Aviation articles by Wikinewsie Iain Macdonald.

This Category ‘sub-page’ will display up to 500 articles which one of the project’s contributors has written on a specific topic.

Thursday, February 3, 2022

On Monday, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Georgia rejected a guilty plea from Travis McMichael after McMichael offered in court to plead guilty to federal hate crimes in the death of Ahmaud Arbery.

It is highly unusual for a U.S. judge to reject a plea agreement, which would waive McMichael’s right to appeal.

McMichael said he was willing to plead guilty to attacking Arbery out of racial animosity, which would make Arbery’s murder a hate crime. In the proposed plea deal, he would have spent the first 30 years of his sentence in a federal prison. After that, he would move to a Georgia state prison for the rest of his life. Per this deal, even if his state charges were overturned, McMichael would still spend many years in prison.

In court, federal prosecutors urged Judge Wood to accept the plea deal, but Arbery’s family asked her not to. The dead man’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said that the men who killed her son did not deserve to choose their living conditions: “Granting these men their preferred choice of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face.”

Prosecutors claimed they had talked with the victim’s family about the plea deal in advance, but lawyers for Cooper-Jones disagreed.

Judge Wood explained that Cooper-Jones’ statement was part of her decision, but her main reason was that she did not want to be held to the strict 30-year sentence agreed upon by prosecutors and McMichael’s lawyers.

Wood’s decision casts doubt on whether McMichael’s father, Gregory McMichael will also plead guilty as planned. Gregory McMichael also helped kill Arbery.

In February 2020, the McMichaels and a third man, William Bryan, chased Arbery, 25, in trucks as he jogged through their suburban Georgia neighborhood. Travis McMichael then fought with Arbery on foot and shot him to death. Bryan took cell phone video of the event, which later appeared on the Internet.

In November 2021, all three men were convicted of murder in Georgia’s Glynn County Superior Court. They were sentenced to life in prison, though only Bryan was granted the possibility of parole. The state of Georgia did not at that time have its own hate crime law, and prosecutors decided to charge the men on the federal level.

Jury selection for Travis McMichael’s federal hate crimes trial is scheduled to begin on Monday, February 7.

Tuesday, May 9, 2006For the first time in three decades, direct and at least partially public diplomatic communication will commence between the United States (US) and Iran. Iranian government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sent a letter to the U.S. president George W. Bush proposing “new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation of the world”.

Mr Gholam-Hossein Elham did not say whether the letter mentioned the nuclear dispute, one of the diplomatic problems currently straining relations between Iran and the USA. This information arrived one day after the Iranian parliament announced that it might retract from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) if Western pressure over its programme was to increase.

Differing reports have been made as to whether or not the letter will be made public, and if so, when. In its online report of 8 May 2006, 09:25 GMT, the BBC quoted Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as saying that the contents of the letter would be made public once Bush had received it. The updated version of the report of 8 May 2006, 14:52 GMT, quotes Asefi as saying that the contents would be made public “at the right time”. An ABC report quoted Gholam-Hossein Elham as saying “it is not an open letter.”

Iran’s foreign affairs minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, delivered the letter to the United States’ interests section in the Swiss embassy in Tehran on Monday. The United States has not held diplomatic relations with Iran since the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said “this letter isn’t it. This letter is not the place that one would find an opening to engage on the nuclear issue or anything of the sort.”

“It isn’t addressing the issues that we’re dealing with in a concrete way,” she added.

John R. Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, also read the letter, saying, “I think it is typical of Iran that when major decisions are about to be taken … that they have tried to throw sand in the eyes of the proponents of the action. That’s what this may be.”

The letter has since been put on an official Iranian website, and on Tuesday, Ahmadinejad said “the letter to US President George Bush carries the Iranian nation’s views and comments on international issues as well as suggestions for resolving the many problems facing humanity.”

Saturday, October 21, 2006

The upcoming 2006 Brampton municipal election, to be held November 13, features an array of candidates looking to represent their wards in city council or the council of the Peel Region.

Wikinews contributor Nick Moreau contacted many of the candidates, including Innocent Watat, asking them to answer common questions sent in an email. This ward’s incumbent is Bob Callahan; Balbir Babra, Manny Bianchi-Morfino, Dolly Khokhar, Maria Peart, Tim Turcott, and Sheila White.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Virgil Griffith recently made headlines when his new tool, the WikiScanner, was revealed. The tool allows users to search for some edits to several editions of the online free-content encyclopedia Wikipedia made from Internet addresses assigned to particular companies.

