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Monday, December 27, 2010

A police official in Mumbai has warned four suspected militants of Pakistani origin have entered the city, the capital of Maharashtra, India, and claims they are plotting attacks in the city. Police are now searching for the four people, thought to be members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Islamic fundamentalist militant group the Indian government holds responsible for the coordinated attacks which hit Mumbai in 2008. Joint police commissioner Himanshu Roy says intelligence suggests “the threat is serious.”

A United States counter-terrorism official said the attacks are likely imminent, and will occur over the Christmas and New Year period. “There’s no question LeT remains interested in pulling off another large-scale attack in India,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, “and we are alert to the possibility that LeT might again try a holiday attack.”

Speaking at a press conference, Roy said “[t]hey have recently arrived in Mumbai. We are not in a position to reveal their nationalities now but they are LeT members.”

Armed police have been posted around high-profile destinations in the city, and roads around the Taj Mahal Palace hotel—seiged by militants in the 2008 attacks—have been closed. Police have released a sketch of one of the militants believed to be in the city.

“The police [are] on high alert all over the city. We cannot take any of these intelligence inputs lightly in the holiday season,” another Mumbai official said. “Since yesterday, we are checking all the possible hideouts, small lodges and guesthouses, railway stations. We are checking all the vehicles that are coming into the city.”

166 people died and hundreds more were injured in the 2008 attacks, in which multiple gunmen attacked the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, a hospital, a police station, and numerous hotels, amongst other sites. The attacks were dubbed “India’s 9/11” by local media. Only one militant survived the attacks, Ajmal Amir Kasab; in May this year he was sentenced to death by hanging, on 86 charges, including murder, terrorism, and waging war against India.

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, December 21, 2004

Tampa, Florida —Frank Ford, an honorably discharged U.S. veteran sergeant who works as a California state prison guard has reported witnessing torture in Iraq and the cover-upactivities of his commanding officers: December 8, 2004, Veteran sergeant accounts US torture coverup. Ford says he was hustled out of Iraq for psychological evaluations at military hospitals in Germany and USA as part of an Army cover-up strategy. David DeBatto, who wrote the original article about Frank Ford states that every doctor that evaluated Ford found him to be completely normal, with absolutely no psychological or mental health issues. However according to VeriSEAL, which claims to provide independent and no-cost verification of Special Operations Forces personnel backgrounds, the cover-up accusations are being made by a fake SEAL member.

Ford has already made several unsubstantiated claims including being a member of President Nixon’s security detail, a medical doctor, a nobleman with a castle in Europe, a Navy SEAL and knowing the exact location of Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid known as “Chemical Ali”. Also Ford has said he has saved the life of a soldier in Iraq, but according to the sources familiar with the incident—doctors and other witness—his claims were exaggerated and he did nothing more than hold the wounded soldier’s IV bag. The name of Ford is listed at the Identified SEAL Impostors page from VeriSEAL.

When inquired about some of the Ford’s exaggerated stories, David DeBatto said:Ford IS an inveterate braggart. This is beyond question as far as I am concerned. However, although that trait may make him unpopular with some, it does not make him a liar. Some people seem to have a hard time separating the two.

According to Ford he attended a discontinued BUD/S program for Navy corpsmen during 1980’s as a doctor assigned to a Navy SEAL team. However Navy records do not list Ford among the program graduates. About this DeBatto said: he called himself “Doc” when I met him too at Fort Bragg in February 2003. However, I asked him right away if he was an MD or PhD. and he told me no, he was just a medic, but he has always been referred to as “Doc” since becoming a Navy medic over 30 years ago. It just kind of stuck he said. He also said he was in some kind of medical school or internship, which, upon later research, turned out to be true. It ain’t Harvard, but it is a legitimate medical school. Actually Frank Ford is a “Doctor of Naturopathy” by the Clayton School of Natural Healing in Alabama.

According to Col. C. Tsai, a military psychiatrist who examined Ford at the Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, Tsai had found nothing at all unstable about Ford.” Tsai was also interviewed by Speigel Television in Germany on this issue. According to Capitain Vic Artiga, Ford’s company commander, who Ford implicates, he was evacuated for “combat stress” behavioal problems.

In a interview to Los Angeles Times reporter, Lt. Col. Timothy J. Ryan, Ford’s commander, said: all allegations of prisoner abuse in Samarra were investigated immediately and no wrongdoing was ever found. Lt. Col. Timothy J. Ryan is also implicated by Ford’s testimony.

Ford said that Artiga accused him of being “delusional” and gave him “30 seconds to retract or face psychiatric referral”. Artiga, who is a police officer in Redwood City as civilian, denied Ford claims:That’s just laughable. In my years as a policeman, I’ve done hundreds of investigations. I can tell yoou that the investigation we did was as thorough as they come.

