Friday, April 7, 2006

Accra —The Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in ICT introduced the Semacode technology and the Semapedia application to a segment of the Ghanaian public in a presentation delivered by Guido Sohne, Developer-In-Residence at the Centre and Chief Software Architect of CoreNett Ltd, a Ghanaian electronic transaction processing company.

Introduced for the first time in Africa, Semapedia is a way of associating Internet sites with physical barcodes that can be read by cameraphones, enabling one to look up information about physical objects quickly and easily.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Pakistani officials said that a suspected US drone attack has killed at least eight people today, including foreign militants, in the country’s northwest.

The officials said that two missiles were fired at a compound being used by suspected Taliban militants in Mir Ali village, in North Waziristan, a region on the Afghanistan-border that is said to be a militant stronghold.

“At least eight people were killed in the drone attack. A compound used by militants was targeted,” said an unnamed official to the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

Police official Mohammad Haroon said to the Reuters news agency that “it was a remote-controlled bomb. Two policemen died on the spot, while a third has succumbed to his injuries a short while ago.”

US military officials generally do not confirm attacks such as these, but its armed forces and Central Intelligence Agency employees in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy pilotless drones in the region.

At least 65 similar drone strikes have killed about 625 people in Pakistan since August of last year, according to AFP.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Dale Ogden, a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate, talks with Wikinews reporter Mike Morales about his platform.

Ogden is a member of the United States’ Libertarian Party.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Pranab Mukherjee was appointed the External Affairs Minister while veteran Congressman A K Antony took his place as Defence Minister in a minor expansion-cum-reshuffle of his 29-month-old government by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Kannada actor-turned-politician M H Ambareesh made his debut in the Union Ministry as Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting.

Jay Prakash Narayan Yadav, an RJD leader and a protege of Railway Minister Lalu Prasad, who had to resign last year following allegations of influencing the police in a case of electoral malpractices against his brother, returned to the government, again as Minister of State for Water Resources.

Oscar Fernandes took over Ministry of Labour.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

On Friday, April 28, Wikinews interviewed Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that sending people with technical skills to developing countries for development projects. Ethan has also founded Global Voices Online and helped found Tripod.com, the free web-hosting company now owned by Lycos. He serves a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Tripod.

The interview was held publicly in a dedicated IRC channel.

• What insipred you to get behind Geekcorps, and has there been a big Geekcorps mission, yet?

I got interested in Geekcorps because I’d lived in Ghana as a student in 1993 and 1994While over there, I was amazed at just how little internet connectivity was availableI did a bit of volunteer work helping wire an environmental organization, but basically the only people who had regular net access were US embassy employees.So I was fascinated to learn that my friends in Ghana were getting online in the late 1990s, and I wondered whether anyone would start building net-based businesses, as people were doing in the USMy wife and I went back to Ghana to visit friends and found that there was a huge deal of enthusiasm about the web and the potential it represented, but almost no expertisepeople were really desperate to learn, but very few people were able to teach at the same time, I was ready to step down from Tripod, and I knew a lot of burned out geeksI started wondering whether some of my friends would be interested in sharing their skills in the developing world and whether that would be a useful thing to dolots of international development folks seemed to think it was a good cause, so I started working on it fulltime.We ended up sending about 100 people overseas over the four years I was involved with the projectwe usually sent about 6-8 to a country at a time, working with a variety of businesses, NGOs and government agencies biggest projects were in Ghana, Mali, Mongolia, Senegal.

• With Geekcorps you pushed the idea that newly tech-savvy citizens of developing countries could start online businesses to do digital work for the developed world. But from an American perspective, that’s outsourcing, the bane of US workers. How do you justify working towards a goal that might cost Americans their jobs?

Basically, I’m concerned about the ability of people all over the world to make a good living, send their children to school, build nice houses, have enough food and clean water, etc there’s clearly something of a tradeoff offered by all sorts of globalization – as millions of Chinese are lifted out of rural povery, industrial manufacturing jobs in the US disappear but the US has a pretty good history of innovating and creating new jobs in fields that require a lot of intellectual endeavor the US continues to found interesting software companies, pioneer new net services and generally do a lot of the interesting development on the cutting edge of tech I think a lot of routine coding jobs are up for outsourcing, but I don’t think that people who design software – or who manage the outsourcing and software development process – are going away any time soon it’s very hard to outsource creative activities – it’s somewhat easier to outsource repetitive processes.I think we need to worry less about individual job loss and more about the ability to continue creating new projects. at the same time, I’m very excited to see companies in the developing world moving up the value chain as well, starting to innovate and create new projects as well…

• Lately you’ve been involved with projects including Global Voices and Worldchanging. Where and how do the two dovetail, and where and how do they differ? What are the strengths of each?

