Monday, December 28, 2009File:4wiki nykaenen matti.JPG

Police in Finland have arrested Matti Nykänen, a four-time Olympic gold medallist ski jumper, on suspicion of attempted murder. He spent the weekend in custody following an incident on Christmas Day in which his wife was injured.

Nykänen, 46, is alleged to have left his wife with wounds to her hands and forehead in a knife attack, causing her to flee to a neighbour’s house where she called the police. The Agence France-Presse reported that the Helsingin Sanomat expects Nykänen, from Jyväskylä, to be charged tomorrow.

Nykänen, who won three of his gold medals at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary and has nineteen medals from various competitions, is best known for sport although recently he has taken up singing, performing in bars and nightclubs, and written an autobiography. A regular sight in the tabloid press, he has sought treatment as an alcoholic and is known to the police, previously serving time in prison for violent offences.

His convictions include assaulting his fourth wife in 2006, and he served four months despite requesting community service; a stab attack from behind with a five-inch blade on a friend landed him a two-year suspended sentence and put the man in hospital. He also served thirteen months for stabbing a friend while drinking and has been prosecuted for attacking a man with a knife in a restaurant, a case dropped through lack of evidence.

He was regularly drunk in training sessions and in public. A weekly Finnish gossip magazine paid for a series of laughing gas treatments in exchange for story rights in a bid to combat his alcoholism. He has worked as PR representative for Jyväskylä and gave relationship advice answering phones for a sex line. He has also been employed by a club known to hire out prostitutes which asked him to be a stripper; media reported he did private shows, an allegation he denies. Swedish and US porn producers offered him roles in their films.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Wikinews has obtained a list of middle management teaching staff allegedly made redundant, or laid off due to restructuring, by Sunshine Coast Grammar School (SCGS), in Queensland, Australia. Sources say that those staff have been told that they can apply for new positions that have opened up.

The list, published on the SCGS alumni Facebook page, contains the names of twenty-two staff members, eight of which taught this article’s primary contributor. Seventeen positions are reportedly being opened up by the private Christian school, eight of which seem to significantly overlap the old ones.

The changes are, apparently, designed to get teachers back into the classroom. “We are not cutting subject choices and extracurricular activities, but retaining a student-driven curriculum that integrates with the new Australian Curriculum, in keeping with our commitment to teaching and learning opportunities,” said headmaster Nigel Fairbairn.

Fairbairn could not guarantee that any of the staff would be given a position in 2011. “That will depend on how many people on that list apply for new positions of responsibility and are successful,” he said.

“The Head of the School cannot guarantee the 21 staff a job at the School in the future, with many of the positions being advertised to external applicants,” said Terry Burke, secretary for the Independent Education Union of Australia Queensland branch (Queensland Independent Education Union, QIEU).

“There has been little or no consultation with affected staff, who should not have to reapply for their jobs,” he said. “Most of the proposed restructuring is highly questionable and places at risk the high quality education at the School.”

Some former students responded angrily to the news.

Four of the affected teachers “were the backbone of the school when [controversy surrounded founding headmaster John Burgess] happened,” a former prefect (student leader) said. “They got it through that crisis and this is the thanks they get.”

“People are angry and shocked,” they continued. “I am aware of at least 10 families who have said they will pull their children out of the school – it’s that bad.”

The student body has not ruled out protesting the schools plans. “It’s getting to that stage,” the former prefect said. “People are trying to look at it in an intelligent way but there is so much anger out there.”

Wikinews understands that Fairbairn attracted criticism when he was a head teacher in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a former student claimed that Fairbairn “replaced the open and welcoming culture … with the tyrannical and oppressive one.”

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

With many venues reporting sell-out shows, the 68th year of the Edinburgh Festival attracted visitors from around the globe. Wikinews’ Brian McNeil roamed the city for the four weeks of the event, capturing the colour, spectacle, and comedy, in photos.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

An Indian engineer working in Afghanistan was kidnapped on Friday evening while travelling from Kalat, the capital of Zabul province, to Ghazni. A. Suryanarayana works for a Bahraini telecommunications and construction firm, Al Mayyad. According to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, Yosuf Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Taliban, has claimed responsibility.

