Saturday, May 24, 2008

New legislation in Victoria, Australia will provide for greater compensation for victims suffering from effects of exposure to asbestos. The legislation is called “Bernie Banton law”, after the late campaigner for asbestos-related issues. The law will remove a restriction which prevented asbestos victims from making another claim after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Banton contracted mesothelioma after working for the Netherlands-based company James Hardie, and died in 2007.

Prior to the Banton law victims of asbestos exposure could seek compensation for asbestosis, a disease resulting from exposure which causes lung scarring, but were unable to seek compensation if they were later diagnosed with mesothelioma.

Mesothelioma is a cancer which develops in the sac surrounding the lungs and chest cavity, abdominal cavity, or the sac surrounding the heart. Patients with malignant mesothelioma generally do not have positive outcomes, and once diagnosed have six months to a year to live. Asbestos usage has been banned in Victoria, Australia since 2003.

Victorian Premier John Brumby welcomed the legislation, saying: “Victorian workers deserve fair compensation for illnesses and injuries they have received just by doing their job.” Brumby acknowledged that Victoria had lagged behind other states in its asbestos compensation practices. “Allowing an exception to the normal rule that court-awarded compensation is final will allow compensation for the true effects of asbestos exposure,” explained Brumby.

Bernie Banton’s widow, Karen Banton, stood alongside John Brumby as the legislation was announced, and spoke out in favor of the law. “The uncertainty that these Victorian families have suffered up until this point, the dilemma of whether I claim and whether I wait … it would be a terrible choice to have to make,” she said. She said her late husband would have been honored by the legislation’s passage, and was appreciative that his name was associated with the cause of justice in the country. “I’m sure Bernie’s looking down from heaven, feeling very honoured and humbled that his name continues to be associated with the fight to correct injustice,” she said.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Victorian Trades Hall Council supported the legislation’s passage, as did Martin Kingham of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Victoria. Kingham said that in the past asbestos sufferers were wary about whether or not to make a claim: “They’ve had to gamble on whether to make a claim now and to cut off any compensation for more serious fatal illness or to, basically, sit it out and wait and see what happens to them and potentially not getting compensated for their original asbestosis.”

“There’s a lot of asbestos around, this is a live issue for the community and we strongly welcome this initiative,” said Australian Manufacturing Workers Union Victorian secretary Steve Dargavel. Victorian Trades Hall Council secretary Brian Boyd called the legislation “a good and decent thing” but said more action was needed to better protect asbestos victims’ families. The additional claims are expected to help approximately 50 people each year. The legislation will be introduced in the State Parliament next year.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Kenyan government has dismissed 25,000 striking health workers, mostly nurses, citing failure to heed government orders to recommence work and concern for the welfare of hospital patients. Speaking on behalf of the government, Alfred Mutua stated the workers were dismissed “illegally striking” and “[defying] the directive … to report back to work”, which he called “unethical”. The government asks that “[a]ll qualified health professionals, who are unemployed and/or retired have been advised to report to their nearest health facility for interviews and deployment”, Mutua stated.

The workers, who had been on strike for four days, were wishing to have improvements made to their wages, working conditions, and allowances. The strikes have caused a significant number of Kenyan hospitals to cease operations. According to Kenya Health Professionals Society spokesperson Alex Orina, the average monthly wage plus allowances for health workers in Kenya is KSh25,000 (£193, US$302 or €230) approximately. With an increasing number of reports of patients neglected in hospitals emerging, two trade unions met with the Kenyan government yesterday and negotitated a return to work, although a significant proportion of demonstrators defied the agreement, The Guardian reported.

Orina told Reuters the dismissals were “cat-and-mouse games, you cannot sack an entire workforce. It is a ploy to get us to rush back to work, but our strike continues until our demands are met”. Frederick Omiah, a member of the same society, believed the government’s actions would “make an already delicate and volatile situation worse”, expressing concern that demonstrations may continue in the capital Nairobi, amongst other locations. Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union chairperson Dr. Victor Ng’ani described government actions as “reckless”.

Mutua said the health workers were “no longer employees of the government” and had been eliminated from the payroll. While Ng’ani told the BBC of difficulties with finding other workers as skilled and experienced, Mutua reportedly stated that this would not be an issue. “We have over 100,000 to 200,000 health professionals looking for work today,” Mutua commented. “There will be a lag of a day or two … but it is better than letting people die on the floor, at the gate, or suffer in pain”.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014 With the English-language Wikinews continuing to increase the amount of original content published, we take a look back at some of the eighty-plus original reports from our contributors during 2014.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Six teenagers were killed in a horrific road accident near Mildura in north-western Victoria, Australia late at night on February 18.

