Dublin gets ready to be rocked once again by U2

Friday, June 24, 2005

240,000 U2] fans are preparing for Ireland’s most successful band ever to return for a hometown gig in Dublin. The supergroup is playing Friday, Saturday and Monday in front of 80,000 people a night at Croke Park. Gardaí have put in place a massive traffic management plan to cope with the influx of people. Fans have been queing since Thursday morning when a group of fans from Holland, Italy and Canada started queuing outside the stadium.

The concert forms part of U2’s current “Vertigo” world tour. The support acts include emerging Irish bands Snow Patrol and The Thrills along with already very popular Paddy Casey. Ash and The Bravery will cap it off as warm up acts on Monday.

The gates for the gig will open at 4pm with the actual band not expected until around 8.30pm. Irish media has entered a frenzied anticipation of the concert all this week, with constant coverage on radio stations. The national broadcaster, RTÉ, is set to dedicated almost 3hr 30min to the band with an exclusive interview by Dave Fanning forming the centerpiece of the stations coverage of the “U2 weekend”. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who played in front of a sell out crowd in Dublin earlier this week told fans that U2 were “still the best band in the world”.

Croke Park is the fourth largest stadium in Europe, with an official capacity of 82,000 – bigger than both Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium and Paris’ Stade de France. Croke Park is used to host GAA matches in sports such as hurling and Gaelic football and regularly attracts audiences of 60,000 or more in the summer months.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

A series of large explosions have occurred close to Hemel Hempstead Hertfordshire, UK. The source of the explosions has been confirmed as the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal (HOSL), Hemel Hempstead, known locally as the Buncefield complex. Up to 150 fire fighters are reported to be at the scene with 10 fire appliances and 1 specialist foamer.

The first ‘blast’ was heard near Hemel Hempstead on Sunday 11 Dec at 6 am. Further smaller explosions followed at 6:24am , 6:26am, 6:30am. BBC News 24 reported an additional, fourth large explosion. Hertfordshire Police Constabulary are currently treating the explosion as an accident.

Reports say the explosion, which registered 2.4 on the Richter scale, was heard as far away as Oxford, and Whitehall, Central London which is 60km (38 miles) away. Eyewitness statements report that the explosion was heard from at least 160km (100 miles) away and as far away as France and The Netherlands. Pilots reported noticing the blast from the North Sea and the West Country area of the UK. The M1 motorway which runs close by has been closed in both directions near the blast which is causing travel chaos as other roads become congested.

Malcom Stewart, a BBC News24 eyewitness who is a tanker driver for the site has reported that the site supplies several oil companies and is a joint operation between Total UK and Texaco, it is also used by BP, Shell and the British Pipeline association. The complex is not a refinery but a storage facility for refined petroleum awaiting distribution to airports and filling stations. The eyewitness reports that the depot has approximately 20 tanks which can hold about 3 million gallons (11 million litres or 70,000 barrels) each. Another News24 eyewitness has just reported that he has seen at least 5 of these tanks on fire.

The depot operates on a 24 hour basis and is split into 2 parts – aviation fuel and domestic fuel. A number of eyewitnesses have reported on UK news that the aviation fuel side appears to be the part of the site that has been affected.

Local authorities were not immediately available for comment but there have been reports of casualties.

Some reports on live television state that, “Several other neighbours said they did see a plane go into the depot.” BBC News 24 were also discussing the idea a possible plane crash as the cause of the explosions. Hertfordshire police have now gone on the record to say that there is no plane involved (BBC News24).

The police have issued a contact number 0800 096 0095 and asked that people do not call the emergency services in Hertfordshire directly unless it is an emergency.

In addition to being an oil storage depot, it is a major hub on the UK oil pipeline network with pipelines to Killingholme Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR), Humberside (10 inch), Merseyside (10 and 12 inch), Coryton on the Thames Estuary (14 inch) and Heathrow (6 and 8 inch) and Gatwick airports radiating from it.

The disaster is believed to be the worst explosion at a petrochemical plant in the UK since the Flixborough disaster of 1974.Hertfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer Roy Wilsher said: “This is possibly the largest incident of its kind in peacetime Europe.”

A firefighting press officer said that they are stock piling foam from neighboring regions for a prolonged attach which they hope will stop the spread of the fire, however, the inferno itself will have to burn out which could take between 24 hours and a few days.

Despite the authorities saying that there is no need to panic buy petrol, filling stations have had above average queues since this morning and some small garages have ran out.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has visited the scene.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

A spokesperson stated on Monday that UK television company ITV have been fined A$3000 (about US$2591 or £1663) for cruelty to animals in an incident on programme “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!“, where two celebrities killed and ate a rat.

The incident involved actor Stuart Manning and television chef Gino D’Acampo, who went on to win the ninth series of the programme, which was broadcast in 2009. Inside the jungle, having been reduced to rations of beans and rice, the two celebrities caught a rat before killing it and then cooking it, to give the beans and rice “more protein”, before eating the rat, which contestant and actor George Hamilton described as “actually quite nice”. Inside the programme’s video diary room, at the time of the recording of it, Gino D’Acampo said: “I saw one of these rats running around. I got a knife, I got its throat, I picked it up.”

