Monday, June 25, 2007

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), an organisation that investigates alleged miscarriages of justice, is to complete a review on June 28, 2007 of the conviction on January 31, 2001 of Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi for the December 21, 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. All 259 passengers and crew of the Boeing 747, and eleven people on the ground, were killed when a bomb destroyed the aircraft over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. Megrahi was convicted on 270 counts of murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. It is expected that the SCCRC will refer Megrahi’s case back to the court of appeal. A summary of the Commission’s findings will be published, but the main report will not.

Today’s Scotsman reported that documents leaked from Megrahi‘s legal team include allegations that evidence used to convict him ‘was subject to deliberate destruction and manipulation for political reasons’. Officials in both the United States and the United Kingdom are accused of “a co-ordinated effort to mislead the court” in order to divert attention from other suspects with links to Iran or Syria, whose support was needed at the time of the first Gulf War.

During its three-year review, the SCCRC has been shown hundreds of documents and photographs which are alleged to show that evidence was invented, manipulated or ignored by the British police on the one hand and the CIA and FBI on the other. Veteran politician Tam Dalyell, who has campaigned against the conviction for years, has now said that the full report by the SCCRC should be made public, adding “The Crown Office has a moral obligation to hold a public inquiry. If it embarrasses the Scottish judiciary, so be it. We’re in danger of becoming the laughing stock of Europe.” He also said “I have no doubt that evidence was planted, and I have said so repeatedly in the Commons. Only a full, public and nonadversarial inquiry can finally settle this matter.” Meanwhile, defence lawyers said that if Megrahi is granted an appeal or retrial they will attempt to convince authorities to release him until the case comes to court.

The credibility of several key parts of the prosecution’s case is seriously questioned in the evidence submitted to the SCCRC, with rescue workers describing items as intact when they were discovered, but which were presented in fragmentary form at the Lockerbie bombing trial. The evidence of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci is also challenged. Although Gauci testified that Megrahi bought clothes from him that were later found to have been in the suitcase containing the bomb, in reality he apparently gave a number of inconsistent and substantially different accounts of who bought the clothes, failed to pick out Megrahi at an identity parade, and even linked the clothes’ purchase to convicted Egyptian terrorist Mohammed Abu Talb, from the Iran-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Defence lawyers also alleged that two early statements by Gauci are missing altogether.

One investigator also claims that evidence was fabricated, while there was insufficient investigation into claims by a baggage handler at Heathrow International Airport that the suitcase containing the bomb was only added to the flight at the last minute.

The SCCRC refused to comment, saying: “It is not for Scottish ministers to comment or preempt the outcome of this review.” Further it said: “It is the strong view of the Scottish Government that due process of law will be followed and seen to be followed in all matters pertaining to this case.”

The SCCRC will issue it’s report on Thursday June 28, 2007.

Saturday, October 6, 2007

Few artists ever penetrate the subconscious level of American culture the way RuPaul Andre Charles did with the 1993 album Supermodel of the World. It was groundbreaking not only because in the midst of the Grunge phenomenon did Charles have a dance hit on MTV, but because he did it as RuPaul, formerly known as Starbooty, a supermodel drag queen with a message: love everyone. A duet with Elton John, an endorsement deal with MAC cosmetics, an eponymous talk show on VH-1 and roles in film propelled RuPaul into the new millennium.

In July, RuPaul’s movie Starrbooty began playing at film festivals and it is set to be released on DVD October 31st. Wikinews reporter David Shankbone recently spoke with RuPaul by telephone in Los Angeles, where she is to appear on stage for DIVAS Simply Singing!, a benefit for HIV-AIDS.

DS: How are you doing?

RP: Everything is great. I just settled into my new hotel room in downtown Los Angeles. I have never stayed downtown, so I wanted to try it out. L.A. is one of those traditional big cities where nobody goes downtown, but they are trying to change that.

DS: How do you like Los Angeles?

RP: I love L.A. I’m from San Diego, and I lived here for six years. It took me four years to fall in love with it and then those last two years I had fallen head over heels in love with it. Where are you from?

DS: Me? I’m from all over. I have lived in 17 cities, six states and three countries.

RP: Where were you when you were 15?

DS: Georgia, in a small town at the bottom of Fulton County called Palmetto.

RP: When I was in Georgia I went to South Fulton Technical School. The last high school I ever went to was…actually, I don’t remember the name of it.

DS: Do you miss Atlanta?

