December 22, 2004

The government of Zambia has launched a new national agricultural policy, according to a report by the Times of Zambia. The newspaper reports that the policy was announced yesterday by the country’s Minister of Agriculture & Co-Operatives, Mr. Mundia Sikatana.

At the event marking the launch of the new program, Mr. Sikatana described the policy as addressing the issues of food security, economic growth and poverty reduction. The policy will cover all sectors of agriculture in the nation, and will be implemented by the ministry of Agriculture.

Mr Sikatana went on to say that the policy contained detailed strategies to cover a variety of sectors within the agricultural industry, including livestock, fisheries, irrigation, and agricultural finance. The new policy also continues Zambia’s previous policy of prohibiting the import and use of genetically modified foods within the country. This policy is controversial due to areas of poverty within the country, and the smuggling of genetically modified grains into the country earlier this month.

The Zambian government has previously been criticised by some for its annual ban on fishing during December. It is unclear whether this policy, which was widely applauded by environmentalists and implemented to protect sensitive fish stocks, will be affected by the new agricultural policy.

Friday, June 13, 2008

British drivers have been urged not to panic buy fuel because of the 4-day walkout by delivery drivers working for companies delivering to Shell petrol stations. The 600 workers have walked out over pay disagreements, wanting an increase to their current pay of £36,500, however their union Unite turned down a last-minute offer of £41,500.

Hoyer UK, which employs tanker drivers for Shell, said, “We extended our offer to the very limits that our business could sustain.” However Unite said in a press release that, “this dispute could have been resolved if Shell had advanced a fraction of the billions of pounds in profit they make every month”, continuing to say, “one of the world’s richest companies is prepared to play Pontius Pilate and see the British public inconvenienced rather than settle this dispute for a sum smaller than the chairman’s pay increase last year”

Shell admitted that the walkout could leave some of its 1,000 forecourts without fuel, but the UK Petrol Industry Association, which represent oil refiners, said that forecourts would have around 4 days of supply, maintaining usual stocking levels. Shell also commented that the strike impact would be “significant”, as the company runs around 1 in 10 of all petrol stations in the UK.

British Business Secretary, John Hutton, said that “the strike, which will have a disproportionate effect on people in Britain, cannot be justified,” and urged both sides to resume negotiations in order to settle the dispute. “We have been working closely with industry to put in place detailed contingency plans to reduce as far as possible the disruption for the driving public,” he added. Unite’s press release also confirms that “provision has been made for fire, police and the emergency services.”

Tanker drivers on strike have set up picket lines at many of Shell’s UK refineries, including those in Stanlow, Avonmouth, Plymouth, Pembroke, Cardiff, Kingsbury, Basildon, Grangemouth, Aberdeen, Inverness, Jarrow and Luton Airport.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

A team of researchers from China, Canada, the United States, and Australia published on Wednesday their discovery of an early fossilized baby snake, reportedly the oldest ever found, in a piece of amber in the middle of a sandstone deposit in Myanmar. The findings appeared in the journal Science Advances.

The specimen, a piece of amber, was found in a sandstone deposit by fossil hunters who contacted scientists in 2016, and later donated it to the Dexu Institute of Paleontology in Chaozhou, China, where scientists were able to examine it closely. The snake skeleton itself, though missing a head, is about 1.9 inches long (47.5 mm). The scientists said a scrap of skin also found suggests another snake, and bits of plant and insect matter indicate the area may have been forest at the time the snake was preserved. They dated the fossil to the Cretaceous period, roughly 99 million years ago, the same period as Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, and early mammals, sharks, and flowering plants. The specimen represents a previously undiscovered species, which the scientists named Xiaophis myanmarensis, or “dawn-snake of Myanmar.”

Co-author Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta noted, “It’s spectacular to have a baby snake in the fossil record because, of course, they’d be such tiny, delicate things.” The researchers concluded it was in fact a snake and not a mere legless lizard by studying the vertebrae, which were found with their ribs intact, in each part of the snake’s body.

