Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Wikinews extended invitations by e-mail on March 23 to multiple candidates running in the Texas’ 6th congressional district special election of May 1 to fill a vacancy left upon the death of Republican congressman Ron Wright. Of them, the office of Democrat Daryl Eddings, Sr. agreed to answer some questions by phone March 30 about their campaigns and policies. The following is the interview with Ms Chatham on behalf of Mr Eddings, Sr.

Eddings is a federal law enforcement officer and senior non-commissioned officer in the US military. His experience as operations officer of an aviation unit in the California National Guard includes working in Los Angeles to control riots sparked by the O. J. Simpson murder case and the police handling of Rodney King, working with drug interdiction teams in Panama and Central America and fighting in the Middle East. He is the founder of Operation Battle Buddy, which has under his leadership kept in touch with over 20 thousand veterans and their families. He was born in California, but moved to Midlothian, Texas. He endeavours to bring “good government, not no government”. Campaign manager Faith Chatham spoke to Wikinews on matters ranging from healthcare to housing.

An Inside Elections poll published on March 18 shows Republican candidate Susan Wright, the widow of Ron Wright, is ahead by 21% followed by Democrat Jana Sanchez with 17% and Republican Jake Ellzey with 8% with a 4.6% margin of error among 450 likely voters. The district is considered “lean Republican” by Inside Elections and voted 51% in favour of Donald Trump in last year’s US presidential election. This is down from 54% for Trump in 2016’s presidential election, the same poll stated.

Monday, January 5, 2009

On Sunday afternoon, a Lafayette-based Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI, Inc.) helicopter bound for the offshore oil fields crashed shortly after taking off from its Amelia base, into a marshy area near Bayou Penchant about 100 miles southwest of New Orleans. The helicopter had been carrying oilfield workers and 2 pilots. Eight people were killed and the Coast Guard helicopter rushed the lone survivor, a 28-year-old medevacted man, in critical condition, to Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center and then taken to Houma‘s Hebert Medical Center.

According to Pamela Norton, age 37, a Gretna woman, her ex-husband, Jorey A. Rivero Sr., age 35, of Westwego, was aboard the oil-services helicopter. “He got onto that chopper about noon Sunday,” she said. The largest helicopter company in the world, Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI, Inc. – formerly Petroleum Helicopters International) has its home base in Lafayette Regional Airport. It provides helicopter services to oil and gas businesses and also flies medical helicopters. “Eight deceased passengers were recovered by the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Department,” Coast Guard spokeswoman Jaclyn Young said. According to Richard Ravinelli, PHI Director of Human Resources, the victims’ names would not be released until all family members concerned are duly notified.

According to Barbara Bryant, her son who worked for three years on oil rigs, was one of the fatalities. “He just spent 3 months offshore, just because he wanted to save up enough money for a down payment on his own house, and he’s been living with me to save his money to do that. He didn’t make it,” she said.

The New Orleans Eighth Coast Guard District Command Center received a distress signal from the Langley, Va. Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC), at 3:30 p.m. Helicopter owner PHI earlier called the Coast Guard, informing about a distress call from its helicopter. Upon AFRCC request, Coast Guard’s Air Station New Orleans’ HH-65C and crew were dispatched to the site of the crash.

Rescue workers at Bob’s Bayou Black Marina in Gibson, Louisiana, an unincorporated community in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, arrived at boat launch to coordinate recovery efforts for the bodies in the wilderness. The Terrebonne Sheriff’s Office Water Patrol and a Coast Guard helicopter also cooperated in search of bodies in waters near Bayou Penchant, a soupy, grassy area which is only accessible by airboat.

Federal investigators led by the National Transportation Safety Board are scheduled to arrive to the crash site Monday to probe the tragedy.

In June, another PHI Air medical helicopter also crashed in Texas. The Sam Houston National Forest accident killed the pilot, paramedic, nurse and a patient who was being transferred from Huntsville to Houston.

Monday, March 12, 2007

24 of 26 Swiss Cantons rejected the proposal for a single health insurance system, in which premiums would be based on income and wealth. The vote on Sunday was the latest in a series of attempts to cut rising costs and ease the financial burden on citizens.

Around 71% of voters rejected the reform. Turnout was at about 46%, slightly above the Swiss average.

As expected, voters in the main German-speaking part of the country turned down the planned reform, which was supported by the centre-left but opposed by the centre-right as well as the business community, parliament and the government.

Opposition in the French and Italian speaking regions was less pronounced. The cantons Jura and Neuchâtel in the French speaking regions voted in favor of the proposed reforms.

