The USAFL Nationals will feature teams from the United States and Canada. A 50/50 rule is being implemented for the tournament. This means that an American team can have no more than nine players who aren’t Americans and a Canadian team no more than nine non-Canadians.
Australian rules football is played on a field 170 metres by 160 metres. The two teams consist of 18 players a side. Scores are quoted as goals-behinds (total).
According to USFooty, the tournament will attract over 1000 players. The tournament will have four divisions for men and one for woman.
De La Fuente at the Lesser-Known Candidates Forum, January 2016. Image: Marc Nozell.
Businessman Rocky De La Fuente took some time to speak with Wikinews about his campaign for the U.S. Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential nomination.
The 61-year-old De La Fuente resides in San Diego, California, grew up in Tijuana, and owns multiple businesses and properties throughout the world. Since getting his start in the automobile industry, De La Fuente has branched out into the banking and real estate markets. Despite not having held or sought political office previously, he has been involved in politics, serving as the first-ever Hispanic superdelegate to the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
De La Fuente entered the 2016 presidential race last October largely due to his dissatisfaction with Republican front-runner Donald Trump. He argues he is a more accomplished businessman than Trump, and attacks Trump as “a clown,” “a joke,” “dangerous,” and “in the same category as Hitler.” Nevertheless, De La Fuente’s business background begets comparisons with Trump. The Alaskan Midnight Sun blog described him as the Democrats’ “own Donald Trump.”
While receiving only minimal media coverage, he has campaigned actively, and according to the latest Federal Election Commission filing, loaned almost US$ 4 million of his own money to the campaign. He has qualified for 48 primary and caucus ballots, but has not yet obtained any delegates to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Thus far, according to the count at The Green Papers, De La Fuente has received 35,406 votes, or 0.23% of the total votes cast. He leads among the many lesser-known candidates but trails both Senator Bernie Sanders who has received nearly 6.5 million votes and front-runner Hillary Clinton who has just shy of 9 million votes.
With Wikinews reporter William S. Saturn?, De La Fuente discusses his personal background, his positions on political issues, his current campaign for president, and his political future.
According to the Pew Research Center, a non-advocacy organization that evaluates issues, attitudes and trends shaping the political landscape of the United States, centrism is on the rise in America. According to Pew, the number of Americans identifying themselves as independents has reached the highest level in 70 years.
Recently 36% of Americans say they are independents, 35% identify as Democrats, while 23% see themselves as Republicans. Some people are abandoning the major parties, re-registering as independent or joining third parties.
One of these third parties are the Modern Whig Party (MWP), who have enjoyed phenomenal growth over the past year; from just 3,000 members last summer to 30,000 now. With the Party’s commitment to “fiscal responsibility” and “bold social progression”, several conservative Democrats and centrist Republicans have been attracted to it.
Wikinews reporter Joseph Ford recently spoke with the Modern Whig Party’s chairman, Mike Lebowitz, about the MWP’s history, present state and future prospects. “Our membership is comprised of people from all parts of the mainstream political spectrum,” Lebowitz explains. He says that the MWP has “pragmatic, realistic, and mainstream” approaches to the numerous issues facing America today.
“A number of print and broadcast media outlets have even gone so far as to proclaim that the Modern Whig Party is “potentially viable,” and “makes sense”,” Lebowitz points out. “We are building this organization realistically, methodically and gradually in an effort to get this right.”
He went on to say much more — including why he thinks you should consider leaving the GOP or the Dems for the MWP — in the interview below.
A team of eight transplantsurgeons in Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA, led by reconstructive surgeon Dr. Maria Siemionow, age 58, have successfully performed the first almost total face transplant in the US, and the fourth globally, on a woman so horribly disfigured due to trauma, that cost her an eye. Two weeks ago Dr. Siemionow, in a 23-hour marathon surgery, replaced 80 percent of her face, by transplanting or grafting bone, nerve, blood vessels, muscles and skin harvested from a female donor’s cadaver.
The Clinic surgeons, in Wednesday’s news conference, described the details of the transplant but upon request, the team did not publish her name, age and cause of injury nor the donor’s identity. The patient’s family desired the reason for her transplant to remain confidential. The Los Angeles Times reported that the patient “had no upper jaw, nose, cheeks or lower eyelids and was unable to eat, talk, smile, smell or breathe on her own.” The clinic’s dermatology and plastic surgery chair, Francis Papay, described the nine hours phase of the procedure: “We transferred the skin, all the facial muscles in the upper face and mid-face, the upper lip, all of the nose, most of the sinuses around the nose, the upper jaw including the teeth, the facial nerve.” Thereafter, another team spent three hours sewing the woman’s blood vessels to that of the donor’s face to restore blood circulation, making the graft a success.