Later, another spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Mohammad Yousuf threatened to kill Suryanarayana within hours if their demand that all Indian citizens leave Afghanistan within 24 hours is not met. The abducted man’s wife has said that she and her three children will commit suicide if anything untoward happens to her husband. A team of Indian experts headed by the Joint Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs, K.B.S. Katoch, has been dispatched to Afghanistan to facilitate the release of Suryanarayana.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005A team of Australian surgeons yesterday reattached both hands and one foot to 10-year-old Perth boy, Terry Vo, after a brick wall which collapsed during a game of basketball fell on him, severing the limbs. The wall gave way while Terry performed a slam-dunk, during a game at a friend’s birthday party.

The boy was today awake and smiling, still in some pain but in good spirits and expected to make a full recovery, according to plastic surgeon, Mr Robert Love.

“What we have is parts that are very much alive so the reattached limbs are certainly pink, well perfused and are indeed moving,” Mr Love told reporters today.

“The fact that he is moving his fingers, and of course when he wakes up he will move both fingers and toes, is not a surprise,” Mr Love had said yesterday.

“The question is more the sensory return that he will get in the hand itself and the fine movements he will have in the fingers and the toes, and that will come with time, hopefully. We will assess that over the next 18 months to two years.

“I’m sure that he’ll enjoy a game of basketball in the future.”

The weight and force of the collapse, and the sharp brick edges, resulted in the three limbs being cut through about 7cm above the wrists and ankle.

Terry’s father Tan said of his only child, the injuries were terrible, “I was scared to look at him, a horrible thing.”

The hands and foot were placed in an ice-filled Esky and rushed to hospital with the boy, where three teams of medical experts were assembled, and he was given a blood transfusion after experiencing massive blood loss. Eight hours of complex micro-surgery on Saturday night were followed by a further two hours of skin grafts yesterday.

“What he will lose because it was such a large zone of traumatised skin and muscle and so on, he will lose some of the skin so he’ll certainly require lots of further surgery regardless of whether the skin survives,” said Mr Love said today.

The boy was kept unconscious under anaesthetic between the two procedures. In an interview yesterday, Mr Love explained why:

“He could have actually been woken up the next day. Because we were intending to take him back to theatre for a second look, to look at the traumatised skin flaps, to close more of his wounds and to do split skin grafting, it was felt the best thing to do would be to keep him stable and to keep him anaesthetised.”

Professor Wayne Morrison, director of the respected Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery and head of plastic and hand surgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, said he believed the operation to be a world first.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The European Commission currently has proposals on the table to extend performers’ copyright terms. Described by Professor Martin Kretschmer as the “Beatles Extension Act”, the proposed measure would extend copyright from 50 to 95 years after recording. A vast number of classical tracks are at stake; the copyright on recordings from the fifties and early sixties is nearing its expiration date, after which it would normally enter the public domain or become ‘public property’. E.U. Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services Charlie McCreevy is proposing this extension, and if the other relevant Directorate Generales (Information Society, Consumers, Culture, Trade, Competition, etc.) agree with the proposal, it will be sent to the European Parliament.

Wikinews contacted Erik Josefsson, European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.), who invited us to Brussels, the heart of E.U. policy making, to discuss this new proposal and its implications. Expecting an office interview, we arrived to discover that the event was a party and meetup conveniently coinciding with FOSDEM 2008 (the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting). The meetup was in a sprawling city centre apartment festooned with E.F.F. flags and looked to be a party that would go on into the early hours of the morning with copious food and drink on tap. As more people showed up for the event it turned out that it was a truly international crowd, with guests from all over Europe.

Eddan Katz, the new International Affairs Director of the E.F.F., had come over from the U.S. to connect to the European E.F.F. network, and he gladly took part in our interview. Eddan Katz explained that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is “A non-profit organisation working to protect civil liberties and freedoms online. The E.F.F. has fought for information privacy rights online, in relation to both the government and companies who, with insufficient transparency, collect, aggregate and make abuse of information about individuals.” Another major focus of their advocacy is intellectual property, said Eddan: “The E.F.F. represents what would be the public interest, those parts of society that don’t have a concentration of power, that the private interests do have in terms of lobbying.”

