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Friday, August 2, 2013

A man and a woman have been killed in a road traffic accident near Connel in the west of Scotland. Seven people, including three children, were also injured in the head-on collision on the A85 road in Argyll at approximately 1830 BST (1730 UTC) yesterday.

A 74-year-old female passenger of a blue Honda CRV and a 32-year-old male passenger of a blue Vauxhall Vectra died at the scene of the crash. The Vauxhall driver, a 32-year-old woman, was transported by helicopter to Glasgow’s Southern General Hospital, where she is reportedly in a critical albeit stable condition.

Three child passengers in the Vauxhall, aged fourteen, five and two, were taken to Oban Hospital and given treatment for minor injuries, as were the Honda’s 51-year-old female driver and two female passengers aged 49 and 46.

A Scottish Fire and Rescue Service spokesperson said hydraulic cutting equipment was used during rescue efforts. “Ambulance personnel and police officers worked closely with our team throughout the incident but sadly one passenger from each car lost their life”, the spokesperson continued. “The thoughts of all emergency responders who were at the scene will be with the casualties and their loved ones as they attempt to come to terms with what has happened.”

Police have appealed for potential witnesses to contact them.

Monday, September 5, 2011

According to United States diplomatic cables passed to WikiLeaks, Mayawati, Chief Minister of the Indian northern state Uttar Pradesh, made use of her private jet to have sandals collected from Mumbai.

Mayawati, a member of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) – which claims to follow a Dalit Socialism ideology – self-identifies as a Dalit. The Dalits are largely those traditionally regarded as Untouchables within Indian society.

One cable, named “Portrait of a Lady”, recently published by WikiLeaks describes the 55-year-old Mayawati as, “a first-rate egomaniac who is obsessed with becoming prime minister”.

“When she needed new sandals, her private jet flew empty to Mumbai to retrieve her preferred brand,” a cable dated October 23, 2008 states; adding, the chief minister is paranoid about her security and fears assassination, employing food tasters to guard against poisoning. The US embassy documents state Mayawati celebrates her birthday each year by receiving millions of dollars in gifts from party members, civil servants and business people whilst officials vie for a chance to feed her cake. An account of Mayawati making a state minister do sit-ups in front of her as punishment for a minor protocol error is included.

Further allegations report a cost of $250,000 to run as a parliamentary candidate for the BSP headed by Mayawati; this allegedly due to institutionalised corruption. “She constructed a private road from her residence to her office, which is cleaned immediately after her multiple vehicle convoy reaches its destination,” the cables claim.

Mayawati, often referred to as the “Dalit Queen”, has been criticised many times, notably for the building of numerous statues of Buddhist and Dalit icons, and of herself.

The single, ex-school teacher, has as-yet not responded to the allegations made in the newly published cables.

Monday, June 7, 2021

In a meeting that was held virtually, Latrobe City Council in Victoria, Australia today unanimously approved its 2021/2022 draft budget. Rates and charges are due to be increased by 1.5%, and A$31.196 million has been allocated for capital works. A$10 million of funding that was borrowed in the previous 2020/2021 budget will be used to fund local projects, with A$7.5 million for the second stage of upgrades to the Moe rail precinct, and A$2.5 million to the upgrade of Kernot Hall, a venue in Morwell.

Speaking about the budget, Councillor Graeme Middlemiss deemed it “a masterful piece of financial engineering”, declaring that the budget would ensure no losses of service for the local community. Middlemiss said that following the closure of Hazelwood Power Station, government grants were issued that led to the construction of a number of local facilities, including a performing arts centre, an aquatic centre, and a basketball stadium. However, told Middlemiss, these facilities caused significant financial strain on the council, with the performing arts centre being funded 40% by Latrobe City Council, and the new facilities also created operating costs for the council to bear.

Speaking about the Moe rail upgrades, Middlemiss said that the council was “fobbed off by the federal government”, with the local federal member of parliament Darren Chester having directed the council to apply for a fund that Middlemiss claimed had closed. This led the council to borrow A$7.5 million to fund the rail upgrades in this budget. Middlemiss predicted that the financial situation could tighten in the next years, but that “at the moment, I think our community will be quite happy with this budget.”

