Saturday, December 3, 2005

James Hardie Industries has signed a final agreement designed to ensure that compensation will be received by victims who suffer health consequences due to their exposure to the company’s asbestos products. The deal, signed on Thursday, is expected to cost the company $4.5 billion over the next 40 years, and James Hardie is obligated to pay 35 per cent of its free cash flow during each of those years to fund a compensation trust.

The Australian corporate watchdog ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) is gaining ground on James Hardie Industries corporate members. It is understood that the company’s agreement with the NSW Government will not provide Hardie directors and executives with the immunities from civil prosecution sought by the company. The possible charges for the members range as high as jail terms of up to five years.

According to The Weekend Australian, a source said, “this arrangement suited ASIC because rather than channelling its efforts into cases that could provide compensation, it can concentrate on alleged offences that could result in criminal prosecution or banning officers from holding directorships or management positions.”

NSW Special Commissioner David Jackson QC said that former Hardie chief executive Peter Macdonald engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct when he told the stock exchange that the asbestos compensation trust Hardie set up in 2001 with $293 million would be “fully funded”. At around the same time, James Hardie share holders voted for the relocation of its corporate base from Australia to the Netherlands.

Another alleged issue is a controversial $1.9 billion share cancellation, which a NSW MP said attracted ASIC to look at the activities of Hardie chairwoman Meredith Hellicar.

The ASIC task force plan to collect and analyse documents and interview witnesses into at least the middle of next year. Until then, any possible new charges are unlikely.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Drag—dressing in the clothing atypical of your born gender—in recent years has found mainstream success. Films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar have prominently featured drag performers. But they have all focused on men in drag as women.

Murray Hill is a comedian, emcee and performer. He is also a drag king. Called “The Hardest Working Middle-aged Man in Show Business”, The New York Times christened him “the current reigning patriarch of the downtown performance community.” He is seemingly everywhere, emceeing a bingo night at the now closed, Jimmy Fallon-backed Mo Pitkins’ House of Satisfaction on Avenue A, or hosting the Polyamorous Pride Day in Central Park. Hill has become a legend in New York’s “anything goes” counterculture theater scene who is beginning to find mainstream success; which would be a first for a drag king.

David Shankbone’s examination of New York City‘s culture has brought him to the whip’s end of a BDSM dungeon, on the phone with RuPaul, matching wits with Michael Musto, grilling Gay Talese, eating dinner with Augusten Burroughs and quizzing the bands that play the Bowery Ballroom. In this segment he talks to downtown legend Murray Hill, former New York City mayoral candidate and comedian, on the last night of Mo Pitkins’ House of Satisfaction.

Friday, March 3, 2006

Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe is reported to be feeling much better after suffering from chest pain for some time.

The Olympic gold medalist was due to swim in the 100m and 200m freestyle and in three relays at the Commonwealth Games, but due to his complaints his fitness has been in doubt. He has been unable to take the drugs needed to overcome his pain as they are banned from the Games.

Thorpe told the media Thursday “It’s actually the best I’ve felt in a while; the antibiotics are starting to work.”

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

Government delegates are meeting this week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) general assembly in Geneva to discuss the WIPO Development Agenda. The meeting will determine how developing countries must implement existing controversial intellectual property rights laws including copyrights, patents, and trademarks. They will also consider the disputed proposal for a global Treaty on the Protection of Broadcastings and Webcasting Organizations.

The Broadcastings/Webcasting Treaty proposal, pushed by traditional broadcast organizations, and lobbyists for a handful of Internet publishers, including Yahoo, is being pushed hardest by the United States government, which ironically, has never considered such legislation domestically. The treaty would create a new layer of intellectual monopoly rights for broadcasters, potentially including ‘webcasters’. Broadcasters would then be able to claim rights over material they broadcast–even material that was in the public domain or licensed under creative commons or copyleft licenses.

