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Wednesday, September 6, 2006

15-year-old teenager, Ngatai Reweti was sentenced and jailed today at Auckland’s High Court for four years after killing Christopher Currie by throwing an eight kilogram chunk of concrete at Auckland’s Southern Motorway.

Currie, from Taupo, was driving along the Auckland Southern Motorway with his friends when the concrete smashed through his windscreen from the Princes Street, Otahuhu over-bridge, killing Currie instantly.

Reweti was originally convicted of the murder of Currie on August 19, 2005 but in July, 2006 a jury overturned this conviction and instead of murder charged him with manslaughter.

Justice Winkelmann, during the sentencing, said: “Reweti’s actions were serious and of breathtaking stupidity worthy of condemnation.” She said it was a mindless act that killed Mr Currie and irreparably damaged the lives of others.

Winkelmann has suggested that he should serve his sentence at a youth justice residence and said that it was not premeditated unlike what the crown said.

Currie’s family are outraged at the sentence. “We feel let down by the justice system. I feel the judge has disrespected us as good people and good people all over New Zealand,” said Wayne Currie, father of Christopher Currie.

Reweti’s family had said that Ngatai was gentle and loving but the deputy principal from his school said that he was often absent and very challenging. Reweti had taken full responsibility for the killing even though he had been smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol the day before Currie died.

Aaron Perkins, crown prosecutor, said: “The sentence should deter others from committing such acts and people should be able to travel on the roads without the fear of a missile being thrown and the consequences of that.”

Friday, November 13, 2009

Wikinews interviewed author Marc Headley about his new book Blown for Good, and asked him about life inside the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base“, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California. Headley joined the organization at age seven when his mother became a member, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Fire broke out on Friday morning and destroyed the bottom two floors of a six-story hospital in Miryang, South Korea, killing at least 37 people, most of them elderly. More than a hundred injuries were reported, with eighteen people in critical condition. This is the highest death toll from fire in South Korea in almost a decade.

The fire is believed to have started at about 7:30 local time, according to fire chief Choi Man-woo. It originated on the ground floor in the emergency room as per various officials. The hospital has 98 beds and a medical staff of about 35, and specializes in long-term care of elderly patients. It adjoins a nursing home, all of whose 94 residents were evacuated. Staff carried some patients out of the hospital on their backs.

One patient, Jang Yeong-jae, who told his story to JoongAng Ilbo, said he escaped by removing a screen from a window to get to a ladder placed by firefighters. He described people “running around in panic, falling over and screaming as smoke filled the rooms”. The majority of the victims died from smoke inhalation and are believed to be elderly, said the head of the city’s public hospital, Chun Jae-kyung. A doctor, a nurse, and a nursing assistant have died, according to the fire service; it took three hours to put out the fire.

In a press briefing, Seok Gyeong-sik, the director of the hospital, apologized to patients and their families. Son Kyung-chul, its chairman, stated that there were no sprinklers because the facility was small. Sprinklers are being installed in the nursing home, where a new law requires them by June 30.

Last month, 29 people died in a fire in a gym in Jecheon; the owner and the manager were arrested for safety violations. In 2014, a blaze in a nursing home in Jangseong left 21 dead. The President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, responded to the Friday fire by calling an emergency meeting of his staff, and promised that the cause would be found rapidly “to prevent the recurrence of the fire in the future”.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The second landing gear failure on a Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) de Havilland Canada Dash 8 (also known as a Bombardier Q400 following Bombardier’s purchase of de Havilland Canada from Boeing) within the space of a week has prompted the grounding of many of the twin-engined turboprops.

On September 9, Scandinavian Airlines Flight 1209 suffered a right landing gear failure during landing at Aalborg Airport, Denmark. A fire broke out during the crash, and five people sustained injuries. This was followed today by the similar crash of Scandinavian Airlines Flight 2748 at Palanga Airport, Lithuania. No-one was injured.

The accidents have resulted in Bombardier recommending the grounding of all Q400s, which have undertaken more than 60,000 flights, as a “precautionary measure”. This affects leading carriers around the world, including SAS, Alaska Air ‘s Horizon Air subsidiary, Flybe, Japan Airlines, Austrian Airlines Group and Augsburg Airways, and covers around 60 aircraft.

SAS and Horizon Air have grounded 27 and 15 aircraft respectively, while Flybe have grounded six. Another airline, Porter Airlines, which operates the type exclusively against any others, have pointed out that their aircraft have not undertaken enough flights to be affected by the measures.

The landing gear are manufactured in the United States by Goodrich Corporation. One industry analyst, Cameron Doerksen, said that he felt that although the incidents and groundings obviously constitute bad publicity, he feels it would not influence the decision of a carrier considering whether to purchase Q400s. Bombardier declined 17 cents, or 2.7 percent, to C$6.23 on the Toronto Stock Exchange and SAS fell 6 kronor, or 4.8 percent, to 118 kronor in stock exchanging in Stockholm. Goodrich stock rose 19 cents to $64.96 on the New York Stock Exchange.