RSPCA Australia had stated that performing an act like this on television was “not acceptable”. Initially, Manning and D’Acampo were charged for animal cruelty. However, their charges were dropped when ITV made the confession that production staff had allowed the celebrities to carry out the act of killing the rat. After a court trial in Sydney, Australia, ITV got a fine of A$3000. The company also had to pay costs of A$2500 (US$2192 or £1396).

An ITV spokesperson said that “ITV has apologised for the mistake which led to this incident. The production was unaware that killing a rat could be an offence, criminal or otherwise in New South Wales, and accepts that further inquiries should have been made. This was an oversight and we have since thoroughly reviewed our procedures and are putting in place a comprehensive training programme to ensure that this does not happen in future series.”

Sunday, October 7, 2007

John Ogilvie is running for the Green Party of Ontario in the Ontario provincial election, in the Carleton—Mississippi Mills riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

A senior Australian advertising executive says the Federal Government’s campaign to promote its workplace changes is the most costly in Australian history. Harold Mitchell from Mitchell and Partners says the Howard Government spent $26 million on TV advertising in October. The figure is more than any other entity including retailing giant Coles Myer.

In October, 11,000 commercials were part of the campaign to sell its Industrial Relations (IR) reforms. Mr Mitchell said he could not recall a larger single monthly spending spree in Australian advertising history.

“There’s never been a campaign in history as big as that,” he said. “It followed of course the ACTU campaign which was something like, maybe one fifth of that size.”

He said the Government was the second biggest advertiser in Australia this year, having spent an estimated $117 million from January to the end of October. Only the supermarket and department store group Coles Myer has spent more in the same period – $156 million. Coles Myer spent $19 million last month.

Of the Government’s October advertising bill, $15 million went on TV ads, a 168 per cent increase on the bill for October 2004. The advertising blitz followed the ACTU campaign against the changes, which Mr Mitchell says came in at about one-fifth of the government’s bill.

The Nielsen Media Research spokesman said the figures are estimates of the cost of placing the advertisements and did not include their production.

On top of the TV spots, the Federal government spent more than $20 million on outdoor and print advertising. Plus another $4 million to $5 million on a nationwide pamphlet mail-out.

At the current rate spending will overtake the record $211 million spent selling the Goods and Services Tax (GST) over four years, and leaves all Australian company spending on advertising in the shade. The Government has earmarked $55 million to the IR campaign.

The professor of marketing at Australian Graduate School of Management, John Roberts, said the intensity of the advertising had become counterproductive. He said people who disagreed with the policy simply had their feelings reinforced by the endless advertising, while others had become “habituated” by the deluge and ignored the ads.

“It’s hard to believe they have done any research on this,” he said. “There is this naive belief you get sometimes in management that if a campaign is not working properly you simply open the spigot a bit more, but it doesn’t work that way.”

Business groups have launched their own campaign supporting the changes too. Yet despite the spending on advertising, two polls this week attributed a sharp drop in the popularity of the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Government, to the planned IR (WorkChoice) changes.

Australian Democrats workplace relations spokesman Andrew Murray “You just shouldn’t as a government be advertising prior to legislation before the Senate. It’s immoral,” Senator Murray said.

Opposition public accountability spokesman Kelvin Thomson said the campaign had cost taxpayers $1.7 million a day but had flopped, with Australians unconvinced that they would be better off under the changes. “It is an obscene waste of $55 million of public money used to fund a highly political flop,” Mr Thomson said.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Three British geology students of Imperial College London have been fined in China for “illegal survey and map-making activities”, according to local media. In addition to making maps, the students were researching fault lines and earthquake activity in Xinjiang — a tense Muslim province to the west of the country where anger against Chinese rule sparked deadly attacks in 2008.

The students were gathering additional data in several regions, including Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road trading post, and an oasis city in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China.

Under Dr. Jian Guo Liu, the students’ supervisor at Imperial College, they also had been in the poor desert village of Keping, where in May local authorities burned the local mosque due to “unlawful religious activities”. Of the three students, two of them, a PhD student aged 23, and a Master of Science student aged 22, went to Aksu Prefecture for their research.

In September, State Security Bureau officials had investigated the students at a hotel for several hours. Thereafter, their equipment, including GPS devices, survey results, and data, were seized. The Aksu Land and Resources Bureau officers claimed they had gathered “illegal data” from 6,000 points which was valuable for mineral prospecting and topographical research.

In the leadup to last year’s summer Olympics in Beijing, China cracked down on map-making and data-collecting across the country. Despite having permission from the Earthquake Administration in the country, the students were fined a combined 20,000 yuan (2,940 dollars) but did not receive additional punishments. “The data they gathered would have been valuable in analysing mineral and topographic features of the areas,” Xinjiang Daily said. They returned to the UK on October 2.