Many developing countries including Brazil, South Africa, India, Iran, Chile, and Venezuela are asking for time to evaluate and study the proposals, and opposition to the treaty has been registered by numerous NGOs and public interest advocates. Fearing a repeat of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), when US copyright law was made more strict to conform to WIPO standards, a coalition of U.S. NGOs is currently circulating a sign on letter calling for public hearings on the implications of the Broadcaster Treaty.

In a recent Financial Times article Professor James Boyle (Law, Duke University) [1] raised objections to the Broadcasting/Webcasting Treaty, saying “intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary, or that they will help rather than hurt”. He elaborated that such laws are made “as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups,” and that concerns for “public interest in competition, access, free speech, and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat.” Professor Boyle fears that “communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules” with harmful effects.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

Macomb, New York Councilman Steve Burke took some time to speak with Wikinews about his campaign for the U.S. Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination.

Burke, an insurance adjuster and farmer, was elected councilman in Brookhaven, New York in 1979. He left the town after being accused and found not guilty of bribery in the 1980s. Since 1987 he has served as Macomb councilman off-and-on and currently holds the post. From 1993 to 1996 and 1999 to 2002 he worked as chairman of the Democratic Party of St. Lawrence County, New York. Among his many political campaigns, Burke unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1992 and recently attempted to run for U.S. Congress in 2014 but too many of his ballot petition signatures were found invalid. Burke filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in the 2016 election on September 18, 2015 and has qualified for the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire Primary.

With Wikinews reporter William S. Saturn?, Burke discusses his political background, his 2016 presidential campaign, and his policy proposals.

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Mosaic Fashions, a UK clothing firm, is set to make history as it becomes the first foreign company to list on the Iceland Stock Exchange (ISE).

Mosaic, which owns the clothing brands Oasis, Karen Millen, Coast and Whistles, operates 600 stores and is majority owned by retail investment group Baugur. Mosaic employs approximately 5,400 staff throughout the UK and Ireland.

The exchange was founded in 1985 and has since grown to encompass 34 firms with a combined value of over US$21bn (€16.3bn; GBP11.1bn).

Thursday, March 26, 2020

In a new study released by the Florida Museum of Natural History on Monday, scientists report spiky skulls evolved at least 25 separate times in different kinds of frogs. The survey was reportedly to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lead author Daniel Paluh, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, said, “Superficially, frogs may look similar, but when you look at their skulls, you see drastic differences […] Some of the weirdest skulls are found in frogs that eat birds and mammals, use their heads as a shield, or in a few rare cases, are venomous. Their skulls show how strange and diverse frogs can be.”

Some scientists had previously suggested smaller frogs would tend to develop spiky skulls, but that is not what this study reports. Here, researchers evaluated CT scans on 158 different species. They found frogs that had similar ecological niches — meaning they either acquired food in the same way or defended themselves from predators in the same way — tended to develop skulls with similar grooves, spikes, or specialized jaw joints regardless of whether they were ancestrally related to each other.

According to the study, skulls with spikes, grooves or ridges — called hyperossification — often accompanied frogs eating very large prey relative to their own body size. The strong, spacious skulls would allow the frogs to have very big mouths with which to catch birds, rodents, reptiles and other frogs. Spikes sometimes coincided with venomous frogs. The researchers speculated the spikes make it dangerous for predators to hit the frog’s head, as the spikes would break venom sacs under the frog’s skin.

Other bone formations included projections resembling fangs or lower teeth that different species of frogs use for catching prey and fighting. Very few frogs have true lower teeth.

One of the study’s authors, herpetologist David Blackburn, told Discover Magazine the frequency of spiky skulls evolving in otherwise unrelated frogs suggested some deep pattern frogs fell into as circumstances arose: “Somehow, these frogs are turning on some ancient developmental machinery in their DNA.”

Since 1973, when frogs skulls were last comprehensively surveyed, scientists have documented enough new species to double the number known to humans. Also, modern techniques exploit CT scans, of which Paluh and his team made liberal use. The research was part of the oVert project, funded by the National Science Foundation, meant to comprehensively CT-scan over 20,000 vertebrate specimens from United States museums.