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Friday, December 4, 2009

Chinese President Hu Jintao met with the European Union’s leaders Jose Manuel Barroso and Fredrik Reinfeldt in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. The EU leaders were in China to attend Monday’s twelfth China-European Union (EU) summit. Barroso said China-EU relations are “more mature, deeper” then before.

China-EU trading relations have grown over the last 35 years. The volume of trade between the pair reached US$425.58 billion in 2008, an increase of 19.5% over the prior year. Bilateral relations are far closer now than in previous years.

Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said the Lisbon Treaty would help strengthen EU-China relations. Summit attendees also talked about nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament, human rights, climate change, combating financial crisis and financial investments.

Before the twelfth China-EU summit, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao met with EU delegates in Nanjing, and the trading partners celebrated the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations.

Monday, October 19, 2009

A report accidentally published on the Internet provides insight into a secretive European Union surveillance project designed to monitor its citizens, as reported by Wikileaks earlier this month. Project INDECT aims to mine data from television, internet traffic, cellphone conversations, p2p file sharing and a range of other sources for crime prevention and threat prediction. The €14.68 million project began in January, 2009, and is scheduled to continue for five years under its current mandate.

INDECT produced the accidentally published report as part of their “Extraction of Information for Crime Prevention by Combining Web Derived Knowledge and Unstructured Data” project, but do not enumerate all potential applications of the search and surveillance technology. Police are discussed as a prime example of users, with Polish and British forces detailed as active project participants. INDECT is funded under the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), and includes participation from Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Indicated in the initial trial’s report, the scope of data collected is particularly broad; days of television news, radio, newspapers, and recorded telephone conversations are included. Several weeks of content from online sources were agglomerated, including mining Wikipedia for users’ and article subjects’ relations with others, organisations, and in-project movements.

Watermarking of published digital works such as film, audio, or other documents is discussed in the Project INDECT remit; its purpose is to integrate and track this information, its movement within the system and across the Internet. An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube is shown to the right. The simplified example of the system in operation shows a file of documents with a visible INDECT-titled cover taken from an office and exchanged in a car park. How the police are alerted to the document theft is unclear in the video; as a “threat”, it would be the INDECT system’s job to predict it.

Throughout the video use of CCTV equipment, facial recognition, number plate reading, and aerial surveillance give friend-or-foe information with an overlaid map to authorities. The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursuing, and capturing the document recipient. The file of documents is retrieved, and the recipient roughly detained.

Technology research performed as part of Project INDECT has clear use in countering industrial and international espionage, although the potential use in maintaining any security and predicting leaks is much broader. Quoted in the UK’s Daily Telegraph, Liberty’s director, Shami Chakrabarti, described a possible future implementation of INDECT as a “sinister step” with “positively chilling” repercussions Europe-wide.

“It is inevitable that the project has a sensitive dimension due to the security focussed goals of the project,” Suresh Manandhar, leader of the University of York researchers involved in the “Work Package 4” INDECT component, responded to Wikinews. “However, it is important to bear in mind that the scientific methods are much more general and has wider applications. The project will most likely have lot of commercial potential. The project has an Ethics board to oversee the project activities. As a responsible scientists [sic] it is of utmost importance to us that we conform to ethical guidelines.”

Although Wikinews attempted to contact Professor Helen Petrie of York University, the local member of Project INDECT’s Ethics board, no response was forthcoming. The professor’s area of expertise is universal access, and she has authored a variety of papers on web-accessibility for blind and disabled users. A full list of the Ethics board members is unavailable, making their suitability unassessable and distancing them from public accountability.

One potential application of Project INDECT would be implementation and enforcement of the U.K.’s “MoD Manual of Security“. The 2,389-page 2001 version passed to Wikileaks this month — commonly known as JSP-440, and marked “RESTRICTED” — goes into considerable detail on how, as a serious threat, investigative journalists should be monitored, and effectively thwarted; just the scenario the Project INDECT video could be portraying.

When approached by Wikinews about the implications of using INDECT, a representative of the U.K.’s Attorney General declined to comment on legal checks and balances such a system might require. Further U.K. enquiries were eventually referred to the Police Service of Northern Ireland, who have not yet responded.

Wikinews’ Brian McNeil contacted Eddan Katz, the International Affairs Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (E.F.F.). Katz last spoke to Wikinews in early 2008 on copyright, not long after taking his current position with the E.F.F. He was back in Brussels to speak to EU officials, Project INDECT was on his agenda too — having learned of it only two weeks earlier. Katz linked Project INDECT with a September report, NeoConopticon — The EU Security-Industrial Complex, authored by Ben Hayes for the Transnational Institute. The report raises serious questions about the heavy involvement of defence and IT companies in “security research”.

On the record, Katz answered a few questions for Wikinews.

((WN)) Is this illegal? Is this an invasion of privacy? Spying on citizens?

Eddan Katz When the European Parliament issued the September 5, 2001 report on the American ECHELON system they knew such an infrastructure is in violation of data protection law, undermines the values of privacy and is the first step towards a totalitarian surveillance information society.

((WN)) Who is making the decisions based on this information, about what?

