Saturday, December 1, 2018

On Wednesday, Greek police announced they arrested 63 people for gold smuggling. According to a report from Associated Press (AP), police seized cash, gold bars, and other items, totaling about two million euros (roughly 2.3 million US dollars).

Police said on Friday the police operation, started on Tuesday, involved 50 homes and 30 stores. Police accused the suspects of buying stolen gold from foreigners who allegedly robbed homes.

Police said the scheme had involved at least two collaborating criminal networks over two years or longer. The suspects had allegedly been melting the gold items and exporting the gold to Turkey using tour buses to avoid taxes, and to Germany. The gold was allegedly smuggled through a number of pawn shops, according to AP.

Press reported pawn shops have multiplied in Greece in the financial crisis ongoing there since 2010, which reportedly has caused people to buy an increased amount of gold and silver to store their assets.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

The California Department of Justice on Wednesday released the warrant and affidavit of a criminal investigation of the Wells Fargo bank. The State of California served the warrant on October 5 to search the San Francisco headquarters of Wells Fargo for felonious activities related to identity theft.

The warrant said property to be seized at the bank’s San Francisco headquarters was related to the unauthorized creation of accounts by Wells Fargo employees including the names of individuals for the accounts; account information and fees; the names of employees and their managers who created accounts without the consent of the Wells Fargo customers in question; and all communications including emails referencing the unauthorised accounts.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s criminal probe is part of an increasing list of officials nationwide questioning the business practices of Wells Fargo such as California State Treasurer John Chiang who announced a one-year suspension of State investment with the bank on September 28; Illinois State Treasurer Mike Frerichs followed suit with a year-long ban on October 3; and Democratic United States Senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who wrote to the U.S. Security Exchanges Commission (SEC) suggesting investigation on September 29.

Saturday, February 18, 2006

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has successfully launched another of their H-IIA space rockets. Its payload, the MTSAT-2 satellite designed to control air traffic and track weather patterns, has successfully separated from the rocket. It is due to be inserted into a geostationary orbit on the 21st of February.

The satellite is owned by the Civil Aviation Bureau and the Japan Meteorological Agency, part of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

The rocket was launched from the Tanegashima space centre in the southern region of Kagoshima, at 15:55 (06:55 GMT). It is the ninth in a series of H-IIA rockets, which form the main part of the Japanese space program. A previous H-IIA rocket was launched less than a month ago.

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

On March 7, voters in the US state of Oklahoma will decide on State Question 820, the Marijuana Legalization Initiative.

If the initiative passes, adults 21 and older could own up to an ounce (28.35 grams) of recreational marijuana and cultivate “not more than six (6) mature marijuana plants and six (6) seedlings” in their homes, and some convictions for marijuana possession could be expunged.

The state’s profits earned by taxing marijuana transactions would fund the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority, while the rest would be split between: the state’s fund pool (30%), programs in public schools to improve student success, extracurricular activities, and decrease drug abuse (30%), governmental and nonprofit programs to counter drug abuse (20%), courts (10%), and the local government where the transaction occurred (10%).

Wikinews emailed interview questions to the Yes campaign on January 6; Michelle Tilley, their Campaign Director, responded on January 11. The following is the interview with Tilley.

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, April 1, 2009

An act signed into law by Afghan President Hamid Karzai last month dramatically rolled back the rights of women in that country, according to human rights groups and a United Nations report on the bill by the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

The Afghan government has not provided a copy of the text of the Shia Family Law to the UN or to other outside groups requesting it, citing “technical problems”, however, the UN and opposition politicians say that the bill contains numerous provisions restricting the rights of women, such as giving their husbands priority in court; requiring the husband’s permission to leave the house, obtain education or employment, or to see a doctor; and reserving the custody of children to male relatives.

In its most controversial provision, though, the law’s Article 132 requires wives to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands, and says that a husband can expect sex with his wife once in every four days except in the event of illness. The United Nations argues that this is equivalent to spousal rape. Spousal rape is specifically prohibited in 45 countries worldwide and may be prosecutable by existing rape statutes in others.

The circumstances of the bill’s passage have raised questions as well, with Senator Humeira Namati saying that the bill was not read out or debated in the House of Elders, the Afghan National Assembly‘s upper house and Shinkai Zahine Karokhail of the House of the People stating the bill received only limited debate in the lower chamber. “They wanted to pass it almost like a secret negotiation,” Karokhail told the Guardian. “There were lots of things that we wanted to change, but they didn’t want to discuss it because Karzai wants to please the Shia before the election.” Namati calls the new law “worse than the Taliban”.