The findings, said scientists, indicate fauna from the prehistoric megacontinent Gondwanaland migrated to Laurasia. This is also the earliest snake to be found in a forest environment, suggesting that snakes had become reasonably biodiverse by the Cretaceous.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The United States Army has announced that Corporal Jeremy Morlock is to face a court martial on three charges of premeditated murder. Morlock is accused of killing Afghan civilians for sport; at least eleven other soldiers are caught up in the allegations.

The prosecution case is that Morlock colluded with Sergeant Calvin Gibbs to plot the deaths of Afghans. Gibbs is said to have planned the attacks which Morlock helped arrange by recruiting other soldiers to carry them out. The pair, as well as three others charged with murder, deny this. Gibbs’s lawyer said his client’s defence is that the Afghans were killed legitimately, while Morlock’s said his client was present but did not cause any deaths. Preliminary hearings in the case were heard last month.

The five are accused of unprovoked grenade and gun attacks. Seven other soldiers are accused of conspiring to cover up the crimes by dismemberment of the corpses and collecting body parts. No other cases have yet been committed for trial, including that of Gibbs. All the soldiers are from the 5^th Stryker brigade, which went to Afghanistan last year and has seen combat in Kandahar, where the alleged attacks occurred between January and May this year.

Morlock is also going to stand trial for assault, use of a controlled substance (hashish), attempting to block an investigation, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to assault and “wrongfully photographing and possessing visual images of human casualties”. The soldiers are accused of photographing their victims and keeping body parts as trophies, though the military has not yet commented on if bones they say the men took were in fact from civilian murder victims. Al Jazeera English reports that much media attention has focused on this detail.

The seven not charged with murder are also charged with assault and using hashish. The assault charge relates to the beating of a whistleblower. Morlock could have faced the death penalty on the premeditated murder charges, but the army has decided not to seek this sentence upon a conviction and instead the maximum sentence available is life without parole.

Officials have commented about concerns the case could have a negative impact on relations with the Afghan public, especially with regards to efforts to undermine Taliban support in Kandahar.

Monday, October 1, 2012

The Iranian Fars News Agency (FNA) yesterday apologised over an article it reproduced Friday, originally written by US satirical news website The Onion on Monday September 24. The parodic article reported “a Gallup poll” suggesting “the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans” would vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, instead of US President Barack Obama. The Onion article also said “77 percent of rural Caucasian voters” would prefer to drink beer with Ahmadinejad or attend a baseball game with him as opposed to Obama.

The FNA’s English service Editor-in-chief said the article had been “extracted” from The Onion and that FNA gives “our formal apologies for that mistake”, as well as pointing out the article was “taken down from our outlook in less two hours”.

However, the editor-in-chief also said “we do believe that if a free opinion poll is conducted in the US, a majority of Americans would prefer anyone outside the US political system to President Barack Obama and American statesmen”. He stressed that this belief does not constitute justification for the error.

In The Onion’s article, fictional West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski says about Ahmadinejad: “I like him better”. ‘Swiderski’ is also quoted by the Chicago, Illinois website as saying the Iranian President “takes national defense seriously, and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”

In Iran, homosexuality is a criminal offence which can carry a penalty of incarceration or capital punishment. Just over five years ago, when he participated in a debate at Columbia University in New York, New York, Ahmadinejad said: “In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country”.

The FNA’s error made international headlines, including in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia. Will Tracy, editor of The Onion, said their website “freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran’s Finest News Source on their superb reportage”, a humourous reference to The Onion’s slogan, ‘America’s Finest News Source’.

On the original web page on The Onion’s website, the satirical news organisation added a reference to “our Iranian subsidiary organization”, providing a link to a screenshot of the FNA’s page.

On the article page, in which The Onion was not attributed as a source, the FNA copied The Onion’s article verbatim and in its entirety, save for part of a sentence saying Ahmadinejad was “a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed”.

This is not the first time The Onion has caused the mistaken belief of their material being factual. In a November 2007 interview with Wikinews, The Onion’s Editorial Manager Chet Clem recounted an incident in which the Beijing Evening News reproduced a story from The Onion created in 2002, copied entirely verbatim, headlined “Congress threatens to leave DC unless new capitol is built”. When the error was highlighted to the Chinese newspaper, Clem said “their response was not to print a correction, but just to say that some newspapers in America make money by printing lies.” In a separate incident, Christians forwarded a story on the Internet from The Onion saying children were converting to Satanism as a result of reading the Harry Potter book series.