E.K. What’s concerning to such a large extent is the fact that the projects seem to be agnostic to that question. These are the searching systems and those people that are working on it in these research labs do search technology anyway. […] but its inclusion in a database and its availability to law enforcement and its simultaneity of application that’s so concerning, […] because the people who built it aren’t thinking about those questions, and the social questions, and the political questions, and all this kind of stuff. [… It] seems like it’s intransparent, unaccountable.

The E.U. report Katz refers to was ratified just six days before the September 11 attacks that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In their analysis of the never-officially-recognised U.S. Echelon spy system it states, “[i]n principle, activities and measures undertaken for the purposes of state security or law enforcement do not fall within the scope of the EC Treaty.” On privacy and data-protection legislation enacted at E.U. level it comments, “[such does] not apply to ‘the processing of data/activities concerning public security, defence, state security (including the economic well-being of the state when the activities relate to state security matters) and the activities of the state in areas of criminal law'”.

Part of the remit in their analysis of Echelon was rumours of ‘commercial abuse’ of intelligence; “[i]f a Member State were to promote the use of an interception system, which was also used for industrial espionage, by allowing its own intelligence service to operate such a system or by giving foreign intelligence services access to its territory for this purpose, it would undoubtedly constitute a breach of EC law […] activities of this kind would be fundamentally at odds with the concept of a common market underpinning the EC Treaty, as it would amount to a distortion of competition”.

Ben Hayes’ NeoConoptiocon report, in a concluding section, “Following the money“, states, “[w]hat is happening in practice is that multinational corporations are using the ESRP [European Seventh Research Programme] to promote their own profit-driven agendas, while the EU is using the programme to further its own security and defence policy objectives. As suggested from the outset of this report, the kind of security described above represents a marriage of unchecked police powers and unbridled capitalism, at the expense of the democratic system.”

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Former Salt Lake City mayor and human rights activist Rocky Anderson took some time to discuss his 2012 U.S. presidential campaign and the newly-created Justice Party with Wikinews reporter William S. Saturn.

Anderson served as mayor of Salt Lake City for eight years (2000–2008) as a member of the Democratic Party. During his tenure, he enacted proposals to reduce the city’s carbon emissions, reformed its criminal justice system, and positioned it as a leading sanctuary for refugees. After leaving office, Anderson grew critical of the Democratic Party’s failure to push for impeachment against President George W. Bush, and for not reversing policies on torture, taxes, and defense spending. He left the party earlier this year and announced that he would form a Third party.

Anderson officially established the Justice Party last week during a press conference in Washington D.C.. He proclaimed “We the people are powerful enough to end the perverse government-to-the-highest-bidder system sustained by the two dominant parties…We are here today for the sake of justice — social justice, environmental justice and economic justice.” The party promotes campaign finance reform and is attempting to appeal to the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is currently working on ballot access efforts, and will hold a Founding Convention in February 2012 in Salt Lake City.

Among other issues, Anderson discussed climate change, health care, education, and civil liberties. He detailed his successes as mayor of Salt Lake City, stressed the importance of executive experience, and expressed his views on President Barack Obama and some of the Republican Party presidential candidates. He spoke in depth about former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, with whom he worked during the 2002 Winter Olympics, and fellow Utahan, former governor and U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, Jr..

Saturday, July 10, 2021

The number of patients in England waiting for treatment by the National Health Service reached 5.3 million in May, data Thursday indicated, the highest since records began in April 2007 for the second consecutive month.

Those on the health institute’s waiting list increased by over 600 thousand in the past three months. However, the average wait time of just under eleven weeks has been steadily declining since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which drove total admissions to hospital down, according to The Guardian.

Total admissions for surgery and normal treatment have increased fourfold to nearly pre-pandemic levels from 54,550 last year to 242,064 in May, according to Sky News. In May 2019, there were 295,881 admissions for routine treatment.

The rise in demand is primarily due to a surge in non-COVID-related admissions: over two million people visited the accident and emergency department (A&E) last month, for example, in the busiest ever June. A blog post published Wednesday by the NHS Confederation warned increasing demand in urgent, non-COVID-related healthcare in both children and adults are “putting severe and unprecedented strain on the urgent care system, with unsustainable numbers of people now visiting A&E, seeing their GPs [general practitioners] and calling ambulances.”

Wait times are trending downward, according to Sky News. Between April and May, the number of people waiting over 52 weeks for treatment fell by 50 thousand, though still thirteen times higher than last year. Patients waiting over eighteen weeks dropped by 83 thousand in the same time, “for the first time this year”, according to NHS medical director Stephen Powis. However, the percent of those who received treatment within eighteen weeks, 67%, remained below the NHS standard of 92%, according to The Guardian.

The average wait time for elective care of 10.8 weeks was down 29% from May last year, according to the NHS Confederation’s chief executive Matthew Taylor. In a blog post on the organisation’s web site he remarked the “treatment backlog of 5.3 million patients” nonetheless “show[s] that while waiting lists are still rising, more people are coming forward for care, which is encouraging, as this is exactly what the NHS is there for.”

