Friday, April 25, 2008

The arsonist responsible for setting fire to the historic Sungnyemun gate (more commonly referred to as Namdaemun gate) in Seoul, South Korea in February has been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. The 600-year-old landmark was considred one of the nation’s greatest and most iconic, with some sources describing it as the single most important one in the country.

The 69-year-old male defendant has a previous conviction from two years ago for attempting to torch the Changgyeong palace, for which he received a suspended prison sentence and was fined. It is understood he destroyed the Namdaemun gate and attacked the palace over an unconnected land ownership dispute which had angered him. He felt that the compulsory purchase of his home a decade ago had been inadequatly compensated for by the state.

After the fire, residents left flowers at the scene and wrote grieving notes.

Chae Jong-Gi, who admitted the crime, was told of the seriousness of the offence in a statement by the Seoul district court. “A heavy sentence is inevitable as the accused inflicted unbearable agony on the people and damaged national pride… (The monument was) the treasure among all treasures which had survived all kinds of historic disasters. Even if restored, the gate’s originality will never return. Therefore, the nature and consequences of this crime are very serious,” said the statement.

The man is thought to have selected the gate as a target due to lax security measures. In the fire’s aftermath, officials have been criticised over this and concerns that firefighting efforts were ineffective, and the Cultural Heritage Administration‘s chief resigned to show he accepted responsibility for the blaze.

The two storey gate in pagoda style was constructed in 1398 and despite a 1447 rebuild and multiple renovations still contained original timbers prior to the destruction in the fire. Only the stone base survived.

According to the Cultural Heritage Administration, a reconstruction effort will take two to three years and cost 20 billion won (US$21 million).

Sunday, July 2, 2006

Israel has continued its barrage of the Gaza Strip with an attack by a helicopter gunship on the office of the Palestinian prime minister. The attack, which left the building ablaze, injured three Palestinian security guards and was described by the prime minister, Ismail Haniya, as senseless. “This is the policy of the jungle and arrogance,” Haniya told Reuters. “They have targeted a symbol for the Palestinian people.”

Israel claims the attack on Gaza, codenamed Operation Summer Rains, is to pressure the Palestinian government into freeing Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli tank gunner Israel describes as having been kidnapped by Palestinian militants on Monday.

Other Israeli strikes on Saturday night hit a school in Gaza City and Hamas facilities in the town of Jabalia in the north of the strip where one 34-year-old Hamas operative was killed and another wounded.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

Researchers from Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the United Kingdom’s University of York and University of Aberdeen have measured face matching aptitude of 49 Australian passport-issuing officers and compared it against a control group of 38 students from UNSW. In the test given to both groups, both had a roughly 20% error rate. The study “Passport Officers’ Errors in Face Matching” was published in PLOS ONE this Monday.

Previous psychological research has shown difficulty of deciding if two photographs are of the same stranger or of two different unfamiliar people. As coauthoring psychologist Dr David White says, “Despite this, photo-ID is still widely used in security settings. Whenever we cross a border, apply for a passport or access secure premises, our appearance is checked against a photograph”.

In the person-to-photo test, 30 officers —with mean age 48.0, 21 of them female— in Sydney Passport Office, during a normal working day, had to compare photograph (presented for up to ten seconds) to the person present. 34 students, 17 of each gender, were recruited as ‘applicants’ for the identification task. The person-to-photo test could not be given to a control group because it was not possible to bring back the ‘applicants’ to repeat the test.

ID cards were generated, genuine and ‘fraudulent’, for each ‘applicant’. Photographs of the ‘applicants’ were just a few days old. Each applicant’s ‘fraudulent’ photo was subjectively chosen for greatest similarity to their genuine photo.

The ‘applicant’ did not know whether the ID they presented was genuine or ‘fraudulent’, to avoid giving any cues to the passport officers. The passport offers rejected 6% of the genuine photos and accepted 14% of the ‘fraudulent’ ones, for 10% wrong decisions overall.

