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Saturday, August 14, 2010

Former US Representative Dan Rostenkowski died of lung cancer Wednesday at his vacation home in Genoa City, Wisconsin. Rostenkowski, whose political career ended in the early 1990s after he was convicted on fraud charges, was 82.

Rostenkowski’s death was confirmed by his spokesperson, Jim Jaffe, who said that the former congressman had been receiving treatment for lung cancer for a while. Rostenkowski had previously been treated for prostate cancer in the 1990s.

Rostenkowski was born on January 2, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. He was an athlete and declined an invitation to try out for the Philadelphia Athletics (now the Oakland Athletics) in order to pursue a career in politics. Rostenkowski attended St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy in Wisconsin, served with the US Army in Korea, and graduated from Loyola University in 1951.

Rostenkowski’s political career was supported by the Cook County political machine, and he became a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1952, one year after graduating from college. In 1958, when he was 30, Rostenkowski was elected to the US House of Representatives. In 1961, he began serving on the United States House Committee on Ways and Means, the chief committee of the House for writing taxes. From 1981–1994, he served as the committee’s chairman. Rostenkowski was involved in the creation of Medicare in 1966 and he helped make amendments to the Social Security system in 1983.

In 1992, a federal jury began an inquiry into the House post office, and Rostenkowski was accused of buying US$22,000 in stamps with government funds and then turning them into cash. The investigation, which lasted two years, led to Republican allegations of corruption within the Democratic party. In 1994, Rostenkowski was charged with 17 felony counts, including the use of federal money to purchase furniture, and obstruction of justice. In order to avoid a trial, Rostenkowski made a deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty to two counts of mail fraud in exchange for fifteen months in prison, two months in a halfway house, and a US$100,000 fine.

Rostenkowski, who was not reelected for a nineteenth term in Congress in 1994, continued to maintain his innocence, and was pardoned by US President Bill Clinton in 2000.

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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

London, England — Yesterday, following her team’s 62–37 win over Mexico in the quarterfinals, Wikinews interviewed Katie Hill of Australia’s women’s national wheelchair basketball team.

((Laura Hale)) Katie Hill, we know you’ve won a bronze medal before. What state are you from?

Katie Hill: I’m from New South Wales.

((WN)) Do you play for a club?

KH: Yeah! I play for the Sydney Uni Flames.

((WN)) You guys played Mexico in the lead up to this?

KH: Yeah. We just had a tournament in the Netherlands, in Europe, and we got to play them there, which is good preparation.

((WN)) You guys dominated in a painful way, embarrassingly for Mexico. You guys did a full court press and half court press and really jammed them up. Was that intentional?

KH: Of course! We had a strong game in our last game against the Netherlands, and obviously we’re a bit fired up, and we want to be here so, you know, we want to play as strong as we can and prepare ourselves for the strongest teams that we can play. So, if we get to practice those kind of things and it works really well, then that’s what we are aiming to do

((WN)) You’re going to meet either the USA or Canada. As an American, I find that terrifying. Do you guys think you have a real shot at the [semifinals]?

KH: Obviously, there’s a lot of good teams in this competition. I think that anyone could win it on their day. As long as we’re playing as well as we can, sure! Definitely!

((WN)) You seemed to have all the answers to the Netherlands yesterday. Every tactic that they tried, you had a counterattack.

KH: They’re a familiar team for us. We’ve been playing them for a while, and I think yesterday’s win was probably the first time we’ve beaten them in quite a long time. So it was nice to finally make that happen now, and have that be a good win for us and put us in a good position.

((WN)) Now’s a good time to find real form.

KH: Exactly! So, we’re saving it all up for when it counts!

((WN)) You did really well in Sydney in that tournament.

KH: Yes.

((WN)) You have that huge fan base with all those gliders shirts. How big a difference does it make on the court?

KH: Oh, it’s unreal. It’s amazing to come out. When you come out here, to many of the girls it’s their first time out, and you come out and there’s a whole big stadium full of people, all you want to do is find your family, and know where they’re sitting, and sometimes that’s really hard. So we’ve got them all in their yellow shirts and they’re all sitting there so they’re all recognisable and it just is amazing to feel so comfortable that all those people are behind you.

((WN)) Who’s here for you?

KH: I have my mum, my dad, my auntie, and also my dad’s girlfriend is here as well.

((WN)) Are you enjoying London, and the food and all?

KH: Yeah! This is the first time I’ve actually been to London. I’ve been through it a few times on our travels elsewhere, but it’s been fantastic, and we’re really enjoying it.

((WN)) Do you plan to continue on to Rio? Or are you going to be like other Paralympians and retire on top?

KH: I don’t plan to retire any time soon. It’s not like this is my last shot and then I’m going to have a rest. But I’m also focused on now and not really in four years time. I’ll see how I’m going then. I like to play basketball so I’m not going to quit.

