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Sunday, June 28, 2020

Last month, a study conducted by archæologist Dr. Naomi Martisius and other researchers concluded Neanderthals living in Europe tens of thousands of years ago were more sophisticated than previously thought. The now-extinct species used to carefully select bones from a particular animal species to manufacture their bone tools, the research showed. The research was published on May 8 in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal.

Dr Martisius and her team used five bone tools discovered from Neanderthals’ sites in southwest France for this research. Four of these bone tools were found in a site called Abri Peyrony and the other one was from Pech-de-l’Azé I. These tools were just a few centimetres in size and were about 50 thousand years old, Dr Martisius told Wikinews. Microscopy analysis of these bone tools called lissoirs (smoothers) suggested Neanderthals used these tools for working animal skin to leathers.

The study stated the fauna of the sites were primarily medium-sized ungulates such as reindeer, in one layer nearly 90%. Despite the overabundance of medium-sized ungulates, Neanderthals used ribs of large bovids for making lissoirs. Dr Martisius told Wikinews this was likely due to the physical characteristics of the bovid ribs, which were “thicker” and “stronger” as compared to the “thin and flimsy ribs” of reindeers. In order to check the origins of the bone tools, the researchers used a technology called non-destructive Zooarchæology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS).

Instead of damaging the bone artefacts in order to discover its origins, the researchers collected collagen from the plastic containers in which these artefacts were kept. Collagen is a type of protein. These bone artefacts were kept in plastic containers: some were kept for about five years, some for just a few months. During this time, the collagen proteins from bone tools were stuck to the walls of its plastic containers. The collagen samples collected from the walls of the containers are broken into smaller molecules called peptides by using a chemical enzyme called trypsin.

After the trypsin has broken collagen fibres into peptides, it is analysed using a technology called Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) Time-of-Flight mass spectrometer (ToF MS). The assisting matrix is a coloured compound. The acidic peptide is combined with the matrix, vapourised, and peptides are released. Some of them are positively-charged particles which travel across a vacuum tube in an electric field. Depending on the weight of the peptides, these molecules reach the end of the vacuum tube at different instances of time, forming a spectrum. These graphs are like unique fingerprints of a species: they are different for different species of animals. Looking at the database of such graphs, taxonomic identifications of the collagen proteins came be made.

All four bone tools from Abri Peyrony gave positive results and showed that the bones were made from large bovids, even though reindeer were more abundant during that time. One of the advantages of using bovid ribs over reindeer’s thin ribs was the bovid ribs would be more resistant to breaking during flexion, Dr Martisius said.

Dr Martisius said such non-destructive ZooMS analysis was previously conducted, but for tools no older than a few centuries. She said such an analysis had never been previously conducted for artefacts so ancient.

Wikinews caught up with Dr Martisius to discuss this research in-depth.

Monday, September 18, 2006

The special TADA court hearing the 1993 Mumbai blasts case has found two of the accused, Asghar Mukadam and his accomplice Qureshi guilty of executing the explosion near Plaza Cinema that killed 10 people and injured 27. Mukadam, the manager of main-accused Tiger Memon (who is still absconding), parked a car laden with RDX near the theatre. Qureshi aided Mukadam by arranging for the explosives to be brought from Raigad to Mumbai.

Special Judge P.D Kode convicted Mukadam of 12 of the 14 charges brought against him, including abetting and intentionally facilitating the commission of terrorist acts, collecting funds for terrorist acts and conspiracy. Qureshi was found guilty of transporting the RDX via boat to the Maharashtra coast, and then bringing it into Mumbai. He was also found to have participated in the meeting where the bombings were planned, and visiting Pakistan to be trained in the execution of the attacks.

