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Tuesday, April 14, 2020

In February 2017, the Iranian Chess Federation announced two teenage chess players, Dorsa Derakhshani and her younger brother Borna Derakhshani, were banned from representing the national team. The federation announced their decision although Dorsa Derakhshani had previously decided and informed the chess federation she did not wish to play for Iran.

Dorsa Derakhshani is currently 21 years old and holds the International Master (IM) as well as Woman Grand Master (WGM) titles. Her brother, Borna, plays for the English Federation and holds the FIDE Master title.

Dorsa Derakhshani was banned since she did not wear a hijab, an Islamic headscarf, while competing at the Tradewise Gibraltar Chess Festival in January 2017. Under the laws of Islamic Republic of Iran, hijab is a mandatory dress code. Her brother Borna Deraskhsani was banned for playing against Israeli Grand Master (GM) Alexander Huzman at the same tournament. Iran does not recognise the existence of Israel, and previously, Irani athletes have avoided playing against Israeli athletes.

Mehrdad Pahlavanzadeh, the president of the country’s chess federation, explained the decision to ban the players saying, “As a first step, these two will be denied entry to all tournaments taking place in Iran and in the name of Iran, they will no longer be allowed the opportunity to be present on the national team.” ^{((fa))Farsi language: ?????? ????? ?? ??? ??? ?? ??? ????? ?? ?? ???? ???????? ?? ?? ????? ? ?? ??? ????? ?????? ??????? ????? ??????? ? ???? ???? ???? ?? ??? ??? ?? ??????? ????.} He further stated, “Unfortunately, something that should not have happened has happened and our national interest is paramount and we have reported this position to the Ministry of Sports.” ^{((fa))Farsi language: ????????? ?????? ?? ????? ????????? ?????? ??? ? ????? ??? ?? ?? ?? ???? ?????? ???? ? ?? ??? ???? ?? ?? ????? ???? ?? ????? ?????.}

IM Dorsa Derakhshani, who currently studies at Saint Louis University in the United States and plays for the United States Chess Federation, discussed her chess career, time in Iran and the 2017 controversy, and her life in Saint Louis with a Wikinews correspondent.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Martin Bionics, a company based out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was awarded the patent to a computer-controlled ankle. The Oklahoma Center for the Advancement for Science and Technology funded $573,000 towards the development of the device.

The computer-controlled ankle functions similar to how the brain controls a real human ankle. Although prosthetic ankles allowed for some basic performance, the technologies remained limited in where and how they may be used.

Vice president of research and development, Jay Martin, said “This design grants a greater sense of security and confidence to the amputee. Functioning at a higher level, walking with a smoother step and dressing without limits will provide the patient with greater self confidence.”

Martin Bionics plans to have the ankle commercially available within the next two years.

Friday, September 26, 2008

On October 14, 2008, Canadians will be heading to the polls for the federal election. New Democratic Party candidate Don Davies is standing for election in the riding of Vancouver Kingsway.

A lawyer, he has spent the last 25 years fighting for human rights. A two-time student government representative, Davies was involved in the anti-apartheid, third world and peace movements. Admitted to the Alberta Bar in 1989, Davies and family moved to Vancouver in 1991, where he became the Director of Legal Resources for Teamsters Canada (Local 31), the next year. He is a long-time volunteer for children’s charity Variety, is Chair of the Parent Advisory Council at Mount Pleasant school, and a Director of the Meridian Cultural Society, among other things.

Wikinews contacted Don Davies, to talk about the issues facing Canadians, and what they and their party would do to address them. Wikinews is in the process of contacting every candidate, in every riding across the country, no matter their political stripe. All interviews are conducted over e-mail, and interviews are published unedited, allowing candidates to impart their full message to our readers, uninterrupted.

The riding is vacant, after Conservative Minister of International Trade David Emerson’s resignation. Emerson was elected in 2004 as a Liberal, serving as the Minister of Industry. Two weeks after re-election in 2006, he crossed the floor to join then-new Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who had won a minority government. Emerson was the first MP in Canadian history to cross the floor before a new government was sworn in. He has stepped down, after pressure from other parties.