Cassandra Manners, aged 16, Stevie-Lee Weight, 15, Cory Dowling, 16, Shane Hirst, 16, and his sister, Abby Hirst, 17, died at the scene. Josephine Calvi, 16, was flown to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where she later died of head injuries. Seven other teenagers were injured, including 15-year-old Marco Medici who is now in a stable but critical condition in The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.

The accident occurred after the teenagers left a 16th birthday party and walked along Myall Road, Cardross, south-east of Mildura. A car allegedly came speeding around a bend, hit the gravel on the side of the road, lost control and struck the group. The alleged driver, later identified as 34-year-old Thomas Graham Towle, fled the scene on foot, leaving his 10-year-old daughter and four-year-old son in the car. Towle was later arrested by police in Redcliffs. He was taken to Mildura police station for questioning.

Towle has been charged with six charges of culpable driving causing death, four charges of negligently causing serious injury, one charge of failing to stop and one charge of failing to render assistance after an accident. Towle faced Mildura Magistrates’ Court on February 20. Magistrate John Dugdale remanded him into custody to reappear before the court on June 26.

Meanwhile, the town of Mildura and surrounding areas is in deep mourning. Premier Steve Bracks said the State Government will provide $AU40,000 for counselling and support services.

Around 3,000 people attended the funeral for Josephine Calvi today. Funeral services for the other five teenagers were held last week.

Saturday, January 6, 2018

On Wednesday, a team of over 200 scientists led by astronomer Tabetha Boyajian announced the mysterious dim-and-recover behavior of stellar object KIC 8462852, also called “Boyajian’s Star” or “Tabby’s Star,” is likely to be due to clouds of color-warping space dust and not a planet, another star or, as some astronomers have hypothesized, a giant structure built by a distant civilization.

“If a solid, opaque object like a megastructure was passing in front of the star, it would block out light equally at all colors,” Dr. Boyajian told the press. “This is contrary to what we observe.” And, in a separate statement, “Dust is most likely the reason why the star’s light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure.”

The research team analyzed 22 months of data collected by an array of ground-based telescopes that covered many wavelengths of light. The study period lasted from March 2016 to December 2017, which included a number of decreases in brightness. The first dip started on the night of Thursday May 18. A robotic 14-inch Celestron telescope at Fairborn Observatory in Arizona watched Tabby’s star lose brightness by a dramatic 3% by Friday, confirming a prediction the star would undergo its unusual dimming events once every 750 days. Other major telescope projects and citizen astronomers confirmed these findings. That dip was complex and continued through to the following Sunday, after a brief rise in brightness over the weekend. It ended a few days later, with Boyajian and fellow astronomer and co-author of the recent paper Jason Wright discussing the phenomena with the public via Twitter: “will we have a flurry of dips to come? Stay tuned!”

“Tabby’s star[…] went through a lot of very strange dimming events that got up to 22% dimmer during the Kepler Mission, and since then we’ve been eagerly awaiting another dip. And the reason that we’ve been waiting for that is that whatever is causing the star to get dimmer will leave a spectral fingerprint behind,” said Dr. Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, after the May event, now a co-author of the current work. “So if it’s a lot of dust between us and the star that’s passing by, it should block more blue light than red light. If there’s gas in that dust, that gas should absorb very specific wavelengths. So we’ve been eager to see one of these changes, these dips in the star, so we can take the spectra.” He also addressed space fans at the time via Twitter: “ALERT:@tsboyajian’s star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please!”

The primary mission of the Kepler project monitored more than 150,000 stars with the primary goal of detecting exoplanets. If a star gets dimmer but then recovers, a planet may have passed in front of it. But Tabby’s star has shown something else. An exoplanet can cause its sun to dim by perhaps 1% and not for very long. Some of Tabby’s dips have been this mild, but others have hit 20% and lasted weeks. It also tends to recover only partially, slowly showing a net dimming over the years.