They’re very different projects and communities, WC is a magazine -it’s a chance for a small group of smart people to write original content on green issues it’s a lot less global than GV – perhaps overly focused on the US and Europe – and has a tight subject focus GV is an edited aggregator People are not so much writing original, opinionated content on GV as they are linking to other content indeed, we ask people to try very hard not to be especially opinionated on GV. Not NPOV, but a similar perspective – you point, you don’t advocate<ethanz> also GVO is huge – 10 regional editors, about 60 regular contributors, a network of about a thousand blogs we regularly link to the community has a very different feeling – much more international, more 24/7. both are fascinating projects, successes in their own ways, but quite different on the tech issues, a little – in both cases, we’re taking very simple weblog tools and asking them to support very large communities. And a little bit on the issue of how they interface with mainstream media in both cases, we’re interested in amplifying memes and getting them picked up by popular press as well as on the web.

• Isn’t that a contradiction? you’re asking people to be “less” opinionated, but not asking them to be unopinionated?

Blogs are essentially about opinion, asking for NPOV in the blog space misses the point – we want to know what opinions people in Syria have but we want our middle east editor to try to fairly represent the different opinions taking place in that space that said, he’s got an opinion as well so asking for NPOV isn’t the right thing to do – asking him to point to a diversity of opinions is, in our case

Geekcorps can be found online at www.geekcorps.org and Global Voices Online is at www.globalvoicesonline.org.

Monday, October 4, 2010

A school bus, with fourteen students from the Temple High School aboard, crashed in Georgia, United States, earlier today on Georgia State Route 113 going southbound, killing one student and leaving a dozen more injured. It is reported that at the time of the crash there was a trainee driving the bus.

According to the Carroll County Schools Superintendent, one student was killed and a dozen others were in need of medical care after the bus rolled over. A spokesman for the mayor and a highway patrolman also confirmed that a student died. The student has been identified as James Rashawn Walker of Temple, Georgia. It is reported that the bus was heading southbound on the highway when the driver lost control and drove into a ditch, which caused the bus to turn over.

Witnesses reported the bus flipped multiple times before coming to a halt. According to a witness, Ben Cole, a lot of the students were crying and in pain. The six injured were taken to the Tanner Medical Center and the Higgins Hospital, among them was the 45-year-old female bus driver. The Carrol County Sheriff’s Department are advising concerned parents to gather at Temple High School.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

A number of reports confirm that Michael Moore’s forthcoming documentary has been leaked onto Peer-to-peer networks. This is the second pre-release leak in a month of a film from Lionsgate Studios.

The movie, SiCKO contrasts the U.S. healthcare system with that of several other countries and includes a trip to Cuba for which Moore is being investigated. The investigation by the Office of Foreign Assets Control within the United States Department of the Treasury is looking into whether Moore has violated United States embargo against Cuba, which has been in effect since 1962 and codified in 1992.

Moore has, according to agency reports, stored a copy of the original film in Canada as a result of the Federal investigation by the Treasury department. His concern is that an attempt may be made to confiscate the section of the film shot in Cuba.

According to Associated Press, David Boies, attorney for Michael Moore, believes the targeting of Moore for his unauthorised trip to Cuba may be the result of the criticism of the current administration in such films as Fahrenheit 9/11.

Tuesday Moore was seen at two pre-release screenings of the movie in Sacramento, California. His audiences were a group of politicians and a number of nurses, each attending their own screening.

The movie opens with a cold statistic that approximately 45 million Americans are without healthcare insurance. It continues by giving examples of people with healthcare insurance who have been denied all or part of their treatment for technical reasons. As well as getting thousands of responses from people who had problems with their insurance he received information from people working inside Health maintenance organizations and ex-employees who claim the system is set up to provide the minimum care and the maximum profit to the company.

The segment of the film that triggered the Federal investigation is his trip to Cuba with a number of people who relate their experiences with healthcare. Among these are several volunteer workers who worked at ground zero following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These people claim to have been refused aid from the fund set up for 9/11 workers and were thus unable to afford their required treatment. After an attempt to obtain treatment at Guantanamo Bay detention facility – which Moore described as the only place on U.S. soil where there is “socialised medicine” – they seek out a hospital in Havana. All are checked and treated free of charge. One woman discovers that an inhaler for her respiratory problems costs approximately five cents in Cuba compared to 120 dollars in the U.S.

Health insurance companies, speaking through their trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), are critical of the film, which calls for healthcare similar to that of Canada, France, or the UK. “We need a uniquely American solution in which the public and private sectors work together to make sure that everyone has high-quality, affordable healthcare,” said Karen Ignagni, president of AHIP, on Wednesday.

The film is scheduled for wide release in the U.S. and Canada on June 29, 2007.