Thursday, November 22, 2007

On Tuesday, the press and members of the National Turkey Federation gathered in large numbers at the White House’s Rose Garden in the United States to witness an annual Thanksgiving tradition in the U.S., a presidential pardon of two Thanksgiving turkeys.

Every year, a U.S. President gives a pardon to two turkeys, saving them from being put on a dinner table somewhere in America. This year, President George W. Bush pardoned two turkeys named May and Flower, who were both chosen for the pardon by the citizens of the U.S.

“Each of you is taking part in a tradition that goes back to the days of Harry Truman. And to paraphrase Harry today, we have a message for our two feathered friends: You cannot take the heat — and you’re definitely going to stay out of the kitchen. I thank everybody who voted online to choose the names for our guests of honor. And I’m pleased to announce the winning names [May and Flower]. [These names are] certainly better than the names the vice president suggested, which was Lunch and Dinner,” Bush said jokingly.

After receiving the pardons, the turkeys got a special ride in a three-car motorcade to Dulles Airport, which included an array of lights, sirens and police motorcycles. From there, both turkeys were flown to Orlando, Florida on a plane dubbed United Turkey One where they were the Grand Marshalls for today’s Thanksgiving Day parade in Walt Disney World. Both turkeys received a welcome which included a red carpet, and free passes to the park.

“So now I have a task, and that is to grant a full presidential pardon to May and Flower. They’ll be shortly flown to Disney World, where they will serve as Honorary Grand Marshals for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. I hope that honor doesn’t go to their head. May they live the rest of their lives in blissful gobbling. And may all Americans enjoy a holiday full of love and peace. God bless you all,” added Bush.

Friday, December 23, 2016

Yesterday, German football club Borussia Mönchengladbach announce their appointment of Dieter Hecking as manager until 2019. Hecking’s predecessor André Schubert was sacked the day before, after one year of service at Borussia Park.

Mönchengladbach has won only one out of its last eleven Bundesliga matches this season. Schubert began as an interim manager of the first team after Lucien Facts resigned from the coach position last September. Schubert led Gladbach to the fourth spot in Bundesliga. Schubert’s last match as Gladbach’s coach ended in a 2–1 loss against VfL Wolfsburg and they are just three points ahead of the relegation playoff.

52-year-old Dieter Hecking began his coaching career in 2000 with a second tier club SC Verl. Hecking played most of his professional career matches in 2. Bundesliga.

In 2003–04, Hecking guided VfB Lübeck in DFB Pokal semifinal. He helped 1. FC Nürnberg avoid relegation in 2009–10 and finished sixth in the Bundesliga in the following season. In 2014–15, Hecking won the DFB Pokal and the DfL-Supercup with Wolfsburg and finished the Bundesliga season as runners-up. They qualified for last season’s UEFA Champions League. Hecking was sacked from Wolfsburg in October.

Mönchengladbach’s sporting director Max Eberl said, “We wanted to add fresh impetus after the developments of recent weeks with a new coach. Dieter Hecking is exactly the right man for that. He is a coach with a lot of experience, who has had a lot of success at different levels with different clubs” ^{((de))German language: ?Nach der Entwicklung der letzten Wochen wollen wir mit einem neuen Trainer einen neuen Impuls setzen. Dafür ist Dieter Hecking genau der richtige Mann, ein Trainer mit viel Erfahrung, der auf unterschiedlichem Niveau mit verschiedenen Vereinen sehr erfolgreich gearbeitet hat}.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

London, England — With the 2012 Summer Paralympics due to start in London later this week, Algeria’s athletics competitors are ready to earn medals in their events.

According to the team’s athletics coaches in a conversation with Wikinews, the runners have been well prepared and have international experience that has prepared them for the Games, having won eleven medals at the 2011 IPC World Championships, eight of which were gold. The coaches believe their runners should easily defeat their African counterparts from Nigeria and Kenya.

