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Sunday, April 13, 2008

Teräsbetoni means “steel-reinforced concrete”, and is also the name of a Finnish heavy metal band formed in 2002. Their music, which centres on an honourable warrior lifestyle or on metal itself, quickly became popular in 2003 on the Internet, resulting in a petition by fans being sent to several record labels demanding a recording deal. In late 2004 the band signed to Warner Music Finland, and the following year debut single Taivas lyö tulta rose to number one in the Finnish charts, and debut album Metallitotuus hit number two and went platinum, and has now sold about 47,000 copies.

The band, who sing exclusively in Finnish, have just released their third album, Myrskyntuoja. The lead single on this album is Missä miehet ratsastaa, which Teräsbetoni decided to enter in the Finnish selections for the 2008 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, where it was selected to go on to the semi-final in Belgrade, Serbia as Finland’s representative this year. Although Finland has seen limited success in the contest, their only victory was with a comparable group. In 2006 hard rock band Lordi – whose monster costumes and pyrotechnic displays are famed – achieved a record 292 points in the final with Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Teräsbetoni’s frontman, vocalist and bass guitarist Jarkko Ahola’s fame extends beyond the band he heads. He also features in Finnish symphonic power metal cover supergroup Northern Kings, alongside Marco Hietala of Nightwish and Tarot, Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica and Juha-Pekka Leppäluoto of Charon.

Wikinews was able to conduct an exclusive interview with Jarkko Ahola to discuss these various achievements. This interview is now published below for the first time.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Miami of Ohio beat the Michigan Wolverines 3–2 at the finals of the NCAA Midwest regional ice hockey tournament Sunday night at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Miami sophomore forward Alden Hirschfeld scored at 1:54 into the second overtime when his shot from the top of the left face off circle deflected into the goal off the skate of the Michigan goaltender Shawn Hunwick.

Pat Cannone led the scoring with two power play goals for Miami during regulation. It looked as though Michigan had won the game in the first overtime when Michigan’s forward Kevin Lynch appeared to score. Unfortunately for Michigan the referee blew the whistle calling a penalty just before the puck went in the net. The Miami goaltender Connor Knapp who made 53 saves in the game was named the most outstanding player of the midwest regional tournament.

This was the first multiple overtime game for the Miami of Ohio RedHawks in their 23 years. Miami will be going to the Frozen Four for the second straight year.

The Boston College Eagles advanced to the Frozen Four in a shoot out with the Yale Bulldogs. BC defeated Yale 9–7 last night at the finals of the NorthEast regionals in front of 6,054 fans at the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts.

BC forward Cam Atkinson had a hat trick and an assist. Mark Arcobello of Yale also had a hat trick. In an attempt to find a way to stop the Eagles scoring Yale played three different goalies during the game. The sixteen total goals is a NCAA record for a regional tournament game. The previous record was thirteen.

This will be the 22nd time that Boston College has made it to the Frozen Four, it is the ninth for coach Jerry York and their third trip in the past four seasons. BC will face Miami of Ohio in the semifinals on April 8 at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

San Fernando, Chile — Ten students from the Liceo María Luisa Bombal of Rancagua, O’Higgins Region were detained by the local police yesterday. Following their release, the students told the media they were required to remove their clothes at the police station.

The students, seven men and three women, took control of the building of the school early yesterday morning in response to the long delay in re-construction of the liceo, following the earthquake of 2010. At around 08:00 local time (1200 UTC), Leonardo Fuentes, general secretary of the Municipal Educational Corporation of Rancagua, authorized the police to clear out the students.

Student leader Jennifer Olivares told Diario VI Región the police “stripped off [their] clothes” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?Al llegar a la comisaría nos desnudaron.} upon their arrival at the police station, Comisaría de Rancagua, something which Lieutenant Colonel of Carabineros Iván Guajardo did not deny. However, police stated the students will be charged by the public prosecutor with robbing food from the school. “It’s a bit illogical that they stripped off our clothes, with the knowledge that there were minors and without [us] being delinquents, but students who took the school peacefully” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?Es un poco ilógico que nos desnuden habiendo menores de edad y no siendo delincuentes, sino estudiantes que estábamos en una toma que había sido pacífica}, said Olivares. Ignacio Muñoz, former leader of the occupation of the Liceo María Luisa Bombal, told El Rancahuaso “the Mayor [Eduardo Soto] promised to begin the reconstruction works last summer, and it’s August already and they don’t even begin to take the debris outside” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?El alcalde se comprometió a comenzar los trabajos de reconstrucción durante el verano de este año, y ya estamos en agosto y aún no comienzan ni moviendo los escombros del interior}. Education Regional Secretary (Seremi de Educación) Pedro Larraín said the government “does not share” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?No compartimos las tomas} such actions, “because they harm education” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?porque perjudican a la educación}.

