Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Mount Stromlo, Canberra — This Easter weekend, elite mountain bike riders competed in the Australian 24-hour solo championships at Canberra’s Stromlo Forest Park. Jason English from Port MacQuarie rode 33 laps and won the men’s race. Liz Smith from Wollongong rode 25 laps and won the women’s race.

Races are won by riding the most laps. If two riders complete the same number of laps in 24-hours, the winner is the one who has ridden them in the shortest time.

Riders wear lights on their helmets and bicycles during night laps. Due to the time of year, there is roughly twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness each day.

The event is a curtain raiser for the WEMBO World Solo 24 hour Mountain Bike Championships, which will be held at Stromlo Forest Park on 12 and 13 October 2013. The race was for solo riders only.

The weekend before, the teams of riders took to the track at the Mont 24 hour race at Canberra’s Kowen forest. With over 3,000 riders participating, it is now Australia’s largest cycling race.

The team version of the race was favoured by the weekend warriors, but also attracted more than a few elite athletes. Laps were ridden in relay fashion: each rider handed over the baton (which looked like a credit card) to another member of the team after riding one or more laps.

The track was in excellent condition, running through the trees. Without steep climbs or overly difficult technical sections, it permitted fast lap times.

No injuries were reported.

Friday, January 1, 2021

After an active year of original content published on the English-language Wikinews, we take a look back at some of the two dozen-plus original reports from our contributors during 2020.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

With online gaming in persistent worlds becoming more prevalent, a US congressional committee has begun to look into the tax implications of these booming online economies. Games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life have large player driven economic systems in which – either following the rules or against them – real world currencies are exchanged for in-game currencies. With the GDP of some of these economies rivaling that of some small countries, the US government is wondering if it is missing out on a potential source of tax revenue: or as some gamers might put it, the IRS is asking “You buy gold?”.

In cases where exchange of a real world currency for in-game currency is permitted by the rules of the game, some of these online games such as Second Life require that players report any income generated by these means to his or her government. In most on-line games however, a black market exists where players buy and sell in-game currencies in direct violation of the game’s rules; situations involving black markets are notoriously hard to tax.

Compounding the issue of currency exchange is the existence of in-game assets. In the real world if someone wins a luxury vehicle, he or she is expected to pay a capital gains tax on his or her winnings. If a 40 person “raid” in World of Warcraft gets a rare “drop,” worth up to thousands of dollars if sold illegally, should they be required to pay a capital gains tax?

Even if the issue of capital gains is ignored, there is still the matter of sales tax. In many of these games, non-player characters and players alike sell items to one another. If sales tax is to be applied, at what rate should it be charged and to what State does it go? Questions such as these have just recently been answered in much less hazy situations such as online versions of brick and mortar establishments.

Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee had this to say on the issue, “I found that talking about this issue with some of the other economists on the committee, they are not really familiar with what a virtual economy is. The idea of Second Life or World of Warcraft or some of these other synthetic universes, they have trouble wrapping their head around it. So there’s an educational hurdle to overcome here.”

The preliminary findings of the committee state that virtual economies deserve clarification of existing tax laws, not new taxes.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

One of the most important arguments in the run-up to the Iraq war made by Colin Powell in his United Nations speech and President Bush in his State of the Union address was that Iraq had an active biological weapons program and possessed mobile biological weapons labs. According to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the main source for this information was an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball who was a source for the German central intelligence agency BND.

Several German intelligence officials responsible for Curveball have now told the LA Times that the Bush administration and the CIA have repeatedly exaggerated his claims and ignored warnings of the BND that the source was unreliable. Recounting his reaction after seeing Powell’s United Nations speech one German intelligence officer said: “We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence.” This corroborates reporting by the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit from 2003 and 2004 based on statements of unnamed senior German intelligence officials.

Nine months earlier, in May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in Curveball’s file in U.S. intelligence databases. Powell was never warned that his United Nations speech contained material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false, even though several people present at Powell’s CIA meetings were fully aware of this.