As coauthor Rob Jenkins, a psychologist at the University of York, said: “This level of human error in Australian passport office staff really is quite striking, and it would be reasonable to expect a similar level of performance at UK passport control. […] At Heathrow Airport alone, millions of people attempt to enter the UK every year. At this scale, an error rate of 15 per cent would correspond to the admittance of several thousand travellers bearing fake passports”.

One week later, 30 officers in Sydney Passport Office took the short version of Glasgow Face Matching Test (GFMT); 28 were participants from the person-to-photo test, and two were replacements for officers from the earlier test who were absent from work the day of the second test. GFMT performance predicted performance on the person-to-photo test for mismatches, but not for matches. The researchers suggested this could be explained by an upper limit on how accurate person-to-photo match trials can be.

The face matching accuracy was found to be independent of experience and training. As Dr David White says, “passport officers did not perform better, despite their experience and training. They made a large number of errors, just like the untrained university students we tested”.

Two years later, the photo-to-photo test was conducted, with images supplied by 21 ‘applicants’ from the person-to-photo test. 27 passport officers —mean age 45.5, 10 of them participants from the person-to-photo test, 22 of them female— as well as 38 volunteers —mean age 18.9, 26 of them female— compared photos taken recently to photos either from two years earlier or from official identification documents. All variations on the trials taken together produced 84 trials, ordered randomly. The testing was again done at the Sydney Passport Office, without time restriction, to encourage accurate response.

A possible solution of the problem is recruitment of staff with high face-matching accuracy, as Dr David White notes: “But we observed very large individual differences. Some passport officers were 100 per cent accurate. This suggests security could be significantly improved by using aptitude tests to select staff for jobs involving photo-ID checks. Because of this study, the Australian Passport Office now sets face-matching tests when recruiting staff and when selecting facial comparison experts”.

Match accuracy tested lower with official identification photos than with two-year-old photos taken by researchers; average error was 29.1%, with volunteers especially inaccurate on the official identification matches. Mismatch average error was 10.6%. Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has stated passport photo specifications comply fully with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards.

Another solution Dr David White mentioned is using multiple photographs: “One of the more recent papers we’ve released shows that if you have multiple images — not just a single snapshot — there are quite large gains in performance”.

As coauthor Professor Mike Burton of the University of Aberdeen says: “There is a great emphasis on a passport image to fit all purposes but people often comment on the fact that their passport photo looks nothing like them […] It seems strange that we expect a single passport shot to encompass a person and allow us to consistently recognise them. Could there in fact be an argument for our passports to contain a multitude of images, taken at different angles, in different lighting and formats?”

The research is supported by the Australian Passport Office within Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and also funded by the Australian Research Council.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

What you are about to read is an American life as lived by renowned author Edmund White. His life has been a crossroads, the fulcrum of high-brow Classicism and low-brow Brett Easton Ellisism. It is not for the faint. He has been the toast of the literary elite in New York, London and Paris, befriending artistic luminaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian McKellen while writing about a family where he was jealous his sister was having sex with his father as he fought off his mother’s amorous pursuit.

The fact is, Edmund White exists. His life exists. To the casual reader, they may find it disquieting that someone like his father existed in 1950’s America and that White’s work is the progeny of his intimate effort to understand his own experience.

Wikinews reporter David Shankbone understood that an interview with Edmund White, who is professor of creative writing at Princeton University, who wrote the seminal biography of Jean Genet, and who no longer can keep track of how many sex partners he has encountered, meant nothing would be off limits. Nothing was. Late in the interview they were joined by his partner Michael Caroll, who discussed White’s enduring feud with influential writer and activist Larry Kramer.

Friday, July 15, 2011

On Tuesday, the Euro fell to a new record low in relation to the Swiss Franc, and to multi-month lows against the U.S. Dollar and Japanese yen; all considered by investors to be safe currencies during times of economic turmoil.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier that recent comments from the newly installed head of the International Monetary Fund, France’s Christine Lagarde, resulted in a sell-off of the Euro. At a roundtable discussion in Washington, Lagarde noted that the IMF had not yet reached discussion of terms and conditions of a second Greek bailout plan. In fact, a representative from the IMF is currently meeting with Eurozone policymakers to draft such a new proposal. The yield differential between Italian bonds and German bonds has spread to more than 300 basis points, something not seen in over a decade and evidence of investors’ concern.