The draft 2021/2022 budget was released on April 12, with 28 days being set aside for written submissions. Those who chose to submit were given the opportunity to speak to their submissions on May 24 at an unscheduled council meeting. One of these submitters who chose to speak was Barbara Johnson, a representative of the Latrobe Combined History Group. The budget resolution now contains a doubling of funding for the area’s 6 local historical societies, who currently each recieve $500 per year. Under this budget, that figure will be doubled to $1000 per year. Deputy Mayor Darren Howe praised the societies’ “outstanding service” today when speaking about the budget, while also thanking Johnson for her recent presentation.

Councillor Dale Harriman today said that he had a number of people contact him about the increased charges proposed in this budget. Harriman said that he understood their annoyance with rising fees, but acknowledged the “constant cost to maintain the facilities”, saying the 1.5% rate rise cap statewide had an impact on the services provided, and ultimately that given the circumstances, the solution provided was the best one, and that the charges would be kept to a minimum.

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Thursday, May 13, 2010

Wikinews reporter Iain Macdonald has performed an interview with Dr Isabella Margara, a London-based member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). In the interview Margara sets out the communist response to current events in Greece as well as discussing the viability of a communist economy for the nation. She also hit back at Petros Tzomakas, a member of another Greek far-left party which criticised KKE in a previous interview.

The interview comes amid tensions in cash-strapped Greece, where the government is introducing controversial austerity measures to try to ease the nation’s debt-problem. An international rescue package has been prepared by European Union member states and the International Monetary Fund – should Greece require a bailout; protests have been held against government attempts to manage the economic situation.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Penske Automotive Group, Inc., an Ohio-based investment group and Telesto Ventures have indicated separately that they are interested in purchasing the Saturn auto brand from General Motors (GM).

According to The Wall Street Journal, Nissan-Renault is interested in purchasing Saturn. Bloomberg, however, indicated that Nissan-Renault may be a partner of Penske’s potential bid. If Penske acquired the brand, they would distribute Saturn vehicles and outsource the assembly.

GM revealed that the Saturn brand along with Saab and Hummer were up for sale when unveiling their restructuring plans to Congress for governmental loans. While the Pontiac brand was originally to be a niche brand, GM had changed their plans recently and decided to eliminate the brand.

Telesto Ventures is an investment group that includes private equity firm Black Oak Partners LLC of Oklahoma City and several Saturn dealerships. Initially, Telesto will purchase Saturn branded cars from GM then act as a general retailer for foreign brands. Telesto is in talks with several foreign manufacturers.

The Ohio group includes many former senior auto company managers plus private financial backers, chemists and engineers who live in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Florida. This group plans to initially purchase cars from GM then purchase existing but closed plants due to automaker restructuring. Additionally, one of the partners indicated a willingness to accept some “legacy” cost in relation to the United Auto Workers. The Ohio group is also pursuing possible loans or other support from national and state governments.

GM is reviewing several offers for Saturn. GM has contracted with S.J. Girsky & Co. to advise them on the sale.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

A National Academy of Sciences report (.pdf) last year said that while the milk and meat from cloned animals would not likely make anyone sick, more research should be performed. Now, a new US-Japan study published in the April 11 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that milk and meat from cloned cattle does indeed appear to meet industry standards and appears to be safe for human consumption.

As BBC News reports, the scientists, led by Professor Jerry Yang from the University of Connecticut, compared the produce from two beef and four dairy clones, all derived from a single Holstein dairy cow and a single Japanese black bull, with the produce from normal animals of similar age and breed.

The meat was analysed against more than 100 physiological, tissue and cellular components, while the milk was analysed for protein, fat and other variables. No significant differences between the produce of cloned and normal cattle were found. Higher levels of fat and fatty acids were found in the cloned cow meat, but they still fell within beef industry standards.

While the study showed the cloned produce to be within the range approved for human consumption, the scientists stressed that the research was still in its early stages. Their findings, they said, provide “guidelines” for further research with larger numbers of clones from different genetic backgrounds.

Cloning livestock may one day increase yields by copying those animals that are especially productive and especially resistant to disease.

