Friday, June 27, 2008

A Casa-212 aircraft owned by the Indonesian air force disappeared while on a flight from the capital Jakarta to Bogor in West Java Friday morning.

The plane was carrying 12 Indonesian military personnel and 6 civilians including a British, Singaporean and Indian national.

The plane was tasked to test a new digital camera designed to conduct aerial mapping and topography.

The aircraft was last sighted on radar in the Salak moutain region on the main island of Java, 90 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of the Indonesian capital.

The Indonesian military has deployed a search and rescue team in the area.

Authorities fear that the aircraft crashed in a densely forested area making any rescue difficult.

Air Force spokesman Chaeruddin Ray said the region was covered in thick fog and in a rough terrain.

Three planes and forty people were deployed into the region to look for the downed plane.

Indonesia has been plagued with several plane accidents resulting in a ban on the entry of Indonesian airlines into European airports. This is the second incident in Indonesian aviation involving a Casa-212. In January of 2008, a similar plane model owned by a private company also crashed.

The Casa-212 is a design by Spanish avionics company Construcciones Aeronáuticas, a turbo-prop plane designed for a short take-off and landing.

The Spanish company licensed an Indonesian avionics firm to assemble and manufacture this aircraft.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Netizens have discovered the photograph that was used to create the iconic Barack Obama “HOPE” poster, which became a national symbol during his 2008 presidential campaign in the United States.

Los Angeles, California street artist Shepard Fairey’s poster design is an almost exact match to an Associated Press photo from October 2006 or earlier. Prior reports beginning on January 14, 2009 claimed that the poster was based on a different photo, a shot by Reuters photographer Jim Young from January 2007. However, on January 20, 2009 Flickr user stevesimula and blog commenters identified the Associated Press photo that appears to be a much closer match.

Fairey had revealed that he found the photographic basis for his four-color screen-printed design using Google Image Search, but could not or would not identify which photo he used. News broke of a supposed source only days ago. According to an earlier attempted analysis by Michael Cramer, it was a photo from TIME magazine which was reversed and stretched slightly. That photo was credited to “Jonathan Daniel” of Getty Images, but this turned out to be a misattribution. Reporter James Danziger of The Daily Beast tracked down the actual photographer for the TIME shot, Jim Young, and in his words “solved the biggest photographic mystery of the 2008 election”. Reuters also celebrated their photo as the basis for such a phenomenon as Fairey’s poster, and a print of the photo was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. But it took only a few days for internet sleuths to show that, while similar, the Jim Young photo was not the one Fairey used.

The most convincing evidence that a different photo is indeed the one comes from Flickr: stevesimula produced a graphic comparing the two purported sources. The side lighting in the alternative photo creates highlight and shadow areas closely matching those Fairey used in his high-contrast stencil-like image, and the overlaid images line up precisely from Obama’s eyes to the shadow on his collar to his tie. Jim Young’s photo would have required manipulation to simply match the profile of Fairey’s design, even without considering details like the highlights and shadows.

The actual photo came from the Associated Press, as Wikimedians discovered using the “reverse image search engine” TinEye.com. That tip led photographer Tom Gralish of The Philadelphia Inquirer to the original photo through a Google image search for both “Obama” and “associated press”. The original contained IPTC metadata identifying the creator as Mannie Garcia, which Gralish quickly confirmed. The shot came from an April 2006 event where George Clooney, not then-Senator Obama, was the main attraction: Clooney was addressing the National Press Club about his trip to Darfur.

Fairey’s appropriation raises questions of intellectual property, as apparently no attempt was made to secure reproduction rights from the Associated Press. Sales of the image (on posters, clothing, and other paraphernalia) were used to fund the production of more posters in support of the Obama campaign, and raised Fairey’s public image considerably. A large hand-finished collage version was recently acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. The purchase price is not known.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

A court in England, UK has jailed a policeman for ten months after he was convicted of defrauding his car insurance company.

Police Constable Simon Hood, 43, arranged for a friend who dealt in scrap metal to dispose of his Audi TT, then claimed it had been stolen.

Hood had been disappointed with the car’s value when he tried to sell it two years after its purchase in 2008. He arranged for friend Peter Marsh, 41, to drive the vehicle to his scrapyard in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. Marsh then dismantled the vehicle with the intent of disposing of it, but parts were later found wrapped in bubblewrap at Ace Tyre and Exhaust Centre.

Marsh picked up the TT from outside nearby Gorleston police station. Records show mobile phone conversations between the conspirators that day in March, both before and after the vehicle was reported stolen. The pair denied wrongdoing but were convicted of conspiring to commit insurance fraud after trial.

The fraud was uncovered after Hood told former girlfriend Suzanne Coates of the scheme. It was alleged before Norwich Crown Court that he had confessed to her in an effort to resume their relationship. Coates said that after the pseudotheft, Hood told her “he didn’t want to look for it. He said it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, which I thought was a bit strange.”

Shortly afterwards Hood suggested they should become a couple once more, she said; she challenged his version of events regarding the car: “He said he did it but I couldn’t tell anyone. He said he did it with Peter. Peter had a key and took the car away and it was going to be taken to bits and got rid of so it was never found.”

Hood was defended by Michael Clare and Marsh by Richard Potts. Both lawyers told the court that their clients had already suffered as a result of the action in mitigation before sentencing. Clare said Hood had resigned from the police after fifteen years of otherwise good service and risked losing his pension. “It is not a case where his position as a police officer was used in order to facilitate the fraud,” he pointed out. “His career is in ruins.” Hood is now pursuing a career in plumbing.

Potts defended Marsh by saying that he, too, had already suffered from his actions. His own insurers are refusing to renew their contract with him when it expires and his bank withdrew its overdraft facility. His business employs 21 people and Potts cited Marsh’s sponsorship of Great Yarmouth In Bloom as amongst evidence he supported his local community.

Judge Alasdair Darroch told Marsh that he did accept the man was attempting to help his friend. He sentenced Marsh to six months imprisonment, suspended for two years and ordered to carry out 250 hours of community service. He was more critical of Hood:

“As a police officer you know the highest possible standards are demanded by the public. You have let down the force. You knew throughout your career that policemen that get involved in serious dishonesty get sent to prison.”