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Monday, October 19, 2020

Businessman Don Blankenship of West Virginia, the U.S. Constitution Party’s 2020 presidential nominee, answered some questions about his campaign from Wikinews accredited reporter William S. Saturn.

Blankenship, reportedly nicknamed the “king of coal”, was chairman and CEO of Massey Energy from 2000 to 2010. During his tenure, the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster occurred, which resulted in the deaths of 29 miners. A jury convicted Blankenship of misdemeanor conspiracy to violate safety standards willfully, and he received a one year prison sentence in 2016. He maintains his innocence and blames federal regulators for the disaster. After his release from prison, Blankenship ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Party’s US Senate nomination in West Virginia. He subsequently sought the Constitution Party’s nomination for President. At the virtual 2020 Constitution Party National Convention this past May, Blankenship won the party’s nomination on the second ballot. He selected Michigan Taxpayers Party chairman William Mohr as his running mate. Mohr spoke about Blankenship with Wikinews in June, describing him as “a good man with vast knowledge in the political field [who] stands firm on his positions, aligns well with the party platform and has an abundance of ability to lead this nation in the direction it needs to go.” Mohr lauded Blankenship’s “ability to influence leaders around him” and claimed the nominee “has a backbone superior to most men and will be the strongest President we have seen in decades.”

The Constitution Party was founded in 1991 as the U.S. Taxpayers Party. It changed to its current name in 1999. The party advocates states’ rights, gun rights, limited government, protectionism, and non-interventionism. It strongly opposes abortion and illegal immigration. In 2016, the party’s presidential nominee Darrell Castle received 203,091 votes (0.15 percent) with ballot access in 24 states. The Blankenship-Mohr ticket is on the ballot in 18 states with write-in access in a few others.

With Wikinews, Blankenship discussed his background, the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on his campaign, what a Blankenship presidency would entail, and policy matters. Additionally, he delivered his final plea to voters ahead of Election Day.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

A paste containing synthetic tooth enamel can seal small cavities without drilling. Kazue Yamagishi and colleagues at the FAP Dental Institute in Tokyo say that the paste can repair small cavities in 15 minutes.

Currently, fillers don’t stick to such small cavities so dentists must drill bigger holes. Hydroxyapatite crystals, of which natural enamel is made, bond with teeth to repair tiny areas of damage.

Yamagishi and colleagues have tested their paste on a lower premolar tooth that showed early signs of decay. They found that the synthetic enamel merged with the natural enamel. The synthetic enamel also appears to make teeth stronger which will improve resistance to future decay. As with drilling, however, there is still the potential for pain: The paste is strongly acidic to encourage crystal growth and causes inflammation if it touches the gums.

The paste is reported in the journal Nature.

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Saturday, March 1, 2008

While nearly all coverage of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, the race for the White House also includes independents and third party candidates. These parties represent a variety of views that may not be acknowledged by the major party platforms.

Wikinews has impartially reached out to these candidates, throughout the campaign. We now interview independent Presidential candidate Frank Moore, a performance artist.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

In late May to early June of 2008, news broke that a previously undiscovered indigenous tribe had been found near the border between Brazil and Peru. Worldwide media was quick to publish the story and the accompanying photographs taken by José Carlos Meirelles. The photos showed people in full body paint aiming bows at the overhead aircraft from which the pictures were taken. Wikinews covered the story as well.

In its Sunday edition, British newspaper The Observer had a story called “Secret of the ‘lost’ tribe that wasn’t” which was about this “discovery” and revealed that the tribe had in fact been known to scientists, including Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), the Brazilian protection agency for Indian interests.

After this revelation, media newswires branded the original story a hoax. These hoax claims spread nearly as quickly as the original story. Rapidly, news sites even claimed that the photos were fake. The true story, however, is more complicated than that.

The Observer’s article featured an interview with José Carlos Meirelles, one of a handful so-called sertanistas that work for the FUNAI. These are field agents that map the areas of uncontacted indigenous peoples, so that their habitat can be protected. He admitted that his desire to protect these tribes had caused him to overstep his mission.

When given the use of an aircraft to seek out new tribes, Meirelles instead flew over an area where he knew a tribe had been observed decades ago. Ultimately, he was hoping to prove that FUNAI’s policy of not contacting the tribes they observe is better for the tribes. With this flight he hoped to find evidence that the tribe, discovered long ago, was better off for not being contacted.

“When I saw them painted red, I was satisfied, I was happy,” he said. “Because painted red means they are ready for war, which to me says they are happy and healthy defending their territory.”

The photos are of a real tribe, long known to Meirelles and other scientists within FUNAI, but protected under Brazilian law.

Meirelles says he has no regrets, because he just wanted to prove these kind of tribes exist and deserve protection. He said that Peruvian President Alan García had claimed that these tribes were imaginary and that he needed to prove they existed. In doing so, he violated FUNAI policies by flying over their area and taking pictures. Both are prohibited. Meirelles claims he will protect the exact location of the tribe’s territory, even if tortured.

Former president of FUNAI, Sydney Possuelo, agreed that the publication of the photos was necessary to quell the doubt about the very existence such uncontacted indigenous peoples.

Survival International, a human rights organisation formed in 1969 that campaigns for the rights of indigenous tribal and uncontacted peoples, admits complicity in the distribution of the original story. Survival International was instrumental in getting the original story international attention.

Nevertheless, Survival International said it did not mislead media because it never described the tribe as “lost”.