((WN)) Thank you very much.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

A new website SpreadingRomney.com now appears prominently among Internet search results for Mitt Romney’s last name and defines romney as: “to defecate in terror”. Spreading Romney was inspired by the santorum neologism coined in advice columnist Dan Savage’s column Savage Love in response to comments made by former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum about homosexuality; Savage’s readers voted to define santorum as: “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

While defining romney as a verb, the word “terror” in the definition given at SpreadingRomney.com links to an article that appeared January 5 in The Huffington Post titled “Mitt Romney’s Dog Incident Comes Back To Haunt Him”. The article describes a 1983 incident where Romney was reported to have affixed his family’s pet Irish setter named Seamus to the roof of their vehicle for 12 hours while on a car trip to Canada; press coverage of the matter recounted how the animal let loose its bowels due to a fear response during the experience.

Similar to online searches leading to the santorum neologism website originally created by Dan Savage, SpreadingSantorum.com, queries for Romney yielding top search results for SpreadingRomney.com are not limited only to Google but extend to other search engines including Bing as well.

MSNBC quoted search engine expert Danny Sullivan, who observed that the website had likely risen of late in search results: “I don’t recall seeing it recently, so it appears to be a new gain.”

The Atlantic reported that as of yesterday, SpreadingRomney.com had received 3,416 like button clicks from Facebook and 1,261 posts on Twitter. The site appeared third in a Google search for Romney, directly below the former Massachusetts Governor’s Wikipedia page.

In a 2003 interview with the Associated Press, Rick Santorum compared legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States to supporting bestiality. Readers of the Savage Love advice column selected a new definition for the Senator’s last name, and Savage created a website SpreadingSantorum.com to promulgate the spread of the phenomenon. The term became a prominent result in searches online, and gained dominance on Web search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Rick Santorum himself has acknowledged and discussed the existence and prevalence of the santorum neologism phenomenon; he was quoted by The Canadian Press on his assessment of Google’s response: “To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can’t handle. I suspect that’s not true.” Santorum criticized the response of the press to the phenomenon in a 2011 radio interview, saying, “It’s offensive beyond, you know, anything that any public figure or anybody in America should tolerate, and the mainstream media laughs about it.”

The company Go Daddy manages the domain name for the website SpreadingRomney.com; the site was registered by an Indianapolis, Indiana-based company named Ayokay LLC which was formed on January 1. The website reportedly started operating on January 10. Rachel Maddow commented upon it on January 12 on her program The Rachel Maddow Show. The founder of SpreadingRomney.com, Jack Shepler, informed Sullivan that he holds no ties to any political campaign group and formed the website out of a comedic motivation.

New York Magazine noted that there may be another neologism this time derived from the last name of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich; linking to an established website for SpreadingGingrich.com. That site is currently asking visitors to submit suggestions for a new definition of gingrich.

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Astronomers have discovered that Saturn’s D ring, the innermost of Saturn’s 15 rings, has grown dimmer in the past 25 years and sections have moved up to 125 miles inward toward the planet. This discovery was made after astronomers compiled results predominantly from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which passed Saturn in 1981, and the Cassini-Huygens probe which entered Saturn’s orbit last year.

Other rings were found to be rotating slower than had previously been estimated with computer models. It was also discovered that the matter composing the rings is of far more widely varying temperatures than had been expected. Sections of Saturn’s F ring were also recognised as breaking apart and reforming, depending on the location of one of Saturn’s moons.

The rings, which are now iconic to Saturn, and known to be common to all Jovian planets in general, were first observed in 1610 by Galileo. The rings have recently become a subject of scientific interest to modern astronomers who believe they are similar in structure to the dust which orbited the Sun, in a similar pattern, and formed the planets some 4.5 billion years ago.

This, and other Cassini-related discoveries, were discussed at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society‘s division of planetary sciences on Monday.

The time is 22:00 (UTC) on June 18th, 2006, and this is Audio Wikinews News Briefs.

Friday, April 18, 2014

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The American satirist Stephen Colbert has announced that he will run for the Presidency of the United States. He made his announcement on his mock news show The Colbert Report.

However, Colbert said that he would only run in his home state of South Carolina as a favorite son. He also said that he would represent both major political parties: the Republicans and the Democrats. It is not known how far Colbert will go with his character during his electoral run.

Colbert has hosted The Colbert Report, a spin-off to another satirical television series, The Daily Show, since its creation in 2005. “I didn’t have a job back then. I wonder what it was like to have a job back then. I am sure I could ask a dentist or a surgeon. He would know.” On the show he plays a right-wing political pundit, based on real-life pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Stone Phillips. Colbert has been credited with popularizing certain words such as “Truthiness”, meaning to believe something intuitively, without regard for actual facts, logic or evidence.

Filling in for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sunday, Colbert wrote: “I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.”