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Monday, April 17, 2006

Tel Aviv police report that a Palestinian suicide bomber has caused an explosion at a restaurant in central Tel Aviv. Eight people are reported dead and at least 40 injured in the blast.

Two of the victims died after they had arrived at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. Of the wounded, six were seriously hurt, 12 sustained moderate wounds, while the rest were lightly injured.

A suicide bomber targeted the same restaurant, “The Mayor’s Felafel,” on January 19. At least 20 were wounded in that attack. The restaurant was reportedly full of holiday travellers.

Palestinian group Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for the attack, as it has for six suicide bombings carried out since a cease-fire was declared in February 2005. Palestinian sources identified the bomber as Sami Salim Hamad, an Islamic Jihad activist from the village of Qabatiyah, on outskirts of the West Bank city of Jenin, where the Battle of Jenin occurred in 2002.

The suicide bombing was the first since Hamas took over the government of the Palestinian Authority less than three weeks ago. On Sunday, Islamic Jihad pledged to carry out more attacks.

The Bush administration has strongly criticized the attacks, calling it “a despicable act of terror for which there is no excuse or justification.” Khaled Abu Helal, spokesman for the Hamas-led Interior Ministry, called the attack “a direct result of the policy of the occupation and the brutal aggression and siege committed against our people.”

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir said Israel held Hamas responsible for the attacks, accusing it of “giving support to all the other terrorist organizations.”

The known deceased:Piroska Boda (50): citizenship: Romanian, nationality: Hungarian, foreign worker in Natanja, spending Easter holidays in Tel AvivRozália Besenyei (48): citizenship: Romanian, nationality: Hungarian7 others are known to be of Israeli citizenship

Friday, September 29, 2006

The field of candidates running to lead the City of Toronto became larger today as former Liberal Party of Canada president Stephen LeDrew threw his hat in the contest for mayor of Canada‘s largest city. LeDrew is running against incumbent Mayor of Toronto David Miller, who is seeking a second term and city councillor Jane Pitfield, who was considered Miller’s main challenger until today. With LeDrew entering the race there are a total of 38 candidates running for the position. The election takes place on November 13, 2006.

Miller is a centre-left politician with links to the New Democratic Party though he also has support from some Liberals and Conservatives. His opponents have been looking for a candidate to challenge him in light of what has been perceived as Jane Pitfield’s faltering candidacy. LeDrew considered supporting Pitfield but, calling her “Calamity Jane” because of the mistakes she’s made in her campaign, concluded she could not unseat the mayor. After other high-profile figures such as former Members of Parliament Dennis Mills and Sergio Marchi and former police chief Julian Fantino declined to enter the contest as a centre or centre-right candidate, LeDrew decided to enter the race. Today was the last day to register as a candidate.

LeDrew has never run for public office though he has many years of experience as a “back room” operative in the Liberal Party and in municipal politics. In 2005, he declared bankruptcy and was ordered to pay 74% of the $364,000 he owed in back taxes.

“The evidence is that LeDrew consciously and continually neglected to pay income tax installments when due and appeared to regard his obligation to pay income tax as subordinate to all other personal obligations,” wrote Justice John Ground of the Superior Court of Justice.

LeDrew says he was trying to pay off his tax debt but also had to pay personal expenses such as school fees for his children.

“I’d gone through a divorce. I was in a law firm … that broke up and I lost money in that. I had four children to put into schools.”

“I was also working 2,000 hours a year (as a) volunteer as Liberal Party president. I said , ‘I owe taxes. The taxpayer can wait. My children can not.'”

“I was proud of my choices, my priorities,” he told the Toronto Star. “I’d do it again. Any father knows his children are the most important thing.”

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A recent study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) shows that the oil and gas industry are creating earthquakes. New information from the Midwest region of the United States points out that these man-made earthquakes are happening more frequently than expected. While more frequent earthquakes are less of a problem for regions like the Midwest, a geology professor from the University of Southern Indiana, Dr. Paul K. Doss, believes the disposal of wastewater from the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process used in extracting oil and gas has the possibility to pose potential problems for groundwater.