“These Indians are in a reserve expressly set aside for the protection of uncontacted tribes: they were hardly ‘unknown’,” said Stephen Corry, director of Survival International in a statement. “What is, and remains, true, is that so far as is known these Indians have no peaceful contact with outsiders.”

“Some of the media got very carried away and started talking about undiscovered tribes,” explains Fiona Watson of Survival International. “There was this interpretation that this was a completely new tribe, completely undiscovered, without bothering to check with sources … Neither the Brazilian government nor Survival has ever used that word, and ‘uncontacted’ means they don’t have any contact with outsiders.”

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre.

PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington University, volunteered at a lab run by Edward Taub, who was testing neuroplasticity on live monkeys. Taub had cut sensory ganglia that supplied nerves to the monkeys’ fingers, hands, arms, legs; with some of the monkeys, he had severed the entire spinal column. He then tried to force the monkeys to use their limbs by exposing them to persistent electric shock, prolonged physical restraint of an intact arm or leg, and by withholding food. With footage obtained by Pacheco, Taub was convicted of six counts of animal cruelty—largely as a result of the monkeys’ reported living conditions—making them “the most famous lab animals in history,” according to psychiatrist Norman Doidge. Taub’s conviction was later overturned on appeal and the monkeys were eventually euthanized.

PETA was born.

In the subsequent decades they ran the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty against Europe’s largest animal-testing facility (footage showed staff punching beagle puppies in the face, shouting at them, and simulating sex acts while taking blood samples); against Covance, the United State’s largest importer of primates for laboratory research (evidence was found that they were dissecting monkeys at its Vienna, Virginia laboratory while the animals were still alive); against General Motors for using live animals in crash tests; against L’Oreal for testing cosmetics on animals; against the use of fur for fashion and fur farms; against Smithfield Foods for torturing Butterball turkeys; and against fast food chains, most recently against KFC through the launch of their website kentuckyfriedcruelty.com.

They have launched campaigns and engaged in stunts that are designed for media attention. In 1996, PETA activists famously threw a dead raccoon onto the table of Anna Wintour, the fur supporting editor-in-chief of Vogue, while she was dining at the Four Seasons in New York, and left bloody paw prints and the words “Fur Hag” on the steps of her home. They ran a campaign entitled Holocaust on your Plate that consisted of eight 60-square-foot panels, each juxtaposing images of the Holocaust with images of factory farming. Photographs of concentration camp inmates in wooden bunks were shown next to photographs of caged chickens, and piled bodies of Holocaust victims next to a pile of pig carcasses. In 2003 in Jerusalem, after a donkey was loaded with explosives and blown up in a terrorist attack, Newkirk sent a letter to then-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to keep animals out of the conflict. As the film shows, they also took over Jean-Paul Gaultier‘s Paris boutique and smeared blood on the windows to protest his use of fur in his clothing.

The group’s tactics have been criticized. Co-founder Pacheco, who is no longer with PETA, called them “stupid human tricks.” Some feminists criticize their campaigns featuring the Lettuce Ladies and “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads as objectifying women. Of their Holocaust on a Plate campaign, Anti-Defamation League Chairman Abraham Foxman said “The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent.” (Newkirk later issued an apology for any hurt it caused). Perhaps most controversial amongst politicians, the public and even other animal rights organizations is PETA’s refusal to condemn the actions of the Animal Liberation Front, which in January 2005 was named as a terrorist threat by the United States Department of Homeland Security.

David Shankbone attended the pre-release screening of I Am An Animal at HBO’s offices in New York City on November 12, and the following day he sat down with Ingrid Newkirk to discuss her perspectives on PETA, animal rights, her responses to criticism lodged against her and to discuss her on-going life’s work to raise human awareness of animal suffering. Below is her interview.

Thursday, January 6, 2005

Colin A. Norman, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science February 2nd, presented the Hubble Origins Probe (HOP) as a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope.

Concerning the shuttle’s estimated one billion dollar cost and 65 monthtime-frame for deployment to earth orbit, Norman said: “Thegroundbreaking science, the cutting edge technology generated inthe development of new instrumentation, the ability of Hubblescience to engage the interest of the public, and its impact onthe imagination of students, make it worthwhile to invest thissum of public funds to complete the last chapter of Hubble’sremarkable legacy.”

HOP will tackle three of the most central intellectual issues ofour age; the nature of dark energy, the natureand distribution of dark matter, and theprevalence of planets, including earths, around other stars.

Norman noted during the testimony that HOP would be, essentially,a lighter copy of the Hubble Space Telescope and would includetwo instruments that were scheduled for installation on theHubble: the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), plus the new Very Wide Field Imager (VWFI) to be paid for and provided by Japan.

The VWFI has a field of view 17 times greater the advancedcamera on board the Hubble now, and is 3-4 times more sensitiveat critical wavelengths. This will provide for mapping 20 timesfaster than achievable by the Hubble at present.

The COS would make possible the identification of the invisibleportion of “ordinary matter,” potentially residing in giganticgas clouds discovered by theChandra X-ray Telescope.

“The WFC3 has greatly enhanced power for discovery in the blue andthe red region of the spectrum and will significantly enhancestudies of galaxies and stars. Its infrared capability isessential to studies of dark energy,” Norman added.

“The decision is obvious. We must continue with theHubble adventure to explore these great questionsfurther, to understand more fully our remarkableUniverse and our place in it. We must do this withintense determination and energy and thus continue toinspire new generations with the wonder and thrill ofexploration and discovery,” concluded Norman.

Colin Norman was educated at the University of Melbourne andOxford University. He has been a professor of physics andastronomy at Johns Hopkins University and astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute since 1984.