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Thursday, October 5, 2006

The Independent Monitoring Commission has reported that the Provisional Irish Republican Army has undergone major changes within their military structure and shows that the IRA Army Council wants to put its military campaign behind it. The Commission consists of John Alderdice, a former Alliance Party leader; Joe Brosnan, former Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Republic of Ireland; John Grieve, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terror Branch; and Dick Kerr, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Agency.

The report states the IRA no longer has the capacity to mount a military campaign anymore or return to one. The units that have been shut down were responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training. The IRA decommissioned their arms last year.

The report also mentions that the IRA has also put its criminality beyond use and is “clamping down” on criminals within the organization, said Lord Alderdice, as he presented the report. He also added, “That doesn’t mean that criminal activity by all members has stopped but the leadership has made public statements and internal directions, investigated incidents of breach of the policy, even expelled some members and has emphasised the importance of ensuring that business affairs are conducted in a legitimate way.”

Finally, the report added that there is not enough evidence or intelligence to identify who killed Denis Donaldson, a British spy who infiltrated the IRA and Sinn Fein, before revealing his status as a spy.

However, the report added that splinter groups like the Real IRA (RIRA) and Continuity IRA (CIRA) are still threats and are still continuing their activity. The Real IRA was the group behind the deadly 1998 Omagh bombing. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) “was not capable of undertaking a sustained campaign [against the British State], nor does it aspire to” according to the report.

It is also noted the creation of two new organizations, Oglaigh na hEireann (Irish Gaelic for “Volunteers of Ireland” and is used by the Irish Defence Forces and the various IRAs.) and the Republican Defence Army. However, the groups are small dissident factions according to the report.

The report also added that the two loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) are also beginning to move from violence but at slower pace and not at a grassroots level like the IRA. Another loyalist paramilitary, the Loyalist Volunteer Force

The report was received warmly by Irish Toaiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ahern, said “These positive and clear-cut findings are of the utmost importance and significance. It is time to make decisions and for Northern Ireland to look to the future.”

“The IRA has done what we asked it to do, and while issues like policing remain to be solved, the door is now open to a final settlement, which is why the talks next week in Scotland are going to be so important.” said Tony Blair in a live statement.

In a surprising reaction, the notoriously hardline leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley, also welcomed the report. He believes that his party’s pressure is working and if Sinn Fein signs up to policing there could be a deal. Paisley said, “If the police question is settled absolutely on a democratic basis and principle we would have come a long way along the road.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said “The DUP don’t have anything other than very limited options. They will or will not participate in power-sharing arrangements. If they don’t participate they are condemning people here, but particularly their own constituents, to second class public services, run by second class fly-in, fly-out British ministers. All the DUP can do is to delay, is to attempt to slow down, but they can’t stop the process of changing.”

Monday, October 15, 2007

Sam Brownback is perplexed. The U.S. Senator from Kansas and Presidential candidate is a Republican whose politics—he is against marriage for gay people, he is against abortion, and he has a clean image in a party tainted by scandal—should speak favorably to the party’s base. But it has not. “I’m baffled by that myself,” Senator Brownback told Wikinews reporter David Shankbone. “We haven’t been able to raise money.”

A recent poll in Iowa has put him in eighth place, with 2% supporting his campaign. “If we don’t finish fourth or better in Iowa…we’ll pull out.”

Senator Brownback’s relationship with God infuses almost every answer you find below. Although he doesn’t feel “competent” to explain why God would dislike gays, he does feel strongly that allowing two men or two women to enter into the union of marriage will destroy it for heterosexuals. Pointing to the research of Stanley Kurtz at the Hoover Institution, Brownback asserts that Northern Europeans have “taken the sacredness out of the institution.”

In the interview, Senator Brownback discusses the tug-and-pull that befalls him when his constituents show up at his office and say, “Look, I’m a conservative, but we need this bridge, we need this subsidy, we need this hospital.” Brownback feels this spending system needs to be changed; however, when it comes to energy policy, Brownback is there for his constituents. David Shankbone asked the Kansas Senator, a supporter of cellulosic ethanol, why he doesn’t support the lowering of tariffs on sugar since sugar ethanol delivers 8 times the energy output of cellulosic ethanol. Brazil, in particular, has become energy independent because of its sugar ethanol program. It’s cheaper to produce, and there is vastly more bang for the buck in sugar fuel than in corn fuel; an entire country no longer needs to import oil because of it. Federal tariffs currently make sugar ethanol too expensive in the United States. “You’re going to kill the ethanol industry here just as it gets going,” was Senator Brownback’s response. However, there is a debate over whether the process to make corn ethanol uses more energy than the ethanol itself produces.

Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Senator Sam Brownback.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Wikinews spoke to the Global Communications Director at Bebo to have a look at the popular social networking site. Sarah Gavin spoke via email to Wikinews’ Gabriel Pollard exclusively.

Bebo – its full name being Blog Early Blog Often – started off life with its name being adopted from a suggestion a journalist made, as well as the memorable nature of the name. Ms Gavin said, “The reality is that the name was chosen for more practical reasons… it was memorable, translated well and most importantly it was available.”

Founded in 2005 by husband and wife team, Michael Birch and Xochi Birch, Bebo was an online community for Internet users to talk to one another online, write blog posts and generally post pictures. Now in 2008, “Bebo allows users to find and communicate with friends as well as discovering, experiencing and sharing professional and user-generated content including video, music, books and other forms of entertainment,” Ms Gavin said. 2005 was the year when at least another two social networking sites entered the market with Friendster and Ringo.com, which was set up by the same people who created Bebo. Ringo was later sold on to Monster.com.

Not only does Bebo facilitate the aforementioned activities on it’s site, but also has access to professional content produced by broadcasters, such as TVNZ in New Zealand, and producers. This is done through its Open Media platform which claims to have over 400 media partners signed up.

Ms Gavin said, “Bebo offers many of the same features found on other sites, but unlike most social networks that limit their scope to communications and utility platforms, Bebo has opened its doors to all media companies, bringing the richness of the media world to its fast-growing community of users.”

Bebo even has its own television series it hosts on its website. KateModern, produced by those who made the popular Lonelygirl15 web-series, is a series exclusive to the Internet and was commissioned by Bebo in April, 2007. Bebo boasts that KateModern is the most popular television show on the Internet and saw it attain over 35 million views in the first season alone.

In early December 2007, Bebo announced its Open Application Platform, compatible with Facebook’s F8 and Google’s OpenSocial platforms. This new platform opens up its API so developers such as NBC Universal and Last.fm can build applications for use on Bebo. 1,300 applications have already been made for Bebo.

With over 40 million members internationally, Bebo has become the only “global Social Media Network” in existence today. Each month its demographic users aged between 16 and 24-years of age inclusive spend a combined total of 2.14 billion minutes a month surfing the highly popular site; or 40 minutes a day per user. The majority of its membership are from English-speaking nations such as United States, Australia and New Zealand where it experiences high popularity.

In the United Kingdom alone, Bebo has more than 11.4 million users, with 1.3 million located just in Ireland; 80% of Irish members are over 18-years-old. Ms Gavin spoke further on the popularity experienced in the world, “It is the number one social networking site in New Zealand, the number two site in Australia, and the number three site in the US and Canada.”

Bebo experiences a gender balance with a virtual “50:50” split between female and male users “in each territory”.

There is also a local version catered for the Polish community as well as there being plans to migrate into a local French and Spanish site.

Bebo also experiences higher usage than rival social networking site, MySpace, and video sharing website, YouTube, combined. “Bebo users are the most engaged and view an average of 92 pages per usage day,” Ms Gavin said.

Ms Gavin said, “Only 10 months after its inception, Bebo was voted Best Social Networking Web Site by more than 300,000 voters in the annual People’s Voice awards, in May 2006. Bebo won the People’s Choice award in the Social Networking category at the 2006 Webby awards and was named as the number one search term in the Year-End Google Zeitgeist 2006.”

Recently it has emerged that youth in Wales have been committing suicide to gain attention, such as having a memorial page on the networking site. In response Bebo have set up their own service called “Be Well” to help make Bebo a “safe and secure environment.” Ms Gavin said, “We are actively working with mental health and social care organisations – including Samaritans – to provide support and advice for our members.

