Tuesday, April 12, 2011

One day after France began enforcing a ban on the public wearing Islamic veils that cover the face, either a niq?b or a burqa, French police briefly detained two veiled women. The police later claimed that the women were arrested for taking part in an unauthorized protest, not because they were wearing veils.

The new law is hotly debated. The women were arrested while outside the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and may now face fines of up to $217 (150 euros), community service and/or a citizenship course under the law.

While the ban covers the burqa and the niq?b, it does not include the hijab or the chador. The hijab is a veil that leaves the face visible while covering the hair and neck, and the chador covers only the body.

The law has stirred much debate, both in France and around the globe. Those who oppose the new law say it limits freedom of speech and freedom of religion, while supporters claim that women are degraded by wearing veils and the law is intended to empower those women, as well as increase public security.

The French government, in defense of the ban, said that it was necessary because wearing veils falls short of the living standards in France and and makes women be of an lower status in a country where everybody is considered equal.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said that the ban is consistent with the national values of France. “The French Republic lives in a bare-headed fashion,” he said in a statement published by a government newspaper.

The French government previously made efforts to accommodate Muslims in the country, including establishing a council dealing with the presence of Islam; however, according to Amer Sahar, a professor who studies the topic, some Muslims in the country say that they feel as though they are under assault by the government. She said that some are “resentful of the fact that they are not allowed to be both Muslim and French.”

The French government is also concerned with women and children who are forced to veil themselves. It has said that such an action is “a new form of enslavement that the republic cannot accept on its soil.” There is a fine of 30,000 euros (about $43,300) and a year in prison for forcing an adult to wear the niq?b or burqa. The fine is doubled for forcing a minor to wear the veils.

Activist Rachid Nekkaz auctioned one of his homes to provide money to pay the fine for any woman arrested under the law. “I would like to send a clear message to President Nicolas Sarkozy that we can do what we want. We have rules. We have a constitution and everyone has to respect it,” he said.

According to the French Constitutional Council, the law “conforms to the Constitution” because it does not limit the freedom of religion or excessively punish people for exercising that right in a place of worship.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Seven bodies have been discovered in a mobile home in New Hope Plantation trailer park in Brunswick, in the US state of Georgia.

Glynn County Police are now holding a murder investigation as to how the bodies got there. They were found shortly after 0800 local time by a family member of one of the victims who alerted the police.

The police mentioned that when they got to the scene there were two critically injured people there. They were immediately taken to hospital. Glynn County Police Chief Matt Doering said that in 25 years, this was the worst incident of its kind he had ever handled.

He commented: “We have never had an incident with so many victims. It is not a scene that I would want anybody to see.” He said that some of the victims had been tentatively identified, but declined to give out names or ages. He also declined to say how the victims had died when asked.

Jimmy Durben of Glynn County’s coroner office said: “It was the worst scene I have ever witnessed in my 17 year history at the coroner’s office.”

Friday, April 10, 2009

Nintendo’s widely popular game system the Wii was hit by a decrease in sales in Japan. Nintendo hopes to regain its sales by releasing a new version of its Wii Sports game in June. The current CEO of Nintendo said in a press conference they will not be slashing prices of their hardware. “If our products are not much different from competitors’, price cuts would generate significant fresh demand. But video games are just not that kind of product.”

As of December 31, 2008 the Wii leads the generation over the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in worldwide sales.

The Wii’s competitor the PlayStation 3 for the first time exceeded sales in 16 months in Japan for the month of March.

The Wii Sports Resort and other new games and software will show up in Japanese stores in June to renew interest in the Wii.

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Pop starlet Kylie Minogue has announced through her management that she has an early stage of breast cancer. The 36-year-old has said she will be going through the treatment in her native Australia. Due to early diagnosis the singer stands a good chance of making a full recovery.

Kylie, who had spent the past week in Melbourne, has revealed that due to the cancer the rest of her Showgirl tour of Australia will be postponed and her appearance at this year’s Glastonbury festival will be cancelled.

The Showgirl tour was due to hit Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth in June. However despite the cancellation, ticket holders are advised to hang on to tickets as new dates may be announced.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The 22nd Fan Expo Canada took place at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this weekend, attracting thousands to the event, one of the most popular in North America. Crossing between the genres of science fiction, horror, anime, fantasy and comics, the event sprawled throughout all corners of the facility. Hundreds of vendors offered products new and old, joined by celebrity guests like Stan Lee, Mark Hamill, and Margaret Atwood. Various local fan organizations were there in a charitable capacity, and thousands of fans donned costumes, many of which they themselves created.

