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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Two days before Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, a biography of actor Tom Cruise written by journalist Andrew Morton, was released in the United States, a video showing Cruise promoting Scientology was leaked to the Internet. The promotional video appeared on video-sharing sites including YouTube, Gawker.com and radar online.com, and clips from the video were also shown on Wednesday morning talk shows in the United States.

In the 9-minute video produced by the Church of Scientology, Cruise is seen discussing his beliefs while the theme from his Mission: Impossible films plays as background music. Cruise appears wearing a black turtleneck sweater, speaking about his dedication to changing people’s lives. The format of the video appears to be an interview with Cruise, and it is edited with questions cut out. Some of Cruise’s responses end abruptly.

Throughout the video, Cruise uses Scientology jargon terms such as “KSW”: “For me, it’s all about KSW.” The term stands for Keeping Scientology Working, which refers to a 10-point letter written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1965 to ensure the organization’s survival. Cruise also discusses “SPs”, or Suppressive Persons, “PTSPs”, a “potential trouble source” influenced by a Suppressive Person, and the need to “confront and shatter suppression”.

Cruise makes assertions about programs which use Hubbard’s teachings such as Criminon and Narconon “We’re the authorities on getting people off drugs. We’re the authorities on the mind. We’re the authorities on improving conditions. We can rehabilitate criminals. Way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures.” Of the manner in which he wishes to spread Scientology’s message, he says “You’re in the playing field or out of the arena.” Cruise also expresses his disdain for psychiatrists, “Crush these guys [psychiatrists]! I’ve had it! Psychiatry doesn’t work. No mercy! None! Go to guns!”

The video concludes with Cruise laughing, and then a voiceover says: “Scientology can be defined by a single question: would you want others to develop the knowledge you have? In answering that question, Tom Cruise has introduced LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] technology to more than 1 billion people on earth. And that is only the first wave he has unleashed. That is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”

According to Reuters, the Church of Scientology stated that the video was shown at a 2004 meeting of the International Association of Scientologists. In a statement, the Church of Scientology said that the video was Cruise’s acceptance speech after he had been given the organization’s “Freedom Medal”, and was shown “before an audience of 5,000 church parishioners and their guests.” The statement also called the video that appeared on the Internet a “pirated and edited version.” A representative for Cruise confirmed the Church of Scientology statement: “The video is of Mr. Cruise making an acceptance speech to fellow parishioners at a private church event in 2004.” David Miscavige, head of the Church of Scientology, had presented Cruise with the “Freedom Medal of Valor” at the 2004 ceremony. Eighty Scientologists have received the “Freedom Medal” since the award’s establishment in 1985, but Cruise is the only recipient of the Freedom Medal of Valor. Andrew Morton’s Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography characterizes Cruise as the second most powerful individual within the organization.

The video first appeared on the Internet on Sunday, and disappeared after the footage was linked to from Gawker.com and The Huffington Post. Gawker.com posted a copy of the video Tuesday morning, and said that the video had “been passed around privately by reporters and writers investigating Cruise’s ties to Scientology.” Gawker.com noted that a smaller video clip which had previously been available on YouTube “is no longer available, most likely after the Church of Scientology sent in a copyright infringement notice.” Gawker.com has stated that the video will stay up on its site, and has reprinted correspondence with Ava Paquette, an attorney with Moxon & Kobrin, a law firm representing the Church of Scientology. Nick Denton of Gawker.com commented on the posting of the video “It’s newsworthy, and we will not be removing it.”

Investigative journalist Mark Ebner is helping to post more than two hours of additional footage related to the Cruise video, and called it “the most unintentionally hilarious footage you’ve ever seen,” and characterized it as “better than” when Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch during a May 23, 2005 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the South Park parody of Cruise in the controversial episode “Trapped in the Closet“. Ebner appeared on The Today Show on Wednesday, and discussed the video’s appearance on the Internet. In response, the Church of Scientology called Ebner a “fraud”. Ebner told the New York Daily News that “These tapes were made for purposes of recruitment.”