According to Sergeant First Class Michael Marciello, an alleged witness, when Captain Vic Artiga saw an initial psychiatrist’s report, Artiga was, “livid”. He “stormed” back to the psychiatrist and “browbeat” her to change her report to read that Ford was mentally unstable, and ordered her to have Ford shipped out of the country. Ford was later strapped to a medical gurney and medvac’d out of Iraq. He was initially sent to Kuwait and eventually to Landstuhl, Germany. Ford then underwent psychological evaluation in Germany and also two bases in the United States for approximately 8 months.

The Ford accusation was reported by David DeBatto and the article can be seen at Salon News. The case is under investigation.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

The death toll from Wednesday’s plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan reached 40 today with the recovery of five more bodies.

There were 58 on board when TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crashed into the city’s Keelung River. Fifteen survived and three more remain missing. Tzu Chi Foundation volunteer Lee Hung Shu-ying said today cold weather meant the families of the missing believe their loved ones are dead.

The Aviation Safety Council is investigating. The plane was in the air for minutes before banking steeply, hitting an elevated road, and crashing into the river. The domestic flight from Taipei Songshan Airport was headed to the island of Kinmen.

Investigators are focusing on the ATR 72-600’s engines. One engine automatically ‘feathered’ itself. Feathering involves the turboprop’s propeller rotating its blades to reduce drag.

Engines autofeather when they fail (‘flaming out’). By reducing drag on the non-working engine, a twin turboprop plane can fly safely using only its other engine. A feathered engine will not provide any thrust. The reason for autofeathering is presently unclear; what is known is the flight crew subsequently shut off the wrong engine. A series of stall warnings went off in the cockpit as the aircraft headed to disaster.

Aviation Safety Council managing director Thomas Wang confirmed an automated “number two engine flameout” message should have alerted the crew to the engine trouble, leading them to follow “the corresponding checklist”. “There are procedures that pilots go through — safeguards — when you’re going to shut down an engine, particularly close to the ground,” said John M. Cox, former commercial pilot and boss of a safety consultant. “Why that didn’t occur here, I don’t know.”

Stephen Fredrick, a former pilot of similar aircraft, told CNN video showing the final seconds is consistent with dual flameout. He said the wings-level, nose-down position suggested gliding.

Wang, however, cautions it is too early to blame any particular factor. “At this moment we just release the numbers, the parameter we’ve confirmed, we did not release any judgment who did what at this time”. The Aviation Safety Council has teamed up with engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney Canada to examine the engines.

Also being prioritised is finalising a cockpit voice recorder transcript and cockpit examination. The aircraft was near-new.

Local prosecutors are investigating potential “professional error”, and the Civil Aeronautics Administration has ordered TransAsia retest all ATR pilots. 90 flights over three days are cancelled to allow the proficiency checks. TransAsia and Uni Air have also been ordered to check their collective 22 ATRs for engine and fuel system problems.

Pilot Liao Chien-tsung and his co-pilot, not publicly identified, were initially hailed as heroes by prosecutors, mayor Ko Wen-je, international press, and at least one relative of a survivor. After declaring “Mayday Mayday, engine flameout” to air traffic control the pair grappled with their struggling plane, avoiding buildings in its path.

They have been credited with reducing the death toll. Their bodies were found in the cockpit, with leg fractures. Both were still holding the wrecked plane’s controls.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The European Union has emerged from its worst recession since World War II, with the announcement on Friday that the region posted a modest growth in the third quarter. Despite the news, some EU economies including Spain and the United Kingdom are still struggling.

Both the European Union as a whole and the sixteen EU countries sharing the euro currency (the “eurozone”) posted positive growth, at 0.2 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively. This follows five consecutive quarters of negative growth. The data was published by the European statistical agency Eurostat and announced by the European Commission in Brussels.

Two of Europe’s biggest economies, France and Germany, helped drive the overall growth. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde announced the French economy had grown 0.3 percent in the third quarter, and predicted it would enter 2010 with its old momentum.

In an interview on French radio, Lagarde said the fact the French economy had posted two successive quarters of positive growth showed it was turning around. She also noted that the labour market had only shed 5,000 jobs in the last quarter, far fewer than at the beginning of the year. Speaking from Singapore, Lagarde predicted Asia would drive the world economic recovery — but she also said it was important to continue government economic stimulus measures through 2010.

Germany’s economy grew 0.7 percent in the third quarter and Italy and the Netherlands also posted an upturn. Lithuania recorded the biggest growth — up 6 percent in the third quarter.

However the economies of both Spain and the United Kingdom shrunk in the same quarter. The UK’s Office for National Statistics initially estimated a fall of 0.4 percent in British output, though this could be revised. Britain had widely been expected to show growth in the third quarter. Eurostat figures also showed that unemployment in Europe overall rose to 9.7 percent in September — the highest in 20 years.

Some economists believe that growth in Europe and the United States may slow or even reverse in 2010, in a so called “double-dip”. Howard Archer of IHS Global Insight warned that the end of some government stimulus such as car scrappage schemes could cause a “loss of momentum”. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF, disagreed, predicting in a statement from Singapore that 2010 would be a global “year of recovery”.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Australia’s Department of Defence spent thousands of dollars on controversial development seminars, Australian media reported Wednesday. The seminars are run by a San Francisco, California-based training company called Landmark Education. The company evolved from Erhard Seminars Training “est”, and has faced criticism regarding its techniques and its use of unpaid labor.