At this time German intelligence officers would not let the CIA meet directly with Curveball, but allowed a CIA doctor to draw blood samples. Questioning the validity of Curveball’s information in front of his CIA supervisor, the doctor was advised to “Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about.”

Shortly after Powell’s UN speech and several days before the invasion, United Nations weapons inspectors attempted to directly verify several key claims made by Curveball, but concluded that they were unsustainable. The White House insisted on its WMD claims based on Curveball’s information.

Even after the invasion, when more and more of Curveball’s accounts were shown to be pure fabrication, the CIA and the Bush administration relied on Curveball’s information. When U.S. forces discovered trucks with lab equipment and Curveball claimed that these were identical to the ones he has been reporting about, the CIA rushed to publish a White Paper claiming that these trucks were part of Saddam Hussein’s secret biological weapons program and Bush claimed publicly that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Several days later, twelve of the thirteen WMD experts who analyzed the trucks agreed that the equipment was not suited for biological weapons production, with the only dissenting voice coming from the author of the original White Paper.

The White Paper remains posted on the CIA website to this date, and President Bush has not yet retracted his statement that Iraq produced “germ warfare agents” made in his State of the Union address or his postwar assertions that “we found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Friday, January 7, 2011

Ted Williams, a former radio announcer from Columbus in Ohio, United States, has become a YouTube sensation after a video of the homeless man talking to a local reporter was uploaded onto the website.

In the YouTube video, he can be seen standing on the exit ramp of Interstate 71 at Hudson Street, holding a sign claiming that he has “the god-given gift of a great voice” and that he had “fallen on hard times”, as well as speaking to Doral Chenoweth III from daily newspaper The Columbus Dispatch. Upon being asked to “[s]ay something with that great radio voice”, he replied: “When you’re listening to nothing but the best of oldies, you’re listening to Magic 98.9. Thank you so much. God bless you. Thank you. And we’ll be back with more right after these words.”

In the video, Williams also mentions how “alcohol and drugs and a few other things became a part of my life and I got two years clean and I’m trying hard to get it back.” This video achieved in excess of eleven and a half million YouTube views since the video was uploaded on January 3, 2011. However, the original video has now been removed because of a copyright violation claim made by The Dispatch. Copies of the clip are currently still available to view online.

Subsequently, Williams received interest from companies wishing to offer occupations, including Ohio basketball team Cleveland Cavaliers — who offered a house to him — and NFL Films, according to the Associated Press. Stating that “It’s that voice,” Kevin McLoughlin described: “When I heard him tell his story, I said, ‘That’s what we do. This guy can tell a story.’ Somehow, some way, I need to get a demo with him.” McLoughlin also believed that “[t]he man deserves a second chance”. Kraft Cheese have also made an announcing job offer to him.

When asked about the effect of this YouTube sensation in an interview with CBS News, he exclaimed: “It’s just sensational for one, it’s numbing for another, overwhelming … It’s just amazing. … Well, I’ve already been characterized as Susan Boyle. … I’m just so, so happy. … I had no idea that something like this would have ever happened to me. It was like, almost, winning the Mega Ball lottery. … It’s phenomenal.”

Having attempted to make contact with his mother, aged 92, in New York, Williams met with her for the first time in approximately twenty years in a hotel in New York, New York on Thursday, according to msnbc.com. He greeted his mother by repeatedly saying the words: “Hi, mommy.”

This story has been likened to the occasion when Susan Boyle became a YouTube sensation in 2009 after a video of her audition on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ was uploaded there. The video was viewed over nine million times within the space of five days.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A Proton rocket which was intended to launch the JCSAT-11 satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit lifted off and successfully completed its first stage burn, but the second stage failed leading to loss of the rocket and satellite.

The launch vehicle was a Proton M booster with a Breeze M upper stage. More than 300 Proton rockets have been launched, all from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Following the launch failure, Kazakhstan suspended the launch of Proton rockets from Baikonur, Interfax news agency reported.

JSAT Corporation immediately placed an order with Lockheed Martin, the satellite manufacturer, for an identical replacement satellite based on the A2100AX design.

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.