The FNA statement released yesterday went on to say “[a]ctive and well-known media occasionally make mistakes, and no media is an exception to this rule”, before going to provide a list of errors made by such publications as The New York Times and Beijing Evening News, as well as television broadcasters like the BBC, ITV, and CNN.

The bottom of the FNA’s statement introduces a list of notable BBC errors reported by The Daily Telegraph on December 6, 2010. While the FNA referenced The Daily Telegraph and the order of the mistakes was changed from the original article, the wording was reproduced verbatim, excluding one omitted sentence under the subheading ‘Nicky Campbell and hunting mark II’ which reads: “Campbell, who is also the presenter of the BBC’s flagship programme for Holy Week, apologised profusely for the mistake.”

According to BBC News Online, the FNA is associated with the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, an Iranian military branch.

Friday, October 12, 2007

The Internet is very much present at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2007, not just, like in previous years, as a means for the journalists who have 80 workplaces for their own notebooks to report on the fair, but like before as a chance – and as a threat for rights-owners of digital media.

After a marginal existence in the previous year, bloggers have got their own “living room 2.0” at the fair, furnished with everything a blogger needs, including media attention. Every day from Wednesday October 10 to Sunday October 14 they will write and podcast about the big names to meet, the events not to be missed and their very personal experiences and thoughts. Three of the bloggers write in English, two English language podcasts are done, to widen the reach of the Book Fair 2.0. The blog entries and podcasts will be available until after the book fair at http://www.book-fair.com/en/wordpress/ and the bloggers themselves can be visited on the weekend at hall 4.2, Q411, though until now it is more the media and less the visitors of the fair, the bloggers come in contact with.

Digitalization and digital media, especially books and magazines offered digitally, are a hot topic at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, as more and more publishers want to see the digital counterparts of their traditional media not just as a field to be present in, but as a possible profit center. With scientific books, this move already was quite successful: Publishing house Springer for example, offering over 40,000 ebooks and over 1700 electronic magazines, of which over 1200 are still actively continued with Springer, nowadays does an ebook-variant of every traditional scientific book they print – and already has the largest part of their cash-flow from digital media.

This is harder for fiction publishing houses as the Pabel Möwig group (VPM), which has become active early. They do offer the digitized new adventures of – say, the outer-space-hero Perry Rhodan -, but the turnover is still only a small addition to the print and other media versions. Readers become readier to read on a screen, but their readiness is still growing slowly. Since a new generation of readers is growing up using the internet as a reference work – especially Google and Wikipedia – it will become more and more natural in the future.

A growing number of service companies in the publishing sector therefore offers re-digitalization apart from increasingly effective content management systems, with which new forms of media can easily be compiled from the contents of a data base.

Older works, of which the publishing house owns the rights, but for which a reprint might not be profitable, are scanned, divided into content sections and tagged. When the original type face isn’t good enough, books are typewritten in third world countries two or three times which are corrected and merged into a final version. Once in the system, digitalized books can be at disposal as MobiPocket ebooks or Print On Demand (POD) and with aid of the Amazon BookSurge program remain available, possibly even within 24 hours.

Digital content can also be used as a marketing-tool with the “Search Inside” from Amazon.com, where the full text of a book is visible but only small parts of the book are shown at a time.

Right after Amazon, Google also presented their own projects for the digitalization of books, where publishers have the option of just sending a box or container full of their books in printed form and leave the job of digitalization to Google, where afterwards their content will be findable with Google Book Search. The difference between those two internet services was obvious, though: Amazon wants to earn money with books, while Google’s business is advertising, their revenue model is AdSense and AdWords, targeted as perfect as possible with full text search. Both services had to answer questions as to how they will protect the content from unpaid exploitation, as probably fewer and fewer users will be willing to pay for a digital eBook when they can read the content for free, up to twenty pages at a time. The freeloader mentality of many Internet users was seen as a threat by many of the publishers.