The New York Times reported that “three partial face transplants have been performed since 2005, two in France and one in China, all using facial tissue from a dead donor with permission from their families.” “Only the forehead, upper eyelids, lower lip, lower teeth and jaw are hers, the rest of her face comes from a cadaver; she could not eat on her own or breathe without a hole in her windpipe. About 77 square inches of tissue were transplanted from the donor,” it further described the details of the medical marvel. The patient, however, must take lifetime immunosuppressive drugs, also called antirejection drugs, which do not guarantee success. The transplant team said that in case of failure, it would replace the part with a skin graft taken from her own body.
Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital surgeon praised the recent medical development. “There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.
Leading bioethicistArthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania withheld judgment on the Cleveland transplant amid grave concerns on the post-operation results. “The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure — if your face rejects. It would be a living hell. If your face is falling off and you can’t eat and you can’t breathe and you’re suffering in a terrible manner that can’t be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying. There are patients who can benefit tremendously from this. It’s great that it happened,” he said.
Dr Alex Clarke, of the Royal Free Hospital had praised the Clinic for its contribution to medicine. “It is a real step forward for people who have severe disfigurement and this operation has been done by a team who have really prepared and worked towards this for a number of years. These transplants have proven that the technical difficulties can be overcome and psychologically the patients are doing well. They have all have reacted positively and have begun to do things they were not able to before. All the things people thought were barriers to this kind of operations have been overcome,” she said.
The first partial face transplant surgery on a living human was performed on Isabelle Dinoire on November 27 2005, when she was 38, by Professor Bernard Devauchelle, assisted by Professor Jean-Michel Dubernard in Amiens, France. Her Labrador dog mauled her in May 2005. A triangle of face tissue including the nose and mouth was taken from a brain-dead female donor and grafted onto the patient. Scientists elsewhere have performed scalp and ear transplants. However, the claim is the first for a mouth and nose transplant. Experts say the mouth and nose are the most difficult parts of the face to transplant.
In 2004, the same Cleveland Clinic, became the first institution to approve this surgery and test it on cadavers. In October 2006, surgeon Peter Butler at London‘s Royal Free Hospital in the UK was given permission by the NHS ethics board to carry out a full face transplant. His team will select four adult patients (children cannot be selected due to concerns over consent), with operations being carried out at six month intervals. In March 2008, the treatment of 30-year-old neurofibromatosis victim Pascal Coler of France ended after having received what his doctors call the worlds first successful full face transplant.
Ethical concerns, psychological impact, problems relating to immunosuppression and consequences of technical failure have prevented teams from performing face transplant operations in the past, even though it has been technically possible to carry out such procedures for years.
Mr Iain Hutchison, of Barts and the London Hospital, warned of several problems with face transplants, such as blood vessels in the donated tissue clotting and immunosuppressants failing or increasing the patient’s risk of cancer. He also pointed out ethical issues with the fact that the procedure requires a “beating heart donor”. The transplant is carried out while the donor is brain dead, but still alive by use of a ventilator.
According to Stephen Wigmore, chair of British Transplantation Society’s ethics committee, it is unknown to what extent facial expressions will function in the long term. He said that it is not certain whether a patient could be left worse off in the case of a face transplant failing.
Mr Michael Earley, a member of the Royal College of Surgeon‘s facial transplantation working party, commented that if successful, the transplant would be “a major breakthrough in facial reconstruction” and “a major step forward for the facially disfigured.”
In Wednesday’s conference, Siemionow said “we know that there are so many patients there in their homes where they are hiding from society because they are afraid to walk to the grocery stores, they are afraid to go the the street.” “Our patient was called names and was humiliated. We very much hope that for this very special group of patients there is a hope that someday they will be able to go comfortably from their houses and enjoy the things we take for granted,” she added.
In response to the medical breakthrough, a British medical group led by Royal Free Hospital’s lead surgeon Dr Peter Butler, said they will finish the world’s first full face transplant within a year. “We hope to make an announcement about a full-face operation in the next 12 months. This latest operation shows how facial transplantation can help a particular group of the most severely facially injured people. These are people who would otherwise live a terrible twilight life, shut away from public gaze,” he said.
Over the past week, diplomatic actions have averted — or, at least delayed — military strikes on Syria by the United States. Wikinews sought input from a range of international experts on the situation; and, the tensions caused by Russia’s support for the al-Assad regime despite its apparent use of chemical weapons.
Contents
1 Interviewees
2 Wikinews Q&A
2.1 China
2.2 Iran
2.3 Russia
3 Related news
4 Sources
File:Ghouta chemical attack map.svg
Map of areas affected by chemical weapons in Ghouta, Syria. Image: FutureTrillionaire.(Image missing from Commons: image; log)
Tensions in the country increased dramatically, late August when it was reported between 100 and 1,300 people were killed in an alleged chemical attack. Many of those killed appeared to be children, with some of the pictures and video coming out of the country showing — according to witnesses — those who died from apparent suffocation; some foaming at the mouth, others having convulsions.
