Author: Admin

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Two US Marshals and one officer of the St. Louis, Missouri Metropolitan Police Department were shot during a gunfight while trying to apprehend a suspect on Tuesday morning. All three were taken to local hospitals for treatment, where one US Marshal later died. The suspect, identified by his family as 35-year-old Carlos Boles, was shot and killed by authorities returning fire.

Eight law enforcement officials arrived at Bole’s St. Louis, Missouri home to serve a felony arrest warrant. Upon entering the house, they were fired at with a semi-automatic firearm, according to ABC News. The shooter reportedly said, “I’m only going out in a body bag.” After the shootings occurred, a SWAT team was requested because police did not know whether any other individuals were in the home. Three children, belonging to Bole’s sister, had left the home before police initially moved in around 6:50 a.m. CST (12:50 UTC).

The wounded officer of the St. Louis Police Department was taken to Barnes-Jewish Hospital after being grazed by a bullet that was stopped by his bulletproof vest, and then falling down. A spokesperson for the police department described the officer, who had been with the department for 34 years, as responsive and communicating.

The two injured marshals were taken to St. Louis University Hospital. A statement released by the US Marshals Service said one of the marshals, 48-year-old Deputy Marshal John Perry had died around 7:00 pm CST (01:00 UTC) after being shot in the head. Perry was a ten-year veteran of the US Marshals Service. The other US Marshal, 31-year-old Theodore Abegg, was reported to be in fair condition, shot in the ankle and is expected to survive. Francis Slay, Mayor of St. Louis, talked to the victims’ families at the hospital.

“Our deputies and law enforcement partners face danger every day in the pursuit of justice for the citizens of this great nation,” said Director Stacia A. Hylton of the US Marshals Service. “Our people and our partners are well trained and prepared, but it is impossible to predict when a wanted individual will make a fateful choice that results in the loss of life or injury. When that happens, and the life lost is a law enforcement officer or other public servant, it is an immeasurable tragedy felt by all. Today, unfortunately, we again feel that pain. Our thoughts and prayers are with our fallen deputy as well as the injured and their families.”

The suspect’s sister said he was not returning to jail, in which he had already served ten years. In December, records show Boles pleaded guilty to burglary, armed criminal action and assault charges. He was living in the 3100 block of Osage Street in the St. Louis suburb of Dutchtown. Boles was wanted for assault on a law enforcement officer in the second degree, three counts of possession of a controlled substance, and resisting arrest. The FBI is now conducting the investigation, per standard procedure.

Monday, February 28, 2005

Cambridge, Massachusetts —The planning board of Cambridge, Massachusetts voted in unanimous approval of Harvard University‘s plan to build a 410,000 ft² (38 090 m²) science center at 24 Oxford Street, according to the local newspapers, the Harvard Crimson and the Cambridge Chronicle. More than half of the space in the building will be constructed underground.

The Northwest Science Building, as it will be called, will house the laboratories of roughly 30 Harvard science faculty members, as well as a chilled water plant and an electrical substation. The building was designed by Craig Hartman, an architect in the San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, who also completed Harvard University Master Plan in 2002, according to the firm’s website. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill also designed such notable buildings as Chicago‘s Sears Tower and the recently completed international terminal at the San Francisco airport.

The vote to approve the plan occurred at the February 15, 2005, meeting of the Cambridge Planning Board at the City Hall Annex, 344 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. In what the Harvard Crimson called a “departure from the norm,” there were no comments from residents at the hearing. The Crimson reported that the Harvard officials at the meeting took this as “a signal that the community was well-informed about the project prior to the presentation.” The sign advertising the hearing can be seen at right.

In related news, the Director of Urban Design for Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s New York office, Vishaan Chakrabarti, will be speaking at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on March 1, 2005.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The U.S. Department of Labor has released data showing that more than 1,000 private military contractors have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Reuters.

The number is based on insurance claims filed on behalf of contractors that had been killed, and includes both U.S. and foreign contractors.

As of March 2007, an additional 10,569 contractors have been wounded in Iraq and 2,428 in Afghanistan.

