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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.

Monday, February 18, 2013

Venezuela’s government has opened a granite processing plant in the state of Bolívar, with the intention of providing about 25% of the granite required nationwide.

Ricardo Menéndez, vice president of the Productive Economic Area, said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has yearned for the creation of this project to empower Venezuelan construction. Granito Bolívar is reportedly the most modern Venezuelan granite plant, not consuming community water or electricity, and is also the largest, with a daily capacity to supply enough material for use in construction of about 820 houses.

Menéndez said, “These granite blocks are the natural resources of our country, are the wealth we have as a country and often [some] simply decided to remove this richness from our country and take them to other countries” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?Esos bloques de granito son la riquezas naturales de nuestro país, son las riquezas que tenemos como patria y que muchas veces sencillamente esas riquezas decidieron sacarlas de nuestro territorio nacional y llevarlas a otros países}.

According to Menéndez, with the help of a state plan, Venezuela intends to exploit its 40,000 million cubic meters or more of granite reserves, generating a set of factories. “[T]he central theme is that these plants, all these factories, are for the construction of socialism; that means using our potential, develop the value chain within the country and of course that yields benefits from the point of view of the production system’s organization…. [Granito] Bolívar is not only the vision that historically we had of exposing richness, but the industries, basic industries we have, that level of our workers in the basic industries and in addition the development of the potential we have in the state” ^{((es))Spanish language: ?el tema central es que estas plantas todas estas fábricas son para la construcción del socialismo, eso significa utilizar nuestras potencialidades, dessarrollar la cadena de valor dentro del país y por supuesto que eso genere beneficios desde el punto de vista de la organización del sistema productivo … Bolívar no solamente es la visión que históricamente se tuvo de exponer las riquezas, sino que son las empresas, las empresas básicas que tenemos, ese nivel de nuestros trabajadores de la empresas básicas y adicionalmente el desarrollo del potencial que tenemos en el estado}.

For the construction of the plant, supplied by 23 quarries, the government of Bolívar provided about 30 million bolívares (US$4.7 million) and the national government €2.3 million (US$3 million). Bolívar reportedly has reserves of about 40,000 million tons of red, black, pink and white granite, sufficient for domestic demand for 200 years.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

On Sunday, the government of Jammu and Kashmir, India, ordered private academic coaching institutions for students until and including class XII to shut down for the next three months calling those institutions “distractions” for the students; with an exception of coaching institutions preparing students for professional exams.

After meeting the heads of some educational institutions, the state’s education minister Syed Altaf Bukhari said: “We had a discussion with our principals today to how to make the education system better. We have come to a conclusion that the distractions which affect our education system […] one of those distractions are the coaching centres”. He added the government is to review the status of the tuition centres with respect to their decisions twice a month.

High schools and colleges have suspended classes since the beginning of the month. Boycotting the classes, students protested against two encounters in Shopian that resulted in the killing of four civilians as well as twelve militants. Then there were protests against the gang rape and murder of eight-year-old girl Asifa Bano in Kathua who police said was held captive and sedated at a temple in January. Retired government official Sanji Ram and several others —including multiple police officers— were arrested earlier this month for, or in relation to, the gang rape and murder of Asifa. Asifa’s corpse was found in the village of Rasana on January 10.

Some of the protesters clashed with the state security forces, and pellets were fired over the protesters. Bukhari said, “Security of the students is paramount, that is why we kept schools and colleges closed. But now the students should control their emotions and go back to their classes […] Now, enough is enough, they have their protest and should attend school now.” Bukhari went on to add that they cannot “afford to have future a generation of illiterates and uneducated.” He said the students who come to the road for protests “would be treated as rowdies”.

According to an official in Jammu and Kashmir’s education department, the motivation behind the temporary shut down of tuitions was “when the coaching centres are closed, students would not have an option but to attend schools”. Coaching Centre Association president Junaid Yousuf responded to this ban, saying: “What is the point of ordering closure of coaching centres and keeping schools open? This defies logic. You are not shutting down the places where protests occur and closed those centres where there are no protests”.

“This distraction leads to fall in attendances in schools. We are not against coaching centres; we will first see how schools function. Therefore immediately we will request and order the coaching centres to stop their shops for some time[…] We are the custodians of the students and want that they are not distracted”, the Education Minister said.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

A team of eight transplant surgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.

The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.

The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Leading bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.

Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.

The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.

In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.

Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.

Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.

According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.

Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”

In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.

In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.