Besides Davies, major party candidates include Liberal Wendy Yuan, Conservative Salomon Rayek, and Green Doug Warkentin. Also putting their hat in the ring are Matt Kadioglu (Libertarian), Kimball Cariou (Communist), and Donna Peterson (Marxist-Leninist).

For more information, visit the campaign’s official website, listed below.

This Saturday at 11 am, Davies will host NDP leader Jack Layton in the Commodore Ballroom at “rally4change”.

Saturday, July 19, 2008

This year’s Leisure Taiwan trade show (a.k.a Taiwan Sport Recreation and Leisure Show) started yesterday, with 131 companies participating including sports media companies such as ESPN and VideoLand Television, businesses selling sports equipment and fitness clubs.

There were also a variety of sports being played in the arena built for the trade show. The events included a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, free style shooting, and bicycle test-riding. In addition, conferences discussed issues related to sports and physical education.

A major topic in the trade show was energy-efficiency and, as a result, bicycles and similar sports equipment were being heavily promoted.

Next Tuesday, companies from the electronics industry plan to promote their industry at “2008 Digital E-Park.” In previous years, organizations from the electronics industry have showcased their products at Leisure Taiwan instead of at the Digital E-Park, so this move has reduced the number of markets covered by Leisure Taiwan.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Marija Minic is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the York Centre riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed her regarding her values, her experience, and her campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Friday, March 5, 2010

An investigation by the BBC has revealed that millions of dollars in famine relief aid money, including the money raised from the charity supergroup Band Aid and the Live Aid concert held by Bob Geldof, was “siphoned off” by Ethiopian rebels to buy weapons. One rebel said that at least US$ 95 million (£63 million) from — Western governments and private charities — was diverted into rebel coffers.

This was also noted in a declassified Central Intelligence Agency assessment of the famine situation titled Ethiopia: Political and Security Impact of the Drought, in which the report states, “Some funds that insurgent organizations are raising for relief operations, as a result of increased world publicity, are almost certainly being diverted for military purposes.”

During the 1984–1985 famine, Ethiopia was fighting Eritrean and Tigray rebels in those two northern provinces, although Eritrea has since gained its independence. Since the countryside was out of the government’s control, aid was brought in from neighboring Sudan. Some aid came in the form of food, while other aid came as cash which would be used by the aid agencies to buy grain from Ethiopian farmers.

Rebels would disguise themselves as traders and merchants to get their hands on the currency. “I was given clothes to make me look like a Muslim merchant. This was a trick for the NGOs,” said Gebremedhin Araya, a senior member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

One such aid worker that brought the grain was Max Peberdy, who worked for the charity Christian Aid. Peberdy is seen in a photo with Araya buying grain.

Araya said that only some of the sacks were filled with grain; the rest were filled with sand. The transaction was overseen by a member of the Relief Society of Tigray (REST), the humanitarian wing of the TPLF. The money was then given to TPLF leaders, including chairman Meles Zenawi, who has been Prime Minister of Ethiopia since 1991. Zenawi has not commented on the allegations.

Peberdy disputes the claims that he was duped, saying, “As far as we were concerned and as far as we were told by REST, the people we were dealing with were merchants.” He added, “It’s 25 years since this happened, and in the 25 years it’s the first time anybody has claimed such a thing.”

However, an exiled TPLF commander who lives in the Netherlands, Aregawi Berhe, is backing Araya’s story. He said the group got their hands on over US$100 million (£66 million) of which 95% went to buy weapons and build up a hardliner Marxist party inside the rebel movement. The remaining five percent would go to famine victims. Berhe told the BBC that the group would put on a “drama” to get the money. Berhe said, “The aid workers were fooled.”

