Thursday, November 29, 2007

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan gave up his uniform in a ceremony yesterday in Rawalpindi. He handed power over to General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani at the headquarters of the Pakistani Army, after being the leader of the army for nine years.

In his final address as leader of the army, he said that the army was the saviour of Pakistan and that the army was his life. He also expressed his pride in being the leader of what he called a “great force.”

Musharraf had been under a lot of pressure to quit as army chief, since the country was put into the spotlight as a result of a state of emergency being declared. He is expected to be sworn in as the civilian president of Pakistan on Thursday.

Both the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, and the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, welcomed the change of duties. However, Bhutto indicated her party may not be prepared to accept Musharraf in his new non-military leadership role. Condoleezza Rice requested the state of emergency be lifted before the planned elections, which are due to take place in January.

Musharraf said General Kayani was “an excellent soldier” and that “the armed forces under his command will achieve great heights.”

General Kayani was named as the successor to Musharraf in October, before the state of emergency was declared in early November.

Friday, May 19, 2006

According to psychologists in Leipzig, Germany, apes and some birds are able to plan their actions ahead of time.

Psychologists Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology say that apes are able to save tools to use at a later time, that will assist them in retrieving food.

The results of the testing are “groundbreaking” and is “a starting point from which we can begin to reconstruct the evolution of the human mind. Apes and jays can also anticipate future needs by remembering past events, contradicting the notion that such cognitive behavior only emerged in hominids,” said Thomas Suddendorf, a psychologist at the University of Queensland Brisbane, Australia.

One aspect of the study is that “our extraordinary abilities of planning for the future did not evolve entirely de novo. Planning for future needs is not uniquely human,” added Suddendorf.

An experiment was performed using bonobos and orangutans. The psychologists placed the apes alone in a room for five minutes. Each of them had a choice of two tools that would allow them to retrieve food and six that would not. The apes were allowed to look at and observe the tools; however, they were not allowed to handle them.

The apes were then taken to a room next door, allowed to take whatever tools they chose, and left alone in the room for at least one hour, while a researcher removed all other tools from the first room. The apes then returned to the first room (where the food was), but the food was not accessible unless they had the right tool to retrieve it.

After repeating the same test several times with each ape, researchers began to see that most apes would begin to use the right tool for the job. Researchers also received similar results even when the apes were left alone in a room overnight where they would sleep.

To make sure that the apes were not associating the tools with the food, they removed the food from the room, but would still give it to the apes if they used the right tool to retrieve it. After this change, most of them did not bring the proper tools, which researchers say confirm that the retrieval is a way of planning for the job.

In experiments using scrub jays (found mostly in the western United States), at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, psychologists have shown that the birds, who usually hide their food to eat later, will hide it again if an enemy bird saw them do it the first time, unless the bird is dominant. The subordinate jay could however, fight the other for the food.

“These results suggest scrub jays remember who observed them make specific caches,” said Joanna Dally who was involved in the study with the scrub jays.

“Together with recent evidence from scrub jays, our results suggest that future planning is not a uniquely human ability, thus contradicting the notion that it emerged in hominids only with the past 2.5 to 1.6 million years,” said Mulcahy and Call in the study.

Saturday, October 8, 2005

The first veto of United States President George W. Bush’s presidency may be used to block an amendment that bans torture and mistreatment of detainees, proposed by two Republican senators. The White House sent a “statement of administration policy” to the Senate declaring strong opposition to the legislation, alleging that it would tie the nation’s hands in the “War on Terrorism”. The statement said that if the bill’s final version contained the anti-torture terms, then “the president’s senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.”

The amendment, an addition to the $440 billion dollar military spending bill, proposed by senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, would establish the Army Field Manual as the uniform standard for the interrogation of Department of Defense detainees and secondly prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons detained by the U.S. government.[1]

The legislation comes in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and allegations of Human Rights Watch, which, in a recent report, accused soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division of “systematically torturing Iraqi detainees”. The report was critizised by a Department of Defense spokesman as using “distortions and errors in fact.”

The amendment received 90 votes in support, and 9 votes against in the Senate. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as 28 other retired senior military officers, also endorsed it.

General Powell said in a letter to McCain: “Our troops need to hear from the Congress, which has an obligation to speak to such matters. I also believe the world will note that America is making a clear statement with respect to the expected future behavior of our soldiers.” Powell said the Senate action “will help deal with the terrible public diplomacy crisis created by Abu Ghraib.”

McCain, a one-time P.O.W. during his military service in the Vietnam War, said after the vote that the White House should not be working against him on this issue: “We think it would be very helpful because it would send a message to the world that the United States of America does not engage in torture. We will not treat people inhumanely. We will adhere to treaties that we are signatories to, and the men and women who do the interrogating will have clear instructions as to how to conduct interrogations.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who later voted for the bill, and White House lobbyists led the unsuccessful opposition to the amendment and senator Ted Stevens had argued that the amendment would prevent “our people from taking the leadership. (sic)”

Saturday, November 4, 2006

On November 13, Torontonians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Scarborough East (Ward 43). One candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Paul Ainslie, Amarjeet Chhabra, Mujeeb Khan, Glenn Kitchen, John Laforet, Abdul Patel, Jim Robb, and Kumar Sethi.

For more information on the election, read Toronto municipal election, 2006.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced last Wednesday that it has agreed definitively to merge with Chicago-based Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx) and form a new publicly traded, for-profit company known as NYSE Group. This announcement was followed two days later by NASDAQ®, which independently announced a definitive agreement to purchase Instinet Group.

Archipelago and Instinet are innovative e-trading (electronic trading) companies, and formerly were the two largest American rivals to NYSE and NASDAQ, in recent years taking increasingly large portions of their market share. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other regulatory agencies still have to review and approve the transactions, particularly with respect to US securities law and antitrust law, in order to ensure that the marketplace remains lawful and competitive.

Other pending issues for NASDAQ include obtaining the approval of Instinet shareholders, as well as customary closing conditions. NYSE must obtain the approval of its members and Archipelago shareholders.

These changes, a reaction to increased e-trading competition and a changed regulatory environment, will result in NASDAQ and NYSE trading each other’s shares and attempting to grab market share, which many hope will drive down transaction costs and ultimately benefit consumers. However, at least one commentator, Dan Ackman writing in Forbes, has noted that the trading commission at the NYSE currently averages less than a nickel (US$0.05) per share, and was less enthusiastic about potential efficiency gains from electronic trading at the exchange.

The transactions are also intended to make the two leading American stock exchanges more globally competitive with such exchanges as the London Stock Exchange, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the Australian Stock Exchange located in Sydney.

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.