The groundings have caused hundreds of flights to be cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded every day. The cost to SAS alone is estimated at 10-15 million Swedish kronor per day.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

In a new setback to the Thai government’s efforts to ease mounting political tensions, protest leaders escaped from their hotel Friday after security forces arrived to arrest them.

One, Arisman Pongruangrong, climbed down three floors using a rope, and was rushed away by supporters thronging the building. The police say Arisman led recent rallies at the national parliament, the election commission, and satellite transmission bases.

Officials earlier Friday said the government is preparing to arrest people linked to violent clashes with security forces last Saturday.

Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban, Thai security chief, announced the raid on the hotel as it was unfolding, saying that a Special Forces unit had closed in around a downtown Bangkok hotel.

“As I am speaking, the government’s special team is surrounding the SC Park Hotel, where we have learned that there are terrorists and some of their leaders hiding,” Suthep said.

A spokesman for the governing Democrat Party, Baranuj Smuthararaks, says arrest warrants have been issued for those suspected of being involved in the violence. Some of the suspects have been identified from photos taken during the clashes.

“Right now the government’s focusing on issuing warrants for acts of terrorism by the people who fortunately have been captured in action [in photos] by both the local and international media,” he said.

According to the New York Times, as many as five protest leaders had been staying at the same hotel as Pongruangrong. Those leaders later appeared together at a protest rally in Bangkok.

“I would like to thank all of the people who saved me,” Arisman said. “You have saved democracy.”The government says armed men infiltrated protester ranks Saturday and fired on troops trying to disperse a rally. Five soldiers and 19 protesters died during the clashes.

Thailand is facing its most severe political crisis in almost 20 years. The anti-government movement, led by the United Democratic Front against Dictatorship or UDD, demands that the government step down and call fresh elections.

UDD supporters, known as red shirts, have held protests in Bangkok for more than a month.

The UDD largely supports former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a coup in 2006 and remains overseas to avoid a jail sentence for corruption. Mr. Thaksin has strong support among the rural and urban poor, as well among some sections of the army and police.

Some parties in the governing coalition want to set a clear time frame for elections to ease tensions. But the government says it will only call elections once the political situation has cooled.

Monday, December 31, 2007

AOL has decided to discontinue development of the Netscape web browser which brought surfing the Internet to the masses, until its user base began to erode during the “browser wars” of the mid-1990s and resulted in the birth of Mozilla project.

Tom Drapeau, the director of Netscape inside AOL announced on the Netscape blog that support for the recently released Netscape Navigator 9 and all of Netscape’s browsers back to version 1.0, will end because it was unable to gain market share and a low number of users that continues to dwindle. Drapeau noted, “AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” and that “the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”

Netscape’s origins lie at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where Netscape’s co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina wrote their first copy of NCSA Mosaic which became the first popular web browser and opened up the web for the first time to the general public and started the rise of the Internet in everyday life.

Andreessen along with Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, started the Mosaic Communications Corporation and released their first product Mosaic Netscape 0.9 in October 1994. A month later the company became the name it is today, the Netscape Communications Corporation to avoid legal problems from NCSA. A year later, had a successful IPO on August 9, 1995 and the stock closed the day at $75.

Netscape’s early success and virtual monopoly of the browser market was short-lived however as Microsoft viewed Netscape’s idea of a consistent browser across various operating systems a threat and quickly began development of its own browser, Internet Explorer.

This competition between Netscape and Microsoft became known as the browser wars, where both companies tried to outdo each other with their increasingly unstable browsers including: new features that did not always work, not providing bug fixes, deviating from Web standards (including the infamous <blink> and <marquee> HTML tags), program crashes and security holes.

By the end of 1997, Netscape’s glory had run out and it experienced it’s first bad quarter, which resulted in layoffs in January 1998. The new year also brought the world with the arrival of what would eventually become Mozilla and later Firefox, when Netscape decided to make the source code for their browser open source. A year later, Netscape was out of steam and was no longer an independent company but now a subsidiary of America Online.

The most recent version of the Netscape browser, Navigator 9, was for the most part was a re-skinned version of Firefox developed internally by a small group of people inside AOL. Netscape’s actual browser development division was closed back in July 2003 and the workers laid off.

However, AOL continues to run Netscape as a brand including a web portal, including a Digg-like social news aggregator which was branded as Netscape.com from June 2006 till September 2007, when it was spun off into a renamed site called Propeller. Netscape.com is now a dually branded AOL Netscape web portal, which is a duplicate of AOL.com. Netscape is also used as a brand by AOL as a low-cost dial-up Internet service provider.

Firefox’s third version is currently available as a beta and Microsoft is expected to release Internet Explorer 8 sometime in 2008.