Wednesday, April 2, 2008

For the first time in 40 years, the Royal Mint has chosen a new set of designs for the reverse of the coins, first introduced in the Coin Design Competition 2005. The designer, Matthew Dent of Bangor, North Wales, was paid £35,000 (GBP) for his designs, which depict the Shield of the Royal Arms spread over the six denominations below £1, with the entire shield embossed on the £1 coin.

The new coins are expected to come into circulation this summer – and Mr Dent envisions a success: “I can imagine people playing with them, having them on a tabletop and enjoying them. I felt it was important to have a theme running through from one to another.” he said, referring to the puzzle-like nature of the new design, which requires the coins to be arranged in a particular way to see the Shield of the Royal Arms.

The chief executive of the Royal Mint, Andrew Stafford, has said that the obverse of the coins will still depict the portrait of the Queen, like it has since 1998. The old coins will remain legal tender until they slip out of circulation.

Monday, June 6, 2011

A jury last week cleared four officers from London’s Metropolitan Police of assaulting a Muslim arrested on suspicion of al-Qaeda involvement. After trial their lawyer described the charge as “unfounded and unsubstantiated” – but in 2009 the police said Babar Ahmed, 34, had suffered “a serious, gratuitous and prolonged” assault.

Ahmed has been previously paid £60,000 in a civil case, which the jury was unaware of. After one hour of deliberations, they acquited Pc Roderick James-Bowen, 40; Pc Mark Jones, 43; Pc Nigel Cowley, 34; and Detective Constable John Donohue, 37, of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

The four officers claimed at trial that Ahmed’s wounds were either self-inflicted or caused during legal restraint during his December 2003 capture. They said he had fought hard against arrest. The prosecutor contended the four officers, from the specialist Territorial Support Group, “punched and [beat Ahmed] on the floor,” calling him a “fucking bastard” and a “fucking cunt.”

“On the floor the assault continued as his wife called out for the police to stop,” Jonathan Laidlaw, prosecuting, told the jury. This was followed, he claimed, by a visit to Ahmed’s prayer room, where he was positioned as if praying and asked “Where is your god now? Pray to him.”

The prosecution alleged further abuse against Ahmed in a police van en route to the police station, with Ahmed saying at Charing Cross police station he was attacked again in an area not covered by CCTV surveillance. He was left, in the words of Laidlaw, with “areas of bruising, reddening and grazes to [his] head and neck, bruising to the chest, areas of bruising to [his] back, extensive bruising and grazing of the arms. In effect, there were injuries all over the victim’s body.”

The defence noted that MI5 bugged Ahmed’s house and a recording of the arrest failed to show elements of the alleged attack. James-Bowen told the court of a “ferocious” fight with Ahmed, who used “significant force.” Jones told the jury his superiors had informed him Ahmed had been trained in both armed and unarmed fighting.

Less than a year earlier, a similar operation in Manchester resulted in an officer stabbed to death by a suspect now serving life in prison. The four officers dealing with Ahmed had been warned their suspect posed a similar threat.

Speaking outside court, their solicitor, Colin Reynolds said the men were now able to “[get] on with their professional lives” following the dismissal by the jury of “unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations.” Local media had been barred during trial from reporting that, between the two of them, Jones and James-Bowen had been accused of a total 40 assaults from 1993 to 2007, all of which have been rejected. Jones was previously tried for assaulting two teens in the back of a police van and yelling racist abuse at them, but was cleared.

Fiona Murphy, who represents Ahmed, was critical of the Independent Police Complaints Commission. “We now call upon the IPCC to put its abject failures in relation to this case to one side and to give proper consideration to the misconduct aspects.” Ahmed released a statement, saying, “Today’s verdict means that no police officer has been held to account for this abuse. Therefore I urge the Metropolitan police to bring disciplinary proceedings against all officers who were personally involved in the assault – and those who turned a blind eye.” His father read it out at a post-trial press conference.