“Bebo recognizes the potential dangers of online and takes proactive measures to promote safe use of its network. Bebo works in collaboration with law enforcement agencies from across the globe… [and] features a ‘report abuse’ button on every page.”

The “Be Well” service has recently expanded its offerings to the Australian and New Zealand markets too.

When asked to comment on any possible offers to buy Bebo by such companies as Google, Ms Gavin said that it was against policy to comment on “rumour and speculation”. However, after the interview, it was revealed that Time Warner’s AOL Internet division is set to buy up Bebo for US$850 million.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

A strong, 6.4 magnitude earthquake stuck Indonesia on Friday, even as recovery efforts continued from the devastating tremors that hit there last month.

The earthquake caused some buildings to sway in the country’s capital, Jakarta; however, there were no reports of injuries. According to officials, the earthquake’s epicentre was in in the Sunda Strait, off the western coast of the island of Java.

The earthquake wasn’t powerful enough to generate a tsunami, according to a Meteorology and Geophysics Agency official, Suhardjono.

On September 30, a powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Indonesia, causing landslides, destroying buildings, and killing over a thousand people. Cleanup and recovery efforts for that quake are still ongoing. Tremors frequently strike Indonesia and neighbouring vicinities, as it is positioned on an arc of fault lines.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

The Independent Monitoring Commission has reported that the Provisional Irish Republican Army has undergone major changes within their military structure and shows that the IRA Army Council wants to put its military campaign behind it. The Commission consists of John Alderdice, a former Alliance Party leader; Joe Brosnan, former Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Republic of Ireland; John Grieve, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terror Branch; and Dick Kerr, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Agency.

The report states the IRA no longer has the capacity to mount a military campaign anymore or return to one. The units that have been shut down were responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training. The IRA decommissioned their arms last year.

The report also mentions that the IRA has also put its criminality beyond use and is “clamping down” on criminals within the organization, said Lord Alderdice, as he presented the report. He also added, “That doesn’t mean that criminal activity by all members has stopped but the leadership has made public statements and internal directions, investigated incidents of breach of the policy, even expelled some members and has emphasised the importance of ensuring that business affairs are conducted in a legitimate way.”

Finally, the report added that there is not enough evidence or intelligence to identify who killed Denis Donaldson, a British spy who infiltrated the IRA and Sinn Fein, before revealing his status as a spy.

However, the report added that splinter groups like the Real IRA (RIRA) and Continuity IRA (CIRA) are still threats and are still continuing their activity. The Real IRA was the group behind the deadly 1998 Omagh bombing. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) “was not capable of undertaking a sustained campaign [against the British State], nor does it aspire to” according to the report.

It is also noted the creation of two new organizations, Oglaigh na hEireann (Irish Gaelic for “Volunteers of Ireland” and is used by the Irish Defence Forces and the various IRAs.) and the Republican Defence Army. However, the groups are small dissident factions according to the report.

The report also added that the two loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) are also beginning to move from violence but at slower pace and not at a grassroots level like the IRA. Another loyalist paramilitary, the Loyalist Volunteer Force

The report was received warmly by Irish Toaiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ahern, said “These positive and clear-cut findings are of the utmost importance and significance. It is time to make decisions and for Northern Ireland to look to the future.”

“The IRA has done what we asked it to do, and while issues like policing remain to be solved, the door is now open to a final settlement, which is why the talks next week in Scotland are going to be so important.” said Tony Blair in a live statement.

In a surprising reaction, the notoriously hardline leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley, also welcomed the report. He believes that his party’s pressure is working and if Sinn Fein signs up to policing there could be a deal. Paisley said, “If the police question is settled absolutely on a democratic basis and principle we would have come a long way along the road.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said “The DUP don’t have anything other than very limited options. They will or will not participate in power-sharing arrangements. If they don’t participate they are condemning people here, but particularly their own constituents, to second class public services, run by second class fly-in, fly-out British ministers. All the DUP can do is to delay, is to attempt to slow down, but they can’t stop the process of changing.”

Monday, September 5, 2005

Feel free to use the Wikimedia sites to solve our Wikinews crossword. Please do not fill it out online as it would spoil it for other people; print it out and fill it in at your own leisure!

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