According to The Procuratorial Daily, the Xinjiang prosecutors’ office approved 1,295 arrests of individuals and indicted 1,154 suspects from January to November 2008. The indictments were based on suspicion of “endangering state security.” In 2007, however, only 742 were arrested, while 619 of them were indicted for the same offense.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Cardiff, Wales —Labour, Plaid Cymru, and No2EU candidates for the Wales seats in the European Parliament met at Cardiff‘s Sandringham Hotel last night for the second of two pre-election hustings debates hosted by Cardiff Trades Union Congress. Cardiff TUC president Katrine Williams moderated as Derek Vaughan of the Labour Party, Jill Evans MEP of Plaid Cymru, and Rob Griffiths of the No2EU coalition, the tops of their respective lists, took questions from an audience of 22 composed largely of socialist activists and trade union members.

Candidates from the Tories, Liberal Democrats, and Green Party were not invited to the evening debate, although the Liberal Democrats did take part in the TUC’s debate earlier in the day. Ms Williams explained that the Liberal Democrats and Tories had been excluded because “we wanted to have candidates more representative of trade unions” but that not inviting the Greens had been “an oversight” due to the less prominent tradition of green politics in Wales. The BNP, UKIP and some minor parties also did not take part.

In opening statements, the three candidates discussed their records and their goals for the European Parliament. Mr Vaughan, leader of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, asserted the pro-organised labour credentials of the Labour Party, which has been under fire for several years from the left, and noted that Labour, which currently controls two of Wales’s four seats in the EU Parliament, has brought £1.5 billion to Wales, with a comparable amount to come in the future. Calling the BNP “Nazis” and comparing the British political situation to that in Germany in the 1930s, Vaughan called for the parties of the left to rally behind Labour in order to ensure that the BNP did not obtain any seats in Wales; but he expressed resignation to the likelihood that the BNP would earn a seat in North West England.

Ms Evans, meanwhile, who has been an MEP for ten years, announced her opposition to the pro-privatisation current in the EU and pledged that Plaid would support a new program of public investment and pro-organised labour revisions of EU directives, particularly the Posted Workers Directive.

Mr Griffiths, meanwhile, who is General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, took a position urging radical reform of the European Union. The Lisbon Treaty, which he characterised as a re-branding of the European Constitution, would, he argued, enshrine neo-liberal policies in Europe and impose them on its member states in a way that was irreversible — “at least by any constitutional means”. Calling for a “social Europe” as opposed to a “United States of Europe“, Griffiths suggested that the creation of a European Defence Agency and the actions of the European Court of Justice were being used to turn the European Union into a capitalist “empire” akin to the United States.

Discussion of the ongoing UK parliamentary expenses scandal and its implications for MEPs, who draw salaries and expenses considerably higher than Westminster MPs do, dominated the early discussion. The Labour candidate expressed the position that the problems in accountability leading to the scandal had been fixed; his opponents noted that of the parties currently representing Britain in Brussels, only Labour has not yet disclosed their expenses (although Mr Vaughan states that the party will begin to do so soon) and Mr Griffiths furthermore declared that the scandal was part of a wider problem: the corruption of the political system by big business.

On the subject of a common European defence policy the three candidates supported widely differing views. The No2EU candidate stated plainly that he considers Europe not to be threatened, and said that a European defence force would be used for foreign adventures in Afghanistan, Africa, and elsewhere in the developing world while at the same time building up the armaments industry in Europe. Ms Evans, meanwhile, argued that the proper role of a common EU force would be as a “civil force” supporting conflict prevention and conflict resolution operations, and also called for the abolition of NATO. Mr Vaughan finished the second round of questioning arguing that a common European armed force should be an alternative to the “US-dominated” NATO, but also stated the importance of bilateral alliances in building up a common European defence force, citing the Franco-German Brigade of the Eurocorps as an example.

Debate ended on the contentious question of MEP salaries, with one member of the audience challenging the three candidates to pledge to accept a wage, if they won, equal to the average wage of their constituents. Ms Evans agreed that the set wage, currently £63,000 rising to £73,000 in 2010, was “too high”, but would not commit to a so-called “worker’s wage”, under heavy criticism from the audience. Mr Vaughan, following, called it “not fair” to ask MEPs to take such a pledge but asserted “I have never been motivated by money” and finished his part in the debate with a call to elect more left-wing socialist MEPs. Mr Griffiths, whose No2EU coalition has made a worker’s wage for MEPs part of their election manifesto, readily pledged to hold to a living wage, albeit not necessarily one equal to the average wage of his constituents, and described some of the difficulties associated with refusing an EU salary, noting that initially No2EU had proposed that its MEPs should draw no salary and claim no expenses from Europe but the coalition’s legal advisors had said that to do so would endanger the status of any of its members as MEPs.

Voting for the European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom takes place June 4.