There are disputes about the exact number of contractors in Iraq, but it is estimated to be between 130,000 and 180,000 U.S.-paid private military contractors, compared to 157,000 U.S. military personnel.

Despite beliefs that the contractors all belong to large military-oriented groups such as the British intelligence firm Aegis or Blackwater USA which has been labelled “mercenaries”, the jobs of contractors killed have been as varied as electrical engineer Ronald Schulz, translator Kim Sun-il and truck driver Murat Yuce.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.

Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.

Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.

Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.

Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.

Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.

Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Eben Moglen, Columbia University Law Professor, will head the newSoftware Freedom Law Center (SFLC). An initial 4 million dollars has been provided by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to fund the project.

The law center will provide free legal service for open source projects and developers. In 2004 OSDL established a separate $10 million Linux Legal Defense Fund providing legal support for Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator and end user companies subjected to Linux-related litigation by the SCO Group. The new law center will not be affiliated with the OSDL.

“This is about taking care of the goose that laid the golden egg and not letting wolves come in the middle of the night and steal it away,” Moglen said during a press conference. “This is a legal firm not involved so much in litigating and defending as it will be for counseling and advising and nurturing non-profits and to prevent millions of dollars in litigation.”

Moglen will serve as chairman and director-counsel of the non-profit organization. Also on board as directors are: Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School; Daniel Weitzner, director of the World Wide Web Consortium‘s technology and society activities; and Diane Peters, general counsel at the OSDL. Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, will help manage as legal director.

Moglen, one of the world.s leading experts on copyright law as applied to software, will run the new Law Center from its headquarters in New York City. The Law Center will initially have two full-time intellectual property attorneys on staff and expects to expand to four attorneys later this year. Initial clients for the Law Center include the Free Software Foundation and the Samba Project.

Other services provided by the SFLC include: asset stewardship, to avoid intellectual property claim conflict; license review and compatibility analysis; legal consulting and lawyer training.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

“Localization of ‘SEMI Safety Guideline'”, executed by Safety and Health Technology Center of Taiwan (SAHTECH) and supervised by Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI), was announced today in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

This localization included several fields on health and safety of semiconductor manufacturing, certification testing on electrical devices, evaluations on fire or natural diseases, and environmental issues on semiconductor manufacturing devices, etc.. Companies and manufacturers from the semiconductor industry also paid more attentions on this guideline because issues on carbon-savings, earthquakes, fire diseases, and environment-efficiencies were included into this guideline.

On the other side of the incoming trade show of 2008 SecuTech Expo, scheduled after 2 weeks at Taipei World Trade Center, not only main fields on security devices, information security, and fire & disease preventions, the digital monitoring will be a hot topic in security industry. For applications on fire & disease preventions, because its issues contained industrial applications and ESH (Environmental, Safety & Health) managements, if a company want to decrease the ratio of fire disease or earthquake, companies from safety and related industries should pay more attentions on disease preventions.

Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Eben Moglen, Columbia University Law Professor, will head the newSoftware Freedom Law Center (SFLC). An initial 4 million dollars has been provided by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to fund the project.

The law center will provide free legal service for open source projects and developers. In 2004 OSDL established a separate $10 million Linux Legal Defense Fund providing legal support for Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator and end user companies subjected to Linux-related litigation by the SCO Group. The new law center will not be affiliated with the OSDL.

“This is about taking care of the goose that laid the golden egg and not letting wolves come in the middle of the night and steal it away,” Moglen said during a press conference. “This is a legal firm not involved so much in litigating and defending as it will be for counseling and advising and nurturing non-profits and to prevent millions of dollars in litigation.”

Moglen will serve as chairman and director-counsel of the non-profit organization. Also on board as directors are: Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School; Daniel Weitzner, director of the World Wide Web Consortium‘s technology and society activities; and Diane Peters, general counsel at the OSDL. Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, will help manage as legal director.

Moglen, one of the world.s leading experts on copyright law as applied to software, will run the new Law Center from its headquarters in New York City. The Law Center will initially have two full-time intellectual property attorneys on staff and expects to expand to four attorneys later this year. Initial clients for the Law Center include the Free Software Foundation and the Samba Project.

