Author: Admin

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 (HR810), approved by the US House of Representatives in 2005, gained a 63-37 approval in the Senate on July 17th, 2006, and will now be presented for presidential approval or veto.

Bill HR810 passed by the Senate as SB471, overrides the 2001 executive order signed by George W. Bush that banned funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for embryonic stem cell research of stem cell lines created after the executive order was issued. The new bill does not include a provision against privately funded research, which is legal under the law, only research funded by NIH.

The bill includes three ethical requirements for funded research. First, the stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in-vitro fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals seeking such treatment. Second, prior to the consideration of embryo donation and through consultation with the individuals seeking fertility treatment, it was determined that the embryos would never be implanted in a woman and would otherwise be discarded. And lastly, the individuals seeking fertility treatment donated the embryos with written informed consent and without receiving any financial or other inducements to make the donation.

President Bush is expected to veto the bill as early as today, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said the veto would be “pretty swift”. This would be President Bush’s first veto of his two terms in office.

As with any vetoed bill, a two-thirds majority of the House and Senate can override said veto, but the original vote (63-37) show that the Senate is more than likely to not get the override votes it would need. Even without the two-thirds original vote, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan has voiced support for a veto override.

Two other bills, S2754 and S3504, the Alternative Pluripotent Stem Cell Therapies Enhancement Act and the Fetus Farming Prohibition Act of 2006, respectively, were failed and passed in that order by the House of Representatives. S2754 was introduced to the House this afternoon and failed by a vote of 273-154, S3504 was passed unanimously by the House and is also expected to be on the President’s desk this morning.

Saturday, June 4, 2005

Overnight Friday a Southerly storm brought snow to both the Southern Alps and the central North Island mountains of New Zealand for the first time this year, closing major roads and stranding travellers at the start of the Queens Birthday holiday weekend. Police and the AA urged motorists to drive with extra care and to the conditions this weekend.

In the North Island, State Highway 1 between Waiouru and Rangipo, the Desert Road was closed by deep snow at 3 PM on Friday afternoon. Other roads in the area, including other parts of State Highway 1 between Bulls and Turangi, State Highway 4, via National Park, and 49, via Ohakune, were closed at 8 PM.

These road closures stopped all traffic through the centre of the North Island. About 200 travellers were reported to have spent the night at the Waiouru Army Camp, being accommodated in the Marae and the Barracks. Grit trucks and snow ploughs worked overnight to clear the snow and reopen roads, with the Desert Road finally being reopened about 12:30 PM Saturday.

Together with a slip threatening to close State Highway 3 in the Manawatu Gorge and damage to State Highway 2 after floods in the Bay of Plenty a couple of weeks ago, the only reliable alternative route for travellers around the North Island was via Wanganui and Taranaki.

In the South Island, Police and the AA advised that chains were essential when travelling over the mountain passes.

Yesterday, Mount Hutt skifield announced it would be opening Saturday morning. Early Saturday morning, skiers were reported to be queuing at the gates of Mount Hutt skifield, eager to get the first opportunity to hit the slopes in 2005. Other South Island ski fields were also indicating June opening dates.

The weather outlook is for cold southerly winds and rain over the Queens Birthday holiday weekend, with snow down to 400m in the South Island.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

On Monday shortly before noon US west coast time (2000 UTC), NASA’s InSight lander successfully touched down on Elysium Planitia on Mars. It sent a signal beep and image of the surface of Mars to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The lander used aerobraking with a heat shield, then a parachute and finally rockets to achieve a soft landing on the surface. It used similar entry, descent, and landing sequence to the Phoenix spacecraft.

Insight project manager Tom Hoffman said, “We hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph [miles per hour; 19,800 kilometres per hour], and the whole sequence to touching down on the surface took only [six and a half] minutes […] During that short span of time, InSight had to autonomously perform dozens of operations and do them flawlessly — and by all indications, that is exactly what our spacecraft did.”

InSight stands for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. The lander’s two-year mission is to assess what Mars is like underground, determining the planet’s heat flow and listening to the reverberations of groundquakes and meteorite impacts.

Acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division Lori Glaze said, “We’ve studied Mars from orbit and from the surface since 1965, learning about its weather, atmosphere, geology and surface chemistry […] Now we finally will explore inside Mars and deepen our understanding of our terrestrial neighbor as NASA prepares to send human explorers deeper into the solar system.”