Health insurance premiums are higher in southern and western Swiss cantons than in German-speaking areas.

The Swiss Interior Minister Pascal Couchepin said an important part of the Swiss Population appeared to be opposed to “a revolution” in health insurance but he said that he wanted current reforms currently under discussion in the Swiss Parliament to go ahead. He called on all sides, especially health insurers and the cantonal authorities, to make efforts to reduce spending on health insurance and aim for a greater cost efficiency. Currently Switzerland has 87 private insurers providing mandatory basic health care coverage for Swiss residents under a 1996 law. But costs have sky-rocketed. Over 100,000 people are not covered by health insurance due to non payment.

Opponents to the initiative argued that a single insurance system would lead to complacency and create a two-tier system, in which the wealthy would be the only ones available to afford to have additional private insurance coverage.

Supporters of the initiative said a single health insurer would increase the system’s efficiency and allow for annual savings of at least 300 million Swiss Francs (about $245 million) in administrative costs. Currently, the funding system is unbalanced, since many clients on low incomes use state subsidies to pay their premiums, according to the Green Party and the Social Democrats.

The initiative to unite all the insurance companies and introduce premiums based on wealth and income was the most recent in a series of attempts over the past ten years to reduce the public spending on health care. A proposal, similar to this recent proposal, to modify the funding system of the health insurance companies was rejected by 73% of voters in 2003.

Switzerland has the most expensive health system in Europe. Switzerland’s expenditure on health care was 11.6% in 2005, in front of Germany and France but behind the United States.

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Russian ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov was recalled on Wednesday after the US President Joe Biden hinted in an interview he felt Vladimir Putin was a killer; and said Russia would “pay a price” for alleged electoral interference in the 2020 US presidential election.

The US intelligence officials released a report confirming the Russian leader’s authorisation of operations “aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy”. In an interview with ABC News, Biden said Putin “will pay a price. […] I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.” Upon interviewer George Stephanopoulos asking if “[y]ou think he’s a killer?”, Biden responded “I do”, but it was possible to “walk and chew gum at the same time for places where it’s in our mutual interest to to work together”.

This came after the United States sanctioned seven of the Russian government’s senior members earlier this month over the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said while “we have still found ways to work together in areas where we have mutual interest”, President Biden will not “hold back in his direct communications”. Spokesperson for the US State Department Jalina Porter said: “We remain clear-eyed about the challenges that Russia poses, and even as we work with Russia to advance U.S. interests, we’ll also work to hold them accountable”.

The US State Department said it had “nothing to comment” if it would recall its own ambassador John J. Sullivan, who has been posted in Moscow since 2020.

In a statement on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s website, spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed “Anatoly Antonov has been summoned to Moscow for consultations” and “[w]e are interested in preventing an irreversible deterioration in relations, if the Americans become aware of the risks associated with this”.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Simon Gray, Quaker website editor for the Friend and an organiser for the World Gathering of Young Friends today launched radio star one as a podcast linked to birmingham alive !, the Birmingham what’s on guide.

“It’s an eclectic mix of jazz, world, electronic, classical, & folk”, he said, “perhaps in a similar vein to Radio 3’s late junction programme”.

Simon is currently in consultation to make the Friend itself be available as a podcast. Already subscribers can read it via an RSS feed, with the appropriate aggregator software. Podcasting is a fast-growing form of broadcasting which is freely available to listeners on the internet.

Thursday, March 2, 2006

Last week, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced it had launched seven lawsuits against operators of websites it claims had been “facilitating the distribution of copyright works”.

In its announcement, the MPAA said it had commenced legal action against the following BitTorrent tracking sites: isohunt.com, bthub.com, and torrentbox.com, which are all owned by the same person; torrentspy.com; niteshadow.com as well as ed2k site ed2k-it.com and Usenet search engines nzb-zone.com, binnews.com, and dvdrs.net.

Despite the announcement on its website and in the media, the MPAA has failed to notify the administrators of the sites involved directly. Joe from Binnews told Wikinews he only found out about the MPAA’s actions after reading it on several news sites. He said, “At first, I double read the article making sure we were not being punk’d. But then I was shocked that we had to read about it publicly first. As of today (February 25), we have yet to get anything (from the MPAA)”.

“Descds”, an administrator of dvdrs.net told Wikinews that the first he knew of the action being taken against the site was when he was approached by the press and users of his site. He said, “We haven’t been informed by the MPAA and quite frankly are outraged by the method they have adopted to file these lawsuits. In actual fact we would still be none the wiser had our members and members of the press not have contacted us.”

