Wednesday, December 28, 2016

George Michael, a well-known British pop singer and songwriter, died on Christmas Day at the age of 53. Michael was found dead at his home in Oxfordshire, England, by boyfriend Fadi Fawaz.

Michael’s publicist released the following statement to People and Entertainment Weekly: “It is with great sadness that we can confirm our beloved son, brother and friend George passed away peacefully at home over the Christmas period. The family would ask that their privacy be respected at this difficult and emotional time.” He also reported that Michael had died of heart failure and “passed away peacefully”.

Sir Elton John said via Instagram, “I am in deep shock. I have lost a beloved friend — the kindest, most generous soul and a brilliant artist. My heart goes out to his family and all of his fans.”

George Michael was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou in London. Over his multi-decade career, he sold more than 100 million records. Along with co-singer Andrew Ridgeley he became famous as part of the duo band Wham!. Together, Michael and Ridgeley produced several hit songs, such as Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go, Freedom, and Last Christmas. In 1985, Wham! was the first Western band to play in China since the beginning of the country’s opening up strategy. Wham! dissolved in 1986. In 1984, Michael recorded the successful single Careless Whisper. Michael was credited as the solo artist in the United Kingdom and as “Wham! featuring George Michael” in the United States. Michael released a hit solo album Faith in 1987, containing hits like I Want Your Sex.

Michael’s life was troubled by both substance abuse and issues with his sexuality. He initially hid his identity as a gay man from his fans, coming out only after a very public arrest for public lewdness in 1998. He would later be arrested for possession of drugs and driving under the influence of drugs. He was sentenced to eight weeks in prison in 2010 for crashing a Range Rover into a storefront while under the influence of drugs and possession of cannabis.

Michael had a history of transforming his negative experiences into art. He wrote White Light about a serious case of pneumonia that led to his hospitalization in 2011, and the music video for Outside, which followed on the heels of his arrest and coming out, showed scenes of a men’s bathroom, a dance club, and men kissing while in police uniforms. He would perform White Light live at the 2012 London Olympics.

Friday, November 29, 2013

With the US retail tradition of ‘Black Friday’ already underway early Thursday evening, some shoppers began gathering outside retail stores as much as 53 hours prior to these special sales events. This, according to a Texas man who told Wikinews that he and his companions had started gathering at their local Best Buy store at 1:00pm on Tuesday, awaiting the 6:00pm Thursday opening. Target retail stores opened across the country at 8pm (local time) on Thursday evening. At 8:45pm Thursday evening, approximately 500 cars were parked at the Target store in Tyler, Texas.

At least four camping tents were set up outside the Best Buy store in the Dallas, Texas area, during pre-dawn hours on Thanksgiving morning. Years ago, it was seen as something special for retail stores to open at 6am on the so-called ‘Black Friday’ following Thanksgiving Day; that time would be considered “late” by modern standards. Many retailers use barricades to organize those who gather at their storefronts. For the first time ever, a shopping mall in Las Cruces, New Mexico will open at 8pm on Thanksgiving Day and will remain open for 25 consecutive hours, closing at 9pm Friday evening.

In recent years, several significant injuries have occurred during the melee that often ensued when stores opened their doors for Black Friday events. In 2011, a woman shot pepper spray at 20 people who were waiting to purchase the newest Xbox system.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Episodes of the Colorado-based cartoon comedy television series South Park have been made available for free via streaming video on the website SouthParkStudios.com. Full-length episodes from the past 12 seasons of South Park can be seen on the site, as well as behind-the-scenes clips and information on upcoming episodes.

After new episodes of the program air on Comedy Central they will be added to the site for one week, but will then be unavailable for the next 30 days before being added to the site’s archives, due to contractual obligations. SouthParkStudios.com was relaunched with free streaming episodes on March 19, and as of Comedy Central’s announcement Tuesday the site had three million hits, two million video plays and one million full-episode streams. 168 of the series’ 169 episodes are currently available on the site.

The site is currently in a beta format and is ad supported, but visitors can watch an unlimited number of episodes. Streaming episodes are uncensored, and each episode will have between three and four advertisements. The website also has news, games, blogs and a feature where users can create South Park avatar characters in their likeness. Fans can also choose from 3,000 episode clips from the show to embed on their blogs or websites. The website was created by WPP agency Schematic, with Toyota and Virgin as launch sponsors.

SouthParkStudios.com launched this past summer with games and other media content, in a deal between South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker where their contract with Comedy Central was extended for three years and the cable television channel agreed to split online ad revenue 50-50. Matt Stone commented on the three-year contract to produce more episodes of the series: “Three more years of South Park will give us the opportunity to offend that many more people … And since Trey and I are in charge of the digital side of South Park, we can offend people on their cellphones, game consoles, and computers too. It’s all very exciting for us.”

