Thursday, October 2, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. Animal Alliance Environment Voters Party of Canada candidate Marie Crawford is standing for election in the riding of Toronto—Centre.

Marie is a Director of Animal Alliance of Canada, a separate but related organization. She volunteers her time for Animal Alliance, but unlike party leader Liz White, does not work out of their office.

Wikinews contacted Marie, 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 incumbent in this riding is National Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jack Layton. Other than Crawford, trying for the riding are Liberal Andrew Lang, Sharon Howarth (Green), and Christina Perreault (Conservative), Marcell Rodden (Marxist-Leninist), and Bahman Yazdanfar (Canadian Action Party), and independent John Richardson. The riding has existed federally since 1979, and has the seat has been occupied by Bob Rae (NDP, 1979–1982), Lynn McDonald (NDP, 1982–1988), Dennis Mills (Liberal, 1988–2004), and Layton (NDP, 2004 to present).

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

Thursday, August 25, 2005

The 30A network has said that it wants to create a carnival atmosphere while protesting at the Forbes Global CEO conference. The protest, which starts on August 30, is expected to attract up to 2,000 protesters. Similar events in the past often had instances of violent confrontations between police and some of the activists. The 30A network is a loose affiliation of groups and individuals co-ordinating the protest.

30A spokesman Bruce Knobloch, of the International Socialist Organisation, made the call for a peaceful protest in a press release last week.

“We want a safe community action showing that people in Sydney oppose Howard¹s plan for a US-style wages system, the war in Iraq and his kow-towing to global corporate chiefs. We pose no threat to the Opera House or the millionaire delegates, or to other users of east Circular Quay,” Mr Knobloch said.

The conference will be held at the Sydney Opera House. The Forbes website says that at the event “senior figures from the world’s leading companies and institutions will discuss the best ways to nurture and capitalize on innovation and reveal the latest global trends.” It was recently announced that George Bush Sr will be attending the conference, along with former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Prime Minister John Howard, and former NSW Premier Bob Carr.

Mr Knobloch described the attendees as “a few hundred neo-conservative corporate chiefs”.

The protesters have been denied access to the Opera House forecourt for the duration of the conference. Mr Knobloch believes that this decision is unjustified. He also accused the police of deliberately creating the conditions for confrontation.

“The police seem intent on creating chaos and confrontation, which is the last thing we need. We’ve urged police to build a barrier in front of the Opera House proper and to allow us to use the public space in the forecourt. By pushing us out into the CBD the police are going to create problems for commuters and business owners,” he said.

30A protestors this week organised a media conference outside Surry Hills Police Station, requesting a meeting to negotiate an agreement. According to an article on Sydney Indymedia, police at the station were unable to discuss the issue, but told 30a representatives that they would be contacted to organise a meeting.

“Minimising the protesters right to peacefully rally dramatically increases police powers and strikes at the heart of protesters’ democratic right to peaceful assembly,” the article said.

ASIO has assessed the conference to be “medium risk”, and this has been used by the police and government to justify the increased security.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Early last night, massive attacks targeted China’s Internet, slowing access to a crawl. The Chinese .cn domain was targeted in the latest of many denial of service attacks against China. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, which manages the .cn domain, this attack was the largest of its kind.

The domain was attacked twice, once at 2am local time, and again at 4am. The second was larger, and Chinese officials said work to restore service was progressing slowly. State-run newsmedia said numerous .cn websites and microblogging website Sina Weibo were targeted.

This outage comes at a sensitive time for China, with the trial of Bo Xilai, a former government official, having just ended. The attack also comes amidst rumors that the Chinese government will be cracking down on social media commentators, according the The Wall Street Journal.

According to a Wall Street Journal interview with Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a company that tracks web traffic and metrics, during the attack Chinese Internet traffic dropped by 32%. He also claimed this attack is an indicator of the susceptibility of Chinese Internet infrastructure to these attacks.

Sina Weibo access is presently working as normal.

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Leaders of African Union (AU) member states met in Niamey, Niger’s capital, for an AU summit where on Sunday Presidents Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria and Patrice Talon of Benin signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement.

Nigeria previously announced it planned to join the AfCFTA in the week leading up to the summit. AU trade and industry commissioner Albert Muchanga announced Benin was to join. The commissioner said, “We haven’t yet agreed on rules of origin and tariff con[c]essions, but the framework we have is enough to start trading on July 1, 2020”.

