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Aviation articles by Wikinewsie Iain Macdonald.

This Category ‘sub-page’ will display up to 500 articles which one of the project’s contributors has written on a specific topic.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Fugitive Ryan Jenkins was found dead in a motel room in Hope, Canada, about 150 kilometers from Vancouver. Police are still trying to determine how long he was at the Thunderbird Motel before he hanged himself.

The RCMP are now looking for an unidentified woman who helped Jenkins check himself into the motel last Thursday. She is described as an attractive blonde in her early 20’s and driving a tinted Chrysler PT Cruiser with Alberta plates.

Ryan Jenkins was wanted for the brutal murdering of his ex-wife, swimsuit model Jasmine Fiore. Her badly mutilated body was discovered in a dumpster southeast of Los Angeles on August 15th. Her teeth and fingers were removed, making identification difficult. She was identified through serial numbers on her breast implants.

Jenkins’s boat was found on Wednesday, south of Vancouver, not far from the US-Canada border. Police believe he drove from California to Blaine, Washington and then took a boat to Point Roberts, Washington where he crossed the border on foot into Tsawwassen, Canada. The RCMP confirmed early Sunday that Jenkins was somewhere in Canada and he should turn himself in. He was considered armed and dangerous.

Ryan Jenkins is from Calgary and moved to Los Angeles after appearing in a reality television show on the VH1 network, “Megan Wants a Millionaire“.

There were a couple of false sightings during the manhunt. One man was stopped on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver for using an alias. Another man was taken off a Vancouver transit bus because he looked similar and was interested in the news story.

U.S. Marshals were offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to his capture.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

United Arab Emirates (UAE) developer Emaar Properties has claimed that their Burj Dubai commercial and residential tower, currently under construction, has become the world’s tallest building, reaching a height of 512.1 metres (or 1,680 feet) and 141 storeys.

The current official record holder, Taipei 101 of Taiwan, has a height of 508 metres and 101 storeys, and will retain the “tallest building” title for some time to come. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat sets the criteria for achieving height records for buildings, and will not evaluate the Burj Dubai until construction is complete in late 2008. Although final height details have been kept secret by the developer, the Burj Dubai is expected to reach nearly 700 metres in height, with approximately 160 storeys.

The current record holder for the world’s tallest free-standing structure is the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada. It has a height of 553 metres. The Burj Dubai, therefore, would claim both records when it is completed.

Once the Burj Dubai is completed, it will have required 330,000 cubic metres of concrete, 39,000 tonnes of steel and 142,000 square metres of glass, according to Emaar Properties. The building will have 56 lifts (elevators) that can move at a rate of speed of 1.75 to 10 metres per second.

Dubai is undergoing a construction boom currently with the Burj Dubai as the planned centrepiece of a $US20 billion project, which will eventually realize some 30,000 apartments and boast the world’s largest shopping mall.

There have been criticisms of the working conditions for construction workers in the UAE. A majority of the estimated 500,000 construction workers in the UAE are foreign workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In a 2006 report on the UAE’s treatment of migrant workers, entitled Building Towers, Cheating Workers, Human Rights Watch documented abuses in UAE such as, “extremely low wages, several years of indebtedness to recruitment agencies for fees that UAE law says only employers should pay, the withholding of employees’ passports, and hazardous working conditions that result in apparently high rates of death and injury.”

In October of last year, Human Rights Watch delivered specific recommendations to the UAE government for improvement of working conditions. The UAE government acted swiftly on the report and put in place several improvements, which were applauded by Human Rights Watch.

However, the salaries of migrant construction workers remain in the range from $106 to $250 per month, while the national average wage is over $2,000 per month. Trade unions remain illegal in the UAE.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

The following is the sixth and final edition of a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2016 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: the Free & Equal Foundation holds a presidential debate with three little-known candidates; three additional candidates give their final pleas to voters; and past Wikinews interviewees provide their electoral predictions ahead of the November 8 election.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Reno Air Races are one of the few remaining air racing events, taking place each year in Nevada, USA.This year, the Reno Air Races had enough competitors in its classes to warrant an extra day of racing heats, which started on Wednesday. Fortunately, this did not diminish the crowds or the excitement for the weekend. The culmination of the week’s events, proved to be an extremely busy Sunday with 12 races and 7 air show performances. These performances included the Red Eagles biplane acrobatics, Patty Wagstaff in her Extra 300S, a C-17 Globemaster III tactical demonstration, and the Blue Angels. For any serious attendee of the air races, the defining event of the week was the Unlimited Gold race at the end of Sunday.

The winner of this year’s Unlimited Gold race was the returning champion from 2008, Strega. Strega was flown by Steven Hinton this year, and at 22 years old, he is the youngest to ever win the National Championship Air Races. His chief competitor for the Gold race was expected to be Will Whiteside flying Voodoo. Unfortunately, Voodoo had mechanical difficulties and was forced to pull out of the race midway through. The second place finisher for the Gold race was John Penney in Rare Bear, who called a mayday after the race finished, though he did land safely.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Apple Inc. today has introduced the much-anticipated iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco.

The iPhone is claimed to be “a revolutionary mobile phone” as stated on the Apple website. The device appears to be running a mobile version of the Apple operating system Mac OSX. It is approximately the same size as a 5th generation iPod, it has a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen display that is used to access all features of the phone including number dial, as well as making phone calls. The iPhone plays music, movies, displays pictures and is able to connect to a wireless network.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the device by walking onto the stage and taking the iPhone out of his jeans pocket. During his 2 hour speech he stated that “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone, We are going to make history today”.

Today Apple also released their Media Center device – Apple TV. It will directly compete with Microsoft’s Media Center operating system. Apple has taken a different approach to the media center market; rather than storing content (such as movies, music and photos) on the device, Apple TV connects to a computer (Mac and Windows) over a wirless network connection and plays all content stored on that computer. This makes it substantially easier for users to organize their media content.

Friday, September 15, 2006

BT Global Services this week laid out its vision for the next three years: its revenues to double in the USA, Japan, India and China, and £400m of annual savings, achieved through offshoring and slashing its procurement costs. £200m of this will come from a reduction in what it spends on technology from vendors on large systems integration projects.

CEO Andy Green admitted that BT had been slower than rivals such as IBM and Accenture to ramp up its offshore headcount. But he claimed that BT Global Services is thriving as the fastest-growing division within BT. He said that the division was outperforming its closest rivals, T-Systems, Orange Enterprise and AT&T Enterprise, which had all posted revenue declines for the most recent quarter. He said BT was fast becoming a familiar brand to businessmen in New York, Tokyo, Mumbai and Shanghai.

He disclosed a few revenue figures not revealed before. For the financial year ending March 2006, UK revenues rose just 2% to £5.5bn, while overseas revenues shot up 48% to £3.3bn. And of the £8.8bn total revenue, £1.6bn was captive work for its parent, while of the remaining £7.2bn, 18% came from the UK government sector and 17% from financial services. BT said it still harbours ambitions to conquer America, despite the failure of the ‘Concert‘ partnership with V in the 1990s.

In a separate story, BT announced it has chosen Chinese vendor ZTE to develop a dual-mode handset — 3G and DAB-IP — for launch by its BT Movio subsidiary next year. DAB-IP (in other words, IP over the DAB digital radio network) will enable BT Movio to broadcast four TV channels at acceptable quality to the handset.3G will enable video-on-demand, so that the users can specify what video clips or programmes they wish to watch. UK legislation specifies that no more than 30% of the DAB spectrum can be used for non-radio purposes, so BT is lobbying for more DAB spectrum to be released, to enable higher quality video and/or more TV channels.