InSight is expected to begin its mission in a few months, once it has placed the equipment on the surface of Mars. Its solar panels are now open, catching sunlight and powering the spacecraft. It is equipped to drive a device up to 16 feet (5 meters) down into Mars’s surface, a record for Mars probes. This is to help characterize heat flow from the planet. Insight also has ultra sensitive seismometers which it is to use to detect Mars earthquakes for the first time. By recording the seismic waves from these quakes, InSight would help scientists infer things about the interior of Mars, such as how seismically active it is. InSight has as single seismometer, with which NASA plans to assess signals from different types of vibrational wave, triangulate their sources, and so derive information about the planetary interior.

InSight was launched May 5 of this year and traveled reportedly 301,223,981 miles (somewhat over 484,773,000 kilometres) between planets followed by two suitcase-sized cube satellites called Mars Cube One, individually MarCO-A and MarCO-B, which relayed information to Earth during the landing process.

Previous successful landers on Mars include Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, and Curiosity. Of these, only Curiosity is still in communication with Earth, after NASA lost communication with Opportunity in June. InSight’s landing spot in the Elysium Planitia is about 600 km from Curiosity’s landing site in Gale Crater.

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Manchester United will be taking on eleven of the top players in Europe in a celebration match next Tuesday at Old Trafford, and the lineup for the European XI is coming together nicely. The game is a UEFA-Manchester United collaboration created to commemorate not only the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, but also the 50th anniversary of Manchester United entering into European club competitions. Funds raised in the match will go to support the Manchester United Foundation, which works with local charities as well as UNICEF to aid children in need. Italian Marcello Lippi will be in charge of coaching the European XI side, and his assistant will be Andy Roxburgh. Confirmed players have slowly been filing into the team, but with current Manchester United on-loan striker Henrik Larsson confirmed, the XI is now complete.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

On November 16, code-sharing and hosting service GitHub re-enabled the public access to youtube-dl repository, a software which can download videos from the internet via the command-line. This move comes after Mitchell Stoltz, a Senior Staff Attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), sent a letter to GitHub on the behalf of youtube-dl’s maintainers. The repository was previously blocked on October 23, after GitHub received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Started in July 2008, youtube-dl is a free/libré open source software written in Python which can download videos from various websites. Citing alleged violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 Circumvention of copyright protection systems, RIAA’s takedown notice had alleged youtube-dl was intended to circumvent the technological protection measures of streaming services and to redistribute music videos without authorisation. youtube-dl’s source code had a number of unit tests to check if the software works in different circumstances or not. Some of the test cases included URLs of some copyrighted songs.

In the letter to GitHub, EFF’s attorney Stoltz said “This file contains series of automated tests that verify the functionality of youtube-dl for streaming various types of video. The youtube-dl source code does not, of course, contain copies of these songs or any others […] the unit tests do not cause a permanent download or distribution of the songs they reference; they merely stream a few seconds of each song to verify the operation of youtube-dl. Streaming a small portion of a song in a non-permanent fashion to test the operation of an independently created software program is a fair use.” The letter stressed “youtube-dl does not decrypt video streams that are encrypted with commercial DRM technologies”.

The URLs to copyrighted songs were removed from the source code on November 16, and replaced with a test video that uploaded on YouTube by Philipp Hagemeister, former maintainer of youtube-dl. Philipp Hagemeister had previously spoken about the takedown with Wikinews.

youtube-dl comes with a small JavaScript interpreter where it acts as a web-browser would behave while receiving video data from the server. The script has “extractors” for various websites to handle videos from different sources. “Any software capable of running JavaScript code can derive the URL of the video stream and access the stream, regardless of whether the software has been approved by YouTube”, the letter read. It borrowed an analogy of Doors of Durin from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for explanation: travelers come upon a door that has writing in a foreign language. When translated, the writing says “say ‘friend’ and enter.” The travelers say “friend” and the door opens. As with the writing on that door, YouTube presents instructions on accessing video streams to everyone who comes asking for it.

Hours after the public access was restored, Sergey M, one of the maintainers of youtube-dl wrote on GitHub, “We would like to thank @github for standing up for youtube-dl and making it possible to continue development without dropping any features. We appreciate [GitHub] for taking potential legal risks in this regard. We would also like to thank [EFF] and personally [Mitch Stoltz] for invaluable legal help. We would also like to heartily thank our main website hoster Uberspace who is currently being sued in Germany for hosting our essentially business card website and who have already spent thousands of Euros in their legal defense.”