Taylor went on to say “our urgent care system [is] running a winter-like service in the middle of summer”, adding “we must go into this next phase with our eyes wide open, and acknowledge much of the care the NHS can provide to patients is likely to be disrupted further, including in the community.”

The Guardian reported other issues, including that nearly 25% of patients in A&E waited over four hours to be seen. Only 75% of cancer patients were seen within two weeks of cancer screening, below a target of 90%, or a GP’s urgent referral, below a target of 85%. An October analysis by Macmillan Cancer Support estimates from the year before, 50 thousand fewer people were diagnosed with cancer, a backlog it warned could grow by four thousand missed diagnoses per month to over 100 thousand this October, and urgent referral activity in England for August was 11% behind 2019 levels.

The NHS has said it budgeted one billion GBP on restoring services and clearing the waiting list, according to The Guardian.

32,551 new COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom were reported on Thursday and another 35 attributable deaths, according to Sky News, up over four thousand from the week before, and the highest since the week of January 27 . This comes after health minister Sajid Javid said cases of COVID “could go as high as 100,000” ahead of the expected lifting of all remaining lockdown restrictions on July 19, dubbed “Freedom Day”, as reported by Sky News and The Guardian.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Dale Ogden, a 2010 California gubernatorial candidate, talks with Wikinews reporter Mike Morales about his platform.

Ogden is a member of the United States’ Libertarian Party.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The United States men’s ice hockey team upset host country Canada, 5-3, in a preliminary round game on Sunday at the Winter Olympics. It is being called the Americans’ biggest Olympic win since the 1980s “Miracle on Ice” victory over the former Soviet Union.

The game was only 41 seconds in when Brian Rafalski of Team USA fired a slap shot that deflected off Canadian star Sidney Crosby’s stick and bounced past Canadian goalkeeper Martin Brodeur.

The Canadians evened the game on a goal nearly nine minutes into the contest on Eric Staal’s shot. The capacity crowd roared its approval and the stadium announcer was still giving the details of Staal’s goal when Rafalski scored again.

Canada evened the game in the second period, but American Chris Drury put Team USA ahead again, 3-2. The Americans took a 4-2 lead on Jamie Langenbrunner’s shot with just under 13 minutes left in the game.

Crosby cut the U.S. lead to 4-3 with about three minutes left. Canada pulled goalie Brodeur, adding an extra attacker in a desperate attempt to tie the contest. The hosts had clearly outplayed the Americans, with a shot advantage of 45-23. But U.S. goalie Ryan Miller, frustrated the Canadians all night, including their last-ditch attack.

Then with just 45 seconds left in the contest, American Ryan Kesler reached around his opponent to slap the final U.S. goal into the empty Canadian net, making it 5-3.

The game was just a preliminary round match, but in hockey-mad Canada, where the sport first originated, it was more than that. To lose to the United States in the Olympics on home soil was devastating.

After the game, Canada fans — many in replicas of the team’s red and white Maple Leaf jerseys — seemed stunned as they filed out of the Canada Hockey Place. Some Americans chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A!” But many Canadians, including Melissa Mazeman of Winnipeg, Manitoba, were still trying to realize what had happened.

“As soon as that first goal was scored within in the first minute, that did hurt, it was kind of crushing,” she said. “But every U.S. player — or every U.S. fan I have seen on the street — I have said congratulations [to].”

Meanwhile, Canadian coach Mike Babcock has replaced Brodeur in the lineup, with Roberto Luongo of the Vancouver Canucks. Babcock said Brodeur’s coordination with his defensemen that led to turnovers and four goals out of 22 American shot attempts. He also noted that Brodeur did not make many big saves.

Babcock said, “We’re in the winning business. And to win at any level you need momentum-changing saves.”

Team USA fan David Loring of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one of a vastly outnumbered corps of fans wearing USA Hockey gear, gave goalkeeper Ryan Miller the credit for preserving the win.

“[Team USA] played really well tonight. I have to tell you, they got outplayed by Canada. We had some really good goalie work this evening. Brodeur made some nice saves, but Miller really played well tonight. That was the difference I thought.”

However, not all Americans are happy. The general manager of the U.S. men’s team, Brian Burke, feels the team isn’t playing at it’s best. “I’m not happy with the way we’ve played to this point. We have to play significantly better. We’re playing with about 10 guys carrying us. They don’t hand out any medals for finishing first in the preliminary round,” Burke said.

He continued saying, “Our center-ice play, we’ve made some glaring turnovers that have resulted in scoring chances. And our overall intensity for 60 minutes — for the first 10 minutes in the second period, I thought we were nonexistent.”

Chris Drury agreed saying, “I’d still say we would be the underdogs on our lack of experience, certainly now that the tournament takes on a whole new meaning with single elimination. We do need to get a lot better.”

The win is the United States’ first Olympic win over Canada since the 1960 Winter Olympics. It also came one day short of the 30th anniversary of the U.S. hockey win over the former Soviet Union in the 1980 Winter Olympics’ Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid.

The victory assures the Americans an automatic quarterfinal berth. Canada could still make the round of eight, but must beat Germany in a play-in game Tuesday to reach the quarterfinals.