“When we found out about the filed lawsuit we was first worried (after all we are only a small site with limited funds), then shocked and finally outraged. Had the MPAA contacted us anytime in the sites history regards their concerns we would have happily worked with them to gain a resolve,” he said.

Descds also said that despite attempts to contact the MPAA he has received no response.

When asked by Wikinews how they felt about discovering the MPAA’s lawsuits both administrators said they would have appreciated being notified before the announcement was made public.

Binnews told Wikinews, “We do feel they should have notified first. We do not even have a confirmation this is for real.”

Dvdrs said, “We have stated many times had the MPAA personally contacted us we would have happily listened to their issues and acted accordingly. We are doing nothing wrong legally on our site and to be made look like an established piracy ring is an outrage. We have worked extremely hard on site to keep within international laws and they have publicly destroyed everything we have worked towards in the last two years. We are receiving negative PR and this is totally unacceptable.”

Wikinews has discovered that both Binnews and dvdrs.net have procedures in place for dealing with alleged copyright infringement under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite this, both sites deny ever being contacted by any organisation with a “takedown” notice.

When asked if Binnews ever received a takedown notice, Binnews replied, “Nope, we have never received a notice from anyone. My cell phone is tied to the site, we have proper DMCA guidelines on the site and no one has contacted us.”

When asked the same question, Dvdrs said, “No never. We would actively respond to any DMCA request quickly and efficiently. We fully support the law and would never try to evade anything within its scope. Had a DMCA been issued by any member, our site would have immediately deleted the offensive file.”

When asked how they would deal with a DMCA takedown notice, Binnews said, “We would act quite quickly. An email sent to the alert system is tied into all of “staff” members, my cell phone and my email.”

According to Dvdrs, they would be equally as compliant. “We would immediately delete the offending file on our server and conduct a thorough research into any files that may also be connected to the one mentioned. We would also respond to the request personally with a follow up email expressing our actions,” they said.

Wikinews asked the administrators if they thought their sites were any different to conventional search engines like Google and Yahoo. Binnews replied, “No, you can go to any search engine and find just about anything.”

Dvdrs also shares Binnews’ position telling Wikinews, “No. We index what is already readily available on commercial, tax paying, US based registered companies hard drives. All we are doing is pointing to files not on our network, much the same way google or any search bot operates. We do not host these files and without the premium paid service of third parties our marked up text based XML files are useless. We have never hosted illegal files and only offer information.”

Dvdrs has expressed that if the MPAA deems them illegal they should also target those who are actually hosting the files. Descds said, “We feel that should the MPAA deem us illegal then they must also target premium paid Usenet Providers who act as the transit for these files. Ironically both Easynews and Usenetserver offer both indexing and carrier for these files and yet have received no such lawsuits filed.”

“We also find it ironic still that Newzbin, creators, instigators and promoters of the NZB format and un-arguably the biggest Usenet Indexing site in the world have received no lawsuits filed. We feel that we are being rail roaded and are not at all happy about it.”

On the other hand, Binnews was surprised that the MPAA did not target ISPs and Usenet providers in the first instance. “Cut the head off and there is nothing for us to index and report on. If the ISPs acted in a proper manner and did what they are more than capable of, we would not be assisting people in combating piracy on their networks,” they said.

Despite being outraged with the MPAA and its actions, Descds said that despite being outside of US juristiction he is happy to assist the MPAA in anyway necessary. “We would like it known for the record that we are actively trying to reach a resolve regards this action by the MPAA. We have contacted them and said openly many times we would welcome their input and act accordingly. Should they feel that NZBS are illegal we will remove those sections immediately and await a legal judgement on their legality. DVDRS is not a pirate network and to call us such has insulted our member base.”

“I would also like it noted that although we host in the US i am actually a UK citizen who currently does not have to adhere to their communications and judgements. However, such is our resolve that I would happily comply should communication between us take place. We can offer little more to help this but hope that the MPAA retract their statement that we are an organised pirate network and restore our good name. Should the MPAA decide to not communicate with us and continue their legal actions we will instruct our attorneys and contact legal bodies like the EFF for help on this matter,” he added.

Binnews also had this to say of the MPAA’s lawsuit: “Binnews does not host any files, the claim that we read “BinNews.com offers files for over 3,000 movies” is 100% completely false. We do not host any files, never have and never will. We provide a legitimate service to copyright holders. No where on our site does it say, “join us, we can give you free movies.” We do not even have pre-made nzb files.”