Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Barbara Bush, former first lady of the USA, died yesterday at the age of 92 in her home in Houston. She had suffered long from Graves’ disease, with which she had been diagnosed in 1988. On Sunday, she declined lifesaving medical treatment to live her final days peacefully in her home. She is survived by her husband, former US President George H.W. Bush with whom she had been together for 73 years, and her five children, including former US President George W. Bush and former US Governor Jeb Bush.

Barbara Bush was born in New York City on June 8, 1925. She married George H.W. Bush at the age of 17, and exited college to marry him. They had six children. George H.W. and their oldest son, George W. Bush, later became President.

“She will long be remembered for her strong devotion to country and family, both of which she served well”, her official death statement says. George W. Bush said “Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us, she was so much more. Mom kept us on our toes and kept us laughing until then.”

Barbara Bush’s funeral will be held in St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston. Until Saturday, her body will be in Geo. H. Lewis & Sons Funeral Home for private visitations.

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Saturday, August 29, 2015

Four foreign men have today gone before a court in Hungary on suspicion of people smuggling. Their detention relates to Thursday’s discovery of a lorry full of corpses in Austria. The death toll was yesterday finalised at 71.

The lorry had been abandoned since Wednesday on the hard shoulder of the “Eastern Motorway”, near the Hungarian border. Roadworkers became suspicious of dark liquid seeping from the vehicle, and responding police found the bodies. Initial police estimates were that 20–50 were suffocated in the back of the lorry which was near Parndorf.

The arrested men are thought to include the vehicle’s owner and at least two drivers. Three are Bulgarian and one is from Afghanistan. Criminal suspects in Hungary can generally be held for 72 hours before charge but prosecutors, citing the seriousness of the case, want the period extended. Extradition to Austria is possible.

Of the 71 dead, 59 are men, eight are women, and four are children. The children are thought to be aged three, eight, and ten years, alongside an eighteen-month-old baby. “There was also a Syrian travel document found” police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil told journalists “so of course our first assumption is that these people were migrants, and likely a group of Syrian migrants. We can rule out that they were Africans”.

The four accused were escorted into court in Kecskemet, central Hungary, by a police convoy. Reportedly the lorry traveled from Kecskemet. Hungary is presently building a border fence across the Serbian frontier, as migrants from war-torn Syria and other regions seek access to the Schengen Area of free movement, which covers most of the EU.

Slovak chicken meat company Hyza, a previous owner, previously told Wikinews the lorry has changed hands several times in roughly the last year. After they sold it they say it was exported to Hungary; it now bears Hungarian plates but still features Hyza branding including pictures of meat.

On the day of the discovery Hyza quickly removed a graphic from their homepage featuring cartoon chicken stowaways in a car being inspected at a customs post. The stowaways also appeared with a line through them alongside the word “imigranti” and the site www.imigranti.sk in one corner. On the other side was Hyza’s logo. Imigranti.sk is also unavailable.

Police today found 26 migrants in a lorry near Braunau am Inn, Austria. The driver, from Romania, refused to stop for police and was arrested following a chase. Police said three children were hospitalised for “severe dehydration”. Found near the German border, the migrants were from Afghanistan, Syria, and Bangladesh.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Farming in urban areas has been banned in the latest turn in the Zimbabwean government’s ‘crackdown’ on the country’s poor.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of a chronic drought and with food supplies running low, thousands fear starvation after they were told they could no longer supplement their food supply with crops grown themselves. A police spokesman told a UN news agency that they were under government instruction to prevent urban farming.

Police spokesman Wayne Bvudzijena said “a lot of harm is being done to the environment. Why can’t those who want to cultivate crops go to rural areas, where people are being allocated farms under the land reform programme?”

People living in urban areas had taken to growing their staple crop – maize – and other grains in patches of land near their houses. Much of the land being used had already been earmarked for cultivation, but the police have been told to ignore any such designations.

A non-governmental organisation, Environment Africa, agreed with some of the policy. “We totally understand and appreciate the need for urban people to supplement their incomes, but they should not do it the wrong way. Ideally, farming should be done on farms, not in towns. What we have witnessed is an irreparable damage to the environment, which will certainly have dire consequences for our beloved cities,” said an official.

A spokesman for the opposition — the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) — said that while planting on undesignated land, especially amid a maze of houses in townships, was not something they could approve, planting on designated areas should be allowed.

Such urban farming could produce up to 100,000t of grain in a good year, the spokesman added. He believes the government aims to drive urban people — who are often MDC supporters — out into the countryside, with the promise of getting land under the “reform program”.

As international concern about Zimbabwe grows, Kofi Annan plans to send a special envoy to assess the situation. However, he has not scheduled a date for the visit.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Chinese President Hu Jintao met with the European Union’s leaders Jose Manuel Barroso and Fredrik Reinfeldt in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China. The EU leaders were in China to attend Monday’s twelfth China-European Union (EU) summit. Barroso said China-EU relations are “more mature, deeper” then before.

China-EU trading relations have grown over the last 35 years. The volume of trade between the pair reached US$425.58 billion in 2008, an increase of 19.5% over the prior year. Bilateral relations are far closer now than in previous years.

Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said the Lisbon Treaty would help strengthen EU-China relations. Summit attendees also talked about nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament, human rights, climate change, combating financial crisis and financial investments.

Before the twelfth China-EU summit, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao met with EU delegates in Nanjing, and the trading partners celebrated the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Besides becoming a political stomping ground for the Pan-Green and Pan-Blue coalitions, there are other changes from past years of Taipei Audio Video Fair (TAVF). With those changes in mind, Wikinews reporter Rico Shen interviewed You-peng Wang, chairman of the Taipei Electrical Commercial Association (TECA), the main organizer of TAVF, about the 60th year anniversary of TECA and the changes to the show.