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Saturday, April 14, 2007

A complex series of events, including a five month-old computer error, was responsible for the battery failure that led to the loss of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor last year, an internal review board says. Findings from a preliminary report released on Friday say that while NASA controllers followed procedures while operating the craft, the procedures did not cover the types of errors that occurred.

According to NASA, on November 2, 2006, the Global Surveyor was ordered to perform a routine adjustment of its solar panels. However, the Global Surveyor reoriented to an angle that exposed one of its two batteries to direct sunlight. The battery overheated, which led to the depletion of both batteries. An incorrect setting in antenna orientation prevented Global Surveyor from relaying its status to NASA controllers. Its preprogrammed systems did not take into account the need to maintain a thermally safe orientation.

That was the last communication that NASA controllers had with the spacecraft.

The Global Surveyor was the first US mission to Mars in twenty years, For ten years, the craft returned detailed information to NASA scientists providing new insights, including evidence that appeared to show the presence of water on Mars and identification of deposits of water-related minerals, which led to selection of a Mars rover landing site.

“The loss of the spacecraft was the result of a series of events linked to a computer error made five months before the likely battery failure,” said Dolly Perkins, board chairperson and deputy director-technical of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The board concluded that NASA controllers had followed procedures, but that the procedures did not adequately cover the type of errors that occurred. In its final report, the board will offer recommendations applicable to future missions.

“We are making an end-to-end review of all our missions to be sure that we apply the lessons learned from Mars Global Surveyor to all our ongoing missions,” said Fuk Li, Mars Exploration Program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Global Surveyor was the longest operating spacecraft at Mars and had lasted four times longer than expected.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Internet group Anonymous today held further protests critical of the Church of Scientology.

The global protests started in Australia where several hundred protesters gathered at different locations for peaceful protests.

In a global speech, the Internet protest movement said Scientology “betrayed the trust of its members, [had] taken their money, their rights, and at times their very lives.” The protesters welcomed the public interest their protests have led to, and claimed they witnessed “an unprecedented flood of Scientologists [joining] us across the world to testify about these abuses.” The group said it would continue with monthly actions.

In a press statement from its European headquarters, Scientology accused the anonymous protesters of “hate speech and hate crimes”, alleging that security measures were necessary because of death threats and bomb threats. This also makes the Church want to “identify members” of the group it brands as “cyber-terrorists”.

Wikinews had correspondents in a number of protest locations to report on the events.

Anonymous states that the next protest is scheduled to take place on April 18, which happens to be the birthday of Suri, the daughter of Tom and Katie Cruise.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The music video for “Gangnam Style”, a song by South Korean artist Psy, has become the first YouTube video to surpass one billion views. The video, which was uploaded to the video sharing website on July 15, became the most viewed of all time last month after overtaking the music video for “Baby”, a song by Canadian singer Justin Bieber, which was placed on YouTube two years ago.

With more than 6.1 million likes, Guinness World Records has recognised “Gangnam Style” as being the most liked YouTube video ever; it also has over 449,000 dislikes. ‘officialpsy’, the YouTube channel upon which the video was uploaded, now has in excess of 2.1 million subscribers and has achieved over 1.4 billion video views overall. According to Google, the company which owns YouTube, the video has attracted between seven and ten million daily views on average since being uploaded to the site.

Park Jae-Sang, the actual name of Psy, explained the meaning of the song in an August 2012 interview with CNN. “People who are actually from Gangnam never proclaim that they are — it’s only the posers and wannabes that put on these airs and say that they are ‘Gangnam Style’ — so this song is actually poking fun at those kinds of people who are trying so hard to be something that they’re not”, he said. Despite its international popularity, in a separate interview with Reuters earlier in August, Park Jae-Sang said “Gangnam Style” — a satire of consumerist aspects of the Gangnam District of the South Korean capital of Seoul — “never targeted foreign countries. It was for local fans”. He said his intention with the video “was to look uncool until the end. I achieved it.”

“Gangnam Style” has inspired countless parody versions, prompting UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph to suggest it was “the most parodied video ever”. Among the parody versions are one performed by inmates of the Philippines’ Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, one with students from Eton College in the United Kingdom, one from Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and one created in the approach to the 2012 United States presidential election called “Mitt Romney Style”.

