Conlon, Sarah Tsang-Fahey, and Anderson Tung.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.

Saturday, July 16, 2005

A General in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and dean at the National Defense University in China commented to visiting Hong Kong reporters on Friday that the PLA might use nuclear weapons against the U.S., in a conflict over the Taiwan Strait. “If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition onto the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu said to the reporters of the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. “We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian [in central China]. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds … of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the remarks “highly irresponsible” and “unfortunate”, and expressed the hope that they did not reflect the views of the Chinese government.

Echoing the official Xinhua News Agency, the People’s Republic of China’s Foreign Ministry officials said that Zhu was expressing personal views, and had warned the reporters accordingly, but stated that China would never tolerate “Taiwan independence”. Reportedly, Maj. Gen. Zhu is not directly involved in the formulation of Chinese military strategy.

The U.S. may defend Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act and is currently Taiwan’s largest arms supplier.

Friday, May 18, 2007

British explorer and mountaineer Edward “Bear” Grylls, has set a new altitude record by piloting a powered paraglider above Mount Everest reaching 29,494ft (8,990m). He and his fellow pilot, Giles Cardozo, who had invented and developed the parajet engine, set out on their attempt from the Himalayan village of Pheriche (altitude 14,435ft (4,400m)) in the early morning of 14th May.

Grylls, 33, is a mountaineer, best selling author and television presenter who spent three years with the elite British Special Air Service (“SAS”) forces. During this time he was involved in a horrific parachuting accident in which he broke his back in three places, almost severing his spinal cord. Remarkably, in 1998, after months of rehabilitation, he became at 23, the youngest British climber to scale Mount Everest and return alive.

Cardozo is considered to be one of the top paragliding pilots in the world, and it is reported that he and Grylls first came up with the idea for the attempt about a year ago when he had invented the engine that would take them up the mountain.

Grylls and Cardozo flew their paragliders together to 28,001ft (8,353m) surviving temperatures of minus 76°F (-60°C) and dangerously low oxygen levels, when a fault developed in Cardozo’s engine, and he had to abort his attempt just 984ft (300m) below the summit. Grylls went on to reach his record height at 09.33 local time. He had originally intended to cross the Mountain but turned back to base camp fearing that he might be arrested if he entered Chinese airspace.

On his return to Kathmandu, Grylls voiced his feelings of loneliness and exhilaration:

The attempt was sponsored by British technology and engineering group GKN. The project, GKN Mission Everest, raised £500,000 (approximately $1m) for Global Angels, a charity helping children in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

In a separate incident, a German paragliding champion has survived being sucked up by a storm to a height of 32,612ft (9,940m) whilst preparing for a world paragliding championship in Manilla, New South Wales, Australia.

Ewa Wisnierska, 35, the 2005 World Cup paragliding winner, lost consciousness and was covered in ice and battered by orange-sized hailstones as she was pulled upwards by the sudden tornado-like storm which she had been attempting to skirt. After regaining consciousness as she descended she was able to make contact with her ground team which had been tracking her by her GPS equipment, and landed safely 40 miles (60km) from where she took off.

Remarkably she spent only an hour in hospital after her experience, being treated for frostbite and blistering to her face and ears.

A fellow competitor, 42 year old Chinese man, He Zhongpin, who was also caught up in the storm, was not so fortunate and died from lack of oxygen and the extreme cold.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Associated Press (AP) news agency has come under fire from the blogging community after issuing a number of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices against bloggers who have used extracts from AP articles.

Quoting from correspondence surrounding the takedown notices, a Drudge Retort contributor claims in his personal blog that not only is AP asserting that the quotes are a copyright violation, but that they also constitute ‘”hot news” misappropriation.

Wikinews contacted several people in an effort to get to the bottom of this issue. Rogers Cadenhead, one of the copublishers of the Drudge Report blog, brought Wikinews up to speed on the DMCA notices. The takedown notices were received by email on June 10, he said. This, in and of itself, constitutes an improper filing. The letter of the law requires that a DMCA notice be sent to the appropriate party by recorded postal delivery.

Cadenhead remains unaware of any other bloggers who have been similarly notified, and says receiving seven takedown notices left him “dumbfounded”. Previous Drudge Retort interaction with AP’s legal team had seen AP complain about people posting entire reports in the comments section of the site. These were quickly removed and users warned that this was inappropriate and indisputably a copyright violation, says Cadenhead.

Cadenhead goes on to discuss how blogs, and other social networking sites, are of benefit to mainstream media such as AP. He describes how the posting of excerpts and quotes helps drive visitors to the sites where the full article text can be found, “MSNBC publishes its news videos with an “embed” button that makes it possible to share them on blogs. If NBC sees the value of that, print-based media should recognize the benefits of encouraging the link-and-excerpt culture of bloggers. I heard on NPR yesterday that 20 percent of the New York Times web traffic is referred by blogs.”

There may be a longer-term strategy behind these actions from the Associated Press. A report on ChannelWeb indicates that AP wants to charge for excerpts of their online content. The pricing schedule reported on this site starts at US$12.50 for quoting five to twenty-five words and goes up to US$100.00 for over 251 words. This, a challenge to the very existence of fair use, is to be managed by the company iCopyright operating as a copyright protection service. Cory Doctorow goes into this in some depth on the Boing Boing site, commenting that those who inform on violators may receive up to one million dollar rewards. In addition, the “no disparagement” clause is highlighted, whereby AP reserves the right to revoke the license where they are unhappy with the usage.

“Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish,” Doctorow wrote.

The controversy provoked by these moves from AP, apparently, prompted them to schedule a meeting with the Media Bloggers Association to hammer out a set of guidelines.

The Associated Press case seems to rely on the 1918 U.S. Supreme Court case, International News Service v. Associated Press where, following INS being prevented from using allied telegraph lines following unfavourable reporting, they used AP reports as a source to rewrite in their own words. With one vigorously dissenting justice, the case was closed in AP’s favour, with the INS usage described as “misappropriation”. Today sees a similar battle played out where bloggers and other citizen journalists simply do not have the resources to place their own reporters at the scene and must excerpt or rewrite from sources such as AP.

According to Michael Kwun, a senior staff attorney with the EFF, one of their blog entries describes the action as biting the hand that feeds them. Kwun questioned whether the 1918 ruling could still be considered “good law”, that changes in Federal law likely rendered it inapplicable, and that there was only a small chance that at state level this could still be applied.

Despite several attempts to get input from the Associated Press, they had not responded to Wikinews at time of publication. Attempts to contact Reuters and the BBC for input also went unanswered.

On June 20, Cadenhead released a statement saying that after receiving additional information from AP, he is “glad” the dispute is over. AP said it had a “constructive exchange” with a “number of interested parties in the blogging community” and will seek to continue dialogue.

“I think it would be helpful for bloggers and users of social news sites to know what the AP believes to be fair use of their copyrighted work,” said Wade Duchene, attorney for Cadenhead. “I hope that any guidelines that are issued are not interpreted as an agreed definition of fair use.”