In response to the allegations, the charity Christian Aid issued a statement saying, “There are allegations in the story which are against all of Christian Aid’s principles and our initial investigations do not correspond to the BBC’s version of events.”

Nick Guttmann, who is director of emergency relief operations for the group, says the “story has to be put into context”. “We were working in a major conflict, there was a massive famine and people on all sides were suffering,” Guttmann said, adding, “Both the rebels and the government were using innocent civilians to further their own political ends.”

Bob Geldof, the Irish rock star who help organized Live Aid, said, “We are talking about a disgruntled, exiled general. The essence of the report also is not just about Live Aid. It’s that all monies going into Tigray — that would be Oxfam, Save the Children, UNICEF and Christian Aid — somehow, we were all duped and gulled. And that’s simply not the case. It just didn’t happen.”

Saturday, March 17, 2018

In the United States, autopsy results were released on Thursday by the Napa County Sheriff’s Office, which show that Albert Wong killed himself after shooting his three hostages at The Pathway Home veterans’ psychiatric center in Yountville, California last Friday. The hostages died instantly from rifle shots to the head, and Wong shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Officials said there was no indication any of the four was killed by a sheriff’s deputy who exchanged shots with Wong.

The Sheriff of Napa County also acts as the county coroner. According to the official report, the three hostages “all suffered immediately fatal head wounds caused by a high velocity projectile consistent with the rifle that the shooter, Albert Wong, used in this incident”. Wong’s fatal head wound was self-inflicted. Sheriff’s Captain Steven Blower clarified that neither Wong nor the hostages was shot by the deputy.

According to authorities, Wong, a former Pathway resident, drove a rented car to the center Friday, March 9, and shortly after 10 AM local time (UTC-8), dressed in black and armed with a semi-automatic rifle, took five of the people at a leaving party hostage. The first call to the emergency 9-1-1 number was made at about 10:20. About ten minutes later, shots were heard, and a sheriff’s deputy and Wong exchanged fire. Wong then shut himself in a room with three of the hostages. The campus was evacuated, but there was no further contact with Wong. A little before 6 PM, a video feed from a remote-controlled robot showed the four people in the room were probably dead.

The three victims were all women. Christine Loeber, 48, was the executive director of the home. Jen Golick, 42, was its clinical director. Jennifer Gonzales Shushereba, 36, was a psychologist on the staff of the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System and also worked with PsychArmor, a nonprofit group, to create a toolkit for college campuses to assist students with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She was entering her last trimester of pregnancy.

Wong, 36, was a decorated veteran who served in the infantry in Afghanistan for a year in 2011–2012. He had been in treatment at the center for about a year but had been expelled two weeks before the hostage-taking because knives were found in his possession. His brother Tyrone Lampkin told The Press Democrat, Wong had been angry and said he “wanted to get back at them”, but what he had mentioned was to “talk to them, yell at them, not to kill them”.

The Board of Directors of The Pathway Home announced on Wednesday that it would suspend operations “indefinitely”. It is a ten-year-old non-profit in-patient center treating veterans with PTSD, brain injuries, depression and addictions on the campus of the Veterans Home of California Yountville. Yountville is a small town in the wine country a little more than 50 miles north of San Francisco. Founded as a last-resort center for intensive treatment of veterans who had not been helped by other approaches, it transitioned in 2015 to providing care to those not yet in crisis, including veterans studying at Napa Community College. The Veterans Home is the largest in the United States, with more than 900 residents.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

China’s Premier Wen Jiabao is in Cairo, Egypt, where he held talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in preparation for the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation that begins on Sunday in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The leaders of 49 African countries are gathering in the Egyptian Red Sea resort for a two-day meeting to discuss economic and political cooperation with China.

At their talks, Wen and Mubarak discussed ways to improve bilateral relations. The Chinese leader also delivered a speech at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo. He spoke about ways to further enhance the friendly relations between China and the Arab world – and to promote the Middle East peace process.

