Saturday, September 8, 2007

Ford Motor Company, the U.S. car maker, will reportedly pay €57 million (US$78 million) for a 72.4 percent stake in the Romanian assembly plant Automobile Craiova, a Romanian official said Friday.

“The offer of Ford Motor Company for a 72.4 percent stake is €4.1556 per share or €57 million overall,” said Sebastian Vladescu, head of the State Property Agency (AVAS), after opening Ford’s improved offer. Vladescu added that the contract may be signed on September 12, during the auto show in Frankfurt.

The Romanian government bought back the Craiova-based car maker from Daewoo Motors, in late 2006 for US$51 million. As the Korean company was bankrupt, the government had to pay another $10 million for debts stemming from past loans. Ford is the only bidder for the purchase of the factory.

According to Washington Post, many auto-part makers have set up in the new European Union member country, attracted by cheap labor, favourable tax rates and the rising output of Renault’s Dacia plant. The vice president of Dacia, Constantin Stroe, said that the price Ford offers is not important. “It’s important to have the factory working as soon as possible”, he added. “With this production facility, Romania will become an important auto production center in Europe”, concluded Stroe, cited by HotNews.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

On Sunday, Manchester United announced the loan of their Spanish goalkeeper Víctor Valdés to Belgian club Standard Liège for the rest of the season.

Last year, Valdés signed an 18-month contract with the English club, but the three-time UEFA Champions League winner was given very little opportunity at Old Trafford. He made only two appearances for The Reds last season, after David de Gea was injured. Relations between Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal and Valdés were not good. Van Gaal did not pick him for the pre-season tour to the United States, saying Valdés was unwilling to play a game with the under-21 team.

This season, Valdés was not allowed in the locker room, and van Gaal prevented him from training with the main squad and the under-21 team. The official team photograph omitted him.

Valdés was a member of Spain’s squad for the World Cup in 2010 and for Euro 2012, collecting a winner’s medal both times. Per Manchester United’s statement, “Manchester United and Standard Liege have reached agreement for the temporary transfer of goalkeeper Victor Valdes, effective until the end of the current season. The deal is subject to formalities being completed.”

On Instagram, he posted a photo that read “Thank you all for your support during these months of hard work for me, i will never forget! See you soon!”

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

24 years ago Iraq and Syria severed diplomatic relations because Syria accused Iraq of giving support to the Muslim Brotherhood who were causing disorder in Syria. Now, as an outcome of meetings between Walid Moallem the Syrian Foreign Minister, the Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, relations will be restored.

Both countries are agreed that the borders between them should be sealed more tightly to prevent the flow of fighters, arms and ammunition to Iraq, Syria saying that Iraq should do more to secure the border than it has been doing lately.

The two countries are agreed that US troops are needed in Iraq at present but that they should leave as soon as they are no longer needed. Syria wants a timetable for the progressive withdrawal of US forces.

The steps needed to establish full diplomatic relations and to open embassies in Baghdad and Damascus are set out in an agreement signed today in Baghdad. Zebari proclaimed “We will hoist the Iraqi flag in Syria and the Syrian flag in Iraq”.

Meanwhile, President Talabani has agreed to meet Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran on Saturday to discuss security matters.

Although the British Prime Minister has been encouraging more positive relations between Iraq and its neighbors, Syria and Iran, the United States has been critical of both of them. Last week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was opposed to including Syria and Iran in talks about security in Iraq. She accused Syria of having aligned itself with “the forces of extremism” and expressed frustration that despite repeated talks with Syria, nothing seems to have influenced their behavior. Regarding Iran, she said she could see nothing in its behavior that suggested it could contribute to stability in the area. She expressed the view that Iraq must take more responsibility for its own security.

Today, the White House welcomed the news of the rapprochement between Syria and Iraq. The spokesman for the US National Security Council saying “We’ve always encouraged Iraq’s neighbors to take a role in supporting and assisting the unity government in Iraq”.

President Bush met the Iraq Study Group, headed by former secretary of state James Baker on Monday. The Democrats in the Group said that, in order to encourage the Iraqi government to face its responsibilities, there should be a phased withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, starting now. The President rejected this suggestion, remarking that this was a military matter and depended upon the situation on the ground.

Recommendations from the bi-partisan study Group are expected to be delivered to the President and Congress sometime in December this year. The group is composed of five Democrats and five Republicans.

Friday, October 5, 2007

Johan Boyden is running for the Communist Party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Toronto Centre riding. Wikinews interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Chemotherapy is usually associated with a collection of side effects ranging from digestive problems to hair loss, but a study published this week in Human Reproduction demonstrated that female cancer patients may find they have something in common with much younger women in one specific area — their ovaries.