The Region of Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins was one of the first in 2012 to resuscitate the previous year’s student protests, more specifically at the Liceo Industrial de San Fernando, which was taken control by the students in late July, and which as of yesterday was still taken. The students of the Liceo Industrial were particularly affected, after the president of the school’s centro de alumnos Guillermo Horta Farías was stabbed outside the educational establishment on July 31; his fellow schoolmates subsequently organized a march in his honour in Rancagua, on August 8. As of August 11, eight high schools have been taken control of by students, in response to the government’s failure to satisfy the secondary and university students’ requests.

Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Eben Moglen, Columbia University Law Professor, will head the newSoftware Freedom Law Center (SFLC). An initial 4 million dollars has been provided by Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) to fund the project.

The law center will provide free legal service for open source projects and developers. In 2004 OSDL established a separate $10 million Linux Legal Defense Fund providing legal support for Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator and end user companies subjected to Linux-related litigation by the SCO Group. The new law center will not be affiliated with the OSDL.

“This is about taking care of the goose that laid the golden egg and not letting wolves come in the middle of the night and steal it away,” Moglen said during a press conference. “This is a legal firm not involved so much in litigating and defending as it will be for counseling and advising and nurturing non-profits and to prevent millions of dollars in litigation.”

Moglen will serve as chairman and director-counsel of the non-profit organization. Also on board as directors are: Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School; Daniel Weitzner, director of the World Wide Web Consortium‘s technology and society activities; and Diane Peters, general counsel at the OSDL. Daniel Ravicher, executive director of the Public Patent Foundation, will help manage as legal director.

Moglen, one of the world.s leading experts on copyright law as applied to software, will run the new Law Center from its headquarters in New York City. The Law Center will initially have two full-time intellectual property attorneys on staff and expects to expand to four attorneys later this year. Initial clients for the Law Center include the Free Software Foundation and the Samba Project.

Other services provided by the SFLC include: asset stewardship, to avoid intellectual property claim conflict; license review and compatibility analysis; legal consulting and lawyer training.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

The United States House of Representatives has passed The Affordable Health Care for America Act or HR 3962, a bill which would ensure that 95–96% of US citizens receive affordable health care.

HR 3962 was passed with 220 yeas and 215 nays. Democrats in the house needed at least 218 votes to pass the bill. 39 Democrats voted against the bill, which contained the Stupak amendment. This amendment curtailed women’s abortion rights. One Republican, Representative Joseph Cao of Louisiana, voted for the bill.

The US Senate has drafted their own health care bill, S. 1679. It is not yet known when the Senate will vote on their version of the bill, but in the end both versions must be merged into one with both the House and Senate voting again.

The health care program associated with HR 3962 is estimated to cost over US$1 trillion over ten years, according to the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who states that it will result in “[…] not one dime added to the deficit.”

US President Barack Obama says that he is “confident” that the Senate will be able to come to an agreement and pass a completed bill. Obama added that he hopes to sign a “comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year.”

Monday, August 10, 2015

Continuing a trend of steady employment growth, the United States economy added 215,000 jobs in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.3%.

“Job growth is quite strong,” stated Jim O’Sullivan, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, a data analysis firm in New York. “This pace of employment growth is clearly strong enough to keep the unemployment rate trending down.”

Average hourly earnings rose 0.2%, marking a rebound after growth stalled in June. Wages have grown by 2.1% over the past year, below the Federal Reserve’s target of 3.5% annual wage growth, and not much more than the underlying rate of inflation.

While sluggish wage growth remains a pocket of weakness in the economic recovery, steady payroll gains averaging 242,000 per month over the past twelve months have led observers to consider a Federal Reserve interest rate hike as increasingly likely, according to The New York Times.

“We view this report as easily clearing the hurdle needed to keep the Fed on track for a September rate hike,” said Rob Martin, an economist at Barclays in New York. “The bar for not moving now is much higher.”

Although the Federal Reserve has not explicitly stated that they plan to raise interest rates in the near future, the US central bank has stated that it would raise rates when it has seen “some further improvement” in the jobs market. The Fed has not increased interest rates since 2006, and during the 2007-2009 recession, it lowered rates to historically low levels.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A recent revelation by American actor John Travolta in court testimony during an ongoing extortion case in The Bahamas that his late son Jett suffered from autism, has stirred debate and controversy over the disease. News media and critics have questioned whether Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston should have acknowledged Jett’s illness sooner. In response to comments made Tuesday about the recent events on the ABC television program The View, the National Autism Association issued a press release stating they “very much support the Travolta family and all families affected by autism”.

Travolta’s testimony last week admitting that his son was autistic was the first time he had stated as much publicly; previously he and his wife had only said Jett had experienced Kawasaki syndrome. Travolta’s son Jett died in January 2009 at the age of 16 after experiencing a seizure. “My son was autistic and suffered from seizure disorder. Every five to ten days he suffered seizures which lasted 45 seconds to a minute,” said Travolta in his court testimony on September 22. A piece in iVillage noted Travolta had been pressured for years to speak out publicly about his son Jett’s autism. iVillage cited a 2007 piece in the New York Post, where a source commented “He could do so much good for autism awareness if he would just come forward.”