Numerous prominent figures have attempted to imitate the “Gangnam Style” dance — which involves crossing one’s wrists over each other and motioning as if “you’re riding an invisible horse in your lower body,” Park Jae-Sang explained — including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US President Barack Obama and Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Nicolas Sarkozy visited the UK today to celebrate the 70th anniversary since Charles de Gaulle made his war broadcast. The French president and the Prince of Wales laid wreaths at the statue of Charles de Gaulle in London.

Earlier, Mr Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni visited the BBC radio studio where the famous broadcast was made on BBC France. The broadcast at the time was said to have been listened to by a very small number of listeners. Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled a plaque and viewed a tapestry given to the BBC by France as a note of gratitude after World War II.

Nicolas Sarkozy and British PM David Cameron met with 200 veterans during a ceremony at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Nicolas Sarkozy awarded the Légion d’honneur to six World War II veterans, three of whom were British.

In a short speech, Mr Cameron said the anniversary was a “reminder that Britain and France are not just neighbours in the geographical sense but also in the emotional sense.” Mr Cameron held an hour of talks with the French president at Downing Street primarily focusing on economics, Afghanistan, and other foreign policy matters. The visit is the first by a French president to mark Gen de Gaulle’s broadcast on June 18, 1940. In the stirring radio appeal, Gen de Gaulle declared himself leader of the “Free French”, spawning the French Resistance, which went on to play a crucial role in defeating the Germans.

Mr Sarkozy’s last official visit to the UK was in March 2008, when he was also accompanied by his wife.

Monday, October 10, 2005

The sets and props of popular claymation characters Wallace and Gromit have been destroyed in a warehouse blaze this morning in Bristol, UK.

The disaster comes only days after the US release of Nick Park‘s latest film featuring the characters, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, which topped the box office chart and took US$16.1 million (GB£9.1 million) over the weekend. The film is scheduled for UK release this Friday.

Sets and models from the new film escaped as they had not yet been added to the Aardman Animation collection hosted in Bristol. Among the damage caused by the blaze, the character Morph was lost; for many UK children the appearance of this character in Tony Hart‘s BBC art programmes was their first introduction to stop motion animation.

The warehouse, located near Bristol’s central railway station, dated from the Victorian era and was formerly part of Ismbard Kingdom Brunel‘s Great Western Railway.

Ten fire crews attended the blaze, in which flames shot 100ft into the air, from 0600 BST into the afternoon, but were unable to prevent the collapse of the roof, interior walls and all three floors of the building.

An investigation will begin once the building has been made safe.

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.

Saturday, October 19, 2019

On Wednesday, more than 100 members, reportedly, of the Northern Arapaho Tribe turned out to watch the release of ten buffalo for the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in the western United States.

Elementary school students sang, Elder Nelson White provided a prayer, and the buffalo were released from a livestock trailer into a into a 48-acre space set aside for them in Kinnear. These American bison, commonly called buffalo, came from the National Bison Range in western Montana run by the U.S. federal government. The animals were transported more than 500 miles (800 km).

“With everything that’s happened to our people, our language, our culture, we feel that bringing the buffalo back here is going to heal us[,]” Crystal C’Bearing of the Northern Arapaho tribal historic preservation office told those gathered to watch the release.

The Arapaho have plans to widen the buffalo’s range to 600 acres and report they are considering eventually pooling resources with the nearby Eastern Shoshone Tribe, who currently have a herd of 33 buffalo.

“I think [working with the Eastern Shoshone]’s definitely a possibility. There’s no sense in having two private herds[,]” said Devin Oldman, who helped manage the delivery of the buffalo. “I would think that we would try to get our numbers up to one or two hundred before we do that so we have a nice strong herd.”

In the 1800s, the buffalo were hunted nearly to extinction not only for their valuable hides but also because many U.S. generals, including President Ulysses S. Grant, believed that removing the buffalo would undermine the economies of many of the Native American tribes that depended on them for food and goods and make it easier to push them onto reservations.