RP: I miss the Atlanta that I lived in. That Atlanta is long gone. It’s like a childhood friend who underwent head to toe plastic surgery and who I don’t recognize anymore. It’s not that I don’t like it; I do like it. It’s just not the Atlanta that I grew up with. It looks different because it went through that boomtown phase and so it has been transient. What made Georgia Georgia to me is gone. The last time I stayed in a hotel there my room was overlooking a construction site, and I realized the building that was torn down was a building that I had seen get built. And it had been torn down to build a new building. It was something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime.

DS: What did that signify to you?

RP: What it showed me is that the mentality in Atlanta is that much of their history means nothing. For so many years they did a good job preserving. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a preservationist. It’s just an interesting observation.

DS: In 2004 when you released your third album, Red Hot, it received a good deal of play in the clubs and on dance radio, but very little press coverage. On your blog you discussed how you felt betrayed by the entertainment industry and, in particular, the gay press. What happened?

RP: Well, betrayed might be the wrong word. ‘Betrayed’ alludes to an idea that there was some kind of a promise made to me, and there never was. More so, I was disappointed. I don’t feel like it was a betrayal. Nobody promises anything in show business and you understand that from day one.

But, I don’t know what happened. It seemed I couldn’t get press on my album unless I was willing to play into the role that the mainstream press has assigned to gay people, which is as servants of straight ideals.

DS: Do you mean as court jesters?

RP: Not court jesters, because that also plays into that mentality. We as humans find it easy to categorize people so that we know how to feel comfortable with them; so that we don’t feel threatened. If someone falls outside of that categorization, we feel threatened and we search our psyche to put them into a category that we feel comfortable with. The mainstream media and the gay press find it hard to accept me as…just…

DS: Everything you are?

RP: Everything that I am.

DS: It seems like years ago, and my recollection might be fuzzy, but it seems like I read a mainstream media piece that talked about how you wanted to break out of the RuPaul ‘character’ and be seen as more than just RuPaul.

RP: Well, RuPaul is my real name and that’s who I am and who I have always been. There’s the product RuPaul that I have sold in business. Does the product feel like it’s been put into a box? Could you be more clear? It’s a hard question to answer.

DS: That you wanted to be seen as more than just RuPaul the drag queen, but also for the man and versatile artist that you are.

RP: That’s not on target. What other people think of me is not my business. What I do is what I do. How people see me doesn’t change what I decide to do. I don’t choose projects so people don’t see me as one thing or another. I choose projects that excite me. I think the problem is that people refuse to understand what drag is outside of their own belief system. A friend of mine recently did the Oprah show about transgendered youth. It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American baseball league and the National baseball league, when they are both so similar. We’ll learn the difference to that. One of my hobbies is to research and go underneath ideas to discover why certain ones stay in place while others do not. Like Adam and Eve, which is a flimsy fairytale story, yet it is something that people believe; what, exactly, keeps it in place?

DS: What keeps people from knowing the difference between what is real and important, and what is not?

RP: Our belief systems. If you are a Christian then your belief system doesn’t allow for transgender or any of those things, and you then are going to have a vested interest in not understanding that. Why? Because if one peg in your belief system doesn’t work or doesn’t fit, the whole thing will crumble. So some people won’t understand the difference between a transvestite and transsexual. They will not understand that no matter how hard you force them to because it will mean deconstructing their whole belief system. If they understand Adam and Eve is a parable or fairytale, they then have to rethink their entire belief system.

As to me being seen as whatever, I was more likely commenting on the phenomenon of our culture. I am creative, and I am all of those things you mention, and doing one thing out there and people seeing it, it doesn’t matter if people know all that about me or not.

DS: Recently I interviewed Natasha Khan of the band Bat for Lashes, and she is considered by many to be one of the real up-and-coming artists in music today. Her band was up for the Mercury Prize in England. When I asked her where she drew inspiration from, she mentioned what really got her recently was the 1960’s and 70’s psychedelic drag queen performance art, such as seen in Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What do you think when you hear an artist in her twenties looking to that era of drag performance art for inspiration?

RP: The first thing I think of when I hear that is that young kids are always looking for the ‘rock and roll’ answer to give. It’s very clever to give that answer. She’s asked that a lot: “Where do you get your inspiration?” And what she gave you is the best sound bite she could; it’s a really a good sound bite. I don’t know about Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, but I know about The Cockettes and Paris Is Burning. What I think about when I hear that is there are all these art school kids and when they get an understanding of how the press works, and how your sound bite will affect the interview, they go for the best.

