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Friday, March 20, 2009

Following the Pilkhana massacre which occurred February 25 and 26 leaving 74 dead and the inferno at the Bashundhara City shopping mall complex March 13 leaving seven dead, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said security measures are being tightened countrywide across Bangladesh.

Fire drills will be enacted at all key-point installations (KPI). Fire fighting systems will be examined by the fire brigade and the public works department (PWD) to ensure functionality. Security measures will be enhanced supplementing areas under private security such as at the Bashundhara City Complex.

The Fire Service and Civil Defence Department requires modernization and needs new equipment to fight fires past the sixth floor of buildings. The Fire Brigade says it needs turntable ladders, snorkels, foam-tenders, lighting units, emergency tenders, fireproof uniforms, and rescue ropes for fire fighting and rescue operations. Transportation to fires is also an issue due to narrow roads, low electrical wires and congestion.

The Bangladesh National Building Code requires fire fighting equipment installed in buildings over seven floors. This code is to be monitored by authorities to ensure compliance with the new guidelines and to make sure buildings are being maintained.

The Bashundhara City Complex opened Monday for shoppers two days after Friday’s blaze. A probe is underway to determine the cause of the fire and to assess structural damage.

Loss of life was minimized as the blaze broke out on a Friday, the beginning of the weekend in Bangladesh, so offices in the upper floors were empty. The lower eight floors are used for shopping and the upper floors are all Bashundhara Group offices.

The mall is valued at Tk 7.0 billion (US$100 million). It is not known if the complex is covered by fire insurance.

It is estimated that it will take over two years to rebuild the area damaged by flames which were burned down to a skeleton. Bashundhara City’s technical advisor, Latifur Rahman, estimated damages at Tk 2.0 billion (US$29m).

Only one television cameraman has been allowed in to film the burnt area. None of the 2,500 shops, cinemas or cafes were burnt by the inferno. The seventh and eighth floors still experience smoke damage, and there was water damage to merchandise.

A three member committee is currently investigating the cause of the fire which will consist of Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary of the ministry, representatives of the police, IGP Noor Muhammad, and fire brigade, Director General Abu Nayeem Md Shahidullah. The committee is required to report within the week with their findings. The forensics department is also sifting through the burnt remains.

The Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industries has also formed a committee which has begun interviewing witnesses and recording their testimony alongside the government committee.

It has been discovered that 150 closed circuit cameras were not being used when the fire started. Another mystery is why the mall fire fighting system has been found unused.

“In the shopping mall there is an ultra-technology elevator which runs even without electricity but we have found that locked,” Iqbal Khan Chowdhury, joint secretary (Police) of the home ministry, said. “Why the fire burnt so fiercely is a matter to think. We have to see if there was any incendiary substance there. These matters seem to be mysterious.”

Mall management has been asked to submit substances and items which would have been in the upper floors when the fire started. The fire erupted on the 17th floor and spread quickly to the two floors above and engulfed the three floors below. The aerial ladders belonging to the Fire Service and Civil Defence reached as high as the 13th floor of the 21-storey building.

Videos have been sent to the United States (US) for examination to assist in determining the cause of the fire and to help in the damage assessment. Experts from the US are expected to arrive soon.

Firefighters were brought to the rooftop of the 20-storey tower by helicopter. The only fatality in this operation was Baki Billa, a firefighter of Bashundhara City firefighting department, who fell when climbing down a rope from a helicopter to the roof of the building. Three other firefighters made the transition safely. At this same time, the chief security officer was safely rescued by the Bangladesh Air Force helicopter, a Bell 212. Six security officers of the complex also lost their lives.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

The naming rights for St James’ Park, the home ground of English football club Newcastle United F.C., are to be put up for sale. The club stated that the club would be “welcoming offers for the stadium naming rights next season”. The move was part of a new drive to “maximise its commercial revenues”, after the announcement that owner Mike Ashley was not selling the club, which had been up for sale since May 2009.

St James’ Park is the largest and oldest football stadium in North East England. Football had been played at St James’ Park since 1880, with Newcastle United using it as their home ground since their inception, in 1892. Despite Newcastle being in the second tier of football, St James Park is the third largest club football stadium in England, behind Old Trafford and the Emirates Stadium.

Naming rights is not unprecedented in English football, including the Premier League grounds the Britannia Stadium, DW Stadium, Emirates Stadium, KC Stadium and Reebok Stadium. Bookmakers Ladbrokes named sportswear company and current club sponsor Addidas favourites to secure the rights. In order to stop the move, BBC Radio Newcastle football commentator Mick Lowes suggested that the Newcastle United Supporters Trust‘s used part of its reported £25m funds to pay Ashley not to sell the rights.

Ex-Newcastle striker and local sports pundit Malcolm Macdonald said of the decision:

they thought they had got on the wrong side of the people of Tyneside then just wait and see what happens if they go through with their plans to re-name St James’ Park because there will be an almighty uproar and outcry. It would upset people so much because it everyone’s second home. That is how people feel about it. It has been St James’ Park forever and a day and it should remain that way.