Australia’s Defence Minister Warren Snowdon said that the government is in the process of reviewing Defence Department expenditures on career development. “We’re in the process now of doing an audit, completely unrelated with anything to do with Landmark, which is being undertaken into learning and development to make sure that they meet our needs. … We have to be very sure that the courses that people do undertake are relevant, appropriate and indeed in line with what community expectations might be,” said Snowdon in an appearance on ABC Radio.

The Australian and Australia’s ABC News reported that Landmark Education had been listed in France as a “possible cult” in the mid 1990s. When asked about this on ABC Radio, a spokeswoman for the company in the United States, Deborah Beroset, responded: “What happened in France was that a commission established by the French parliament issued a report in which they listed almost 200 organisations as being possible cults … We were never contacted. We were inappropriately included in that list”.

In a program which aired Wednesday, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio program AM reported that Australia’s Defence Department spent at least AUD12,270 of taxpayer funds to send government employees to Landmark Education courses. According to AM, the Defence Department said it does not appear that further funds have been sent to Landmark Education since 2004.

In a statement released by the Defence Department, the government stated: “A search of Defence records does not indicate exactly how many individuals attended courses with this training provider, however it is believed it was a small number of individuals. … Defence has been unable to determine individual reasons for why groups within Defence choose this training provider.”

AM also reported that the use of unpaid labor by Landmark Education “has attracted the attention of the US and French governments,” and that some individuals in the mental health field have accused the company of brainwashing. When asked about the allegations by mental health experts that Landmark Education’s techniques amounted to brainwashing, Deborah Beroset responded: “Well, there is absolutely no credence to that whatsoever.”

In a March 9 article in the Herald Sun, Peter Rolfe reported that taxpayer money was used to send at least 37 police and government staff from Victoria, Australia to seminars run by Landmark Education. Police and Emergency Services Minister Bob Cameron said that “Decisions on the appropriateness of staff attending courses by Landmark Education are made by individual managers who remain best-placed to assess the development needs of their staff,” but State Liberal MP Murray Thompson told the Herald Sun that the funds should have been put towards fighting crime. Apple Inc., Reebok, and Mercedes-Benz have sent employees to Landmark Education seminars, according to a spokeswoman for Landmark.

In October 2006, Landmark Education took legal action against Google, YouTube, the Internet Archive, and a website owner in Queensland, Australia in attempts to remove criticism of its products from the Internet. The company sought a subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an attempt to discover the identity of an anonymous critic who uploaded a 2004 French documentary of the Landmark Forum to the Internet. “Voyage au pays des nouveaux gourous” (Voyage to the Land of the New Gurus) was produced by Pièces à Conviction, a French investigative journalism news program. The Electronic Frontier Foundation represented the anonymous critic and the Internet Archive, and Landmark withdrew its subpoena in November 2006 in exchange for a promise from the anonymous critic not to repost the video.

Landmark Education is descended from Erhard Seminars Training, also called “est”, which was founded by Werner Erhard. est began in 1971, and Erhard’s company Werner Erhard and Associates repackaged the course as “The Forum” in 1985. Associates of Erhard bought the license to his “technology” and incorporated Landmark Education in California in 1991.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

A 17-year-old boy has died and a 16-year-old boy is in a serious condition in hospital after a fight broke out at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, Australia, on Monday at around 8 p.m. Sydney time (10:00 UTC).

According to New South Wales Ambulance Inspector Mark Whittaker, the 17-year-old, who worked at the event, went into cardiac arrest after being stabbed in the chest in front of his parents. Paramedics performed CPR on the teenager before loading him into an ambulance. He died while being transported to Westmead Hospital. The 16-year-old suffered stab wounds to his leg and is undergoing treatment.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested at the show and was taken to Auburn Police Station for playing a small role in the stabbing, according to police. He appeared in a juvenile court and was granted bail on charges of affray, carrying a knife in public and being armed with intent.

Strike force detectives are still trying to track down others involved in the stabbing. They believe the stabbing was not a random attack, and instead was a planned confrontation between two groups.

The carnival’s adult section was closed to allow forensics teams to inspect the area.

The show’s manager Murray Wilton denied claims that event security failed. He said it was impossible to check the bags of all attendees, and they had decided to carry out random bag checks instead.

Event organisers have promised full refunds will be offered for people who no longer wish to attend the show.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave his condolences and said: “All our kids will be going to the Royal Easter Show. My kids will be going to the Royal Easter show. We want them to be safe. This is a very distressing event. The violence that is there, that has no place. It has no place in this country. It has no place at an event where people are coming to enjoy themselves.”

Superintendent Danielle Emerton of the New South Wales Police Force has reassured people the show is still safe and asked for the public’s help to find others involved in the stabbing. She said: “We know that there were thousands of people at the show last night and we know that there’s a lot of vision that is out there,” urging anyone with information about the incident to come forward.