Friday, September 26, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. New Democratic Party candidate Don Davies is standing for election in the riding of Vancouver Kingsway.

A lawyer, he has spent the last 25 years fighting for human rights. A two-time student government representative, Davies was involved in the anti-apartheid, third world and peace movements. Admitted to the Alberta Bar in 1989, Davies and family moved to Vancouver in 1991, where he became the Director of Legal Resources for Teamsters Canada (Local 31), the next year. He is a long-time volunteer for children’s charity Variety, is Chair of the Parent Advisory Council at Mount Pleasant school, and a Director of the Meridian Cultural Society, among other things.

Wikinews contacted Don Davies, 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 vacant, after Conservative Minister of International Trade David Emerson’s resignation. Emerson was elected in 2004 as a Liberal, serving as the Minister of Industry. Two weeks after re-election in 2006, he crossed the floor to join then-new Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had won a minority government. Emerson was the first MP in Canadian history to cross the floor before a new government was sworn in. He has stepped down, after pressure from other parties.

Besides Davies, major party candidates include Liberal Wendy Yuan, Conservative Salomon Rayek, and Green Doug Warkentin. Also putting their hat in the ring are Matt Kadioglu (Libertarian), Kimball Cariou (Communist), and Donna Peterson (Marxist-Leninist).

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

This Saturday at 11 am, Davies will host NDP leader Jack Layton in the Commodore Ballroom at “rally4change”.

Friday, July 15, 2011

On Tuesday, the Euro fell to a new record low in relation to the Swiss Franc, and to multi-month lows against the U.S. Dollar and Japanese yen; all considered by investors to be safe currencies during times of economic turmoil.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that recent comments from the newly installed head of the International Monetary Fund, France’s Christine Lagarde, resulted in a sell-off of the Euro. At a roundtable discussion in Washington, Lagarde noted that the IMF had not yet reached discussion of terms and conditions of a second Greek bailout plan. In fact, a representative from the IMF is currently meeting with Eurozone policymakers to draft such a new proposal. The yield differential between Italian bonds and German bonds has spread to more than 300 basis points, something not seen in over a decade and evidence of investors’ concern.

Adding to the Euro’s woes is the upcoming release of the bank stress tests on Friday. The European Bankers Association said that they expect the data release to shed new light on the Eurozone’s banking situation. Representatives of several of the Eurozone’s governments, including Germany, have requested that the association consider releasing fewer specific details for fear that investor panic will ensue. The inadequacy of the capitalization rates has been an issue with the European Central Bank, whose president recently called upon Eurozone banks to make every effort to put their balance sheets in order.

For the time being at least, an unsubstantiated rumor reported by the Wall Street Journal states that the Eurozone’s central banks’ purchase of periphery debt has helped to quell the downward momentum of the Euro.

Friday, April 6, 2007

The Montreal Heart Institute (MHI) notified the public, through a news release Wednesday, that a recent high volume of patients has put a strain on the hospital’s resources. The MHI requested that the public avoid its emergency department and find alternate care, if possible. It did indicate that acute care emergency patients would not be turned away.

The notice was to be in place for 24 hours from Wednesday. On Thursday, the MHI issued a extension to the public notice for an additional 24-hour period.

The number of patients that visited the MHI over the past few months had been abnormally high and reached a peak in the past two weeks, according to the head of emergency services. Alain Vadeboncoeur indicated that it was unusual for the MHI to put out such an advisory, but assured the public that the hospital would “always take the big emergencies.”

The hospital treats 45 to 50 emergency patients per day, typically, but that number jumped to as many as 70 patients per day in the past two weeks. The MHI maintains 153 beds, including 42 in medical intensive care and 29 in surgical intensive care and performs 1,850 cardiac surgeries yearly.

It was suggested by the MHI that people requiring non-emergency care contact their regional Info-Santé for telephone-based advice, or visit a local clinic.

Founded in 1954, the MHI specializes in cardiovascular treatment, with an emphasis on prevention, specialized care, research, and assessment of new technologies. The MHI is a teaching facility affiliated with the University of Montreal.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Unknown individuals gained access to a server of University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). As a result, around thirteen years of email correspondence between researchers is now available worldwide. Substantial previously unpublished climate change observations are included.

According to initial reports by TGIF Newspaper and the Watt’s Up With That blog, hundreds of emails and documents were made available from a FTP site on a Russian server with an accompanying statement:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents”

Some journalists suppose that this event is a consequence of increased attention on CRU after it played a substantial role in the IPCC fourth assessment report (2007).

The released data is a 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents. Some of the contents have been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phillip Jones. In an interview with TGIF Newspaper, he stated that a breach of security had taken place and that a large quantity of files had been “stolen”. The interviewer discussed one of Dr. Jones’ published e-mails:

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values…

The interviewer asked Dr. Jones to explain the phrase “hide and decline”, but he answered that he had no idea what he meant by using them (as they were made in the context of a discussion taking place 10 years ago), and he had not attempt to mislead:

No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.

In a press release by the University of East Anglia, Dr. Jones stated that:

“That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice.

“Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Center in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

“[…]My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.”