Ahmed was never charged, but was re-arrested in 2004 and has spent the last seven years in custody facing extradition to the US. The US seeks to try him for fundraising for militancy amid claims he is a member of al-Qaeda; though initially a ruling in favour of extradition was reached an appeal is pending.

Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC, who oversaw the trial, expressed support for Ahmed’s position detained without trial: “I express the hope that his ordeal as a man in detention in this country for a number of years without trial is brought to an end as soon as possible, either by his extradition or by his release. It is no concern of this court as to which, but it is a matter of concern and I would have thought should be a matter of concern to the public at large, quite apart from Mr Ahmed, that here is a man who has been in custody for literally years without knowing what his fate is to be.”

Saturday, March 14, 2015

This weekend saw the opening of two new exhibitions at Edinburgh’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Wikinews attended Thursday’s press preview for the event where a full contingent of the capital’s press turned out to see the striking collection of paintings, photographs, and other works. Presented below are a selection of images captured at the preview.

REFLECTIONS: A Series of Changing Displays of Contemporary Art, billed as a showcase of a “diverse range of internationally-renowned contemporary and modern artists” is to display major works from the Gallery’s permanent collection, alongside important loans. Alongside this broad range of works, a three-room display of pieces on-loan from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation — with a dramatic painted steel relief, ‘borrowed’ from the Tate in London — runs from March 14 through to January 10 next year.

Admission to both exhibitions is free; being located in Dean, to the north-west of Edinburgh’s city centre, a free Gallery bus service is available.

Friday, March 13, 2009

A team of archaeologists excavating an Ancient Egyptian tomb have discovered golden jewelry in a recently-discovered lower chamber at the Valley of the Kings burial site in Luxor, Egypt.

Two golden rings and five golden earrings were found in the tomb of Djehuty, an 18th-dynasty official of Queen Hatshepsut, and were probably the property of Djehuty or his family.

The discovery was announced by Farouk Hosni, Egypt’s current Minister of Culture.

Djehuty was overseer of the treasury and overseer of works for the Queen. Hatshepsut reigned approximately 1479–1458 BCE. Djehuty was responsible for managing the huge amounts of precious goods brought in from Egypt’s military expedition to Punt in the Horn of Africa and the vast building projects of Hatshepsut which have made the female pharaoh one of the most-remembered of any from ancient Egypt.

Djehuty died after Hatshepsut did, sometime during the reign of Thutmosis III. Both Hatshepsut’s and Thutmosis’s names are recorded on the tomb. In a fashion typical of ancient Egyptian rivalries, Hatshepsut’s name was partly obscured on the monument over the tomb sometime after the queen’s death.

The team, led by José Manuel Galán of the National Research Center (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC), in Madrid, Spain, had been excavating the tomb, designated TT11 and located in the necropolis of Dra’ Abu el-Naga’, since 2002. While much of Djehuty’s funerary equipment was lost to fire in antiquity, the lower chamber of his tomb was concealed at the end of a three-meter shaft and discovered at the end of 2008.

A superficial description of the tomb itself was recorded almost two hundred years ago by 19th-century French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion, rubble blocking the entrance hindered excavation until the 21st century. In that time, emphasis in Egyptology has changed from the cataloging of treasures to the investigation of ancient culture, life and religion.

Since excavation began, Djehuty’s tomb has yielded a number of surprises. It was discovered that the tomb was re-used repeatedly up to and during the Greco-Roman period. There is an unusual face-on depiction of pharaoh Thutmosis III hunting ducks, and the mummy of a young, bejewelled, as-yet unidentified woman.

In 2007, 44 preserved bunches of flowers thought to be from Djehuty’s funeral were found in the site. In their 8th season of excavation, which ended on February 22, 2009, the team also found considerable evidence that below Djehuty’s tomb is a network of burial sites from the 11th dynasty, four thousand years old.