Attempts by the Church of Scientology to stop distribution of the video via the Internet “seem to have backfired spectacularly,” according to The Press Association, and by Thursday the video was viewable on websites other than Gawker.com, including the New York Post, Independent Television News and the BBC. For websites based in Britain usage of the video is protected under copyright laws, specifically for reporting news and current affairs. Still other reports on the video linked to locations where it could be watched, including a report in The Times. Copies of the video were not available on Google Video on Thursday, but were still available on YouTube.

Attorney Mark Stephens of London-based firm Finers Stephens Innocent commented on the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove the video from the Internet: “The Scientologists, by taking action to enforce their copyrights, have made it a news story. The mistake was not to foresee that a news story has special protection in copyright law in reporting news and current events.”

Monday, September 20, 2010

An event attended by thousands of people, called “Handkerchiefs in the air” (Spanish: Pañuelos al Aire), took place on Monday morning at Pichilemu, in Daniel Ortúzar Avenue. The event was organized by Loreto Puebla, former Governor of {{w|Cardenal Caro Province||, coordinated with Mayor of Pichilemu Roberto Córdova Carreño.

Fernando Urzúa, who also works as newsreader on a local radio, conducted the event. The event was broadcasted by Radio Somos Pichilemu (We Are Pichilemu), owned by former Mayor Jorge Vargas González, who also attended the event.

The event started by giving handkerchiefs with the logo pictured at the left to all the attendants, at around 11:40 local time (15:40 UTC). Then, they proceeded to take the official photograph, which will be officially published on the website of the Municipality of Pichilemu on Tuesday.

Urzúa, and two Pichileminian folk music groups played several cuecas, Chile’s national dance, and people were invited to dance. The event ended with the Mayor Córdova giving diplomas and Chilean wine bottles to large families who were dancing, a group of elderly from Recoleta and two policemen of Pichilemu. The parish priest of Pichilemu said that “the celebrations were quite stupendous” and that “Pichilemu is an example of unity of the people.”

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Scientists at NASA have recently released the most detailed map of Antarctica ever. NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite took 10,000 photographs of the continent over a period of two years, from 1999 to 2001. 1,100 pictures were chosen to form the mosaic map. Officially titled the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA), the map reveals Antarctica’s geography in high definition and with accurate colors. Details as small as half the size of a basketball court are visible.

NASA created the map to coincide with the International Polar Year of 2007-2008. Robert Bindschadler, chief scientist of the Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, remarked, “This innovation is like watching high-definition TV in living color versus watching the picture on a grainy black-and-white television.” The map represents a tenfold improvement over previous Antarctic imagery databases.

Landsat 7 managed to capture 80% of the continent in high definition. While the satellite was not able to take photographs of the South Pole due to its orbit path, lower-resolution images helped fill in the gap.

The map will help scientists plan and carry out expeditions on the notoriously difficult terrain. The new, intensely detailed information will also facilitate the tracking of environmental changes such as the calving of ice shelves. Researchers will be able to use such data to better understand phenomena like global warming in such amazing detail that even relatively small changes will be visible. Geologists, on the other hand, will be able to use the maps to study Antarctic rock formations.

The LIMA images are available to the public via the internet. The National Science Foundation contributed nearly US$1 million to create the website.

The Landsat 7 satellite will continue to document Antarctica from space through to 2011. Subsequently, NASA will launch the Landsat Data Continuity Mission. Information from both projects will update the map.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

India is the latest of the countries where the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experiment has started. Children from the village of Khairat were given the opportunity to learn how to use the XO laptop. During the last year XO was distributed to children from Arahuay in Peru, Ban Samkha in Thailand, Cardal in Uruguay and Galadima in Nigeria. The OLPC team are, in their reports on the startup of the trials, delighted with how the laptop has improved access to information and ability to carry out educational activities. Thailand’s The Nation has praised the project, describing the children as “enthusiastic” and keen to attend school with their laptops.

Recent good news for the project sees Uruguay having ordered 100,000 of the machines which are to be given to children aged six to twelve. Should all go according to plan a further 300,000 machines will be purchased by 2009 to give one to every child in the country. As the first to order, Uruguay chose the OLPC XO laptop over its rival from Intel, the Classmate PC. In parallel with the delivery of the laptops network connectivity will be provided to schools involved in the project.