News media and critics have suggested that Travolta and his wife’s allegiance to Scientology was behind their rationale for not previously acknowledging that Jett was autistic. The Church of Scientology opposes psychiatry and does not recognize autism as an affliction. Church representative Tommy Davis had told MSNBC that “The Church of Scientology has no position on autism,” however a Scientology-founded organization the Citizens Commission On Human Rights stated to the United States Senate in 2008: “The Citizens Commission on Human Rights believes that there is no known medical treatment for autism except off-label drugs.”

Former Scientologists Tory Christman and Claire Headley were interviewed about the recent revelation by Travolta for The Daily Beast, and commented on its implications. Christman suffers from epilepsy, a condition which also causes seizures. She told The Daily Beast that the Church of Scientology pressured her to go off of her seizure medications, and instead take “vitamins and supplements”. After doing so, Christman experienced a grand mal seizure and knocked out two of her teeth in the bathroom. Headley, who has filed a lawsuit against Scientology for labor-law violations, told The Daily Beast that the only techniques that Scientology would have sanctioned to help Jett would have been internal procedures known as “assists and objective processing”. Church representative Tommy Davis responded to The Daily Beast: “This religion is utterly and completely about helping. It’s just insane to think that Scientology would be a factor in somebody not getting all the help they need.”

ABC News reported Tuesday that the president of the National Autism Association (NAA), Wendy Fournier, stated those that had experience with autism awareness had previously recognized signs from media video that Jett Travolta suffered from the disease. Fournier commented: “It didn’t really come as a surprise for people. But I’ve read some things that really bother me – basically that they should have come forward sooner. Everybody handles autism in the best way that they can and for whatever personal reasons they had, they chose not to make it public. Just because you have a child with autism and you’re a celebrity, it does not automatically mandate you to be a spokesperson for the disorder.” Another official from the autism community, the national manager for Talk About Curing, Autism Rebecca Estepp, said to ABC News: “The Travoltas are suffering right now from a tragedy that could affect anyone. … We’ve heard of several children passing away with seizures lately.”

On Tuesday’s edition of the ABC television program The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg commented on the statements made by the representative of the National Autism Association to ABC News about Travolta’s admission of his son’s autism. “Since John Travolta has testified his son Jett was autistic in this blackmail case, the National Autism Association has come out saying they didn’t expect him to be a celebrity spokesperson for autism, but he should have come forward sooner,” said Goldberg.

The View co-hosts proceeded to discuss whether Travolta should have publicly revealed his son’s ailment earlier, and the impact of labels in society and the media. Sherri Shepherd commented on the negative impact of labeling individuals, and guest-host Gloria Estefan remarked: “I don’t like labels, period.” “I guess what is stunning to me is that anyone has the right to expect you to say anything about your family,” said Goldberg.

“Isn’t it partly that he’s a Scientologist and that there’s a reputation that Scientologists don’t believe in diseases of certain kinds?” asked co-host Joy Behar. Goldberg asserted that it was the individual’s decision whether or not to speak publicly about such an issue. Shepherd pointed out that celebrity actress Jenny McCarthy has spoken out publicly about autism, which her son suffers from, and noted that her voice has helped to focus public attention on the disease.

Behar questioned Travolta’s earlier statements that his son had Kawasaki disease: “The thing about Travolta though – he called it Kawasaki disease. Did he know that it was autism, and just said it was Kawasaki – was he making that up? I don’t know.” Goldberg said: “This is not the way to get people to come out and say, ‘You know what, I’m going to take a stand.’ It’s just, it’s none of your business until somebody wants to make it your business, but that’s just me.

After the program’s broadcast, the National Autism Association came out with a press release Tuesday, in response to statements made on The View. “The National Autism Association stated today that they very much support the Travolta family and all families affected by autism”, said the press release. The NAA clarified that the statement made to ABC News by its president Wendy Fournier was the opposite position of that quoted by Goldberg, asserting that it was taken out of context. “I agree with Ms. Goldberg, the Travoltas, like any other family struggling with the illness of their child, are entitled to their privacy. I have read hurtful, judgmental comments from individuals as well as organizations, suggesting that that the Travolta family owed it to the autism community to use their celebrity to bring awareness to the disorder. I couldn’t disagree more,” said Fournier.

The organization’s board chair, Lori McIlwain, commented in the press release: “NAA is here to support families and fellow parents. This debate does not serve anyone. As a nation, we need to instead focus on helping those affected by autism, which now affects 1 in 100 children.” According to the release, the organization was founded in 2003, and is one of the largest in the United States. The NAA’s mission includes educated families about autism and neurological disorders.

Cleveland, Ohio-based University Hospitals Case Medical Center child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Marcie Hall said that according to studies one fourth of autistic children may concurrently have seizure disorder. The director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Management Center at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center, Dr. Shlomo Shinnar, stated: “In neurologically-normal children with epilepsy, the risk of death is actually no different than for children without seizures.”