The lower chamber also displays passages from the Egyptian funerary text the Book of the Dead on its walls and a colorful mural of the goddess Nut, an embodiment of the heavens, on the ceiling. The names of Djehuty and his parents were also intact in the second chamber; the names were defaced in the previously-known first chamber of the tomb, which had also been looted.

According to a press release from Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Djehuty’s tomb is only the fifth known decorated burial chamber of the 18th dynasty. An additional unusual feature of the tomb is that its upper chamber is decorated in relief, rather than simply paint. When the excavation is completed, Dr Galán’s team plans to open the site to the public as the carved stoneworks will not be destroyed by tourists’ activities as paint would.

The identification of Djehuty is a complicated one, as a number of officials of the 18th dynasty bore the name, including a general and several governors. The name itself is an alternate transliteration of the name of the Egyptian god usually written in English as Thoth.

Monday, April 23, 2012

File:Frida Kahlo by Artist René Romero Schuler.jpg

According to a new diagnosis by a surgical pathologist, Frida Kahlo most likely suffered uterine damage during a streetcar accident as a teenager and this led to a rare condition known as Asherman’s syndrome, and that would explain the Mexican artist’s infertility.

Dr. Fernando Antelo, from the Harbor–UCLA Medical Center, said, “Her survival defied the grim prognostication by her physicians; however, complications from this physical trauma would emerge in her adulthood.” He presented his diagnosis yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association of Anatomists in San Diego.

Asherman’s syndrome is normally caused by a trauma to the uterus that results in internal scar tissue. For example, it can occur after multiple procedures to clear the uterus after a miscarriage or abortion, which is known as a “D & C” procedure. Antelo said Kahlo tried to have children many times and her miscarriages, as well as three therapeutic abortions, could have further aggravated the scarring.

At present the condition could be diagnosed and treated after advancements in medical imaging and hysteroscopy, but in Kahlo’s time, Dr. Antelo said, the technology had not advanced far enough to diagnose and treat her. Asherman’s syndrome has been known since 1894 when it was first reported. Kahlo died at age 47 in 1954.

“She kept attempting to have children with a uterus that wasn’t in any condition to do that,” Antelo said.

Antelo, who has been working on connections between art and medicine, says that Kahlo brought her infertility to the canvas and this can be seen in her many paintings of reproductive organs or in her depiction of her own bleeding body in the 1932 painting Henry Ford Hospital. In that image, Kahlo is shown lying on a hospital bed with multiple umbilical cords extending from her body and each one holds an object or body part, except one holding a baby.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

A building being prepared for demolition collapsed this morning in New York‘s Upper West Side around 9 a.m. EDT. Five people are known to be injured from the accident, as well as one rescue worker who was injured in the aftermath. None of the injuries were life-threatening.

The building was a supermarket, which was being taken down to make room for a high-rise building, something that residents took issue with. The roof, front wall, and scaffolding all fell to the ground, as stated by Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta.

Soon after the incident at least 100 police and fire department personnel combed the wreckage for more victims, using search and rescue dogs to find people by scent. They quickly accounted for the twenty-five construction workers who were working on the supermarket. Most of the victims’ injuries were broken bones, including one person who broke all four extremities.

Subway lines 1, 2, and 3 have been closed or redirected in response, along with the M104 bus.

Monday, June 12, 2017

On Friday, Japan’s parliament, the National Diet, passed a law to allow Emperor Akihito to abdicate. The law gives Akihito three years to become the first emperor to abdicate since Emperor Kokaku in 1817, two hundred years ago.

The newly passed law, made in response to the country’s Imperial Household Law’s lack of abdication provisions, applies to only Akihito, aged 83. It prohibits Akihito’s successors from abdicating.

Akihito ascended to the 2,000-year-old Chrysanthemum Throne when his father Emperor Hirohito died in 1989. Having a cardiac surgery and treatment for prostate cancer, Akihito in a televised address last year said age and health were interfering with his duties. Per Japan’s current constitution, an emperor cannot make political statements, so Akihito did not explicitly mention abdication.