“We are taking this fluid that has a whole host of chemicals in it that are useful for fracking and putting it back into the Earth,” Doss said. “From a purely seismic perspective these are not big earthquakes that are going to cause damage or initiate, as far as we know, any larger kinds of earthquakes activity for Midwest. [The issue] is a water quality issue in terms of the ground water resources that we use.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique used by the oil and gas industries which inject highly pressurized water down into the Earth’s crust to break rock and extract natural gas. Most of the fluids used for fracking are proprietary, so information about what chemicals are used in the various fluids are unknown to the public and to create a competitive edge.

Last Monday four researchers from the University of New Brunswick released an editorial that sheds light on the potential risks that the current wastewater disposal system could have on the province’s water resources. The researchers share the concern that Dr. Doss has and have come out to say that they believe fracking should be stopped in the province until there is an environ­mentally safe way to dispose the waste wastewater.

“If groundwater becomes contamin­ated, it takes years to decades to try to clean up an aquifer system,” University of New Brunswick professor Tom Al said.

While the USGS group which conducted the study says it is unclear how the earthquake rates may be related to oil and gas production, they’ve made the correlation between the disposal of wastewater used in fracking and the recent upsurge in earthquakes. Because of the recent information surfacing that shows this connection between the disposal process and earthquakes, individual states in the United States are now passing laws regarding disposal wells.

“The problem is that we have never, as a human society, engineered a hole to go four miles down in the Earth’s crust that we have complete confidence that it won’t leak,” Doss said. “A perfect case-in-point is the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, that oil was being drilled at 18,000 feet but leaked at the surface. And that’s the concern because there’s no assurance that some of these unknown chemical cocktails won’t escape before it gets down to where they are trying to get rid of them.”

It was said in the study released by the New Brunswick University professors that if fracking wastewater would contaminate groundwater, that current conventional water treatment would not be sufficient enough to remove the high concentration of chemicals used in fracking. The researchers did find that the wastewater could be recycled, can also be disposed of at proper sites or even pumped further underground into saline aquifers.

The New Brunswick professors have come to the conclusion that current fracking methods used by companies, which use the water, should be replaced with carbon diox­ide or liquefied propane gas.

“You eliminate all the water-related issues that we’re raising, and that peo­ple have raised in general across North America,” Al said.

In New Brunswick liquefied propane gas has been used successfully in fracking some wells, but according to water specialist with the province’s Natural Resources De­partment Annie Daigle, it may not be the go-to solution for New Brunswick due its geological makeup.

“It has been used successfully by Corridor Resources here in New Bruns­wick for lower volume hydraulic frac­turing operations, but it is still a fairly new technology,” Daigle said.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with U.S. states to come up with guidelines to manage seismic risks due to wastewater. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is the organization that also deals with the policies for wells.

Oil wells, which are under regulation, pump out salt water known as brine, and after brine is pumped out of the ground it’s disposed of by being pumped back into the ground. The difference between pumping brine and the high pressurized fracking fluid back in the ground is the volume that it is disposed of.

“Brine has never caused this kind of earthquake activity,” Doss said. “[The whole oil and gas industry] has developed around the removal of natural gas by fracking techniques and has outpaced regulatory development. The regulation is tied to the ‘the run-of-the-mill’ disposal of waste, in other words the rush to produce this gas has occurred before regulatory agencies have had the opportunity to respond.”

According to the USGS study, the increase in injecting wastewater into the ground may explain the sixfold increase of earthquakes in the central part of the United States from 2000 – 2011. USGS researchers also found that in decades prior to 2000 seismic events that happened in the midsection of the U.S. averaged 21 annually, in 2009 it spiked to 50 and in 2011 seismic events hit 134.

“The incredible volumes and intense disposal of fracking fluids in concentrated areas is what’s new,” Doss said. “There is not a body of regulation in place to manage the how these fluids are disposed of.”

The study by the USGS was presented at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America on April 18, 2012.

Monday, November 5, 2012

The following is the twelfth and final edition of a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2012 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after a brief mention of some of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: a fan of Wikinews asks a critical question at the Second presidential debate; Gary Johnson discusses Syria and foreign intervention with Wikinews, and three candidates give the their final plea to voters ahead of the November 6 election.