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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Local media reported on Tuesday that a gold mine collapsed in northwestern Tanzania on Sunday, killing at least twenty people. According to reports, the incident occurred at Geita region when the 100-metre-deep shaft the miners were working in collapsed after being flooded by heavy seasonal rains. Some media reports say that thirty people might have been killed by the accident.

“I know there is no hope of finding anybody alive,” said Kelega Chacha, a miner who left the site soon before the mine’s collapse. “We will just have to look for the bodies to give them a decent burial.”

A local newspaper, The African, quoted Donald Mremi, the Geita District Mines Officer, as saying that rescue efforts were hampered due to poor equipment. The African also reported that a dozen of the bodies of the victims have already been identified.

Tanzania is the third largest producer of gold in Africa. Much of its output is produced by international firms running large operations. Smaller-scale mines, however, can be quite dangerous, and frequently lack proper safety equipment. Over 45 people were killed in a northern Tanzanian mine in 2008 after the mines they were working it were flooded. In another incident in 2002, a compressor used to provide miners inside the shafts broke down, causing those inside to suffocate.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

US interrogators have claimed that they are under pressure to find incriminating evidence against Iran when they interview Iraqi insurgents, The Observer reported on Sunday.

Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for the US military in Iraq, told the British newspaper that information about Iran is “gold”.

“They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran (when interrogating prisoners)”, he claimed in the interview, adding that “it feels a lot like, if you get something and Iran’s not involved, it’s a let down.” He further claimed that people have said to him that “they’re really pushing the Iran thing”. Brose denied being asked to manufacture evidence, but stated that “if a detainee wants to tell me what I want to hear so he can get out of jail … you know what I’m saying.”

The US government accuses Iran of arming insurgents in neighbouring Iraq, and refuses to rule out military action against Iran for its alleged attempts to build nuclear weapons. In the past the US has been accused of using exaggerated and fabricated evidence to build its case against Iraq prior to the war.

The Observer article, which has not been picked up by any other mainstream news agency (but reported in Iran), also quoted a military intelligence officer as saying that “The message is, ‘Got to find a link with Iran, got to find a link with Iran.’ It’s sickening.”

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

January’s second Interview of the Month was with Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on 23 January in IRC.

The EFF is coming off a series of high-profile successes in their campaigns to educate the public, press, and policy makers regarding online rights in a digital world, and defending those rights in the legislature and the courtroom. Their settlement with Sony/BMG, the amazingly confused MGM v Grokster decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, and the disturbing cases surrounding Diebold have earned the advocacy organization considerable attention.

When asked if the EFF would be interested in a live interview in IRC by Wikinews, the answer was a nearly immediate yes, but just a little after Ricardo Lobo. With two such interesting interview candidates agreeing so quickly, it was hard to say no to either so schedules were juggled to have both. By chance, the timing worked out to have the EFF interview the day before the U.S. Senate schedule hearings concerning the Broadcast flag rule of the FCC, a form of digital rights management which the recording and movie industries have been lobbying hard for – and the EFF has been lobbying hard to prevent.

Wednesday, May 3, 2006

On Friday, April 28, Wikinews interviewed Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of Geekcorps, a non-profit organization that sending people with technical skills to developing countries for development projects. Ethan has also founded Global Voices Online and helped found Tripod.com, the free web-hosting company now owned by Lycos. He serves a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Tripod.

The interview was held publicly in a dedicated IRC channel.

• What insipred you to get behind Geekcorps, and has there been a big Geekcorps mission, yet?

