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Sunday, December 13, 2015

Macomb, New York Councilman Steve Burke took some time to speak with Wikinews about his campaign for the U.S. Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Burke, an insurance adjuster and farmer, was elected councilman in Brookhaven, New York in 1979. He left the town after being accused and found not guilty of bribery in the 1980s. Since 1987 he has served as Macomb councilman off-and-on and currently holds the post. From 1993 to 1996 and 1999 to 2002 he worked as chairman of the Democratic Party of St. Lawrence County, New York. Among his many political campaigns, Burke unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1992 and recently attempted to run for U.S. Congress in 2014 but too many of his ballot petition signatures were found invalid. Burke filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the 2016 election on September 18, 2015 and has qualified for the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary.

With Wikinews reporter William S. Saturn?, Burke discusses his political background, his 2016 presidential campaign, and his policy proposals.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter.

The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion.

Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He commented that the jump was an indication that exporters have emerged from their downslide.

“We can say that China’s export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,” he said.

However, although China overtook Germany in exports, China’s total foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9% last year.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

A report commissioned under a Pentagon contract to ascertain the effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on recruitment of personnel into the United States Army has been completed. Written by a retired U.S. Army officer and executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Andrew Krepinevich, it was not publicly released. Upon inquiry, a copy was provided to the Associated Press.

As part of the conclusions reached in the Krepinevich report, it notes a drop in Army recruiting for the year 2005, a first since 1999, which came after the Army recently adopted policies of offering increased enlistment incentives. The report states that the Army is unable to maintain troop deployment to Iraq for a period adequate to disable the insurgency occurring there, and is faced with declining recruitment and re-enlistment rates.

In an Krepinevich interview , he said the Army remains an effective force and has plans to expand the number of available combat brigades for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conditions described by the report are listed as being triggered by simultaneous force restructuring, training requirements, and troop deployment requirements as well as the length of the engagement. Krepinevich also said in the interview that he believes the reason that Pentagon officials do not publicly state that the reduction in troop levels was prompted by stress on the Army; “That gives too much encouragement to the enemy.”

George Joulwan, former NATO commander and retired four-star general in the US Army detailed his observations in an interview given on CNN in December of 2005; “Whether they’re broken or not, I think I would say if we don’t change the way we’re doing business, they’re in danger of being fractured and broken, and I would agree with that.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s comments made in a news conference at the Pentagon one day after the Associated Press article was published declared that the report “is just not consistent with the facts.” He continued and stated of the US Army that “The force is not broken,” and that such thoughts were “almost backward.”

He supported this with the following comments “The world saw the United States military go halfway around the world in a matter of weeks, throw the Al Qaida and Taliban out of Afghanistan, in a landlocked country thousands and thousands of miles away. They saw what the United States military did in Iraq. And the message from that is not that this armed force is broken, but that this armed force is enormously capable.”

He acknowledged the unique requirements of the campaigns in Iraq and in Afghanistan with the statement that “There is no question if a country is in a conflict and we are in the global war on terror, it requires our forces to do something other than what they do in peacetime.”

On the matter of the review of US defense strategy planned for February 2006, he stated that it was “the next step in a long line of bold changes.”

US Representative John Murtha incited controversy when he called for an early exit from Iraq in the fall of 2005, arguing in part that the US Army was “broken, worn out.”

Friday, March 23, 2007

Yesterday, Belgian Archbishop Godfried Danneels visited the Catholic University of Leuven to give a lecture on health care and religion, entitled “Care for the body, care for the mind”. Some 120 people, mainly professors at the University Hospitals, but also clerics and students, attended the conference and following piano recital.

In his introduction speech, Dean of Medicine Bernard Himpens reminded the audience how much the art of medicine had changed since the time of Andreas Vesalius, probably the Faculty’s most famous scientist. The Dean stressed the important role of the Hospital’s Biomedical Ethics Committee, but added that religion continues to be important.

“Some people even believe that good ethics must be carried by faith, and any profound ethics should result in faith,” the Dean noted. He asked the question where the evolution of a merely “passive tolerance for the Christian starting points” would lead the health care system.

In his lecture, the Archbishop acknowledged that the technical aspects of health care were probably the most important to achieve results, but that on the other hand, the medical-technical approach by itself could not guarantee the happiness of the patients.

Wikinews asked Professor Martin Hiele, Chairman of the Commission for Medical Ethics, if he felt there was a need for a lecture on the subject of religion and health care. He replied that

Prof. Bernard Spitz, from the University’s Department of Developmental Biology and head of the Hospital’s Obstetrics Department, told Wikinews that

The lecture was organised by the DeGroof Bank and the Faculty of Medicine. It is the first of three lectures on the subject of religion, spirituality and ethics in health care.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Officials said on Thursday, after analyzing data from the Germanwings Flight 9525 cockpit voice recorder, that the airbus crashed into the French Alps because its co-pilot deliberately crashed it.

On the cockpit voice recorder, the captain can be heard trying to get back into the cockpit. Transponder data indicates the autopilot was told to descend form 38,000 feet to 100 feet. The last part of the recording contains screaming during the sudden decent.

Investigators are still searching for the plane’s flight data recorder.

The co-pilot started training in 2008, and was diagnosed in 2009 with serious depression according to BBC News. Later he completed his training and passed all his tests to pilot, according to Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr.

In light of this incident, several airlines announced a ban on leaving any one person alone in the cockpit.

The flight path and altitude chart can be seen in the images below.

Sunday, April 10, 2005

The Cambridge city council adopted a resolution on April 4 to request that the US Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) “take explicit account” of the activities of local construction firm W. R. Grace, which has previously contaminated an industrial area near the Alewife train station with asbestos. The council cited Grace’s “extraordinarily extensive and well-documented history of contaminating sites and concealing the contamination” as the reason for its request.

The resolution was a reaction to a Response Action Outcome Statement and Risk Characterization (RAO) that W. R. Grace filed with the DEP. The Cambridge Chronicle recently took the filing as evidence that “the state seems poised to stop watching over” the contaminated site.

In February, W.R. Grace was indicted by a federal grand jury for contamination as a product of vermiculite mining operations in Libby, Montana, USA. The company was also charged with “concealing information about the health affects [sic] of its asbestos mining operations.”

Friday, August 24, 2007

A police station of the Spanish Guardia Civil was attacked today Friday by a car bomb in the Basque city of Durango, injuring two policemen. It is believed to be the first serious attack of the separatist group ETA since it unilaterally ended a cease-fire in June. The blast caused serious damage to the police barracks in Durango, shattering windows and damaging police cars parked outside. Several nearby apartment buildings were also damaged. Police sources believe the bomb, estimated to contain between 80 and 100 kilograms of explosives, was detonated remotely by one of the two attackers who fled in another vehicle. Another car exploded about one hour later in the town of Amorebieta, possibly the one used by the activists to flee.

ETA detonated two small explosive devices on July 25 along the route that the Tour of France used when the race dipped into northern Spain for a few hours.

ETA called the cease-fire in March 2006, but grew frustrated with a lack of government concessions in ensuing peace talks, and set off a huge bomb in a parking area at Madrid’s airport on December 30, killing two people. It insisted then that the truce was still in effect, but finally declared it formally over in June, and Spanish security forces have been on alert ever since.