DS: You think her answer was contrived?

RP: I think all answers are really contrived. Everything is contrived; the whole world is an illusion. Coming up and seeing kids dressed in Goth or hip hop clothes, when you go beneath all that, you have to ask: what is that really? You understand they are affected, pretentious. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s how we see things. I love Paris Is Burning.

DS: Has the Iraq War affected you at all?

RP: Absolutely. It’s not good, I don’t like it, and it makes me want to enjoy this moment a lot more and be very appreciative. Like when I’m on a hike in a canyon and it smells good and there aren’t bombs dropping.

DS: Do you think there is a lot of apathy in the culture?

RP: There’s apathy, and there’s a lot of anti-depressants and that probably lends a big contribution to the apathy. We have iPods and GPS systems and all these things to distract us.

DS: Do you ever work the current political culture into your art?

RP: No, I don’t. Every time I bat my eyelashes it’s a political statement. The drag I come from has always been a critique of our society, so the act is defiant in and of itself in a patriarchal society such as ours. It’s an act of treason.

DS: What do you think of young performance artists working in drag today?

RP: I don’t know of any. I don’t know of any. Because the gay culture is obsessed with everything straight and femininity has been under attack for so many years, there aren’t any up and coming drag artists. Gay culture isn’t paying attention to it, and straight people don’t either. There aren’t any drag clubs to go to in New York. I see more drag clubs in Los Angeles than in New York, which is so odd because L.A. has never been about club culture.

DS: Michael Musto told me something that was opposite of what you said. He said he felt that the younger gays, the ones who are up-and-coming, are over the body fascism and more willing to embrace their feminine sides.

RP: I think they are redefining what femininity is, but I still think there is a lot of negativity associated with true femininity. Do boys wear eyeliner and dress in skinny jeans now? Yes, they do. But it’s still a heavily patriarchal culture and you never see two men in Star magazine, or the Queer Eye guys at a premiere, the way you see Ellen and her girlfriend—where they are all, ‘Oh, look how cute’—without a negative connotation to it. There is a definite prejudice towards men who use femininity as part of their palette; their emotional palette, their physical palette. Is that changing? It’s changing in ways that don’t advance the cause of femininity. I’m not talking frilly-laced pink things or Hello Kitty stuff. I’m talking about goddess energy, intuition and feelings. That is still under attack, and it has gotten worse. That’s why you wouldn’t get someone covering the RuPaul album, or why they say people aren’t tuning into the Katie Couric show. Sure, they can say ‘Oh, RuPaul’s album sucks’ and ‘Katie Couric is awful’; but that’s not really true. It’s about what our culture finds important, and what’s important are things that support patriarchal power. The only feminine thing supported in this struggle is Pamela Anderson and Jessica Simpson, things that support our patriarchal culture.

Friday, June 1, 2007

In an unannounced vote yesterday, the Philadelphia City Council in the United States voted 16-1 to endorse the eviction of, and end their lease held in perpetuity with, the local council of the Boy Scouts in Philadelphia. The Scouts must pay market rent or leave the building. The Cradle of Liberty Council has more than 60,000 members in Philadelphia and Delaware and Montgomery Counties.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

A 182-page report issued September 1 by the United States National Research Council warns that the amount of debris in space is reaching “a tipping point”, and could cause damage to satellites or spacecraft. The report calls for regulations to reduce the amount of debris, and suggests that scientists increase research into methods to remove some of the debris from orbit, though it makes no recommendations about how to do so.

NASA sponsored the study.

A statement released along with the report warns that, according to some computer models, the debris “has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures”. According to the Satellite Industry Association, there are now about 1,000 working satellites in Earth orbit, and industry revenues last year were US$168 billion (£104.33 billion,€119.01 billion).

The debris consists of various objects, such as decommissioned satellites and exhausted boosters, but the vast majority of the particles are less than one centimetre across. 16,094 pieces of debris were being tracked as of July, although estimates put the current number at over 22,000. The total number of fragments is thought to be as high as tens of millions. While most of the debris is very small, some of it is travelling at speeds as high as 17,500 mi h^-1 (28,164 km h^-1; 7,823.3 m s^-1).

The International Space Station sometimes has to dodge larger fragments, and in June its crew was forced to prepare to evacuate due to a close encounter with debris.