Parker and Stone released a statement about the website: “We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time, so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.” Parker and Stone don’t think that the move will affect DVD sales of past seasons, because fans will still want to own episodes in a “hard copy” format.

The website is managed by South Park Digital Studios LLC, a joint venture of Parker and Stone and Comedy Central. Anne Garefino, general manager of South Park Digital Studios stated: “One goal in moving forward is to make every episode of South Park available worldwide … Currently, full episodes are not available in the U.K., Australia and a few other foreign territories, but we’re not far off from making that happen. We have some contractual issues to sift through but we’re getting there.”

On the move to make the episodes available for free, Sam Thielman of Variety wrote: “It’s a good time for Parker and Stone to distance themselves from the YouTube community given Comedy Central parent Viacom’s protracted lawsuit against the Web-based video distrib, which features clips from the show.” Viacom is suing YouTube for US$1 billion in damages relating to video clips displayed on the video-sharing website. Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire wrote: “With all their content already out there Stone, Parker and Viacom realized offering South Park episodes online directly is a low risk proposition. They might as well draw some ad revenue from it.”

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Despite the hopes of many University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) students, The Onion was not named after their student center. “People always ask questions about where the name The Onion came from,” said President Sean Mills in an interview with David Shankbone, “and when I recently asked Tim Keck, who was one of the founders, he told me the name—I’ve never heard this story about ‘see you at the un-yun’—he said it was literally that his Uncle said he should call it The Onion when he saw him and Chris Johnson eating an onion sandwich. They had literally just cut up the onion and put it on bread.” According to Editorial Manager Chet Clem, their food budget was so low when they started the paper that they were down to white bread and onions.

Long before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Heck and Johnson envisioned a publication that would parody the news—and news reporting—when they were students at UW in 1988. Since its inception, The Onion has become a veritable news parody empire, with a print edition, a website that drew 5,000,000 unique visitors in the month of October, personal ads, a 24 hour news network, podcasts, and a recently launched world atlas called Our Dumb World. Al Gore and General Tommy Franks casually rattle off their favorite headlines (Gore’s was when The Onion reported he and Tipper were having the best sex of their lives after his 2000 Electoral College defeat). Many of their writers have gone on to wield great influence on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert‘s news parody shows.

And we are sorry to break the news to all you amateur headline writers: your submissions do not even get read.

Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Chet Clem and Sean Mills about the news empire that has become The Onion.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Episodes of the Colorado-based cartoon comedy television series South Park have been made available for free via streaming video on the website SouthParkStudios.com. Full-length episodes from the past 12 seasons of South Park can be seen on the site, as well as behind-the-scenes clips and information on upcoming episodes.

After new episodes of the program air on Comedy Central they will be added to the site for one week, but will then be unavailable for the next 30 days before being added to the site’s archives, due to contractual obligations. SouthParkStudios.com was relaunched with free streaming episodes on March 19, and as of Comedy Central’s announcement Tuesday the site had three million hits, two million video plays and one million full-episode streams. 168 of the series’ 169 episodes are currently available on the site.

The site is currently in a beta format and is ad supported, but visitors can watch an unlimited number of episodes. Streaming episodes are uncensored, and each episode will have between three and four advertisements. The website also has news, games, blogs and a feature where users can create South Park avatar characters in their likeness. Fans can also choose from 3,000 episode clips from the show to embed on their blogs or websites. The website was created by WPP agency Schematic, with Toyota and Virgin as launch sponsors.

SouthParkStudios.com launched this past summer with games and other media content, in a deal between South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker where their contract with Comedy Central was extended for three years and the cable television channel agreed to split online ad revenue 50-50. Matt Stone commented on the three-year contract to produce more episodes of the series: “Three more years of South Park will give us the opportunity to offend that many more people … And since Trey and I are in charge of the digital side of South Park, we can offend people on their cellphones, game consoles, and computers too. It’s all very exciting for us.”

Parker and Stone released a statement about the website: “We got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time, so we gave ourselves a legal alternative.” Parker and Stone don’t think that the move will affect DVD sales of past seasons, because fans will still want to own episodes in a “hard copy” format.

The website is managed by South Park Digital Studios LLC, a joint venture of Parker and Stone and Comedy Central. Anne Garefino, general manager of South Park Digital Studios stated: “One goal in moving forward is to make every episode of South Park available worldwide … Currently, full episodes are not available in the U.K., Australia and a few other foreign territories, but we’re not far off from making that happen. We have some contractual issues to sift through but we’re getting there.”