The team is comprised of 17 male competitors and six female competitors. Athletics events commence on Thursday.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

A six-pound infant born in San Francisco, California has six perfectly formed and functional fingers and toes on his hands and feet, so that it isn’t considered a disability or deformity, say doctors at Saint Luke’s Hospital who were amazed by the oddity.

In a medical rarity, super baby Kamani Hubbard was born two weeks ago with 24 working digits. He is healthy and home with his parents in Daly City, California. Polydactyly, a congenital disorder is not uncommon in humans and animals, including cats, but to happen on both hands and feet is a rare hereditary condition.

“Nurses and doctors, looked so normal they couldn’t tell, they told me he was six pounds in good health, that was all they said,” said Miryoki Gross, Hubbard’s mother. Her baby’s specialness didn’t even show up on prenatal ultrasounds. “I heard nothing before I gave birth so I’m still in shock, kinda,” Gross added. Despite the mother’s shock, Kamani’s father, Kris, was the first to notice the condition.

Polydactyly (from Ancient Greek means ‘?????’ (polus) or “many” + ‘????????’ (daktulos) “finger[s]”), also known as polydactylism, sexdactyly, hexadactyly, or hexadactylism, is a congenital physical disorder consisting of supernumerary fingers or toes.

In Kamani’s case, however, all of the digits are perfectly formed and function or work normally. “I was in amazement, it took a little time for me to take it all in,” said Kris, a postal worker, who has a family history of polydactylism, but none of his relatives can remember it happening on both hands and feet.

Mostly, cases of polydactyly are surgically corrected. Kris himself had nubs of sixth digits, which were removed during his early childhood, for having been non-functional. “My son has six fingers then I saw toes, and I thought, this is quite unique. Some family members have had six fingers, not completely developed. But not the toes,” Kris noted.

“I would be tempted to leave those fingers in place. I realize children would tease each other over the slightest things, and having extra digits on each hand is more than slight. But imagine what sort of a pianist a 12-fingered person would be imagine what sort of a flamenco guitarist, if nothing else think of their typing skills,” Dr. Treece remarked.

“I just want him to see what greatness will be in store for him,” said Kris.

Fully developed and functional extra digits on both hands and feet are considered very rare as a genetic trait in medical history, amid some partial development of an extra digit occurs about twice in every 1,000 white male births. Ordinarily, polydactylism appears as an extra piece of non-functional tissue, typically occurring as an extra finger, sometimes with a bone, but no joint.

“It’s merely an interesting and beautiful variation rather than a worrisome thing,” said Dr. Michael Treece, a St. Luke’s Hospital pediatrician, and the OBGYN who delivered Kamani. He has postaxial polydactyly, which is 10 times more likely to occur in black children, and also more likely to appear in boys.

Goliath, a figure in Old Testament, was depicted as having had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

Blues guitarist Hound Dog Taylor, Get Carter, Little Tich, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and several other figures in history have had polydactyly. Sid Wilson, a turntablist of Slipknot, had been born with an extra finger and toe on his hands and feet which were removed shortly after his birth as doctors considered them to be dead.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A recent study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) shows that the oil and gas industry are creating earthquakes. New information from the Midwest region of the United States points out that these man-made earthquakes are happening more frequently than expected. While more frequent earthquakes are less of a problem for regions like the Midwest, a geology professor from the University of Southern Indiana, Dr. Paul K. Doss, believes the disposal of wastewater from the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process used in extracting oil and gas has the possibility to pose potential problems for groundwater.

“We are taking this fluid that has a whole host of chemicals in it that are useful for fracking and putting it back into the Earth,” Doss said. “From a purely seismic perspective these are not big earthquakes that are going to cause damage or initiate, as far as we know, any larger kinds of earthquakes activity for Midwest. [The issue] is a water quality issue in terms of the ground water resources that we use.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique used by the oil and gas industries which inject highly pressurized water down into the Earth’s crust to break rock and extract natural gas. Most of the fluids used for fracking are proprietary, so information about what chemicals are used in the various fluids are unknown to the public and to create a competitive edge.