Amongst Syria’s few remaining allies, Iran, China, and Russia continue to oppose calls for military intervention. In an effort to provide a better-understanding of the reasoning behind their ongoing support, the following people were posed a range of questions.
Belgian prime minister Yves Leterme has offered to resign amid a political dispute, the press office of the Belgian parliament reported on Thursday.
File photo of Yves Leterme.Image: Lawrence Jackson.
The Belgian king, King Albert II, has not yet accepted the prime minister’s offer. He and Leterme met on Thursday’s afternoon, the office said. The king said that the resulting political turbulence from the resignation “seriously threatens” the country’s standing in the European Union.
“[He] had no other choice than to inform us that he would go to the king immediately to tender the government’s resignation,” said Belgium’s health minister, Laurette Onkelinx.
The Belgian palace commented on the issue in a written statement. “The king and the prime minister jointly underlined that […] a political crisis would be inopportune and would seriously damage both the economic and social well-being of the citizens and the role of Belgium in Europe.”
Leterme also resigned as prime minister in late 2008 over a banking scandal. He returned to office last November when former PM Herman van Rompuy gave up the post to become the first, full-time head of the European Union.
This latest resignation is a fallout of Belgium’s long-term power struggle between the country’s French-speaking Walloons and Flemish-speaking majority.
The latest disagreement centers on special rights for Walloons living near Brussels; specifically, the location of electoral boundaries around the capital. A key coalition member, the Flemish liberal Open VLD Party, pulled out of the government, frustrated over the failure to resolve the dispute. Party chairman Alexander De Croo said that”[w]e have not agreed on a negotiated solution and therefore Open VLD no longer has confidence in the government.”
Without the VLD, the other four government parties have 76 of 150 lower house seats in the parliament, although governing with such a small majority would be hard, Al Jazeera says.
Correction — May 8, 2018 This headline incorrectly locates the tsunami in Southeast Asia; it was in the South Pacific, as stated in the lede.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
A tsunami that was generated in the South Pacific by a powerful undersea earthquake has killed at least 110 people, according to authorities.
The epicentre of the earthquake
The majority of the fatalities occurred in Samoa, where rescue workers say at least 84 people were killed. Another 24 people are confirmed dead on American Samoa, while at least seven fatalities have been reported in nearby Tonga.
The US Geological Survey says an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck early Tuesday local time. It generated waves that devastated coastal areas, knocked down buildings and sent cars floating out to sea.
Strong aftershocks followed the initial earthquake, with at least one measuring a magnitude 5.6. Tsunami alerts were issued for the entire South Pacific region but were later canceled. Survivors fled to high ground and stayed there for hours.
Several villages were destroyed on the southern Samoan coast of Upolu, which is also home to many tourist resorts.
During a flight on from Auckland, New Zealand to Apia, Samoa, Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi told reporters he was shocked by the disaster. “So much has gone. So many people are gone. I’m so shocked, so saddened by all the loss.”
“The situation is very bad,” said Marie-Francoise Borel, a spokesperson for the International Red Cross, to the CTV News Channel by telephone. “This massive wave has swept across – it’s destroyed villages, it’s destroyed homes, people are in shock.”
The assistant chief executive of Samoa’s disaster management predicted that the death toll in the country could surpass one hundred, saying that searches for bodies in the region are still ongoing.
“They are still continuing the searches for any missing bodies in the area. Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami had brought a lot of sand onshore, so there have been reports the sand has covered some of the bodies. So we need specialised machines to search for bodies that are buried under the sand,” he said.
The communications head for the International Federation of the Red Cross, Jason Smith, told the Al Jazeera news agency that the Red Cross “[…] is working hard through five evacuation centres to provide people with safe places to stay and access to clean water,” estimating that up to 15,000 people in sixty villages were affected by the tsunami.
At the capital of American Samoa, Pago Pago, the tsunami measured 1.57 meters in height. The superintendent of the National Park of American Samoa Mike Reynolds reported four waves as high as six meters. People who experienced the quake said it was long, lasting from 90 seconds to three minutes.
We’re focused on bringing in the assistance for people that have been injured, and for the immediate needs of the tens of thousands of survivors down there.
Pago Pago city streets were strewn with overturned vehicles, cars, and debris. Some buildings located only slightly above sea level were completely destroyed by the waves, and power in some locations is not expected to be restored for up to a month. FEMA administrator Craig Fugate said that “we’re focused on bringing in the assistance for people that have been injured, and for the immediate needs of the tens of thousands of survivors down there.”
“The first federal team members are currently en route to American Samoa aboard a Coast Guard plane and will be providing on the ground assessments once they arrive on the island,” Fugate said. “FEMA, who has provisions pre-positioned in a distribution center in Hawaii, is also preparing to send supplies as needed to help meet the immediate needs of the survivors.”