I got interested in Geekcorps because I’d lived in Ghana as a student in 1993 and 1994While over there, I was amazed at just how little internet connectivity was availableI did a bit of volunteer work helping wire an environmental organization, but basically the only people who had regular net access were US embassy employees.So I was fascinated to learn that my friends in Ghana were getting online in the late 1990s, and I wondered whether anyone would start building net-based businesses, as people were doing in the USMy wife and I went back to Ghana to visit friends and found that there was a huge deal of enthusiasm about the web and the potential it represented, but almost no expertisepeople were really desperate to learn, but very few people were able to teach at the same time, I was ready to step down from Tripod, and I knew a lot of burned out geeksI started wondering whether some of my friends would be interested in sharing their skills in the developing world and whether that would be a useful thing to dolots of international development folks seemed to think it was a good cause, so I started working on it fulltime.We ended up sending about 100 people overseas over the four years I was involved with the projectwe usually sent about 6-8 to a country at a time, working with a variety of businesses, NGOs and government agencies biggest projects were in Ghana, Mali, Mongolia, Senegal.

• With Geekcorps you pushed the idea that newly tech-savvy citizens of developing countries could start online businesses to do digital work for the developed world. But from an American perspective, that’s outsourcing, the bane of US workers. How do you justify working towards a goal that might cost Americans their jobs?

Basically, I’m concerned about the ability of people all over the world to make a good living, send their children to school, build nice houses, have enough food and clean water, etc there’s clearly something of a tradeoff offered by all sorts of globalization – as millions of Chinese are lifted out of rural povery, industrial manufacturing jobs in the US disappear but the US has a pretty good history of innovating and creating new jobs in fields that require a lot of intellectual endeavor the US continues to found interesting software companies, pioneer new net services and generally do a lot of the interesting development on the cutting edge of tech I think a lot of routine coding jobs are up for outsourcing, but I don’t think that people who design software – or who manage the outsourcing and software development process – are going away any time soon it’s very hard to outsource creative activities – it’s somewhat easier to outsource repetitive processes.I think we need to worry less about individual job loss and more about the ability to continue creating new projects. at the same time, I’m very excited to see companies in the developing world moving up the value chain as well, starting to innovate and create new projects as well…

• Lately you’ve been involved with projects including Global Voices and Worldchanging. Where and how do the two dovetail, and where and how do they differ? What are the strengths of each?

They’re very different projects and communities, WC is a magazine -it’s a chance for a small group of smart people to write original content on green issues it’s a lot less global than GV – perhaps overly focused on the US and Europe – and has a tight subject focus GV is an edited aggregator People are not so much writing original, opinionated content on GV as they are linking to other content indeed, we ask people to try very hard not to be especially opinionated on GV. Not NPOV, but a similar perspective – you point, you don’t advocate<ethanz> also GVO is huge – 10 regional editors, about 60 regular contributors, a network of about a thousand blogs we regularly link to the community has a very different feeling – much more international, more 24/7. both are fascinating projects, successes in their own ways, but quite different on the tech issues, a little – in both cases, we’re taking very simple weblog tools and asking them to support very large communities. And a little bit on the issue of how they interface with mainstream media in both cases, we’re interested in amplifying memes and getting them picked up by popular press as well as on the web.

• Isn’t that a contradiction? you’re asking people to be “less” opinionated, but not asking them to be unopinionated?

Blogs are essentially about opinion, asking for NPOV in the blog space misses the point – we want to know what opinions people in Syria have but we want our middle east editor to try to fairly represent the different opinions taking place in that space that said, he’s got an opinion as well so asking for NPOV isn’t the right thing to do – asking him to point to a diversity of opinions is, in our case

Geekcorps can be found online at www.geekcorps.org and Global Voices Online is at www.globalvoicesonline.org.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

A resident of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound his whole life, Correctional Services officer Paul Johnstone is running for the Ontario New Democratic Party in the Ontario provincial election. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

A magnitude 8.1 undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami that has killed at least fifteen people, including six children, in the Solomon Islands. Tsunami warnings have been issued for parts of Australia as well.

According to the US Geological Survey, the magnitude 8.0 quake struck Sunday, April 1, 2007 at 20:39:56 (UTC) about 45 km (25 mi) south-southeast of Gizo, New Georgia Islands, Solomon Islands, at a depth of 10 km.

Friday, January 1, 2021

After an active year of original content published on the English-language Wikinews, we take a look back at some of the two dozen-plus original reports from our contributors during 2020.