Niger’s president Mahamadou Issoufou said, “Nigeria is Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country. Without Nigeria the free trade zone would’ve been handicapped.”

The agreement seeks to remove tariffs on 90 percent of commodities and better intregrate African economies.

At the opening of the AU summit, AU chairperson President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said, “The success of the AfCFTA will be the real test to achieve the economic growth that will turn our people’s dream of welfare and quality of life into a reality”.

With Sunday’s signings, all but one of the member states of the 55-member AU have signed on to the agreement, with Eritrea the only state unsigned. African leaders have negotiated the deal over the last four years. While 54 nations have signed onto the AfCFTA, only 27 have ratified the agreement.

While many transactions in Africa occur using U.S. dollars or euros, the AU announced an electronic pan-African payment system.African Export–Import Bank president Okey Oramah said the use of third-party currencies “costs Africa between $5 and $7 billion,” further saying, “Beyond that, it also reduces trade because Africa has a scarcity of foreign exchange.”

There are reportedly 1.3 billion people in the free trade area, with the combined economies of the countries worth US$3.4 trillion. One of the stated goals of AfCFTA is to encourage more intra-Africa trade. Currently about 16–17 percent of African trade occurs between African countries. This is in contrast to the European Union members, where intra-European trade accounts for over 60 percent of trade.

The International Monetary Fund said in May the AfCFTA might be for African countries comparable to the European and North American trade blocs as an “economic game changer”.

Seven members states had bid to host the AfCFTA secretariat, the operational organ of the free trade agreement, with Ghana winning the bid.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

A woman who held the Guinness World Record for having the world’s longest fingernails has lost them in a four-car accident in her hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States.

66-year-old Lee Redmond was seriously injured after she was ejected from the sports utility vehicle (SUV) she had been a passenger in. It had collided with one car, causing it to collide with two other cars on Tuesday February 10. She is expected to make a full recovery.

“[Her nails] were damaged beyond repair,” reported the BBC, quoting Guinness World Records, who also said that Redmond’s nails were “a fundamental part of her life and unique character”. The cause of the crash is not yet known and an investigation is ongoing.

Redmond is credited by the Guinness Book for having a combined fingernail length of 28 feet, the longest on record. She has been growing all eight fingers and two thumbnails since 1979. Her longest of all nails was her right thumb, which was 2ft and eleven inches long.

Before Redmond was named as the record holder in 2006, Shridhar Chillal from India had the longest at a combined length of just over twenty feet.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

The anti-poverty group Oxfam says global warming is altering the human food supply and threatening some of the world’s poorest people with hunger. At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, the group argued developed countries should pay to address the problem, and costs could top $50 billion a year.

Climate change, which many scientists believe is fuelled by human activities, alters rain cycles and causes increased droughts and flooding. Rising temperatures mean some traditional crops do not grow as well as they used to. The United Nations predicts that in some African countries, crop yields could fall by half.

Oxfam researcher Kate Raworth says coping with these issues will be expensive.

“Oxfam has estimated that for all developing countries to adapt to climate change will cost at least $50 billion a year,” she said. “And for that to be done with justice we believe that the rich and the most polluting countries should pay the vast share of the money to make possible for those countries most vulnerable and least responsible for causing the problem to cope with the new realities they have to deal with.”

The report released by Oxfam at the conference on Tuesday says some countries are already feeling the effects of a warming planet. In South Africa, farmers are planting faster-maturing crops to adapt to unpredictable rainfall.

Bangladeshis are creating floating vegetable gardens that can thrive in spite of floods. But Mozaharul Alam, who heads Bangladesh’s climate adaptation effort, says overall improvements to the food system still leave many families vulnerable.

“Most of the agriculture is subsistent in nature,” said Alam. “So if [there is] any failure of the crop on the ground, even if there is food available in the market, unless the people has the buying capacity, that availability of the food in the market has no meaning to the vulnerable family.”

Oxfam argues the United States, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Australia should be among the major sources of funds to help developing countries solve their climate change problems.

These countries have agreed in principle, but one task of the Bali Conference is to find out how much individual countries are willing to spend on climate-related issues. It also aims to begin deciding how to divide those resources between prevention of further climate change, and adaptation to the changes that are already taking place.

The conference involves thousands of scientists, government officials and development group representatives, and runs for another 10 days.