Didi Afuafi, 28, who was riding on a bus in American Samoa when the tsunami struck, described her experiences. “I was scared. I was shocked. All the people on the bus were screaming, crying and trying to call their homes. We couldn’t get on cell phones. The phones just died on us. It was just crazy,” she said. “This is going to be talked about for generations.”
US President Barack Obama declared a major disaster in American Samoa, and has sent federal aid to support local recovery efforts in the US territory.
“My deepest sympathies are with the families who lost loved ones and many people who have been affected by the earthquake and the tsunami,” Obama said. He had earlier pledged in a written statement to give a “swift and aggressive” government response to the disaster.
“I am closely monitoring these tragic events, and have declared a major disaster for American Samoa, which will provide the tools necessary for a full, swift and aggressive response,” Obama said.
During a Wednesday appearance near Washington, D.C., the president said the US was ready to help its “friends” in neighboring Samoa and throughout the region.
In Tonga, seven people were confirmed dead and another three missing, after waves struck Niuatoputapu, a northern island.Acting prime minister Lord Tuita said in a statement that “according to information gathered from Niuatoputapu so far, seven people are confirmed dead, three missing and four with very serious injuries,” Lord Tuita, the acting prime minister, said in a statement. “It is reported that the tsunami did serious damage to the village of Hihifo, which is like the capital of the island.
“The hospital on the island is reported to have suffered major damage; telephone communication has been cut as a result of damage to equipment and facilities on the island; homes and government buildings have been destroyed,” he said.
An airplane was reportedly chartered by Tongan authorities to determine the amount of damage done to Niuatoputapu, but wasn’t able to land.
Sunday, April 3, 2005The annual Sunday Times Rich List published today showed that Ireland now has six euro billionaires, up from four last year. The combined wealth of Irelands 250 wealthiest is €42.3bn.
Topping the list was the new entrant Hilary Weston with a fortune estimated at over €7.2bn. Weston was excluded in previous lists because the majority of her wealth was made abroad, however a rule change this year allowed the Dublin born model to enter in first place. Mrs Weston, 63, grew up in Ireland and built her modeling career there before becoming wed to Galen Weston, heir to his grandfathers multi-billion euro retailing fortune in Canada. The couple permanently moved to Canada in 1983 after a kidnap attempt by the IRA.
Ukraine Solidarity protest organised in Pariser Platz, Berlin with the Brandenburg Gate lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian Flag. Image: Leonhard Lenz.
On Sunday, a suspected Russian missile strike was carried out on a civilian oil terminal located in Vasilkiv, near Kyiv, Ukraine. The incident was reported by Ukrainian Member of Parliament Anna Purtova. She described this deadly incident as an “environmental catastrophe”. The oil facility was located just 39 kilometers (24 mi) from Kyiv.
Apart from this, Russian troops were spotted in different locations in and around the city of Kharkiv. A gas pipeline was also blown up by Russian troops in Kharkiv yesterday before daybreak. The Governor of Kharkiv Oblast Oleh Synyehubov advised citizens not to go outside and stated “the Russian enemy’s light vehicles have broken into Kharkiv, including the city centre”.
On Saturday, Russian troops conducted a missile strike on a high-rise residential building in Kyiv which injured at least 6 people.
Video footage showing the missile strike in Kyiv on Saturday. Image: Kyiv City Council.
The Kremlin had sent a diplomatic delegation to Belarus, offering talks with Ukraine. The proposal was initially rejected by Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Belarus was complicit in the invasion and Ukraine would like to hold talks elsewhere.
Today, Ukraine has accepted the proposal for talks with the Russian Federation on the Belarusian border. The Ukrainian Presidential Office has confirmed the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had called Zelensky earlier Sunday.
The United States and its allies have initiated the transfer of arms and weapons to support Ukraine and imposed numerous sanctions to affect Russia financially. On Saturday, it was announced several Russian banks would be removed from the SWIFT international payment system, resulting in its disconnection from the international financial system. It was also decided to impose ‘restrictive measures’ on the Central Bank of Russia to prevent it from undermining the impact of the sanctions from the West.
The leaders of the European Commission and the United States said in a joint statement they “will hold Russia to account and collectively ensure that this war is a strategic failure for Putin”.
Google and Facebook have barred the Russian state-controlled media outlet RT News from receiving money from advertisements.
The Kremlin said Russian troops were advancing “in all directions” and Putin thanked the Russian Special Forces who were carrying out the operation in Ukraine. Sources also reveal Putin directed his nuclear deterrence forces to stay on high alert, citing “aggressive statements” by NATO and tough financial sanctions from the West and its allies. The Ukrainian presidential advisor, Mykhaylo Podolyak, said over 3,500 Russian troops were killed in action or wounded. Russia has not yet released any casualty figures.