Scientists from the University of Edinburgh examined donated ovarian tissue from fourteen female cancer patients, most of whom had Hodgkin lymphoma, and compared it to tissue from healthy women. They found the samples from women who had been treated with a specific chemotherapeutic regimen known as ABVD not only contained greater numbers of dormant ova — egg cells — than those from women treated with harsher regimens but also more than samples from healthy women. ABVD is named for combining several drugs known as adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine.

These reproductive cells were not merely more plentiful in ABVD patients. They also appeared immature, “new” in the words of lead researcher Evelyn Telfer. This challenges the conventional belief that girls are born with all the ova they will ever have and the numbers can only go down as the cells are either used up by the reproductive cycle or succumb to damage or natural aging. However, further research is needed to confirm this. The study covered relatively few patients by scientific standards, and David Albertini of the Center for Human Reproduction in New York has suggested the cells may not actually be freshly grown. Instead, they may have always been there and were merely rendered more detectable by ABVD treatment.

The ability to grow new egg cells may have significant implications for women in Western societies, many of whom postpone childbearing to establish careers, sometimes into their late thirties or forties. However, Telfer warns against making use of these findings too soon: “There’s so much we don’t know about the ovary. We have to be very cautious about jumping to clinical applications.”

The experiments had been discussed earlier this year at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

Friday, February 26, 2010

According to a government official, at least 26 people were killed in a stampede on Thursday at a historic mosque in the northwestern city of Timbuktu, Mali.

“There were 26 killed and 40 wounded,” Oumar Sangare, the Internal Ministry spokesman, told Reuters. However, other news agency reports put the death toll as low as fifteen.

An official, who requested to remain anonymous, said the accident could have begun as a result of renovation work on the Djingareyber mosque—which is made primarily of mud, and was built in the fourteenth century. Construction work blocked off some of the roads, and that could have been a factor in the incident. “The mosque is being renovated, financed by the Aga Khan, and the work is carried out by South African specialists,” the official told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency.

“Because of these renovations, the passage on the north side of the mosque is closed off. On that side, to get through, the faithful found an improvised alleyway. But the alley couldn’t take the number of people using it. So there was a stampede. Somebody shouted ‘someone has died’ and panic took over,” the same official went on to say.

Others have remarked that rescue services responded “very quickly” to the stampede, and helped the “many injured.”

The Xinhua news agency reports the stampede started when an elderly woman fell in one of the town streets near the city’s main mosque, where a sermon was being conducted in front of a large crowd; a passersby then rushed to assist the woman, apparently disrupting the crowd’s movement and causing the stampede.

“People were circling the mosque, a ritual at each Mouloud [the observance of the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday] and there was a huge crowd build up,” commented Mohamed Bandjougou, one of the witnesses to the event, to AFP by telephone. “There were at least fifteen dead. The bodies were taken to the morgue.”

Authorities warned the number of injured may actually be higher than reported, saying that “we cannot rule out the fact that the number of those injured will increase because some of them are still hiding in their homes instead of coming to the hospital.” A hospital source commented that some of the people hurt were in critical condition, and needed to be evacuated to the capital, Bamako, as soon as possible.

The mosque’s imam, who gave his name as Asseyuti, commented on the incident. “We’re in mourning. What happened is a real trauma. We accept the will of God. He gives us life, he takes it away,” he said.

According to an official statement, Malian president Amandou Toumani Toure is traveling to Timbuktu from Bamako in light of the stampede.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

The death of Scottish artist Alan Davie was announced on Sunday. Davie, 93, was known for his colourful abstract paintings.

Davie’s career also saw turns as a jeweler, a jazz musician, a lecturer, and a poet. Born in Grangemouth, near Falkirk, in 1920, he studied painting from 1938 to 40 at Edinburgh College of Art.

His father was a teacher who dabbled in art and his mother’s family was musically inclined. Upon seeing Coleman Hawkins performing in a music shop in Edinburgh, Davie borrowed £600 from his father to buy himself a saxophone. After serving in the Second World War, at which time he wrote much poetry later transcribed by his father, Davie toured with Scottish jazz bands.

Davie’s work was admired by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and David Hockney. Davie himself collected non-Western art and liked tattoos, graffiti, and ‘outsider art’. His final interview before death, with The Telegraph, gave an insight into how he viewed art: “It’s an urge, an intensity, a kind of sexual need[…] something I do from an inner compulsion, that has to come out.”

He initially avoided painting as a career at all, then spent several years earning money by other means whilst his paintings failed to sell. His exhibitions in the late 1950s, however, were highly successful and launched his career. He was in the habit of choosing titles for his art only after completion.

Despite a strong presence owing to his lengthy red beard and off-beat humour, he was shy; his international fame waned. Recent years have seen a revival of interest with price increases for his early art. London alone is host to three exhibitions this month including at the Tate.

Tate Britain calls Davie “one of the first British artists after the war to develop an expressive form of abstraction” producing “kaleidoscopic canvases[…] that the artist relates to his love of jazz”.