According to Karokhail and others, the law received Karzai’s support in order to boost his popularity among Afghanistan’s Shi’a population, which comprises an estimated ten per cent of the country, ahead of an upcoming election in August. A Monday ruling by the Afghan Supreme Court has allowed Karzai to remain in power in the interval between the expiration of his term on May 21 and the upcoming Afghan presidential election in August. It is unclear whether the law would apply only to Shi’a persons or to all Afghans.

Nonetheless some changes were made to the bill; the proposed minimum age of marriage for girls was raised to 16 from aged 9 and temporary marriage is not provided for. MP Shukria Barakzai says that “before this was passed family issues were decided by customary law” and that the new law, while not perfect, is an “improvement”. MP Ustad Mohammad Akbari defended the bill as well, saying it protects women’s rights: “Men are stronger and women are a little bit weaker; even in the west you do not see women working as firefighters.”

A spokesman for Mr. Karzai gave reporters no comment.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Speaker of the U.S. House John Boehner announced yesterday that he would agree to a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut. In an effort to end the impasse between the House and Senate, Boehner told Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid that he would schedule a House vote on the Senate version of the bill that would extend the tax cut, which was due to expire at the end of the year.

Speaker Boehner announced the agreement in a brief statement: “Senator Reid and I have reached an agreement that will ensure taxes do not increase for working families on January 1”. Boehner informed other congressmen of the deal in a conference call yesterday evening.

The House may pass the bill via unanimous consent today, which would not require the presence of all members. Boehner and Reid also agreed to a bipartisan negotiation committee to sort out differences and extend the tax cut for an entire year, a goal recently sought by Republicans in the House.

The extension of the payroll tax cut, which would prevent approximately 160 million Americans from seeing a tax increase in 2012, had already been passed by the Senate last weekend. Earlier yesterday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell joined several other Republican Senators in encouraging the House to pass the extension.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said that once the House acts, he “will be happy to restart the negotiating process to forge a yearlong extension.” At a news conference, Speaker Boehner issued a statement: “We have fought the good fight. Why not do the right thing for the American people even though it’s not exactly what we want.” President Obama also responded to the development in a statement: “This is good news, just in time for the holidays. This is the right thing to do to strengthen our families, grow our economy, and create new jobs. This is real money that will make a real difference in people’s lives.”

The tax cut extension impasse began when the House effectively rejected the Senate-approved version of the bill on Tuesday after being faced with opposition from House Republicans, specifically those associated with the Tea Party movement, who advocated for spending cuts and the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Members of Australia’s Health Services Union (HSU) will go on strike in Victoria next week in a dispute over stalled wage and career structure negotiations. Over 5000 physiotherapists, speech pathologists and radiation therapists will walk off the job next week, effectively closing the state’s 68 largest health services.

The strike will force the closure of intensive care units and emergency departments across the state.

It is feared the strike could continue into Easter.

National secretary of the HSU, Kathy Jackson said admissions would be crippled, while intensive care patients would have to be evacuated to New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia as hospitals will not be able to perform tests or administer treatment.

“When an ambulance shows up you can’t admit a patient without an X-ray being available, you can’t intubate them and you can’t operate on them,” she said.

“If something goes wrong in an ICU you need to be able to X-ray, use nuclear medicine or any diagnostic procedure,” said Ms Jackson.

Ms Jackson said the HSU offered arbitration last year, but the state government refused. “They’re not interested in settling disputes, they hope that we are just going to go away.”

“We’re not going away, we’ve gone back and balloted the whole public health workforce in Victoria, those ballots were successful, 97 percent approval rating,” she said.

The HSU is urging the government to commence serious negotiations to resolve the dispute before industrial action commenced.

The government has offered the union a 3.25 per cent pay increase, in line with other public sector workers but the union has demanded more, but stopped short of specifying a figure.

Victorian Premier John Brumby said the claim would be settled according to the government’s wages policy. “The Government is always willing and wanting to sit down and negotiate with the relevant organisations . . . we have a wages policy based around an increase of 3.25 per cent and, above that, productivity offset,” he told parliament.

The union claims it is also arguing against a lack of career structure, which has caused many professionals to leave the health service. Ms Jackson said wages and career structures in Victoria were behind other states.

Victorian Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said he was not in support of the proposed strike and called on the government to meet with unions. “There could not be a more serious threat to our health system than has been announced today.”

“We now have to do whatever is possible to stop this strike from proceeding,” he said.

The opposition leader will meet with the union at 11:30 AM today.

Victorian Hospitals Industry Association industrial relations services manager Simon Chant said hospitals were looking at the possible impact and warned that patients may have to be evacuated interstate if the strike goes ahead.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.