The TADA court began pronouncing the verdict in the 1993 bombings which killed 257 in 13 explosions, on the 12 of this month, and has so far found seven persons guilty in the serial blasts case. Four members of the Memon family were convicted last week, and Mohammad Shoaib Kasam Ghansar (Tiger Memon’s hitman) was found guilty on Thursday.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Guinea’s military government has said that it is launching what it calls an independent investigation into last week’s killing of opposition demonstrators by security forces. Military ruler Captain Moussa Dadis Camara told state television that the commission of inquiry is his government’s response to calls from the international community, political opponents, and local human rights groups to prosecute those responsible for last Monday’s violence.

A Justice Ministry statement said that the commission will include members of the ruling military council, political parties, trade unions, civil society groups, human rights organizations, lawyers, judges, and university professors.

In all, the military government said 31 people will investigate what happened when security forces opened fire on opposition demonstrators at Conakry‘s main sports stadium. Human rights groups say at least 157 people were killed in the clashes. The military says 57 people were killed, most in the crush of protesters fleeing the stadium.

Captain Camara has blamed both “uncontrollable elements” of the military and political opponents who he said should not have staged an illegal protest.

Opposition leaders say they will not join proposed regional efforts to mediate the crisis unless Captain Camara resigns and his military council is dissolved.

There was no immediate word on whether opposition groups would take part in the military government’s probe into the killings last week.

The Economic Community of West African States says it is organizing a regional investigation involving both the United Nations and the African Union.

Human Rights Watch says that is an “excellent move.” But it also supports Guinea’s own inquiry into the events of September 28.

“You could have up to 150 or even more murders of mostly peaceful demonstrators. Not to mention the horrific sexual abuse that happened against an unknown number of women and other abuses that were happening including theft and looting and so on,” said Corinne Dufka, head of the Human Rights Watch operations in West Africa. “This was done by all accounts by members of the security forces. They need to be held accountable.”

Dufka said the volume of photographic evidence of sexual assaults against women at the protest should be front and center in any investigation. “You see security forces from a number of different corps,” said Dufka. “You have members of the presidential guard. You have what appear to be members of the military, the police, and the gendarmerie. So right there you have a number of people who are responsible.”

The demonstrators were protesting Captain Camara’s expected run for the presidency. He has not yet formally announced his candidacy, but has told supporters that he will not insult them by ignoring their demands that he run.

The African Union suspended Guinea following Captain Camara’s December coup. The AU said it will sanction him later this month unless he makes clear that he will not be a candidate in elections scheduled for January.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Many rhythm gamers are anticipating the release of “Taiko no Tatsujin 11: Asian Version”, the Namco Bandai Games Inc. (NBGI) beta version of which was recently showcased at the 2008 Taipei Game Show.

In fact, several managers from amusement stores in Taiwan frequently imported large quantities of arcade games, including rhythm games. Eventually, some slot machine developers modified codes from several game consoles like the Wii, PlayStation 2 (PS2), and Sega Saturn to fulfill needs for amusement arcades, but they risked hardware failure and copyright infringement.

But before those modifications happened in Taiwan, many rhythm games just used songs from other arcade machines due to copyright issues from enrolled songs.

The upcoming game will benefit Mandarin-language gamers after its release, but it may hide some secrets behind the development of “Taiko no Tatsujin 11: Asian Version”. Wikinews reporter Rico Shen recently interviewed the producer of “Taiko no Tatsujin” Tatsuhisa Yabushita to talk about some of the background of this upcoming game and its series.

Friday, April 1, 2005

, holds a majority in the new parliament, and asserts that sharia is “non-negotiable”.]]

Half of those who won seats reserved for women in the new National Assembly of Iraq are members of a coalition dominated by Shi’a religious parties, and they say they want Islamic sharia-based laws with legal differences in treatment for the sexes, and which permit a certain level of domestic violence.

Says Nada al-Bayiati, of the Women’s Organisation for Freedom in Iraq, “It’s weakening our position. How can you argue for women’s rights when the women are undermining you?”

Eighty-nine in all, women make up one-third of the current parliament.

The Shi’a cleric-backed United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), holds the majority of seats in the National Assembly since the recent election, and asserts that sharia is “non-negotiable”.

