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Saturday, March 14, 2015

This weekend saw the opening of two new exhibitions at Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Wikinews attended Thursday’s press preview for the event where a full contingent of the capital’s press turned out to see the striking collection of paintings, photographs, and other works. Presented below are a selection of images captured at the preview.

REFLECTIONS: A Series of Changing Displays of Contemporary Art, billed as a showcase of a “diverse range of internationally-renowned contemporary and modern artists” is to display major works from the Gallery’s permanent collection, alongside important loans. Alongside this broad range of works, a three-room display of pieces on-loan from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation — with a dramatic painted steel relief, ‘borrowed’ from the Tate in London — runs from March 14 through to January 10 next year.

Admission to both exhibitions is free; being located in Dean, to the north-west of Edinburgh’s city centre, a free Gallery bus service is available.

Monday, October 19, 2009

A report accidentally published on the Internet provides insight into a secretive European Union surveillance project designed to monitor its citizens, as reported by Wikileaks earlier this month. Project INDECT aims to mine data from television, internet traffic, cellphone conversations, p2p file sharing and a range of other sources for crime prevention and threat prediction. The €14.68 million project began in January, 2009, and is scheduled to continue for five years under its current mandate.

INDECT produced the accidentally published report as part of their “Extraction of Information for Crime Prevention by Combining Web Derived Knowledge and Unstructured Data” project, but do not enumerate all potential applications of the search and surveillance technology. Police are discussed as a prime example of users, with Polish and British forces detailed as active project participants. INDECT is funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and includes participation from Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Indicated in the initial trial’s report, the scope of data collected is particularly broad; days of television news, radio, newspapers, and recorded telephone conversations are included. Several weeks of content from online sources were agglomerated, including mining Wikipedia for users’ and article subjects’ relations with others, organisations, and in-project movements.

Watermarking of published digital works such as film, audio, or other documents is discussed in the Project INDECT remit; its purpose is to integrate and track this information, its movement within the system and across the Internet. An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube is shown to the right. The simplified example of the system in operation shows a file of documents with a visible INDECT-titled cover taken from an office and exchanged in a car park. How the police are alerted to the document theft is unclear in the video; as a “threat”, it would be the INDECT system’s job to predict it.

Throughout the video use of CCTV equipment, facial recognition, number plate reading, and aerial surveillance give friend-or-foe information with an overlaid map to authorities. The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursuing, and capturing the document recipient. The file of documents is retrieved, and the recipient roughly detained.

Technology research performed as part of Project INDECT has clear use in countering industrial and international espionage, although the potential use in maintaining any security and predicting leaks is much broader. Quoted in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Liberty’s director, Shami Chakrabarti, described a possible future implementation of INDECT as a “sinister step” with “positively chilling” repercussions Europe-wide.

“It is inevitable that the project has a sensitive dimension due to the security focussed goals of the project,” Suresh Manandhar, leader of the University of York researchers involved in the “Work Package 4” INDECT component, responded to Wikinews. “However, it is important to bear in mind that the scientific methods are much more general and has wider applications. The project will most likely have lot of commercial potential. The project has an Ethics board to oversee the project activities. As a responsible scientists [sic] it is of utmost importance to us that we conform to ethical guidelines.”

Although Wikinews attempted to contact Professor Helen Petrie of York University, the local member of Project INDECT’s Ethics board, no response was forthcoming. The professor’s area of expertise is universal access, and she has authored a variety of papers on web-accessibility for blind and disabled users. A full list of the Ethics board members is unavailable, making their suitability unassessable and distancing them from public accountability.

One potential application of Project INDECT would be implementation and enforcement of the U.K.’s “MoD Manual of Security“. The 2,389-page 2001 version passed to Wikileaks this month — commonly known as JSP-440, and marked “RESTRICTED” — goes into considerable detail on how, as a serious threat, investigative journalists should be monitored, and effectively thwarted; just the scenario the Project INDECT video could be portraying.

When approached by Wikinews about the implications of using INDECT, a representative of the U.K.’s Attorney General declined to comment on legal checks and balances such a system might require. Further U.K. enquiries were eventually referred to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who have not yet responded.

Wikinews’ Brian McNeil contacted Eddan Katz, the International Affairs Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.). Katz last spoke to Wikinews in early 2008 on copyright, not long after taking his current position with the E.F.F. He was back in Brussels to speak to EU officials, Project INDECT was on his agenda too — having learned of it only two weeks earlier. Katz linked Project INDECT with a September report, NeoConopticon — The EU Security-Industrial Complex, authored by Ben Hayes for the Transnational Institute. The report raises serious questions about the heavy involvement of defence and IT companies in “security research”.

On the record, Katz answered a few questions for Wikinews.

((WN)) Is this illegal? Is this an invasion of privacy? Spying on citizens?

Eddan Katz When the European Parliament issued the September 5, 2001 report on the American ECHELON system they knew such an infrastructure is in violation of data protection law, undermines the values of privacy and is the first step towards a totalitarian surveillance information society.

((WN)) Who is making the decisions based on this information, about what?