Adding to the Euro’s woes is the upcoming release of the bank stress tests on Friday. The European Bankers Association said that they expect the data release to shed new light on the Eurozone’s banking situation. Representatives of several of the Eurozone’s governments, including Germany, have requested that the association consider releasing fewer specific details for fear that investor panic will ensue. The inadequacy of the capitalization rates has been an issue with the European Central Bank, whose president recently called upon Eurozone banks to make every effort to put their balance sheets in order.

For the time being at least, an unsubstantiated rumor reported by the Wall Street Journal states that the Eurozone’s central banks’ purchase of periphery debt has helped to quell the downward momentum of the Euro.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Italian prosecutors have asked a judge to indict a United States soldier for fatally shooting Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari at a roadblock in Iraq a year ago. The shooting occurred when Calipari was escorting the Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena on her way to Baghdad airport. When their car came under fire from U.S. Marines at a roadblock, Calipari was fatally shot while trying to shield Sgrena, who was only lightly wounded in the incident.

The circumstances of the shooting are a matter of dispute between Italy and the United States. The U.S. military claims that the car was approaching the checkpoint at high speed, when the troops attempted to signal the car with light signals, aiming a green laser at the windshield and warning shots. When the car failed to slow down, the soldiers shot into the engine of the car.

The Italian government claims that there were no warning signs prior to the shootings. They contest that the car was speeding and that it accelerated after the first round of fire. Moreover, they allege that a proper inquiry into the case was impossible since the vehicle was removed and army logs destroyed shortly after the incident.

Italian prosecutors are arguing that the shooting was a “political murder” as Calipari was a civil servant and the shooting damaged Italy’s interests. In Italy, murder suspects cannot be tried in absentia unless the murder has political connotations. It is expected to take at least two months for a judge to rule on the indictment request.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome declined to comment.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

The tsunami caused by Japan’s magnitude 8.9 quake on Friday destroyed the commercial fishing harbor of Crescent City, California, a coastal town still recovering from a devastating tsunami in 1964. Although most of the fishing boats were removed in advance, the 198 docking slips that the harbor had provided for boats, enabling the livelihoods of the fishing crews, were lost.

Harbormaster Richard Young said that the harbor is destroyed. “We’re facing not only physical but financial disaster,” he said during a briefing. “Our business activity came to a screeching halt yesterday, and that affects the entire community.” Councilwoman Kelly Schellong said, “This is going to have a trickle-down effect beyond the lost jobs.”

Crescent City’s unemployment rate was 13 percent before Friday’s tsunami destroyed its commerical fishing industry.

The 1964 tsunami that hit Crescent City killed 11, demolished the harbor and heavily damaged large portions of the business district. Although the city subsequently rebuilt, another tsunami again damaged the harbor in 2006. The city was in the midst of reconstructing the harbor when Friday’s tsunami hit. The harbor is surrounded by land and a breakwater built after the 1964 disaster. The tsunami’s huge waves entered through a small opening provided for the entrance and exit of boats.

Lori Dengler, director of the Humboldt Earthquake Education Center, says Friday’s tsunami was one of as many as 38 tsunamis to strike Crescent City within the last 78 years. She calls the city a “tsunami magnet” because of the topography of the ocean floor that contributes to its vulnerability. She also blames the breakwater built after the 1964 tsunami because it traps tsunami waves in the harbor, causing them to boil and churn.

A county supervisor found the view painful on Saturday as she surveyed the wreckage accompanied by state officials. She is hoping they will provide emergency assistance. “We don’t have the financial resources,” she said. “We need money. That’s what it takes to fix things…. Our poor little harbor.”