“The relationship between Chinese civilisation and Islamic civilisation goes back years,” Wen said in his speech. “China is a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. The basic policy of the Chinese government is to ensure equality among all ethnic groups and speed up the economic development of all regions.”

This July, clashes between Muslim minority Uighurs and the dominant Chinese group Han killed almost 200 in the Xinjiang region; vigilantes from the latter group started attacking Uighurs several days later.

Chinese officials said that they would punish those responsible for the attacks “severely”, and several hundred people were detained in a crackdown. The government’s treatment of the Uighur group was condemned by some countries abroad, with the United States saying that China was “[repressing] peaceful expressions of religious beliefs and political views.”

Wen, however, maintained that there was no discrimination against Muslims in China.”In China, more than 20 million people from 10 ethnic groups believe in Islam. They are all members of the big family of the Chinese nation,” he continued in his speech. “Their beliefs, culture and way of life are fully respected.”

At this second China-Africa summit, Wen is expected to offer African nations several billion dollars in credit and loans. To feed China’s appetite for raw materials, Chinese companies have invested billions of dollars in Africa. Trade between China and the continent also continues to grow.

The first China-Africa summit was held in 2006.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

The British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne delivered the budget today, an annually-held audit of the country’s finances deciding how taxpayers’ money should be spent. He set out plans to boost the housing market in his fourth budget, as well as stating the economy will grow by 0.6% — half his prediction four months ago.

George Osborne revealed plans to improve the housing market, including a “Help to Buy” shared equity scheme which would offer buyers who can place a 5% deposit on a new house, a 20% loan to buy it. He said: “This is a budget for those who aspire to own their own home”. He also offered a new Mortgage Guarantee, created in conjunction with mortgage lenders — the scheme would allow them to offer loans to homeowners without the need for a large deposit and offer guarantees to support up to £130bn of lending for three years beginning in 2014.

As a measure to attract investment to the British economy, he announced to reduce corporation tax from 21% to 20% taking effect from April 2015. The rate of corporation tax has fallen from 28% in 2010 to the current level of 21%. The United Kingdom is to have lower rates of corporation tax than the USA at 40%, France at 33%, and Germany at 29%.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) stated the government debt reduction programme to reduce the budget deficit will miss its targets. The government has forecast the total public sector debt will begin to fall by the financial year 2015/2016, while OBR says national debt will reach a high of 85.6% of GDP, £1.58 trillion, in 2016/17. Osborne defended the government efforts to reduce the deficit and said: “Our judgement has since been supported by the IMF, the OECD and the Governor of the Bank of England.”

In response to the Budget speech, the Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband said: “At the worst possible time for the country. It’s a downgraded budget from a downgraded Chancellor […] Debt is higher in every year of this Parliament than he forecast at the last Budget. He is going to borrow £200 billion more than he planned.”

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Balls said to The Independent, “They are borrowing £245bn more in this Parliament, we said all along …said this two years ago, if they had moved more quickly with a sensible, targeted package of measures to kick-start the economy, which would have meant at that time more borrowing for a VAT [Value Added Tax] cut to bring forward housing investment, then we would have got the economy growing and the deficit coming down.”

The Business Secretary Vince Cable told the BBC in an interview, the “age of austerity” would probably end within the current decade, but made no more definite forecast.

The head of the British Federation of Small Businesses, John Walker, said: “The Budget opens the door for small businesses to grow and create jobs. The Chancellor has pulled out all the stops with a wide ranging package of measures to support small business. […] [W]e are pleased to see the scrapping of the 3p fuel duty due in September”.

Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of Unite the Union, criticized the budget for not helping working families. He said: “This is a Budget for the few by the few that attacks the many. Millionaires are days away from getting a £40,000 tax cut from the Tories, but George Osborne is using the budget to attack hard-working public sector workers. The worst chancellor in British history has gone further by giving big business another tax cut while staff caring for the sick get pay cuts. […] [H]e should have raised the national minimum wage by £1 and drop the senseless plan to give millionaires a tax break in a few days’ time”.