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Friday, January 13, 2006

Prominent Thai civil rights lawyer, Somchai Neelapaichit, is now presumed dead, according to an admission by the country’s Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Somchai rose to prominence as a lawyer defending Muslim people accused of involvement in the troubles in the predominantly Muslim provinces of southern Thailand. According to the information provided by the PM, evidence has been provided to the Department of Special Investigations that leads them to believe the lawyer is now dead. This is not considered news by the journalist’s family, according to his wife the country’s Prime Minister admitted to her last year that her husband was dead, and gave assurances that action would be taken against those responsible.

Thailand’s DSI became involved with the disappearance of Somchai in July 2005 when allegations were made that police were involved with the lawyer vanishing. His involvement in cases related to the southern insurgency was suspected to have been behind his disappearance. Somchai had lodged appeals with the Bangkok Criminal Court on behalf of five suspects accused of being involved in a raid on a Narathiwat armoury where weapons were seized and soldiers killed, alleging that they had not been given fair treatment during their prosecution.

The admission follows on from the conviction of Police Major, Nguen Thongsuk, who was prosecuted for illegally detaining the lawyer in 2004. Following that he was last seen in public in March 2004. In the case against the police four other officers were acquitted.

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Wikinews extended invitations by e-mail on March 23 to multiple candidates running in the Texas’ 6th congressional district special election of May 1 to fill a vacancy left upon the death of Republican congressman Ron Wright. Of them, the office of Democrat Daryl Eddings, Sr. agreed to answer some questions by phone March 30 about their campaigns and policies. The following is the interview with Ms Chatham on behalf of Mr Eddings, Sr.

Eddings is a federal law enforcement officer and senior non-commissioned officer in the US military. His experience as operations officer of an aviation unit in the California National Guard includes working in Los Angeles to control riots sparked by the O. J. Simpson murder case and the police handling of Rodney King, working with drug interdiction teams in Panama and Central America and fighting in the Middle East. He is the founder of Operation Battle Buddy, which has under his leadership kept in touch with over 20 thousand veterans and their families. He was born in California, but moved to Midlothian, Texas. He endeavours to bring “good government, not no government”. Campaign manager Faith Chatham spoke to Wikinews on matters ranging from healthcare to housing.

An Inside Elections poll published on March 18 shows Republican candidate Susan Wright, the widow of Ron Wright, is ahead by 21% followed by Democrat Jana Sanchez with 17% and Republican Jake Ellzey with 8% with a 4.6% margin of error among 450 likely voters. The district is considered “lean Republican” by Inside Elections and voted 51% in favour of Donald Trump in last year’s US presidential election. This is down from 54% for Trump in 2016’s presidential election, the same poll stated.

Friday, February 3, 2012

The following is the third in a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2012 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after a brief mention of some of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail, the challengers to President Barack Obama react to the results of the New Hampshire Democratic Party primary, two new political parties choose their first presidential nominees, and an economist who announced his intentions to seek the nomination of Americans Elect answers a few questions for Wikinews.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI went to visit his homeland in Marktl-am-Inn, Germany today. The Pope celebrated Mass in front of 70,000 people, at Kapellplatz square. Benedict had a six-day homecoming tour of his native Bavaria, a state in Germany. He said a prayer remembering 9/11 victims.

Benedict also planned to make visits to where he was born, and to Freising, where he was ordained a priest. He will also visit Regensburg, where he once taught theology; he still has a house in the city, and his brother Georg, a retired priest and choir director, lives there as well.

“This is the mother that generations have come to Altoetting to visit,” he said. “To her we entrust our cares, our needs and our troubles.”

He visited his first house, which he lived till he was two years old. The house had to be cleaned after it was spattered with blue paint early on Sunday. The police described it as vandalism.

“This is a really big thing — I’ve never seen a pope before,” said Juergen Tauer, a 38-year-old computer technician from the Bavarian town of Degendorf who took the day off to travel to Altoetting with his wife and three children. “It’s great that the pope is coming to Altoetting.”