Lee Ryder, the Evening Chronicle‘s chief sportswrite blogged:

We need to make Coors Light Park a fortress” – to even imagine a future Toon player uttering such words will make many physically sick…Renaming St James’s Park is simply bad taste in the eyes of most Geordie fans – and many will feel that even the injection of silly money to do it will do nothing to make up for another piece of heritage being ripped away from the Tyneside streets….Renaming St James’s Park to Coors Light Park, Bwin Park or even the McDonalds Arena shows that Newcastle’s top brass have again got it so seriously wrong

George Caulkin of The Times wrote of the decision:

Renaming St James’ Park is a muddle-headed, flawed and divisive notion which must not and cannot stand. In an era of recession, there may be a need for Newcastle, in their own words, to “maximise their commercial revenues,” but if it comes at the expense of goodwill (what little there is left of it), hope and a sense of community, it would also come at a bitter, prohibitive, self-defeating cost.

There has been debate over the correct spelling and pronunciation of the stadium name, with differing accounts based on its meaning and origin. In 2008, the club insisted to the BBC programme Look North that the the correct spelling of the Stadium is St James’ Park, with no following ‘s’ after James’, because the stadium is not named as “the park of St James”, rather, it is named after the nearby St James Street, which predates the ground.

The announcement came on the same day as it announced Chris Hughton as the club’s permanent manager, and that owner Mike Ashley was taking the club off the market for a second time.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

First Active has become the first financial institution to offer 100% mortgages in the Republic of Ireland. The bank previously offered 100% financing to professionals in finance and medicine, but is now to offer this product to anyone who can afford to meet the repayments.

The development is a huge boost for first time home buyers who have been struggling to get on the Irish property market in recent years due to the rapid increase in house prices. A typical first time buyer in Dublin with 92% financing would normally have to put down a deposit of €20,000-€30,000 in cash, but now have the option to produce no deposit.

First Active has said that 100% mortgages will be available across its entire range of mortgage products.

Note however that this is not necessarily an entirely positive development.

The United States and most of Europe have experienced a housing price bubble in recent years. A bubble occurs when buyers purchase a property not because its price is appropriate for its actual value but because they expect the price to significantly rise in the short term permitting resale with a profit.

In other words, the prices people pay for properties becomes divorced from the real value of the property; the purchase is speculative and depends purely upon the expectation that people will continue to buy properties in this way (e.g. without proper consideration of their real value).

The terrible weakness in this is that when the market corrects itself and prices fall to a level where properties are being priced at their actual realistic value, anyone holding a property loses a great deal of money, since the price they paid does not reflect the actual realistic value of the property.

This kind of shock to the housing market is extremely undesirable. Significant write downs in the value of property often significantly depress the economy as a whole.

Less than 100% mortgages force buyers to invest a significant amount of money in the act of purchasing their house, which tends to discourage purely speculative purchasing, thus helping to mediate house price bubbles.

With 100% financing, anyone who can meet repayments can speculatively purchase a property. This naturally encourages pricing bubbles.

Saturday, August 6, 2005

The Finnish police isolated the ports of Katajanokka and Länsisatama on Saturday. The ports were isolated at around 9.30 p.m. local time and the isolation was called off at around 11.30 p.m.

Finnish police received reports from Estonia that a shipping container loaded with explosives could be coming from Estonia Saturday evening. They checked every truck that passed the ports with the assistance of the Border Guard Service. There are still two ships due to arrive in Helsinki tonight, but they were already checked in Tallinn.

Monday, October 13, 2008

In an attempt to speak with as many candidates as possible during the 2008 Canadian federal election, Wikinews has talked via email with John Kittredge. John is a candidate in Toronto, Ontario’s St. Paul riding, running under the Libertarian Party banner. Libertarians are a minor, registered political party; they are looking to earn their first ever seat in the House of Commons.

Incumbent Carolyn Bennett of the Liberals is running against Libertarian Kittridge, Conservative Heather Jewell, New Democrat Anita Agrawal, and Justin Erdman, a Green. Bennett was the Minister of Health under previous Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal government. Since it was created in 1935, the riding has been batted about between the Liberals and the now defunct Progessive Conservative party.

The following is an interview with Mr. Kittridge, conducted via email. The interview has had very limited editing, to eliminate in-text mentions of website addresses, but is otherwise left exactly as sent to Wikinews.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.

Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.

Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.

Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.

Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.

Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Frenzied destruction of empty Jewish settlements in Gaza by Palestinian looters have marred plans for exploiting those facilities to create much needed jobs for the area.

Greenhouses in Gaza have been partly destroyed as crucial equipment was stripped by the Palestinians. Looters took everything from water pumps, plastic sheets, tubing and equipment. This makes at least one third of the hothouses at least temporarily unusable to feed the families of Gaza and for potential export to Israel.

The facilities were purchased by a group of Jewish-American donors and given to the Palestinian government to encourage economic development. It was initially anticipated over four thousand Palestinians could be given work at the greenhouses, however all offers have been suspended prior to the damage being assessed and repairs arranged.