Atwood, a Booker Prize-winner, was there to launch her graphic novel Angel Catbird, with illustrator Johnnie Christmas. Lee was making his final Canadian convention appearance, part of a larger farewell tour. Hamill’s schedule included a panel with Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series, in which the Star Wars lead played the Joker.

Ubisoft, Microsoft, and PlayStation VR all had large areas set up for attendees to try their latest games. In the 20-minute PlayStation VR demonstration of Batman: Arkham VR, players are dropped down a secret elevator in Bruce Wayne’s manor, to the Bat Cave, to suit up. From there, the demonstration took players to investigate the murder of Nightwing.

The Northern Arena Esports Championship ran throughout the weekend, facing off teams of video gamers in a packed hall. Even in early rounds, the event was well attended, with the stands full of gamers, watching the matches with live colour commentary. The finals saw US team Cloud9 and Immortals, from Brazil, face off in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Both unbeaten teams going in, the Brazillian team won the championship and $50,000.

Gameplay was delayed during the “third map” (third round) of the finals, when one Immortals player was caught with their headset off. After nearly half an hour, the team was deducted a point, leading to a sudden but temporary rush of success by the US team.

The Canadian garrison of 501st Legion returned with their setup of photo-ops, with proceeds to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Volunteer organization Comic Corps of Canada collects donations of comics, to distribute to children and youth in the hospital. Along with collecting comics on-site, the group was fundraising through raffles and button sales.

Other charitable fan-based groups included The Ontario Ghostbusters, Doctor Who Society of Canada, and Klingon Assault Group.

• Brampton Spider-Gwen and Symbiote Spidey pose at the Comic Corps booth.Image: Nick Moreau.

• A showdown at the 501st Legion booth.Image: Nick Moreau.

• Successful Stormtroopers share a high-five.Image: Nick Moreau.

The thousands of cosplay outfits on parade around the various halls offered a tremendous cross-section of genres and eras of pop culture. The majority of outfits involved at least some elements made from scratch, a fantastic display of craftsmanship. Of the thousands, Wikinews spoke with a cosplayer going by the name “The Katherinator”. She was outside the building in the gardens, waiting for a photographer she had arranged to shoot her new Epic Mickey costumed character-style outfit. With shoes as wide as a forearm, and a rigid torso of carved foam, she remained exuberant even when caught in the traffic between halls, many hours into wearing the outfit.

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Wednesday, June 21, 2017

A sixteen-year-old girl from Lakhisarai district, Bihar, India, reported to the police on Sunday that she had been raped multiple times and thrown out of a moving train.

She was found unconscious near the tracks not far from Kiul Junction by some locals who took her to a nearby hospital. She was later taken to the Patna Medical College and Hospital (PMCH). A PMCH doctor commented anonymously, “She has received at least two dozen stitches in her private parts, both her feet are irrevocably damaged, her thigh bone is fractured and she has serious injuries on her waist. Her condition is very critical”.

The girl, a tenth grade student, said she was abducted in a field and raped on, by reports, Friday or Saturday, by two men; according to Indian newspaper DNA, Santosh Yadav and Mrityunjay Yadav. She was later raped by several others — by varying reports, three to six — and taken on a train from Chanan railway station. Two of the alleged assailants lived in the same locality, according to senior police officer SK Singhal.

She was raped again, she said, on the train and received several wounds as the rapists mutilated her before throwing her out of the train. “I could hear them speaking that they should kill me and they threw me out of the train. When I gained consciousness, I was in a hospital”, she said.

As of Monday, police said one juvenile allegedly involved had been arrested.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Journalist, counselor, painter, and US 2012 Presidential candidate Joe Schriner of Cleveland, Ohio took some time to discuss his campaign with Wikinews in an interview.

Schriner previously ran for president in 2000, 2004, and 2008, but failed to gain much traction in the races. He announced his candidacy for the 2012 race immediately following the 2008 election. Schriner refers to himself as the “Average Joe” candidate, and advocates a pro-life and pro-environmentalist platform. He has been the subject of numerous newspaper articles, and has published public policy papers exploring solutions to American issues.

Wikinews reporter William Saturn? talks with Schriner and discusses his campaign.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 File:Turing1.jpg

More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.

The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers. File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg

Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.

Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.

In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.

Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.

Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots. Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”