Everyone was excited about the chance to see the pope.

Friday, September 27, 2013

On Tuesday the World Bank released the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development. For Fiji, the report focused on progress being made in the country as it relates to gender roles and the local impact of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Girls from Fiji believe they can attain a university education. In contrast, boys from rural areas in Fiji generally do not believe they will stay in school past the primary level. The report attributes this to the need for boys to contribute to the family income. This pushes them out of school and into the workforce.

It also says girls have less free time than boys. Girls have specific household chores that limit their free time. Boys, in contrast, have fewer structured household tasks, and the tasks they do have require less time. Boys also have greater ability to leave the house than girls. The report says these differences play a role in defining gender roles. This can lead boys into engaging in bad behavior and increase their exposure to drugs and alcohol. The report says this pattern exists elsewhere in countries like Yemen, Sudan, Bhutan, India, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Liberia, and Papua New Guinea. The report quotes a Fijian boy as saying, “Boys, they take their bikes and scoot off and roam around in villages here and there”.

Fijian girls are beginning to challenge these traditional cultural gender norms. While they acknowledge and admire the hard work their mothers have done in the domestic sphere, they seek better education and opportunities.

While the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979, Fiji did not ratify it until August 1995. They were the 139th country to do so. At first, Fiji objected for cultural reasons to one part of CEDAW, and said Constitutional sections containing different rules for men and women on their ability to marry foreigners was incompatible with another part.

These objections were eventually dropped and constitutional changes were made between 1997 and 1999. CEDAW helped bring about family law reform in 1995. A civil uprising in 2000 stalled some iniatives, but the 2002 CEDAW review assisted in reviving efforts. In 2009, the minimum age allowed for both men and women to marry was raised to 18 years.

Since the introduction of CEDAW, reforms have been made that allowed for more equal partners, make divorces easier to get, make it harder for women to be excluded from the home, and improve the amount, and enforced the payment, of spousal support and following a divorce. The report notes that a 2010 review of CEDAW said there is still room for improvement in terms of inheritance rights for women.

Fiji has a population of 854,000, with an annual average percentage population growth of 0.6%. 31% of the population is aged 0 to 14. The average life expectancy for men is 67 years and for women is 71 years.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

A 6-year-old boy and his father were shot and killed Saturday afternoon while eating inside a busy Del Taco fast food restaurant in San Bernadino, California, before the shooter turned a gun on himself.

According to the San Bernadino Police Department, 56-year-old Jimmy Schlager arrived at the Del Taco at 1:15pm PST (2015 UTC) on a bicycle, and, armed with two semi-automatic guns, entered the restaurant and opened fire on a family of four who were dining together. The employees and other customers all ran out of the restaurant and escaped without injury.

The father of the family, identified as 33-year-old Alex Trujillo, was declared dead at the scene, said the San Bernadino Fire Department. His wife and two sons were taken to Loma Linda University Medical Center in critical condition. His 6-year-old son, Adrian, died shortly after. The victims each suffered two bullet wounds, except the mother, who police say received up to ten gunshots. The names of the 29-year-old woman and her 5-year-old son have not been released. Both remained in critical condition on Saturday night.

After shooting the family, Schlager, later identified as the woman’s step-father, shot himself in the head. He was taken to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, where he later died from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police said Schlager had previously been arrested a number of times, on charges that included theft and assault with a deadly weapon.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Researchers have found a crucial genetic difference between humans and chimps that could help explain our language and speech abilities. The difference lies in a gene called FOXP2 which encodes for a protein of the same name. This acts as a transcription factor, controlling the activity of other genes.

The human and chimp versions of the protein differ in only two of their 740 amino acid components, but when researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, replaced the human gene with the chimp version in neurons grown in the laboratory, they found it affected the expression of at least 116 other genes.

The results are detailed in a paper published on Thursday in the scientific journal Nature.

Author of the study Dr. Daniel Geschwind, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, said the gene had a “major role” in differences between chimps and humans. “We showed that the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 not only look different but function differently too.”