The plethora of hypotheses behind Tabby’s star has made it a favorite among space fans and both professional and amateur astronomers. Space dust was one of the many hypothesized explanations, but if that’s the reason, its origin was and remains a mystery with stargazers speculating many giant comets could be on elliptical orbits or breaking up in front of it or the dips in brightness could be aftereffects of the star consuming a planet. Some even hypothesized alien civilizations might have been harvesting the sun’s energy using a Dyson sphere. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) devoted some observation time to Tabby’s star in the fall of 2016 as part of the Breakthrough Listen project. No radio or laser pulse signals were detected.

“This latest research rules out alien megastructures, but it raises the plausibility of other phenomena being behind the dimming,” said Dr. Wright. “There are models involving circumstellar material — like exocomets, which were Boyajian’s team’s original hypothesis — which seem to be consistent with the data we have […] some astronomers favor the idea that nothing is blocking the star — that it just gets dimmer on its own — and this also is consistent with this summer’s data.”

This study is a departure from many previous works in that it relies heavily on the work of citizen scientists, volunteers who help examine the great quantities of data produced by NASA’s Kepler mission. The follow-up observations after the Kepler project were funded by a $100,000 Kickstarter to continuously monitor Tabby’s star. The unusual behavior of Tabby’s star was discovered in 2011 by volunteers for the Planet Hunters citizen science project, which was implemented to search for planets in the Kepler data.

“It’s exciting. I am so appreciative of all of the people who have contributed to this in the past year — the citizen scientists and professional astronomers. It’s quite humbling to have all of these people contributing in various ways to help figure it out,” Dr. Boyajian said in a statement.

[edit]

Monday, April 3, 2006

Sometime during the night of Friday, January 28, 15 year-old Jenissa Ryan was assaulted and raped in Alice Springs. She was discovered near the entrance of Centralian Senior Secondary College around 10:30 a.m., and a college employee called an ambulance. The attack was not reported in the mainstream national media until this week, when it became known that the victim was the great-granddaughter of famous indigenous artist Albert Namatjira.

In an article published in Saturdays Sydney Morning Herald, Russell Skelton said that the fact that she was an Aborigine, and the location of her bashing, contributed to her death. “If Jenissa had been white, she might be alive today, though the scars of her brutal bashing and rape could never be erased. If she had been bashed and left for dead almost anywhere else, assistance would have been immediate and the outrage strident.” He also said that if her connection to Namatjira had been known, Jenissa’s death would have been a “national scandal.”

Police believe that she was attacked by a number of youths her own age while walking home. She continued to walk home, but collapsed unconscious near the entrance to the college. Here, according to police, she was found by three teenage boys, who dragged her out of view and raped her.

Jenissa was still alive when found. Skelton considered it likely that people had seen her during the morning but done nothing. “That means a number of residents of middle-class Grevillea Drive probably noticed. The white T-shirt and striped tracksuit pants were hard to miss,” he said.

She was taken to Alice Springs Hospital, and then flown to Adelaide’s Women and Children’s Hospital.

On February 13 Northern Territory Police charged a 16 year-old male and a 15 year-old female with assaulting Jenissa Ryan. Three other males, aged 14, 15, and 16, have been charged with having unlawful sexual intercourse with Jenissa Ryan. Police expressed gratitude for the assistance they had received from members of the public.

Father Asaeli Raass said that both indigenous and non-indigenous people were in denial about the incident. “Yes, it’s a painful thing, but people are sweeping it under the carpet when they should be confronting the big issues Jenissa’s death raises,” he said. He also said that the initial wave of publicity “never travelled outside Alice Springs.”

Jenissa’s mother, Carmel Ryan, said that her daughter wanted to be a painter, like her great-grandfather. “She wanted to be like him, to make a creative contribution we would all be proud of. Tragically that can never be, but I feel nothing but sorrow for the parents of the children involved in this terrible event,” she said.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

As the National Disaster Coordinating Agency continues to evaluate the reports coming from regions all over the Philippines, bodies of those who drowned or perished while at sea have started to float into the shores of islands in Central Philippines. On Thursday, the Philippines Coast Guard reported that villagers recovered 124 bodies whose identities are still uncertain.

Advanced decomposition has made identification difficult for authorities and, fearing a health epidemic, all of the bodies were immediately buried in makeshift graves.

The identification of the victims has caused a stir among relatives looking for their missing family members, as forensic investigators were rendered helpless in proceeding to the scattered locations where bodies have been washing ashore.

Over 100 divers from the combined Philippines and United States naval forces have been working overtime to retrieve the bodies of passengers trapped inside the capsized MV Princess of the Stars.