The media buzz made Virgil’s tool near-inaccessible as it was swamped with queries. Initially broken by Wired, the articles highlighted edits from network addresses assigned to Diebold and the CIA, and encouraged readers to reveal and share their findings. Mainstream media such as the BBC revealed that edits made from CIA addresses had made changes to the article on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that edits were made from Vatican addresses to Gerry Adams’s article.

Readers of the BBC news website were quick to point out that edits to Wikipedia also originated from the BBC network addresses. Peter Clifton, head of BBC Interactive, confessed to writing about himself and revealed that a prankster within the BBC had edited George W. Bush’s entry to state that his middle name was “Wanker”. The BBC’s Internet address range had a total of nearly 8,000 edits to other various English Wikipedia articles such as Janet Jackson, Super Furry Animals and Freeview.

Without confirmation such as Peter Clifton gave, it is usually impossible to determine from the IP address alone if the edits made from it were even performed by an employee of the organization. While it is likely that the majority of edits are from an organisation’s employees there is the possibility that visitors could be using a company address, or a public-wifi could be on offer. All of this would appear to be edits from the company according to Wikiscanner, and even when the edits do come from employees or representatives, there is no way to tell from the data alone whether the company endorses the edits, or even knows about them.

While Wikipedia advertises itself as the encyclopaedia “anyone can edit”, there are guidelines on the site directing how users may edit the articles—and even, in some cases, who shouldn’t be editing them. None of Wikipedia’s “conflict of interest” policies attempt to limit what people can edit based on the Internet address that they are using.

Wikinews had already started an investigation into just what edits the tool revealed. Hampered by the difficulty getting results due to the traffic load on the web server, we began checking company names and names of media groups. In addition to verifying that the vast majority of edits from network addresses assigned to the BBC were beneficial to the Wikipedia project, the others, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters and AP received a fairly clean bill of health. People using Reuters’ Internet connectivity appeared the first to discover Wikipedia, editing as early as February 2002. Users from AP had made a few edits to articles about the AP, none of which could be considered negative contributions, other contributions included additions to several The Simpsons episodes. However, edits originating at address space assigned to FOX News, and its parent company, News Corporation were more frequently unproductive, many which under Wikipedia and most other Wikimedia project policy, would be considered vandalism and would usually result in a block or ban of editing Wikimedia projects.

The edits from FOX’s address space, now totalling almost 700, start with an edit to the article on FOX which deleted links to websites critical of FOX. Some of the edits could be characterized as an attempt conceal criticism voiced in the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism which alleges bias by FOX News. This was replaced with a link to the company’s official response and another to a story put out by FOX News questioning the validity of the film’s sources. The same Internet address at FOX News then removed criticism from the article on Alan Colmes.

Other addresses within FOX also edited articles on FOX News employees such as Brit Hume, Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace inserting positive information, highlighting their ratings successes and slogan, “fair and balanced” before going on to describe the New York Times as “left wing” and blanking the quotes section on the article about their columnist Mike Straka. The current version of this article is disputed on neutrality grounds as the entire biography and criticism sections have been removed. Including comments about anti-war protesters – “whom he has denounced as “smelly”, “stupid”, “stinking”, “jobless”, “anti-American” and “traitors”.“

More recent edits include downplaying Sean Hannity‘s importance to the show Hannity and Colmes by removing the fact that he is the shows executive producer and referring to him as simply “host” or “co-host”. Details of Wendy Murdoch‘s previous marriage to the husband from the couple who sponsored her trip to study in the United States were excised by another Fox News address.

Investigation of a wider field of media organisations revealed that the News Corporation subsidiary British Sky Broadcasting has the same history of juvenile and prank edits with insults posted against staff on their payroll as well as UK celebrities. The main proxy server that allows their staff on the Internet currently has a large warning of who the IP address belongs to and a list of block messages and block/edit warnings. Some of the vandalism committed through their proxy has been described as “racist” and “potentially libelous”.

WikiScanner cannot identify the origin of any edit made by a registered user. Users are not required to register an account to edit Wikipedia, and those who do not register have their edits associated with an IP address. Edits from unregistered users are, inaccurately, called “anonymous” edits.

Wikimedia’s privacy policy does not allow revealing the IP address of registered users except as dictated by Wikimedia’s privacy policy. Users of Wikiscanner cannot find out about editing by registered users, even if they are coming from the same IP address as the “anonymous” users who did not register.

Virgil’s conditions for speaking to the media include the format of a link to his website. His goal, to get a Google search for “Virgil” to return his page as the top listing. As of publication he’s succeeded.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The following is the third edition of a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2016 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: two individuals previously interviewed by Wikinews announce their candidacies for the Reform Party presidential nomination; a former Republican Congressman comments on the Republican National Convention; and Wikinews interviews an historic Democratic National Convention speaker.