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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”.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Rico Daniels is a British TV presenter living in France who is known for his two television series — The Salvager — whilst he still lived in the UK and then Le Salvager after he moved to France. Rico has been in a variety of jobs but his passion is now his profession – he turns unwanted ‘junk’ into unusual pieces of furniture. Rico’s creations and the methods used to fabricate them are the subject of the Salvager shows.

Rico spoke to Wikinews in January about his inspiration and early life, future plans, other hobbies and more. Read on for the full exclusive interview, published for the first time:

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Michael Ryan, a messenger at the office of the prime minister, has been identified as the mole who leaked confidential papers to Telecom.

The leaked papers were detailing the plan for the government to unbundle the local loop. It was to be released on Thursday with the 2006 budget, but since Telecom, a publicly traded company, found out they decided to release it early.

Michael Ryan, May 2, was told to shred a document, but instead of doing that he took it and gave it to Telecom’s Group Financial Controller Peter Garty, a close friend. He gave it to Peter Garty because he thought he would find it interesting. Michael Ryan told Peter Garty to not make a copy of it. Peter Garty made a copy.

Telecom shares fell from $5.65 to $4.65 following the disclosure, wiping about $2 billion off the value of the company.

The States Service Commission has passed the case onto the police.

The mole has lost his job. His actions were described as “gross and disgraceful dishonesty” by Prime Minister Helen Clark.

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Lunar Jim, the star of an stop-motion animated series for preschooler, will be touring Canadian malls this fall. Produced by Alliance Atlantis, the tour will run from September 9 to October 14.

The tour will feature part of Jim’s lunar village, an inflated replica of his home on Moona Luna. Also at the events will be a colouring activity, an area to play with the recently launched Fisher-Price toys, and have their photo taken with a costumed character version of Jim, and cut-out characters of the rest of the cast.

The tour coincides with the launch of Lunar Jim toys by this month. Canadians can watch the series on CBC and Société Radio-Canada (SRC), the French version of CBC.

• Coquitlam Centre (Coquitlam, British Columbia): September 9 – 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Landsdowne Centre (Richmond, British Columbia): September 10 – 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Southcentre (Calgary, Alberta): September 16 – 9 a.m. – 8 p.m.
• West Edmonton Mall (Edmonton, Alberta): September 17 – 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Polo Park Shopping Centre (Winnipeg, Manitoba): September 23 – 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Northgate Shopping Centre (Winnipeg, Manitoba): September 24 – 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
• Square One (Mississauga, Ontario): September 30 – 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.
• Upper Canada Mall (Newmarket, Ontario): October 1 – 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
• Centre Mall (Hamilton, Ontario): October 7 – 9:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
• Masonville Mall (London, Ontario): October 8 – 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
• Mic Mac Mall (Halifax, Nova Scotia): October 14 – 9:30 a.m. – 9:30 p.m.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

On Wednesday, nine men were jailed due to sexual abuse and rape of two teenage girls at a children’s home in Bradford, England. A tenth defendant was found not-guilty.

The nine men were prosecuted for 22 different crimes. These included rape and inciting child prostitution.

Judge Durham Hall QC said they “appear not to have shown any respect for the minimum standards of decent behaviour.” Prosecutor Kama Melly QC said the victims were “ripe and vulnerable to manipulation” and had been used “to satisfy [the accused’s] sexual desires”.

One of the victims decided to allow her name to be made public. She said she did this to show victims “there is nothing to be ashamed of”. One of the victims said the men thought they were “nothing but a toy to play with”.

Bradford Council stated, “The Safeguarding Board will look closely at this case to see if there are any lessons we can learn that could help us keep young people safer”.

Sunday, July 24, 2005

After the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) completes its acquisition of Chicago-based electronic trading company, Archipelago Holdings within the next 12 months, the impact will also be felt in San Francisco, California as the future of the 123-year-old Pacific Exchange (PCX) becomes murky.

This stems from a deal struck in January of this year, before the NYSE merger, when Archipelago struck a deal worth $83 million to take over operations of the San Francisco stock exchange and its 260 employees. All PCX operations are scheduled to be under Archipelago control by the end of September. Archipelago had planned to maintain the San Francisco operations.

As details were released Thursday of the April NYSE-Archipelago merger to the Securities and Exchange Commission, all Archipelago functions are to be folded into NYSE operations, including the PCX stock and options trading business. The report did not state whether or not the San Francisco employees would be kept after the merger is complete.

Started in 1882 at the San Francisco Stock Market, the Pacific Exchange, along with other regional stock exchanges, has suffered as customers shifted to electronic trading, which bypassed the need for stock exchange services in many instances.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

In a 7-2 decision handed down on Monday, the US Supreme Court struck down California’s violent video game law and ruled that video games are protected speech covered by the First Amendment. The California law banned the sale and rental of violent video games to minors.

The underlying question was whether the violence in video games has the ability to affect children more than violence in other media, such as books, movies, plays and other forms of entertainment.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said that depictions of violence have never been regulated by the US government. Thus violent videos are not to fall under government control as does pornography but is to be accorded the same First Amendment protections as other forms of entertainment. The sale of violent video games is not to be criminalized and California’s attempt to do so was “unprecedented and mistaken.” Scalia noted, referring to fairy tales, that “the books we give children to read—or read to them when they are younger—contain no shortage of gore.”

The beginning of the decision states, “Video games qualify for First Amendment protection. Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium. And ‘the basic principles of freedom of speech…do not vary’ with a new and different communication medium.”

“The most basic principle—that government lacks the power to restrict expression because of its message, ideas, subject matter, or content, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U. S. 564, 573—is subject to a few limited exceptions for historically unprotected speech, such as obscenity, incitement, and fighting words. But a legislature cannot create new categories of unprotected speech simply by weighing the value of a particular category against its social costs and then punishing it if it fails the test.”

The justices were not convinced by the existing research that the interactive nature of video games pose a greater risk to society because of their interactive nature. None of the results of the existing research put before the court showed that violent games cause violent behavior. “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively. Any demonstrated effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media. Since California has declined to restrict those other media, e.g., Saturday morning cartoons, its video-game regulation is wildly under-inclusive, raising serious doubts about whether the State is pursuing the interest it invokes or is instead disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint.”

According to Nadine Kaslow, professor and chief psychologist at Emory University Department of Psychology and Grady Hospital, the evidence regarding the effects of violent video games is mixed. While there is evidence to suggest that exposure of children to violence results in more aggressive and less pro-social behavior, some studies show there is no negative effect, she said. She point out that toy guns were popular and parents monitored whether toy guns were allowed in the home.

This ruling does not prevent private retailers from placing restrictions on their sale of video games. The video game industry currently has its own rating system, much like that used for movies, and educates retailers in using the rating system to prevent minors from buying mature-rated games. According to PC World the industry’s compliance is better than that of other entertainment industries. Further, parental controls have been added to game consoles.

The view of the Entertainment Software Association that a better strategy is the education of parents rather than court battles.