Disaster management officials in the country announced that the dead from the weekend battering from Typhoon Fengshen could reach to a high of 1,300 people nation-wide. State officials reported that some 2.4 million Filipinos were affected by the disaster, putting property damage at a conservative estimate of $125 million.

Relatives of missing passengers were finally brought near the site where the ferry capsized. On board a tug boat, relatives became severely emotional after a Roman Catholic mass was celebrated to commemorate the memory of those lost at sea.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

On Friday evening, an explosion in Chengdu, China caused partial shutdown of a facility operated by Foxconn, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturers and a major supplier to companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony, Apple, Motorola and Nokia. Initial investigations now suggest the explosion was caused by poor ventilation, which lead to high concentrations of combustible dust.

The blast happened at 7:18PM, around the time workers change shifts. A fire followed. Emergency services had control by 7:30PM. At least three people were killed, at least fifteen injured. Foxconn halted production to investigate, saying “All operations at the affected workshop remain suspended and production at all other workshops that carry out similar processing functions have also been halted pending the results of the investigation. All other production operations in our facilities in China continue operating normally.”

On Monday, city officials gave the cause as combustible dust in the air at a polishing workshop. Hong Kong-based labor rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior said they reported aluminium dust problems in March when they reviewed working conditions at Foxconn. After the explosion, they commented that workers were complaining “the ventilation of the department is poor. Workers polish the iPad cases to make them shiny. In the process, there is lots of aluminum (aluminium) dust floating in the air. Workers always breathe in aluminum dust even though they put on masks. When workers take off their cotton gloves, their hands are covered with aluminum dust.”

Foxconn responded by saying the group was trying to “capitalize on the tragic accident” and misrepresented “Foxconn’s commitment to the health and safety of our employees.”

Foxconn is responsible for making iPads and iPhones for Apple. Research group IHS iSuppli said the explosion may cause loss of production of 500,000 iPads during this quarter of the year. They said there is a larger facility in Shenzhen, but it cannot cope with re-compensating the possible loss.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

A research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering has developed a robot that assembles itself within four minutes from a flat sheet into a 3D (three-dimensional) moving structure. Unlike previous self-folding machines, the robot can function autonomously. Science published the study this Friday.

Also on Friday, Science published a report of a Cornell University-led research team on applications of origami in design of programmable metamaterials.

As The Guardian reported, MIT–Harvard team lead author Sam Felton, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate, priced the manufacturing equipment for the robot at $3,000, which could then make each individual unit — a 13cm-long, Transformer-like robot — for about $100.

As described by MIT researchers, the initially flat sheet consists of five layers: copper wires in the middle, then two layers of paper (above and below), and two outer layers of shape memory polymer. The embedded heating circuits activate the robot’s self-folding by heating shape memory polymers at the hinges. The parameters defining the fold pattern which determines the final 3D shape are placement of the self-folding hinges, and the order of their triggering. Felton told about creation of the pattern: “Cyclic folds are used by a software program called ‘Origamizer’ as building blocks to create any polyhedron. We’ve discovered that we can […] create a wide variety of structures and machines.”

Once the battery is attached to the design, the robot folds itself into the pre-determined shape and walks away, with motion of the four-legged robot controlled by the included microprocessor and two small motors synchronised by it. Each of the four legs has eight “linkages” which convert the force applied by a motor into motion. “It lets you transfer just one degree of freedom into a whole complicated motion, all through the mechanics of the structure,” says coauthor Erik Demaine, MIT professor of computer science and engineering.

The robot moved during testing at about 5.4 centimeters per second, over a pre-determined route, not just a straight line — without any outside assistance. Marc Lavine, a senior Science editor, suggested such robots might be put in place “through a confined passageway, such as a collapsed building, after which they would assemble into their final form autonomously”.

The folding pattern studied by the Cornell-led research team is well-known in origami as Miura-ori, whose unusual engineering properties caught the attention of team member Chris Santangelo of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Cornell University lead author Jesse Silverberg commented on potential of origami-based engineering: “When incorporated into more complex devices, these materials will enable on-the-fly transformation of mechanical function. We envision combining these origami-inspired materials with computer-controlled actuators to build more complex machines, such as hardening shells, locked-in joints and deployable barriers; and ultimately, this transformer technology will revolutionize the way we think about materials, moving them beyond their current static form, and revealing more functionality than what originally meets the eye”.