“If you say to a man he cannot use force against a woman, you are asking the impossible,” pediatrician turned politician, Jenan Al-Ubaedey of the UIA, told The Times.

“So we say a husband can beat his wife, but he cannot leave a mark. If he does that, he will be punished.”

“If you don’t allow your husband to take another wife, he’d have an affair anyway […] I’d rather know my husband has another wife that I know about.”

Under a proposed law, men would be allowed up to four wives, regardless of the desires of the first wife, while women may have only one husband.

And if two other laws currently slated for debate go through, women will only be eligible for half the inheritance given to men, and denied custody of children over the age of 2 in the event of divorce.

Legitimacy of the election, and the Assembly it elected, has been questioned.

Forty Sunni groups via the Muslim Scholars Association, had called for boycotting to protest the U.S.-led occupation, while Shi’a on the other hand vigorously promoted voting in the election, influencing not only voter turnout, but also what candidates were on offer.

And over 40% of Iraq’s population live in mostly-Sunni governates of Baghdad, Al Anbar, Ninawa and Salah ad Din, where entrenched violence was significant-enough to dissuade willing voters.

Turnout in these four governates ranged from a mere 2%, in Al Anbar, to a high of only 51%, in Baghdad. Comparatively, in the nine more peaceful, mainly-Shi’a regions in the South, turnouts averaged 71%; and for the three Kurdish regions in the North, the average was 85%. [1]

Final official figures of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI), reveal that overall, 58% of registered voters actually voted in the 2005 election — however many who were eligible did not register including three quarters of expatriates.

One woman who abstained, Houzan Mahmoud, a UK based spokesperson for The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, did so not because of a clerical command or to protest the occupation. In a published statement she says that violence that has erupted against women since the invasion, and that policies do not differ significantly between candidates, when it comes to women’s rights.

“If Iraqi women take part in Sunday’s poll, who are they to vote for? Women’s rights are ignored by most of the groupings on offer,” she writes.

“In reality, these elections are, for Iraq’s women, little more than a cruel joke. Amid the suicide attacks, kidnappings and US-led military assaults of the 20-odd months since Saddam’s fall, the little-reported phenomenon is the sharp increase in the persecution of Iraqi women. Women are the new victims of Islamic groups intent on restoring a medieval barbarity and of a political establishment that cares little for women’s empowerment.

“Having for years enjoyed greater rights than other women in the Middle East, women in Iraq are now losing even their basic freedoms. The right to choose their clothes, the right to love or marry whom they want. Of course women suffered under Saddam. I fled his cruel regime. I personally witnessed much brutality, but the subjugation of women was never a goal of the Baath party.”

However, according to the US State Department’s Fact Sheet Iraqi Women Under Saddam’s Regime: A Population Silenced, Iraqi women in fact endured significant political repression under the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi government and its representitives are claimed to have used beheading, rape, torture, and murder as political tools against certain women such as political dissidents or those whom the government declared to be prostitutes, in order to maintain their party’s hold on power.

Some of these kinds of violence continue to be perpetrated by certain individuals and groups in the new Iraq. Mahmoud continued, “In the last six months at least eight women have been killed in Mosul alone – all apparently by Islamic groups clamping down on female independence. Among these, a professor from the city’s law school was shot and beheaded, a vet was killed on her way to work, and a pharmacist from the Alkhansah hospital was shot dead on her doorstep.”

But the move to sharia law actually came before the election. In January 2004, the Iraqi Women’s League (IWL) expressed horror at the interim Shi’a dominated Iraqi Governing Council’s Decision 137, which they explain replaced Iraqi civil law concerning family law, with sharia law.

“Decision 137 establishes sectarianism and gives formal power to informal, unaccountable and self appointed religious ‘leaders’,” the IWL statement said.

“The Iraqi family law (otherwise known as the Personal Status Law) is the achievement of the struggle of the Iraqi people for much of the past century not a law written by Saddam Hussein.”

After protest by IWL and others, and appeal to former U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, the Decision was anulled.

