Friday, October 10, 2008 Stock markets across the world have fallen sharply with several seeing the biggest drop in their history. Asian markets saw the biggest sell-off. The Nikkei dropped 9.62% to reach a 20 year low. Japan also saw a collapse of a mid-size insurance company, Yamato Life Insurance Company, which declared bankruptcy. The…
Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder of PETA, on animal rights and the film about her life
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals…
Bush’s Iraq ‘Strategy’ seen as public relations exercise
Sunday, December 4, 2005 The US commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq said that he had no knowledge of the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq document released by the US President. This, along with speculation that the document was chiefly authored by a public opinion analyst recruited by the White House…
England: Multi-storey carpark in Liverpool gutted by fire, 1,300 vehicles destroyed
Thursday, January 4, 2018 A fire on Sunday night in the seven-storey carpark for the Echo Arena in Liverpool, England destroyed almost all the vehicles parked inside and led to cancellation of the final evening of the Liverpool International Horse Show and evacuation of nearby blocks of flats. The blaze reportedly started with a parked…
Australia/2006
Contents 1 January 2 February 3 March 4 April 5 May 6 June 7 July 8 August 9 September 10 October 11 November 12 December [edit]
John Reed on Orwell, God, self-destruction and the future of writing
Thursday, October 18, 2007 It can be difficult to be John Reed. Christopher Hitchens called him a “Bin Ladenist” and Cathy Young editorialized in The Boston Globe that he “blames the victims of terrorism” when he puts out a novel like Snowball’s Chance, a biting send-up of George Orwell‘s Animal Farm which he was inspired…
Seeds placed in Norwegian vault as agricultural ‘insurance policy’
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a vault containing millions of seeds from all over the world, saw its first deposits on Tuesday. Located 800 kilometers from the North Pole on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the vault has been referred to by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso as a “frozen…
U.S. manufacturer General Motors seeks bankruptcy protection
Monday, June 1, 2009 United States automobile manufacturing firm General Motors filed for bankruptcy and Chapter 11 protection from its creditors at 12:00 UTC Monday, in a Manhattan, New York federal bankruptcy court. This was the largest bankruptcy filing for a U.S. manufacturing company, and with declared assets of $82.29 billion and a debt of…
US VX nerve gas disposal test a success
Monday, May 9, 2005 Workers at Newport Chemical Depot in Indiana have completed a successful test-run of a chemical reactor designed to dispose of Cold War stockpiles of VX nerve agent. After encountering initial difficulties when the temperature in the reactor grew too high, workers were able to adjust the speed of the device. 180…
Wikinews’ overview of the year 2008
Wednesday, December 31, 2008 Also try the 2008 World News Quiz of the year. What would you tell your grandchildren about 2008 if they asked you about it in, let’s say, 20 years’ time? If the answer to a quiz question was 2008, what would the question be? The year that markets collapsed, or perhaps…