The UK Space Agency told Wikinews that space flight “is likely to be made more difficult” by the debris. However, communications will “[n]ot directly” be affected, “but if the GEO ring became unusable, there is no other altitude at which objects appear [‘]geo-stationary[‘] and so all antennas on the ground would then have to move in order to track the motion of the satellites”.

Donald J. Kessler, the lead researcher and former head of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office, said that “[t]he current space environment is growing increasingly hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts,” and suggested that “NASA needs to determine the best path forward for tackling the multifaceted problems caused by meteoroids and orbital debris that put human and robotic space operations at risk.”

Two events are thought to be the largest individual sources of space debris. Kessler said that “[t]hose two single events doubled the amount of fragments in Earth orbit and completely wiped out what we had done in the last 25 years”.

The first of these was a controversial 2007 Chinese anti-satellite weapon test, which smashed the decommissioned weather satellite Fengyun-1C into approximately 150,000 fragments over a centimetre in size—making up roughly twenty percent of all tracked objects—537 miles above the Earth’s surface.

The Chinese government has so far failed to respond to Wikinews’s queries regarding the incident.

The other is a 2009 collision between twelve-year-old active satellite Iridium 33 and the defunct Russian Strela-2M satellite Kosmos-2251—both weighing in excess of 1,000 lbs (454 kg)—that occurred 490 miles over Siberia, the first such collision. The Iridium satellite was replaced within 22 days, according to Iridium Communications, who operated it.

In a statement released to Wikinews, Iridium Communications said that they “received no warning of the impending collision. Although commercial projections of close encounters (commonly called conjunctions) were available, the accuracy of those projections was not sufficient to allow collision avoidance action to be taken.” They also made the assurance that the Air Force Space Command and United States Strategic Command now provide them with information through the Joint Space Operations Center, and that “when necessary, [they] maneuver [their] satellites based on this information to avoid potential collisions. [They] believe this is a substantial first step in better information sharing between the government and industry and support even more robust interaction which can provide better and more efficient constellation operation.”

Iridium expressed their support for “[l]ong-term investment to improve Space Situational Awareness” and “[i]mproved information sharing between industry and the U.S. government”, as well as more “[g]overnment support for policy and processes which would permit sharing of high-accuracy data as required to allow reliable assessment and warning” and “[i]ncreased cooperation between the government and U.S. and foreign commercial operators.”

They maintained that “the Iridium constellation is uniquely designed to withstand such an event. Because of the resilient and distributed nature of the Iridium constellation, the effects of the loss of a single satellite were relatively minor”, and that “any other system, commercial or military, which experienced the loss of a satellite, would have suffered significant operational degradation for a period of months if not years.” Nonetheless, the company is “concerned over the increasing level of risk to operations resulting from the debris in space.”

The report makes more than thirty findings, and more than twenty recommendations to NASA. None of the recommendations regard how to clean up the debris. However, it does cite a report by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which suggested various possible techniques for catching and removing space debris, such as magnetic nets.

However, international law does not allow one country to collect another’s debris. George J. Gleghorn, vice chair of the committee, observed that “[t]he Cold War is over, but the acute sensitivity regarding satellite technology remains”.

The debris will, in time, be pulled into the earth’s atmosphere—where it will burn up—by gravity, but more debris is being created faster than this can happen.

The report recommends collaborating with the United States Department of State on “economic, technological, political, and legal considerations.” As already mentioned, international law does not allow one country to collect another’s debris.

According to the report, “[t]he problem of space debris is similar to a host of other environmental problems and public concerns characterized by possibly significant differences between the short- and long-run damage accruing to society … Each has small short-run effects but, if left unaddressed, will have much larger impacts on society in the future.”

A spokesperson for the UK Space Agency told Wikinews that the organisation “does not have any plans to get directly involved with [the clean-up] initiative but through its involvement with NASA in the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, it is conducting studies to identify which objects present the biggest hazard and how many objects may need to be removed and from where.” It says that the viability of such an operation is “a question of treating the symptom or the cause of the problem. Building more physical protection is costly and if the environment deteriorates too far, becomes unviable. It is best to treat the root cause, the presence of debris in orbit, and remove the large objects before they can break up into many thousands of uncontrolled fragments capable of destroying a satellite on impact.”

The spokesperson also pointed out that “[u]nder current licensing regimes (such as in the UK), countries are now obliging operators to remove satellites from crowded regions of space at the end of operational life”.