E.K. What’s concerning to such a large extent is the fact that the projects seem to be agnostic to that question. These are the searching systems and those people that are working on it in these research labs do search technology anyway. […] but its inclusion in a database and its availability to law enforcement and its simultaneity of application that’s so concerning, […] because the people who built it aren’t thinking about those questions, and the social questions, and the political questions, and all this kind of stuff. [… It] seems like it’s intransparent, unaccountable.

The E.U. report Katz refers to was ratified just six days before the September 11 attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In their analysis of the never-officially-recognised U.S. Echelon spy system it states, “[i]n principle, activities and measures undertaken for the purposes of state security or law enforcement do not fall within the scope of the EC Treaty.” On privacy and data-protection legislation enacted at E.U. level it comments, “[such does] not apply to ‘the processing of data/activities concerning public security, defence, state security (including the economic well-being of the state when the activities relate to state security matters) and the activities of the state in areas of criminal law'”.

Part of the remit in their analysis of Echelon was rumours of ‘commercial abuse’ of intelligence; “[i]f a Member State were to promote the use of an interception system, which was also used for industrial espionage, by allowing its own intelligence service to operate such a system or by giving foreign intelligence services access to its territory for this purpose, it would undoubtedly constitute a breach of EC law […] activities of this kind would be fundamentally at odds with the concept of a common market underpinning the EC Treaty, as it would amount to a distortion of competition”.

Ben Hayes’ NeoConoptiocon report, in a concluding section, “Following the money“, states, “[w]hat is happening in practice is that multinational corporations are using the ESRP [European Seventh Research Programme] to promote their own profit-driven agendas, while the EU is using the programme to further its own security and defence policy objectives. As suggested from the outset of this report, the kind of security described above represents a marriage of unchecked police powers and unbridled capitalism, at the expense of the democratic system.”

Monday, August 21, 2006

Buffalo, New York —

After nearly thirty years, Pano’s Restaurant at 1081 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York will end a tradition of being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week by ending its overnight food service.

The tradition for Buffalonians, who are able to enjoy drinks at the bars and clubs until 4:00 a.m. will end sometime at the end of August or September, according to overnight manager Wendi Dittmar and restaurant accountant Roseanne Jones.

“We will be starting the closure of the overnight shift sometime in the next 2 weeks to a month,” said Dittmar in an exclusive interview with Wikinews.

Jones told Wikinews that owner Pano Georgiadis is “just fed up” with the “destruction, the walk-outs of bills and fights that the ‘drunk’ people cause” in his restaurant.

Pano’s opened in 1977 on the day of the blizzard of ’77’ and has “remained open for 24 hours since then”, only closing for an hour at a time on the weekends to clean up and prepare the restaurant for breakfast, said Georgiadis.

Artvoice, which holds the “Best of Buffalo” competition every year where readers vote for their favorite Buffalo place, has listed Pano’s as the Best of Buffalo for best brunch, best Greek restaurant, best patio and best super-cheap breakfasts for 2006.

Dittmar also says that Georgiadis is expected to make several “public service announcements” within the next few weeks to “thank customers for their patronage.”

Friday, September 26, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. New Democratic Party candidate Michael McMahon is standing for election in the riding of Prince Edward—Hastings. McMahon moved to Windsor in 1951, getting a degree in education, teaching locally and in Papua New Guinea. He served as Branch President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), served on multiple of their major committees, and recently retired from the Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board.

Wikinews contacted Michael McMahon, 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.

Since being redefined in 2003, the riding includes the County of Prince Edward and the County of Hastings (except the City of Quinte West). Conservative Party member Daryl Kramp currently represents the riding, after beating a Liberal in 2004. Ken Cole of the Liberals and Alan Coxwell of the Greens are also running in the riding.

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

Sunday, August 13, 2006

A power outage hit large parts of Tokyo, and Chiba, Japan. The electrical blackout occurred due to an industrial accident, in which a crane damaged some power lines accidentally at 7:40 AM local time (2240 UTC), the Kyodo News agency reported, quoting Tokyo Power Electric Co. Power was reported to have been restored to most areas within a few hours.

At least two elevators stopped with an unknown number of people trapped inside, said a fire official in Tokyo. Some train services were halted. The number of passengers was lower than normal due to a holiday. About 800,000 residences were affected by the blackout, according to the power company. Most services have since then been restored.

Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea delayed opening by an hour as many rides did not function due to the power problems.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Monday about 500 migrants may have been killed in a deliberate sinking in the Mediterranean Sea last week. The unverified claim comes after IOM debriefed two Palestinian survivors.

In a statement, IOM said, “If this story, which police are investigating, is true, it would be the worst shipwreck in years”. The organization added, if the story would be revealed as true it would be “not an accident but a mass murder, perpetrated by criminals without scruples or any respect for human life”.

IOM Spokesperson in Italy Flavio Di Giacomo told AFP, “Two survivors brought to Sicily told us that there had been at least 500 people on board. Nine other survivors were rescued by Greek and Maltese ships, but all the rest appear to have perished”.