“The milking production levels in the US are three to four times higher than levels in China; maybe even five times or more compared to cows in India and some other countries,” Professor Jerry Yang told BBC News. “Therefore cloning could offer technology for duplicating superior farm animals. However, all the products from these cloned animals must be safe for human consumption. …and it is a major issue for scientists to provide a scientific basis for the data and information to address this question.”

As USA Today reports, there is currently no law governing the sale of meat or milk from the estimated 1,000 to 2,000 cloned farm animals in the USA. But since 2003, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has asked producers to voluntarily keep the meat and milk of these animals, and that of their offspring, out of the food supply.

Wired News reports that companies like ViaGen and Cyagra, which offer livestock-cloning services, have also been waiting for several years for a final say from the FDA.

“For the United States agricultural industry, (cloning) can reduce the number of cows necessary for milking,” said Jerry Yang “They can have a pleasant environment and produce even more milk.” He also said that cloning cattle from the United States, where genetic breeding is more advanced, could save developing countries 50 years of breeding.

The idea of cloning animals for human consumption is not without its critics. First, there are the welfare concerns, as most cloned animals do not make it to term before being born, and many of those that do are born deformed or prone to illness. The Humane Society of the United States has asked for a ban on milk and meat from clones for just this reason. Second, there is still the concern that healthy clones may have subtle defects that could make their food products unsafe to eat.

As the Washington Post reports, some critics are asking why it is necessary to clone cows that produce huge amounts of milk when surpluses, rather than shortages, are the main problem facing the U.S. dairy industry today.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician who works for HP Labs, claims to have proven that P is not equal to NP. The problem is the greatest unsolved problem in theoretical computer science and is one of seven problems in which the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered million dollar prizes to the solutions.

The question of whether P equals NP essentially asks whether there exist problems which take a long time to solve but whose solutions can be checked quickly. More formally, a problem is said to be in P if there is a program for a Turing machine, an ideal theoretical computer with unbounded amounts of memory, such that running instances of the problem through the program will always answer the question in polynomial time — time always bounded by some fixed polynomial power of the length of the input. A problem is said to be in NP, if the problem can be solved in polynomial time when instead of being run on a Turing machine, it is run on a non-deterministic Turing machine, which is like a Turing machine but is able to make copies of itself to try different approaches to the problem simultaneously.

Mathematicians have long believed that P does not equal NP, and the question has many practical implications. Much of modern cryptography, such as the RSA algorithm and the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, rests on certain problems, such as factoring integers, being in NP and not in P. If it turned out that P=NP, these methods would not work but many now difficult problems would likely be easy to solve. If P does not equal NP then many natural, practical problems such as the traveling salesman problem are intrinsically difficult.

In 2000, the Clay Foundation listed the “Clay Millenium Problems,” seven mathematical problems each of which they would offer a million dollars for a correct solution. One of these problems was whether P equaled NP. Another of theseseven, the Poincaré conjecture, was solved in 2002 by Grigori Perelman who first made headlines for solving the problem and then made them again months later for refusing to take the prize money.

On August 7, mathematician Greg Baker noted on his blog that he had seen a draft of a claimed proof by Deolalikar although among experts a draft had apparently been circulating for a few days. Deolalikar’s proof works by connecting certain ideas in computer science and finite model theory to ideas in statistical mechanics. The proof works by showing that if certain problems known to be in NP were also in P then those problems would have impossible statistical properties. Computer scientists and mathematicians have expressed a variety of opinions about Deolalikar’s proof, ranging from guarded optimism to near certainty that the proof is incorrect. Scott Aaronson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has expressed his pessimism by stating that he will give $200,000 of his own money to Deolalikar if the proof turns out to be valid. Others have raised specific technical issues with the proof but noted that the proof attempt presented interesting new techniques that might be relevant to computer science whether or not the proof turns out to be correct. Richard Lipton, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, has said that “the author certainly shows awareness of the relevant obstacles and command of literature supporting his arguments.” Lipton has listed four central objections to the proof, none of which are necessarily fatal but may require more work to address. On August 11, 2010, Lipton reported that consensus of the reviewers was best summarized by mathematician Terence Tao, who expressed the view that Deolalikar’s paper probably did not give a proof that P!=NP even after major changes, unless substantial new ideas are added.