Becky Hogge, Executive Director of the U.K.’s Open Rights Group (O.R.G.), joined our discussion as well. “The goals of the Open Rights Group are very simple: we speak up whenever we see civil, consumer or human rights being affected by the poor implementation or the poor regulation of new technologies,” Becky summarised. “In that sense, people call us -I mean the E.F.F. has been around, in internet years, since the beginning of time- but the Open Rights Group is often called the British E.F.F.“

Monday, February 25, 2008

Parts of a body belonging to a child have been discovered at the Haut de la Garenne in Saint Martin, Jersey, a United Kingdom Crown dependency off the coast of Normandy, France.

The Victorian building, which was originally built as a children’s care home and is now a youth hostel, has been under investigation recently as part of an inquiry into child abuse which occurred during the 1960s. The investigation has now been refocused with the aim to excavate further the grounds of the building, under the command of a specialist team from the UK who will use ground scanners and sniffer dogs to detect any other possible remains.

The body is believed to date from the early 1980s though further information about the identity of the child has not yet been released. The remains were found buried underneath a concrete floor inside the building. Today, the Guardian newspaper revealed that there are fears of a possible six further bodies buried on the site.

“There could be six, but it could be higher than that,” according to lead investigator Lenny Harper, who further said, “Allegations range from physical assaults right through to rape. It is difficult to envisage more horrific crimes than some of those that are alleged to have been carried out here.”

A helpline set up to find more information about alleged child abuse at the Haut de la Garenne and Jersey Sea Scouts has garnered a total of 140 contacts, made up of those claiming to be witnesses or victims to the crimes. The information gathered from the telephone inquiry triggered the search of the grounds.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Art thieves in Greece broke into the Athens National Gallery on Monday and stole three valuable works of art.

Among them was a painting by famous Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, dated 1939, called Woman’s Head which was a gift to the Greek people for their resistance to the Nazis during World War 2. The other two works were Mill by Piet Mondrian and a sketch of St. Diego de Alcala by Guglielmo Caccia. A fourth painting, Landscape, also by Piet Mondrian was dropped by the thieves when pursued by security. All three works stolen were stripped from their frames.

The police stated multiple alarms during the evening of the heist in other parts of the building had distracted the gallery guard. Investigating yet another alarm, he saw the shadow of a fleeing individual. Citizen’s Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis apologized for the loss, citing that the security at the gallery was “non-existent”.

The value of the works stolen was not yet determined by gallery officials. The artwork in question was on display at the gallery as part of an exhibition called “Unknown Treasures”, including works of Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

TEL AVIV – Prime Minister Ariel Sharon considered a temporary coup d’état of the Israeli government with other members of the Israeli military shortly before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, it has been revealed.

Days leading up to the ’67 Arab-Israeli War featured a build-up of Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi forces on the border that was perceived by many as a threat to the very existence of Israel. Military advisors pressured for a preemptive strike, which was felt necessary to offset Israeli numerical inferiority. Then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was under intense pressure from his cabinet and military on the decision to pursue diplomacy or war. Many pro-war officials considered war inevitable and a delay only harmful to Israel.

Ariel Sharon was a Major General in the Israeli military during the war. On May 28th, he advised the Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin that the cabinet could be detained and a coup declared. Sharon and others felt that the civilian government was unable to reach a necessary decision. The military would make the decision the government would not, and begin war in the government’s best interests.

He explains: “We often asked whether in the State of Israel there could arise a situation in which the army takes control. And I always said it was impossible, that this couldn’t happen in the State of Israel.”

“And then, after the meeting on May 28, I said to the chief of staff and others who were present, that there had arisen a situation in which this could happen, and that it would also be well accepted – that is to say, to seize control not in the framework of wanting to govern, but in the framework of making a decision, the fundamental decision, and that [the] army can make it without the government.”

“I don’t remember if he agreed or not, but I think he also viewed it in this way.”

Sharon stressed that no definite plan existed. However, he defended giving it serious consideration, saying: “They [the civilian government] would have accepted it with a sense of relief. That was my feeling.”

Prime Minister Eshkol later decided in favor of war on June 5th. Ariel Sharon served as a commander of the Southern Division. His comments may be found in full in Ma’arachot, a publication by the Israeli defense ministry.