Iraq! What About Iraqi Women?, an essay by Bhaskar Dasgupta, tells that Iraqi women were winning rights as early as the 1920s and 30s, which improved their status. By the time of the overthrow of Hussein, they had formal equality under law, including not only the right to vote and freedom from wearing of veils, but the right to work with equal pay, paid maternity leave, higher education, extensive medical coverage, and eligibility for political office or voluntary military service, among other rights.

According to Dasgupta, these rights made Iraq a leader in equality of the sexes in the Middle East for the better part of last century, although a number of studies reveal horrific abuses of both women and men, under Hussein’s regime, and Hussein enabled laws allowing men to kill their wives in certain situations (see Wikipedia article Honor killing for background on the practice).

The first Gulf War in 1991, and ensuing sanctions, made economic conditions in Iraq difficult, and literacy and employment rates of women began falling.

Now the majority party in the only internationally recognised parliament of Iraq wants to reaffirm the interim Iraqi Governing Council’s repeal of the Personal Status Law, and its replacement with laws based on sharia, a doctrine which in some countries sees women stoned to death as punishment for engaging in extra-marital love affairs.

The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in its latest newsletter, Equal Rights Now, alleges widespread violence against women since the U.S.-led invasion. The violence has been facilitated by the general lack of order, and includes documented cases coming from U.S. troops, as well as locals.

“Violence against Iraqi women in general and in the city of Mosul in particular continues. Groups of political Islamists, in collaboration with remnants of the Ba’ath Party, have launched a campaign of terror and killing against women for no reason other than that we are women,” reads one report.

The report continues to detail killings of women attributed to Islamist gangs, who “have sanctioned the raping of’quislings‘ and ‘infidels‘ because they claim those women’s souls, property and bodies are fair game for all so-called freedom fighters”.

Many other such reports exist, despite a strong taboo against discussion of sexual abuse, which could be expected to result in significant under-reporting of these cases. However, many of the allegations have not had the degree of media coverage that the notorious abuse cases of Abu Ghraib Prison of 2003-04 received.

According to Dr Udaedey, many of the women legislators are in fact puppets. “It’s true that many of them — maybe a third — have just been put there by the men. They are not aware and don’t come to meetings, so they don’t know what’s going on,” she told The Times. “About 10 per cent of them are learning, but the others don’t really care.”

However, Dr. Udaedey plans to remained focused on protecting the role of Iraqi women as shar’ia law seems destined to become a guiding influence on Iraq’s new constitution. According to her interview in the Christian Science Monitor, “She plans to encourage women to wear the hijab and focus on nurturing their families. At the same time, she says, she will fight for salary equity, paid maternity leave, and reduced work hours for pregnant women.”

Elected Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, in an interview with Der Spiegel, also asserts that women will not be forgotten in the new Iraq. He says that sharia law will remain “only as one of several sources of jurisprudence” and that women will “Never [be required to wear veils in the new Iraq]. They will be free to choose for themselves.”

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

A United States Coast Guard crew rescued six Iranian seamen from a ship in distress yesterday. The cargo ship Ya-Hassan was rescued about 50NM (92.6km) off the coast of Umm Qasr, Iraq. The ship’s engine room had flooded. This is the second time within a week that a United States crew has rescued Iranian citizens.

According to the United States Navy, the Ya-Hassan signaled Coast Guard cutter Monomoy around 3 a.m. local time (0000 UTC) with signal flares and flashlights. Once rescued, the seamen were given water, blankets, and a meal prepared according to Islamic dietary laws. One of the crew members was treated onboard the Monomoy for minor injuries.

The rescued seamen were eventually given over to Iranian Coast Guard vessel Naji 7. The US Navy said the captain of the Naji 7 “thanks us for our cooperation.”

On January 5, a US Navy vessel escorting the USS John C. Stennis rescued 13 Iranian sailors who were being held by pirates. The United States, by its own account, often rescues ships in foreign waters, but has been publicizing the rescue of Iranian ships because of increased tensions between the United States and Iran.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.

Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.

Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.

Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.

Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.

Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.