Hours after GitHub restored the public access to the repository, Stoltz tweeted “I think of youtube-dl as a successor to the videocassette recorder. The VCR empowered people to take control of their personal use of free-to-air video, but it had to be saved from the copyright cartel. The same goes for youtube-dl. GitHub did the right thing here.”

youtube-dl is used by thousands of people around the world. Multiple Creative Commons-licensed and public domain videos on Wikimedia Commons are uploaded via a tool called video2commons, which relies on youtube-dl to download media. youtube-dl also lets users download videos from LiveLeak — a video-sharing platform for citizen journalism. Videos downloaded using youtube-dl are also used for the purpose of fair use, or for evidence. When a copyright holder chooses to release their work, be it a photograph, a video, or audio, under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, they allow everyone to freely own, share or modify the work as long as the reusers properly attribute the author of the work. YouTube also hosts many audio and video recordings in the public domain which can be used for any purpose without any restrictions.

In the blog post announcing “youtube-dl is back”, GitHub said, “Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways. We also understood that this project’s code has many legitimate purposes, including changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos.”

GitHub also announced any new 1201 takedown notices will be “carefully scrutinised by legal experts” to reject “unwarranted claims”, and said it will side with software developers if the claims are ambiguous. The announcement also mentioned GitHub Trust and Safety team would treat developer’s tickets as a “top priority”. GitHub also pledged donation of USD 1 million for developer defense fund “to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims”.

GitHub had blocked public access to many forks of youtube-dl upon receiving the DMCA notice in October. Wikinews notes public access is not yet restored for the forked repositories listed in RIAA’s copyright notice and still displays “Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown”.

During the period when GitHub had disabled public access for the repository, Sergey M had been developing youtube-dl and hosting it on GitLab, another code-sharing and hosting site. However, since GitHub has restored public access of youtube-dl, Sergey M has made the GitLab repository private.

After this, Wikinews reached out to Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Foundation, who has been highly critical of DRM (digital rights management, the subject of the DMCA) for many years now, to discuss the harms of DRM and DMCA 1201.

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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

On the final day of campaigning before the vote in the London mayoral election, incumbent Ken Livingstone attacked main rival Boris Johnson as “a joke”. He warned Londoners that they were not voting in a “Celebrity Mayor” contest.

Livingstone unveiled a campaign poster in West Ham that will also be printed on postcards and sent to one million Londoners. It reads: “Don’t vote for a joke. Vote for London.”

“It’s not an election for the host of Have I Got News For You or a celebrity mayor. It’s about who is best placed to run an £11bn budget every year,” Mayor Livingstone said, referring to the panel game show, for which Boris Johnson has been a guest host.

“Tomorrow you have a choice between new policies and fresh energy from a new mayor in City Hall or more of the same from a tired, out-of-date administration that is beset by allegations of sleaze,” responded Johnson in a mass e-mail to over 500,000 voters. “I am optimistic about London’s future and believe we can make London a greater place to live in.”

London will be voting for mayor tomorrow, May 1. Ken Livingstone is the candidate for The Labour Party and Boris Johnson is the candidate for the Conservative Party. There are a number of other candidates, but recent opinion polls have shown it to be a two-person race, with some polls predicting a victory for Livingstone and others Johnson.

Friday, March 5, 2021

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak announced the UK’s 2021 budget on Wednesday in the House of Commons. This comes amid significant damage to the country’s economy from the COVID-19 pandemic, in which over 700 thousand people have lost their jobs, with the economy shrinking by 10%.

Sunak announced an extension of the furlough scheme, which had been paying employees who could not work due to the pandemic 80% of their wages. He said it would be extended until September. The scheme also mentioned firms would have to pay 10% of this in July, and 20% in the months of August and September as the scheme ends. It was also announced that support for self-employed people would continue, with another grant for between February and April.

Other support for workers included the minimum wage increasing to £8.91/hour from April, and an existing £20 weekly increase in Universal Credit being extended through September.

Sunak also announced some changes to taxation in the country, with corporation tax rising to 25% in April 2023. Sunak said that this would be the lowest rate in the G7, and that businesses would only be taxed if they made profits of over £250 thousand, which is only 10% of companies. Companies with profits of less than £50 thousand will continue to pay 19% corporation tax. Sunak said that income tax, national insurance, and VAT would not change in this budget with alcohol and fuel duty continuing to be frozen.

For hospitality firms, VAT will continue to be frozen at a reduced rate of five percent. The contactless payment limit will be increased from £45 to £100 this year. New freeports were also announced in locations at East Midlands Airport; Felixstowe and Harwich; Humber; Liverpool City Region; Plymouth; Solent; and Thames and Teesside. These would allow reduced customs costs, and encourages investment.