One such colloquialism, “trick,” is frequently used by scientists and engineers to refer to an essential or non-obvious element in the solution of a problem, as opposed to the common political usage connoting deception.

Commentators argue that the published messages show the researchers’ reluctance to publish scientific material, though it contains serious global warming observations. Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by skeptics’ and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The East Anglia University has shut down the original server, from which the information was stolen. A university spokesman stated that data was published without permission, but did not confirm whether all of the published communication is genuine:

We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.

Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.

The release of the documents comes just weeks before a major climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006File:Greenpeace Vessels Esperanza and Arctic Sun.jpg

Anti-whaling protesters have joined forces across Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the U.S.A calling for an end to the killing of whales for meat by Japan. Greenpeace organised the international day of action as it continued its efforts to disrupt the hunting of minke whales by the Japanese whaling fleet currently in the Southern Ocean.

The day of action was being marked to protest the actions of the fleet which protesters believe violate the 1986 International Whaling Commission (IWC) global ban on commercial whaling. Japan’s JARPA Japanese Whale Research Program was allowed to operate under a Special Permit in the Antarctic according to Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling. In its JARPA-2 plan, Japan plans to double its annual scientific research catch of Minke whales to 935, and to add 10 Fin whales to its quota. The International Fund for Animal Welfare states that over the next two years, Japan plans to kill 50 endangered Humpback whales and an additional 40 fin whales.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Yaakov Neeman, an Israeli politician who served as justice minister and finance minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, died in his Jerusalem home on Sunday. He was 77.

Born in 1939 in Tel Aviv, Neeman, alongside future President Chaim Herzog, founded law firm Herzog, Fox and Neeman in 1972. He was appointed finance minister in 1979, a position he held until 1981. He was later appointed justice minister by Netanyahu, based on his legal training and loyalty.

Unusually for a senior minister, he had never served in the Knesset. He held the job for two months before resigning; he was being investigated for perjury. Michael Ben-Yair, Attorney General of the day, launched the probe after Neeman testified at a bribery trial. Neeman was cleared.

Neeman regained the Justice Ministry post in 1997, resigning again the next year. He blamed insufficient support from Netanyahu and resumed law. In 2009 Netanyahu was reelected, again appointing Neeman minister of justice. In 2013 this role passed to the Hatnua party’s Tzipi Livni.

Neeman’s last resignation, in 2013, came as he was under investigation by the Israel Tax Authority for evading tax via his law company. The Tel Aviv Magistrates Court ultimately acquitted him.

Outside law and politics Neeman was also an industrialist. He worked with Israel Aircraft Industries, airline El Al, and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. In 1986 he was credited as key to convincing business partner Herzog, who was then president, with pardoning members of the Israel Security Agency; after a bus was hijacked, security forces shot dead two Palestinians once the hijack had concluded.

Neeman specialised in tax law. A fluent English speaker, he had degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and New York University. His wife and six children survive him.

Current President Reuven Rivlin spoke of a good lawyer and advisor whose wisdom he had sought as recently as last week. “The entire Justice Department bows his head”, said current Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. Herzog’s son Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition Zionist Union, spoke of “a tender-hearted, broad-minded and generous man” who “was a mentor and close friend for tens of years.”

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein said Neeman was “a unique figure in our public life, blessed with talent and pleasantness, who believed in his heritage and his people with his entire body.” Netanyahu called Neeman “one of the senior jurists in the country, of a sharp mind and a warm Jewish heart.”

Sunday, February 1, 2009

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has condemned the workers who staged mass walkout across the country on Friday.

Speaking to the BBC from the World Economic Forum in the Swiss skiing resort of Davos, he said that the walkouts were “not the right thing to do”. Workers on industrial sites in Wales, Scotland, Cheshire, Hampshire and Teesside had left their plants and staged protests outside in sympathy with staff at Lindsey Oil Refinery in Lincolnshire, after French owner Total had given a contract to an Italian firm. The firm brought 300 Italian and Portuguese staff into the plant.

Brown had made a speech in 2007 where he called for “British jobs for British workers”. He explained to the BBC’s Politics Show that “when I talked about British jobs, I was taking about giving people in Britain the skills, so that they have the ability to get jobs which were at present going to people from abroad”. The government says that European Union (EU) law makes it impossible for them to provide British jobs for British workers in the EU common market. Earlier, the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson, told the BBC that recent European Court of Justice judgments had undermined employment rights but that the government would be pushing the EU to take action if it finds that the foreign workers are ‘undercutting’ UK citizens. He described the walkouts as “unhelpful”, but said he understood the anger over EU workers coming to the UK “on worse terms and conditions to actually get jobs in front of British workers on the basis of dumbing down the terms and conditions.”

The walkouts were also condemned by the opposition Conservative Party. Foreign affairs spokesman William Hague said that “strikes are never the way forward” and that his party strongly supported the free market in labour in the EU. He said that it was “so unbelievably ridiculous and silly” for Brown to have made the promise on British jobs in the first place.

The government has asked the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) to examine the circumstances behind the strikes and see if British workers are being unlawfully excluded, as the GMB union has claimed.

Secondary or sympathetic industrial action has been illegal in the UK since the 1980s. However, the penalties apply only to unions organizing secondary action and not to individual workers walking out.