Some of the affected genes control the formation of connections in the brain, whilst others relate to facial movements. Several have already been found to be involved in language disorders. Mutations in FOXP2 itself were also known to affect speech and language; the gene was first identified in members of a family suffering from language problems who were found to share a genetic mutation.

Frances Vargha-Khadem at University College London has studied patients with FOXP2 mutations, and agrees with the new research. As well as language problems, some of her subjects have changes in the shape of their jaws, mouths and tongues. She thinks that chimps may also have these differences.

“We believe FOXP2 is not only important for the higher order cognitive aspect of language but also for the motor aspect of speech and language,” said Genevieve Konopka, one of the authors of the paper at UCLA.

Previous research indicates that the changes in FOXP2 occurred around 200,000 years ago with the rise of modern humans. Geschwind also suggests that several of the related genes may have evolved together. Preliminary studies have shown signs that they too emerged relatively recently.

Scientists are now keen to further study FOXP2 and the genes that it affects. Geschwind believes this could eventually lead to breakthroughs in treatment for disorders such as autism and schizophrenia, which affect language skills.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the A.P. Giannini Foundation and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.

Monday, January 1, 2007

More bombs went off just after midnight (0500 GMT) on New Year’s Day in Bangkok, injuring eight people near a shopping mall where hours before a New Year’s Eve countdown was cancelled due to a string of six bombings earlier in the evening.

The first bomb exploded at a seafood restaurant on the Saen Saeb Canal near Pratunam Pier just seconds after midnight.

Three foreigners and two Thais were injured. One of the foreigners had her legs amputated by the blast, according to television and local newspaper reports. The foreign tourists were having dinner at the restaurant.

Police said the bomb was hidden in a tire at the pier.

A second bomb exploded in a telephone booth near a pedestrian bridge at CentralWorld, where thousands of people had gathered earlier in the evening for a countdown party and had been urged by authorities to leave the area and go home. Several foreigners were injured and rushed to hospitals.

Another bomb was found and disposed of without incident at Suan Lum Night Bazaar, another late-night venue for tourists.

A possible bomb was investigated at Buddy Bar, a popular music venue on Khaosan Road. It turned out to be a false report. Police had earlier closed the venue and other bars on the street frequented by backpackers, urging people to return to their hotels and guesthouses.

Earlier in the evening, bombs had gone off at six locations across the city, from about 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Twenty-five people were injured and three later died at hospitals from their injuries. The biggest toll was at Victory Monument, where 17 people were injured, two of them dying from their injuries. Other targets were a police booth at Saphan Kwai intersection, where two people were injured, and a market in Khlong Toei, where three people were injured, one fatally. At Seacon Square shopping mall, a bomb was found in a trash can inside the mall and taken to the parking lot, where it exploded without injuring anyone. Police booths on Sukhumvit Soi 62 and in suburban Nonthaburi were also hit, but there were no injuries.

After the bombings, Bangkok Governor Apirak Kosayothin had ordered the cancellation of the countdown celebrations at Central World and Sanam Luang and other smaller ones.

“Due to several bomb explosions in Bangkok and for the sake of peace and security, I would ask all of you to return to your homes now,” Apirak told a crowd of around 5,000 people at CentralWorld. Most of the crowd dispersed quickly and calmly.

Army Commander-in-Chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin ordered soldiers deployed around the capital. Security was intensified on the Metro and Skytrain rail systems. The Skytrain cancelled plans to run all night and closed at midnight as usual. Department stores closed early.

Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont visited victims at a local hospital. He appeared on television looking tense, telling reporters he didn’t know who was responsible for the attacks.

Surayud was appointed premier after a coup d’état on September 19 in which the military led by Sonthi ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

The Nation newspaper quoted a “security source” as saying “the old power clique” was behind the bombing.

However, there is also the ongoing violence by Muslim separatists in the South Thailand insurgency, which has left 1,900 people dead since 2004.