On the move to make the episodes available for free, Sam Thielman of Variety wrote: “It’s a good time for Parker and Stone to distance themselves from the YouTube community given Comedy Central parent Viacom’s protracted lawsuit against the Web-based video distrib, which features clips from the show.” Viacom is suing YouTube for US$1 billion in damages relating to video clips displayed on the video-sharing website. Richard Menta of MP3 Newswire wrote: “With all their content already out there Stone, Parker and Viacom realized offering South Park episodes online directly is a low risk proposition. They might as well draw some ad revenue from it.”

Friday, April 20, 2007

Around 1:40 p.m. CDT, NASA employees reported that two shots were fired in the NASA Building 44 in the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. A SWAT team later reported that Bill Phillips, a contract engineer with Jacobs Engineering, had killed David Beverly as well as himself, leaving a female hostage physically unharmed.

Phillips entered a conference room with gun drawn and ordered all but one person out. Phillips barricaded himself on the second floor of the two-story building, with David Beverly and another female hostage. The building was evacuated and police were summoned. NASA security, Houston police and a SWAT team were on the scene.

Houston news reported at 5:22 p.m. CDT that Bill Phillips, the gunman, and David Beverly, the hostage, were both dead. Police reported that the SWAT team heard one shot and decided to engage, but before they reached the room they heard another shot. When SWAT reached the scene, the male hostage was dead from a bullet to the chest, the gunman was dead from a bullet to the head, and the female hostage, Fran Cranshaw, was gagged and bound to a chair with duct tape, but was otherwise unharmed.

All NASA employees had first been warned to stay in their buildings but were later told by NASA they were free to go home if their working day was over. Mission Control locked its doors during this incident, as this is a standard procedure in such situations. No NASA Mission has been affected by this incident, according to NASA.

In the first press conference, police said that communication to the gunman had not yet been established, but that negotiators had already tried it two times unsuccessfully.

The motive of the hostage-taking, and whether the three people had any connection to each other, is currently under investigation.

The Houston Chronicle reports that last month Phillips had received one e-mail from his employer, Jacob engineering Inc., “describing problems with his work and offering suggestions on improvement.” Jacobs printed that e-mail on March 18, the same day he bought the 38-caliber gun that police suspect was used in the shooting.

Despite reassurances by Cranshaw and Beverly, Phillips would not believe that management was not going to fire him, according to Cranshaw. During the 3-hour standoff, Phillips used a dry-erase board in the room indicating he was tired of being called “stupid,” police said last Saturday.

Michael Sampson, the co-manager of the space agency’s Electronic Parts and Packaging Program, who had known Beverly for ten years, described him as friendly, peaceful person, with a positive attitude to his co-workers.

Relatives describe Phillips as a loner who always kept to himself. He had lost his father in 2003, but had decided not to return to his hometown in Tennessee. Smith, a cousin of Phillips, remarked that in the Christmas card he had received from him last year, Phillips said that he was feeling lonely and without family, but nothing in the card suggested anything so tragic.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005 British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has suffered what some consider a humiliating political defeat after the House of Commons dismissed a controversial government proposal to permit the detention of terror suspects for up to 90 days without bringing charges. Under current UK anti-terrorism laws, suspects can be held for up to 14 days without any charges being made against them.

Members of Mr Blair’s Labour Party used the vote to rebel against the proposal, with a crucial 49 tipping the balance to reject it by 322 votes to 291. It was the first Commons defeat for Mr Blair in his 8 years as Prime Minister. Later, a second proposal to extend the detention time limit for terror suspects to 28 days was passed by 323 votes to 290.

The police called for new powers after the bomb attacks in London on July 7, 2005. They argued that because anti-terrorist investigations can take considerable time, the new powers would have been justified. Critics are sceptical of these claims. Opponents believe that by effectively giving the government the right to imprison for up to three months anyone who it alleged to have been involved in terrorism, without having to present any charges in court to justify the detention, the bill could have led to abuses of power.

Leaders of the opposition parties were delighted with the results. Conservative leader Michael Howard said the vote had “diminished” the Prime Minister’s authority and that he should tender his resignation. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called Mr Blair a “lame duck”.

Speaking after the result of the vote was announced, Mr Blair accused those who’d opposed the measure of being “out of touch”, talking of a “worrying gap between parts of Parliament and the reality of the terrorist threat and public opinion”.

Former Conservative ministers Peter Lilley and Stephen Dorrell criticised the government for using senior police officers to lobby MPs over the vote. They characterised this as the “politicisation of the police”.