Last Monday four researchers from the University of New Brunswick released an editorial that sheds light on the potential risks that the current wastewater disposal system could have on the province’s water resources. The researchers share the concern that Dr. Doss has and have come out to say that they believe fracking should be stopped in the province until there is an environ­mentally safe way to dispose the waste wastewater.

“If groundwater becomes contamin­ated, it takes years to decades to try to clean up an aquifer system,” University of New Brunswick professor Tom Al said.

While the USGS group which conducted the study says it is unclear how the earthquake rates may be related to oil and gas production, they’ve made the correlation between the disposal of wastewater used in fracking and the recent upsurge in earthquakes. Because of the recent information surfacing that shows this connection between the disposal process and earthquakes, individual states in the United States are now passing laws regarding disposal wells.

“The problem is that we have never, as a human society, engineered a hole to go four miles down in the Earth’s crust that we have complete confidence that it won’t leak,” Doss said. “A perfect case-in-point is the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, that oil was being drilled at 18,000 feet but leaked at the surface. And that’s the concern because there’s no assurance that some of these unknown chemical cocktails won’t escape before it gets down to where they are trying to get rid of them.”

It was said in the study released by the New Brunswick University professors that if fracking wastewater would contaminate groundwater, that current conventional water treatment would not be sufficient enough to remove the high concentration of chemicals used in fracking. The researchers did find that the wastewater could be recycled, can also be disposed of at proper sites or even pumped further underground into saline aquifers.

The New Brunswick professors have come to the conclusion that current fracking methods used by companies, which use the water, should be replaced with carbon diox­ide or liquefied propane gas.

“You eliminate all the water-related issues that we’re raising, and that peo­ple have raised in general across North America,” Al said.

In New Brunswick liquefied propane gas has been used successfully in fracking some wells, but according to water specialist with the province’s Natural Resources De­partment Annie Daigle, it may not be the go-to solution for New Brunswick due its geological makeup.

“It has been used successfully by Corridor Resources here in New Bruns­wick for lower volume hydraulic frac­turing operations, but it is still a fairly new technology,” Daigle said.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with U.S. states to come up with guidelines to manage seismic risks due to wastewater. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is the organization that also deals with the policies for wells.

Oil wells, which are under regulation, pump out salt water known as brine, and after brine is pumped out of the ground it’s disposed of by being pumped back into the ground. The difference between pumping brine and the high pressurized fracking fluid back in the ground is the volume that it is disposed of.

“Brine has never caused this kind of earthquake activity,” Doss said. “[The whole oil and gas industry] has developed around the removal of natural gas by fracking techniques and has outpaced regulatory development. The regulation is tied to the ‘the run-of-the-mill’ disposal of waste, in other words the rush to produce this gas has occurred before regulatory agencies have had the opportunity to respond.”

According to the USGS study, the increase in injecting wastewater into the ground may explain the sixfold increase of earthquakes in the central part of the United States from 2000 – 2011. USGS researchers also found that in decades prior to 2000 seismic events that happened in the midsection of the U.S. averaged 21 annually, in 2009 it spiked to 50 and in 2011 seismic events hit 134.

“The incredible volumes and intense disposal of fracking fluids in concentrated areas is what’s new,” Doss said. “There is not a body of regulation in place to manage the how these fluids are disposed of.”

The study by the USGS was presented at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America on April 18, 2012.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

What would you tell your grandchildren about 2008 if they asked you about it in, let’s say, 20 years’ time? If the answer to a quiz question was 2008, what would the question be? The year that markets collapsed, or perhaps the year that Obama became US president? Or the year Heath Ledger died?

Let’s take a look at some of the important stories of 2008. Links to the original Wikinews articles are in all the titles.