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Michael Gurian, psychologist and author of “What Could He Be Thinking?“, has claimed to identify approximately one hundred structural differences between male and female brains in a recent study. Gurian comments:

“Men, because we tend to compartmentalize our communication into a smaller part of the brain, we tend to be better at getting right to the issue, the more female brain (will) gather a lot of material, gather a lot of information, feel a lot, hear a lot, sense a lot.“

One major structural difference that Gurian has made clear is that males generally have more activity in the mechanical centers of the brain, while women have more activity in centers of the brain dedicated to verbal communication and emotion. A clear example of this is the hypothetical situation of giving a child a toy. He explains it as such:

“That doll becomes life-like to that girl, but you give it to a two-year-old boy and you are more likely, not all the time, but you are more likely than not to see that boy try to take the head off the doll. He thinks spatial-mechanical. He’s using the doll as an object.“

Another expert, Dr. Marianne Legato, says it all boils down to genetics, noting that the Y chromosome (which only males carry) has “at least 21 unique genes unique to males which control many of the body’s operations down to the level of the cells.”

Gurian agrees that culture is significant in brain development, but argues that biology plays an equally important role. He makes a point of how the MRI scans show that the female corpus callosum, the center of the brain which regulates communication between the brain’s hemispheres, is larger than the male’s. On the other hand, the scans also show that information flows more freely between the hemispheres of the male brain.

The exact role that brain structure plays in behavior, however, has been an area of considerable contention in science for literally hundreds of years. Early studies in craniometry conducted by Paul Pierre Broca were used to attempt to distinguish differences between human races, though have now been dismissed as scientific racism. The nature-nurture debate has raged for centuries in a variety of forms, without yet any clear resolution as to the role in which innate biological tendencies interact with environmental conditions or willed behavior. As such, studies relating to brain structure and claims to innate behavior often generate substantial controversy.

MIT anthropologist of science Joseph Dumit’s study of brain imaging in his book Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity, noted that the apparent “transparency” of such pictures (the appearance that they can be easily interpreted by laymen, when they are often the source of ambiguity and dispute by even highly-trained neurosurgeons) has led to their proliferation as indicators of objective truth in media and in courts of law, and that such conclusions are often knowingly exaggerated by the specialists creating the images for better visual effect.

The timing of Gurian’s book comes on the heels of another controversy over gender differences sparked by comments made by Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who blamed low numbers of women in the sciences on genetic differences. Summers has been criticized by a large number of academics and scientists, as well as by many news publications, in the wake of what he was reported as saying during a conference on January 14.

Friday, March 3, 2006

The San Jose, California fire department and Hazardous Materials crews today responded to a chemical emergency at a JDS Uniphase manufacturing facility. The incident, at 80 Rose Orchard Drive, off North First St., sent between 15 and 17 people, including two firefighters, to the hospital with symptoms and for observation.

Those exposed to the hazard reported a smell of “burnt rubber”, along with symptoms of eye and throat irritation.

Over 48 others were held in a nearby building while the incident was assessed. Rose Orchard Way was closed for much of the day while emergency crews responded. Estimates put the incident at about 10 a.m. (1800 UTC).

As of 6 p.m. television news reports, authorities still had not determined the source or nature of the chemical, but said neighboring buildings were not in danger.

JDS Uniphase manufactures fiber optic communications and test equipment, and was formed from a merger of JDS FITEL and Uniphase Corporation in 1999.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. New Democratic Party candidate Katy Austin is standing for election in the riding of Simcoe—Grey. Born in St. Catherines and raised in Barrie, Austin has a Bachelor of Physical and Health Education from the University of Windsor. Teaching in various Ontario schools, she has been active in the Simcoe NDP riding association since 1975. Austin rode her bike, solo, from Victoria, British Columbia to Elmvale, Ontario (a total of 4 500 km) in 40 days during the summer of 1996, camping along the way.

Wikinews contacted Katy Austin, to talk about the issues facing Canadians, and what they and their party would do to address them. Wikinews is in the process of contacting every candidate, in every riding across the country, no matter their political stripe. All interviews are conducted over e-mail, and interviews are published unedited, allowing candidates to impart their full message to our readers, uninterrupted.

The riding is currently held by Helena Guergis (Conservative), the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Sport. Also challenging Guergis are Peter Ellis (Green), Andrea Matrosovs (Liberal), Caley McKibbin (Libertarian), and Peter Vander Zaag (Christian Heritage).

For more information, visit the campaign’s official website, listed below.