Blown for Good author discusses life inside international headquarters of Scientology

Friday, November 13, 2009

Wikinews interviewed author Marc Headley about his new book Blown for Good, and asked him about life inside the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base“, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California. Headley joined the organization at age seven when his mother became a member, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Viktor Schreckengost, the father of industrial design and creator of the Jazz Bowl, an iconic piece of Jazz Age art designed for Eleanor Roosevelt during his association with Cowan Pottery died yesterday. He was 101.

Schreckengost was born on June 26, 1906 in Sebring, Ohio, United States.

Schreckengost’s peers included the far more famous designers Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes.

In 2000, the Cleveland Museum of Art curated the first ever retrospective of Schreckengost’s work. Stunning in scope, the exhibition included sculpture, pottery, dinnerware, drawings, and paintings.

Monday, May 21, 2007

In an unofficial move by contractor, Roy Harding, a rubbish tip has been named after comedian John Cleese, dubbed “Mt. Cleese” in Palmerston North, New Zealand.

The naming came after Mr Cleese visited Palmerston North last year and described it as a great place to go to commit suicide, claiming it was the “suicide capital of New Zealand”. He also stated that they were glad to leave after their performance at the Regent on Broadway was over. Mr Harding says it is just to get back at Mr Cleese.

Official signage is now being ordered after city councillors said they thought it was good idea. “People just smile and leave it there,” Chris Pepper, waste and water manager, said.

John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg), entertainer, suggested that the Awapuni Landfill be named after Mr Cleese after the comments arose in a podcast on his website. However, Mr Clarke’s suggestion was slightly different, choosing the name, “John Cleese Memorial Tip…All manner of crap happily recycled.”

The slightly bare tip, now being used as a waste minimisation centre, is being prepared for a large delivery of compost.

John Cleese is most famous for his parts in Monty Python and Fawlty Towers television shows as well as various movies including A Fish Called Wanda.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

A storm yesterday caused a crane to fall into Mecca’s Grand Mosque, killing 107 or more and wounding 238, according to Saudi Arabia’s Civil Defense Authority.

Civil Defense Authority director General Suleiman al-Amr, in remarks to al-Ikhbariya television, said “All those who were wounded and the dead have been taken to hospital. There are no casualties left at the location”.

The accident, which occurred yesterday afternoon, was caused by strong winds and heavy rain that led the crane to fall. Photos released of the scene showed numerous bloodied bodies and various scattered debris.

The accident occurred at a time when the mosque was relatively uncrowded. “Had it happened an hour later it would have been much worse,” Khaled Al-Maeena, editor at large at the Saudi Gazette, said. “Had it happened five hours earlier or four hours earlier, I think the death toll would have been more than a thousand.”

The crane accident comes just ten days before the beginning of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. As undergoing a pilgrimage to Mecca is a mandatory religious duty for all Muslims who physically and financially can, millions of pilgrims arrive in Mecca each year for the Hajj. Construction was underway at the mosque in order to enlarge the mosque and improve crowd control, which has been a recurring problem during Mecca’s pilgrimages.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

As many states across the US continue to struggle financially, many individuals, including some economists report multiple positive indicators for Texas.

The chief economist with Comerica Bank told media sources this week that most of the improvements are attributed to strong creations of jobs in both the energy and manufacturing and services sectors. More specifically, that report called the state’s recent job growth, “robust”.The state’s unemployment rate in March was more than 1% lower than the nationwide rate, according to recent data.

When asked her opinion about the state’s present economic trajectory, Chantal Woodhull, a middle school teacher in Tyler, Texas told Wikinews, “It’s getting better.” Other sources indicate slight improvements in the real estate sector.

According to a recent report, retail job growth in Houston outstretched all other states, increasing its number of workers by over 4%. Across the US, retail jobs are improving at a slow pace in many large metropolitan areas.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced yesterday that Simplicity Inc. is recalling nearly one million baby cribs after two infant deaths have been linked to a design failure.

Simplicity Inc. supplies cribs to large American big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart Inc., and several other giant retailers including Target Corp. and Big Lots Inc.

A dangerous gap can be created if the drop-side of the crib has been installed upside-down, and thus becomes detached. That space can cause infants to be suffocated.

Parents are being urged by the company to check their Simplicity cribs to make sure the drop-side was installed correctly and is not a safety hazard. The cribs being recalled have these model numbers: 4600, 4605, 4705, 5000, 8000, 8324, 8800, 8740, 8910, 8994, 8050, 8750, 8760 and 8996.

The affected cribs cost between US$100 and $300, and were sold between January of 1998 through May of 2007.

Two separate deaths have been reported because the drop-side was installed upside down. Fifty-five non-fatal entrapment cases have been reported. And, the CPSC is now investigating a third infant death involving a newer-style crib.

Simplicity Inc. says the faulty cribs were made in China. However, according to CPSC, the recall is about the design flaws that the U.S. manufacturers designed into the product, not a made-in-China problem.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Unknown individuals gained access to a server of University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). As a result, around thirteen years of email correspondence between researchers is now available worldwide. Substantial previously unpublished climate change observations are included.

According to initial reports by TGIF Newspaper and the Watt’s Up With That blog, hundreds of emails and documents were made available from a FTP site on a Russian server with an accompanying statement:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents”

Some journalists suppose that this event is a consequence of increased attention on CRU after it played a substantial role in the IPCC fourth assessment report (2007).

The released data is a 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents. Some of the contents have been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr Phillip Jones. In an interview with TGIF Newspaper, he stated that a breach of security had taken place and that a large quantity of files had been “stolen”. The interviewer discussed one of Dr. Jones’ published e-mails:

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values…

The interviewer asked Dr. Jones to explain the phrase “hide and decline”, but he answered that he had no idea what he meant by using them (as they were made in the context of a discussion taking place 10 years ago), and he had not attempt to mislead:

No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.

In a press release by the University of East Anglia, Dr. Jones stated that:

“That the world is warming is based on a range of sources: not only temperature records but other indicators such as sea level rise, glacier retreat and less Arctic sea ice.

“Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Center in the United States, among others. Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves; there is no need for anyone to manipulate them.

“[…]My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues.”

One such colloquialism, “trick,” is frequently used by scientists and engineers to refer to an essential or non-obvious element in the solution of a problem, as opposed to the common political usage connoting deception.

Commentators argue that the published messages show the researchers’ reluctance to publish scientific material, though it contains serious global warming observations. Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by skeptics’ and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The East Anglia University has shut down the original server, from which the information was stolen. A university spokesman stated that data was published without permission, but did not confirm whether all of the published communication is genuine:

We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites.

Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry.

The release of the documents comes just weeks before a major climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, meant to lay the groundwork for a new global treaty to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change.