The remainder of this article is based on Carla G. Munroy’s Khairat Chronicle, which is available from the OLPC Wiki. Additional sources are listed at the end.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

< 2005 crosswords

Quick crosswords for January (solutions are on following days):

• 27 January 2005
• 28 January 2005
• 29 January 2005
• 30 January 2005
• 31 January 2005

> February crosswords

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Buffalo, New York —The city’s Common Council met in Council Chambers today with a full agenda. Among the items in the agenda was the Elmwood Village Hotel proposal.

The Elmwood Village Hotel is a proposed hotel by Savarino Construction Services Corporation and is designed by architect Karl Frizlen of the Frizlen Group. It is to be placed on the corner of Elmwood and Forest Avenues in Buffalo and will require the demolition of at least five properties (1109-1121 Elmwood).

During the hour-and-a-half meeting, the Common Council approved the hotel proposal. The entire voting process for the proposal took less than two minutes, and the public was not allowed to speak. The Council voted unanimously in support of the proposal; however, the city’s Planning Board must also approve the proposal. The Board will meet on Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 8:00 a.m. on the 9th floor of City Hall, room 902.

The approval allows for the rezoning of all five properties, including 605 Forest, to a “special development plan,” or a C-2 zone.

“There is a ‘special development plan’ in front of the council, which changes only one thing about the zoning. It allows one permitted use — for just a hotel. The rest of the zoning remains as it is under the current Elmwood Business District zoning. 605 and 607 Forest are not required for the project. They are not part of the footprint for the project. Let me answer this question again. This is on the record, in council: 605 needs to be rezoned in order to facilitate the project because of the sideyard requirement. Anything in C-2 is excluded besides the hotel. So we’ve taken the C-2 and included the hotel as a permitted use, and excluded everything else, and everything else remains the same,” Eva Hassett, Vice President of Savarino Consrtruction, said to Wikinews during a public meeting on March 16, 2006.

However, during the same meeting, Pano Georgiadis, owner of 605 Forest and owner of Pano’s Restaurant on Elmwood, threatened to “sue” Savarino Construction saying, “If you try to get a variance to change the code, I will sue you. This is my home, number one.”

Savarino Construction hopes to break ground this Summer.

Despite the Council’s approval, organizers have scheduled another protest that will be held this Saturday, March 25, 2006 at 2:00 p.m. on Forest and Elmwood.

Some citizens are even considering legal action and are considering an “injunction in State Supreme Court,” going “pro se, meaning I am going to present the case myself,” said Clarence Carnahan, a concerned citizen and local business owner who is opposed to the hotel, to Wikinews.

Carnahan wrote a “notice of cease and desist” which was also presented to the Council at today’s meeting.

Patty Morris, co-owner of Don Apparel with Nancy Pollina, said, “We are going to fight the good fight to the bitter end, but we cannot afford it [legal action]. Now it’s a legal matter, and it’s in the hands of the law, and I know there are some people very interested in hiring a lawyer.”

Nancy Pollina says that she is “looking into a defense fund” and is currently talking to lawyers.

==Related Wikinews==

• “Citizens protest Buffalo, N.Y. hotel proposal” — Wikinews, March 20, 2006
• “Buffalo, N.Y. hotel proposal threatened by possible lawsuit” — Wikinews, March 16, 2006
• “Buffalo, N.Y. hotel proposal delayed further” — Wikinews, March 10, 2006
• “No hotel previously on site of proposed Buffalo, N.Y. hotel location” — Wikinews, March 4, 2006
• “City Planning Board postpones decision on Buffalo, N.Y. hotel proposal” — Wikinews, March 2, 2006
• “Residents and business owners attend “private” meeting on Buffalo, N.Y. hotel proposal” — Wikinews, February 28, 2006
• “Eva Hassett, VP of Savarino Construction Services Corp. answers questions on Buffalo, N.Y. hotel redesign” — Wikinews, February 27, 2006
• “Alternative to controversial hotel proposed to Buffalo, N.Y. business owners and residents” — Wikinews, February 23, 2006
• “Hotel development proposal could displace Buffalo, NY business owners” — Wikinews, February 17, 2006