When abdication happens, under new law, Akihito’s son and heir apparent Naruhito will ascend the throne, becoming the country’s 126th emperor. Besides Naruhito, Akihito has another son and a daughter.

Emperor Akihito’s heir apparent Naruhito, born in 1960, graduated from Oxford University and married a Harvard University graduate Masako Owada in 1993. Portland State University professor Kenneth Ruoff told the BBC that, while Akihito and his wife have been active in social causes, Naruhito and Masako have done little in this regard. A Kyoto Sangyo University emeritus professor Isao Tokoro said Naruhito “has been educated,” is born, and is qualified “to be emperor[.]”

In 2006, the National Diet debated on allowing female ascendance, as the emperor lacked grandsons at the time, due to the current male-only royal ascendance laws. Then Hisahito, now 10, was born, and the debate lapsed.

Naruhito has only one child Aiki, 15, while his brother Prince Akishino, 51, has three children, including his only son Hisahito. Per current law, Hisahito is qualified to ascend after his uncle Naruhito and his father.

The royal family has 19 living members, including seven unmarried princesses and five males. Female royals, if marrying a commoner, would have to give up their royal status, leaving the royal family, while males would still be allowed to retain their royal status after marrying a commoner. Akishino’s daughter Princess Mako announced her plans last month to relinquish her royal status and leave the royal family in order marry a commoner Kei Komuro, a graduate student and law firm worker, both of them aged 25. In 2005, Mako’s aunt and Naruhito’s sister Sayako, formerly Princess Nori, married a commoner Yoshiki Kuroda, a town planner, and was forced to relinquish her status and leave the family.

A Temple University Japan professor Jeff Kingston said a national succession crisis has people raising concerns about female princesses leaving the royal family when getting married. Kingston added the family “[has] a shortage of male heirs.” Kingston also said ousting a female royal for marrying a commoner is “a very old-fashioned approach, totally out of sync with 21st-century norms” to many people around the world, including in Japan.

In a survey by Kyodo News conducted in May of about 3000 people at least 18 years old, 68 percent said the Imperial Household Law should be amended to allow future emperors to abdicate. 25 percent favored separately legislating each abdication. Four percent said abdication of emperors should never be allowed.

On questions involving female royals, 86 percent said to allow empresses; 59 percent supported both empresses and established branches of female lineages. 62 percent supported establishment of separate branches for princesses retaining their roles while marrying commoners; 35 percent opposed. 61 percent said female ascendance should be debated only after the abdication, while 28 percent said it shouldn’t wait for the abdication.

Early this year, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe considered giving imperial status to branches of those who left the royal family. In the survey, 22 percent supported the idea; 72 percent opposed.

The Abe government has avoided the debate of female ascendance but recently passed a non-binding resolution attached to the newly passed abdication law to consider how to strengthen female royal status, possibly including allowing them to retain their royal titles and continue their duties, to compensate for the declining royal population.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.

PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.

PETA was born.

In the subsequent decades they ran the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty against Europe’s largest animal-testing facility (footage showed staff punching beagle puppies in the face, shouting at them, and simulating sex acts while taking blood samples); against Covance, the United State’s largest importer of primates for laboratory research (evidence was found that they were dissecting monkeys at its Vienna, Virginia laboratory while the animals were still alive); against General Motors for using live animals in crash tests; against L’Oreal for testing cosmetics on animals; against the use of fur for fashion and fur farms; against Smithfield Foods for torturing Butterball turkeys; and against fast food chains, most recently against KFC through the launch of their website kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.

They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier‘s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.

The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.

Friday, November 3, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Don Valley West (Ward 25). Three candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include John Blair, Robertson Boyle, Tony Dickins, Cliff Jenkins (incumbent), and Peter Kapsalis.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.