Other services provided by the SFLC include: asset stewardship, to avoid intellectual property claim conflict; license review and compatibility analysis; legal consulting and lawyer training.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Prominent Thai civil rights lawyer, Somchai Neelapaichit, is now presumed dead, according to an admission by the country’s Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Somchai rose to prominence as a lawyer defending Muslim people accused of involvement in the troubles in the predominantly Muslim provinces of southern Thailand. According to the information provided by the PM, evidence has been provided to the Department of Special Investigations that leads them to believe the lawyer is now dead. This is not considered news by the journalist’s family, according to his wife the country’s Prime Minister admitted to her last year that her husband was dead, and gave assurances that action would be taken against those responsible.

Thailand’s DSI became involved with the disappearance of Somchai in July 2005 when allegations were made that police were involved with the lawyer vanishing. His involvement in cases related to the southern insurgency was suspected to have been behind his disappearance. Somchai had lodged appeals with the Bangkok Criminal Court on behalf of five suspects accused of being involved in a raid on a Narathiwat armoury where weapons were seized and soldiers killed, alleging that they had not been given fair treatment during their prosecution.

The admission follows on from the conviction of Police Major, Nguen Thongsuk, who was prosecuted for illegally detaining the lawyer in 2004. Following that he was last seen in public in March 2004. In the case against the police four other officers were acquitted.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

A lawsuit filed by a former employee of Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children (now Sunrise Children’s Services) and four other tax-payers, has shed light on the possibility of religious coercion by the organization. The lawsuit challenges the faith-based agency’s eligibility for state funds.

Specifically, interviews of children conducted by the state of Kentucky have revealed complaints from some of the children. Mainly, children who said they were Catholic, Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witnesses or atheist voiced complaints in the interviews.

“They tried to more [or] less force me to become a Christian,” said one child in an exit interview. “I just felt I was being pressured into giving up my religion.”

Another child reported s/he was “not allowed to choose when or when not to attend a religious service,” per the interview, and was told “‘to do’ some type of Bible study during that time or get consequences.”

Both the Commonwealth of Kentucky and Sunrise say there is a strict policy against proselytizing in the program and that it does not prevent children from practising their individual faiths.

They also stress that these complaints number merely a “handful” among the approximately 1,500 children that are served by the faith-based agency.

“If a child says, ‘I don’t want to go to the Baptist church,’ then the child does not go,” Jonathan Goldberg, the state’s attorney, said. Some children might have mistankenly believed they were forced to go, he added.

The plaintiffs are seeking to have the interviews unsealed, at least in the cases where the child is now 18 years of age or older. The state and Sunrise argue they need to be kept confidential.

The lawsuit originated with Alicia Pedreira, who was fired in 2000. She alleges her firing was direct result of Sunrise (then Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children) finding out she is a lesbian.

Sunrise Children’s Services provides residential programs and foster care homes for children that have suffered abuse or neglect. Since 2001, Kentucky has paid Sunrise US$61 million to provide the services for children who would otherwise be in direct state custody.

In 2001, the state did find cause for action against one of Sunrise’s homes to fix “a coercive religious environment” where staff members confirmed that church attendance was required.

With accusations of undue pressure by a Christian agency funded by the state, the Sunrise case bears some similitude to the lawsuit against Iowa for paying Chuck Colson’s evangelical agency to run part of its prison.

Last June, U.S. District Judge Robert W. Pratt strongly reprimanded and ruled against Iowa’s use of a Christian social service agency to administer its prison. Judge Pratt stated: “For all practical purposes, the state has literally established an Evangelical Christian congregation within the walls of one of its penal institutions… There are no adequate safeguards present, nor could there be, to ensure that state funds are not being directly spent to indoctrinate Iowa inmates.”

The Iowa ruling is pending appeal.

Critics point to both of these cases as failures of George W. Bush’s faith-based services initiative. The program is often seen as conflicting with the tradition of separation of church and state in the United States.