According to the two survivors, the boat, which departed on September 6 from Damietta, Egypt bound for Malta, sank in the Mediterranean Sea last Wednesday when people smugglers rammed it; drowning the vast majority of its 500 plus passengers, including refugees from Egypt, Sudan, Syria and Palestine. They said the smugglers had become angry when the passengers refused transfer to a smaller vessel that they doubted could carry them.

The Palestinian ambassador to Malta, Jubran Tawil, said three Palestinians who had been on board the boat have been rescued with aid from Panamanian ships and flown to Malta by a Maltese helicopter together with some of the dead.

According to UN data, this year the number of migrants by sea to Europe exceeds 130,000, up by 50,000 from last year. Many people from North Africa and the Middle East attempt to reach Europe on overcrowded, unsafe boats. Over 2,500 people on this journey have drowned or disappeared this year, 2,200 of them since June.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Ford Motor Company said on Tuesday that its sales in the United States rose 43% in February compared to the same period last year, as the automaker outsold rivals Toyota and General Motors.

Ford said that total sales improved to 142,285 units, compared to 141,951 units sold by GM. Additionally, Ford said that its share of the total US car market rose to 17%, up from 14% a year ago. The increase was better than analysts had predicted, and Ford’s stock rose to a five-year high in morning trading, before declining later in the day. Ford’s sales were significantly influenced by a 74% increase in fleet sales to businesses. Rental car agencies alone accounted for around 30,000 units sold. Sales to retail consumers increased only 28%.

The increases were led by sales of two sedans, the Fusion and Taurus, which rose 166.5 and 93.3% respectively, although sales of other models such as SUVs and pickup trucks also increased. Both models were significantly redesigned last year, and analysts said that improved quality from such cars were driving the increases.

Other companies also reported February sales today, nearly all reporting sales gains as well, although none as large as those of Ford. Toyota was the sole exception to the sales gains, as their sales declined 8.7%, as the company was faced with a global recall during the month that led to a temporary stoppage of production for some models.

“The strength of our new products … are resonating with customers,” said Ken Czubay, Ford’s vice president of sales and marketing. However, he believed that traditional Toyota customers were not buying rival autos, but rather awaiting the results from the recalls.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Hundreds of thousands of British public sector workers went on strike across the country yesterday to protest planned changes to pensions. As industrial action swept the country, half of all schools were hit when teachers walked out, thousands of emergency service responders did not arrive at work, and there were warnings of immigration delays at Heathrow airport.

Police arrested 26 people as protesters picketed on a march in London, and riot police kettled demonstrators as clashes broke out. Reports vary, but it is thought that up to half of British state schools have been affected as employees did not turn up to work.

Mark Serwotka, the leader of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), said the strikes would serve as a “wake-up call” to the coalition government. “It’s a very, very clear signal to the government that they have been rumbled,” Serwotka said. “This is not about pensions, this is about making public sector workers pay for the economic problems, and we are determined to keep going until they change direction.”

Government officials condemned the strike and said the planned changes to pensions, which would see teachers work until age 68 and get less from their pensions, were “fair to taxpayers” as Britain attempts to deal with a large budget deficit. A spokesperson for Downing Street insisted the strike was having a “minimal” impact and said the turnout suggested many public sector workers supported the pension changes.

Christine Blower, the general secretary of one of the striking unions, the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said the strike demonstrated “the anger and distress that this government is causing teachers.” She said the “unjustified attacks” on the pensions of teachers “are nothing short of disgraceful.” Speaking on BBC television programme Question Time, she added: “Much of this has already been imposed on teachers without negotiation, and when we say there are talks going on it’s perfectly true that the government is talking but it isn’t actually listening.”

But despite government claims that the strike was having little impact, 5,679 schools were closed and another 4,999 were affected as teachers did not turn up for work. Michael Gove, the education secretary attacked the walkouts as “disappointing and unnecessary”. Thousands of staff handling emergency 999 calls also striked and pickets were held outside courts as members of the PCS walked out in protest.

Francis Maude, the cabinet office minister, also maintained that the strikes were wrong and said the low number of people walking out showed many supported the government’s plans. “What today has shown is that the vast majority of hard-working public sector employees do not support today’s premature strike and have come into work today,” he said.

Senior Labour party figures including Ed Miliband, Tessa Jowell and John Denham said the strikes were unjustified until negotiations with the government had concluded. Mary Bousted of the NUT criticised Labour’s lack of support for the striking workers: “The response of Ed Miliband has been a disgrace – he should be ashamed of himself. If our strike is a mistake, what has he done to oppose this devastating attack on our pensions? If the opposition will not defend our pensions, we will.”

A largely peaceful march by 30,000 protesters took place through London, and the atmosphere was reported to be largely peaceful, but Metropolitan Police officials said 26 people had been arrested. At a meeting in Westminister, many left wing figures attacked the government plans. Ken Livingstone, a former mayor of London who is running for the job again next year, said the coalition government had “mishandled” the issue of pensions. “The government must end its attacks and negotiate on the core issues under contention,” he added.