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Wednesday, August 13, 2008

File:BeijingOlimpicGames2008-08-08.jpg

Officials representing the Beijing Olympic Games in China have confirmed that the organizations in charge of the Opening Ceremony for the 2008 Summer Olympics may have faked at least two parts of the production. The ceremony lasted a total of four and a half hours.

It has been revealed that nine-year-old Lin Miaoke, who performed “Ode to the Motherland” during the ceremony, was only a visual effect. A recording of another girl’s voice played throughout the stadium and on the television and radio broadcasts. It is also now known that that some of the fireworks shown on television were computer-generated imagery.

The New York Times reports Lin’s voice was not perfect, and a member of the Chinese Politburo demanded that a more suitable voice was used. Organizers found that voice in seven-year-old Yang Peiyi. Another girl was used in rehearsals, but she was deemed to be too old.

“The reason was for the national interest,” Chen Qigang, the opening ceremonies general music designer, said Sunday during a radio interview. “The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression.”

Filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the production’s director, praised Lin at a press conference with Chinese media.

“She’s very cute and sings quite well, too,” he said according to a transcript of the news conference. “I was moved every time we did a rehearsal on this, from the bottom of my heart.”

The initial performer was a ten-year-old girl who was not named in the report and “whose voice was really good,” but Zhang decided that she was too old. About ten girls were auditioned for the role at Central People’s Radio Station in Beijing.

“After the recording, we thought that Lin Miaoke’s voice was not very suitable,” Chen Qigang said during his radio interview with Beijing Music Radio. “Finally, we made the decision that the voice we would use was Yang Peiyi’s.”

During the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, tenor Luciano Pavarotti mimed to a recorded version of the song he was singing. The recording was of him, but the singer, then 70 years old, had problems with a cold and opted to lip sync.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Zork Hun is running for the Libertarian party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Parkdale-High Park riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

The Associated Press has reported that the United States Department of Agriculture is currently investigating a possible case of mad cow disease. USDA official John Clifford said that a routine test indicated the possible presence of the disease.

The Agriculture Department says that the first test was inconclusive and that further tests are being conducted in the department’s laboratory in Ames, Iowa; however, those test results for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) will not be available for at least 4-7 days.

“This inconclusive result does not mean we have found a new case of BSE. Inconclusive results are a normal component of most screening tests, which are designed to be extremely sensitive,” said Clifford. “We remain very confident in the safety of U.S. beef.”

Clifford also stated that no parts of the cow have entered the human food or animal feed chain.

At least 150 human deaths worldwide have been linked to the consumption of affected cattle, most in the United Kingdom. One case of the disease was reported in a human in the U.S., but the Centers for Disease Control believe that the individual got it while traveling in the U.K.

The U.S. has had a total of two previously confirmed cases of the disease. The most recent occurred in June when, for the first time, a calf born in the U.S. tested positive for the disease. The first case was in December 2003 when the disease was found in a cow born in Canada located at a Washington State farm.

On March 3, the EU confirmed Sweden‘s first case of mad cow disease. Canada reported its fourth case of mad cow disease in January.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

The following is the second edition of a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2016 presidential election. It features original material compiled throughout the previous month after an overview of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: the effect of the Brexit vote on the US presidential election is examined; a well known businessman and sports team owner pitches his candidacy for vice president; and Wikinews interviews the winner of the American Independent Party California primary.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

A trustee of the estate of the late author Adrian Jacobs filed a lawsuit against the US publisher of the Harry Potter series, Scholastic Inc, on Tuesday. He claimed that J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, had copied scenes from Jacob’s novel, The Adventures of Willy the Wizard, to the fourth novel of the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The suit followed a similar case last year, in which the trustee sued the UK publisher of the series, Bloomsbury Publishing plc. Both of these cases are currently pending.

The complaint stated that in both books, the protagonists “are required to deduce the exact nature of the central task in the competition”, and had done so in a bathroom. Both books also involved “rescuing hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal creatures.” The suit also claimed that Christopher Little, a literary agent of Rowling, was originally the literary agent of Jacobs. The claim was denied by Scholastic.

Scholastic called the claim “completely without merit”. They pointed out that Rowling had said in February that she had never read Jacobs’ book. The trustee said that the US was the world’s largest foreign market, so they brought their first overseas action there. He demanded that all copies of the Harry Potter novel be destroyed, and all the profit made by the book given to him.

Monday, January 9, 2017

On Friday, the U.S. Congress completed the official counting of the electoral college votes, confirming Donald Trump’s pending U.S. presidency under their own authority. In most years, this is a formality, but amid concerns about Trump’s losing the popular vote by a considerable margin, Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and allegations that some of the presidential electors who supported Trump may have been ineligible to serve, more eyes than usual have followed the confirmation process. The final count was 304 votes for Trump and 227 for Hilary Clinton, with Colin Powell a distant third at 3.

The U.S. Constitution allows Congress to overrule the electoral college by rejecting invalid votes so long as the objections are made by at least one Representative and at least one Senator and, earlier this week, Representative Shiela Jackson Lee, and six other House Democrats attempted to get it to do just that. Representative Lee has argued that voter suppression was a serious matter in her home state of Texas. While the more reserved Jamie Raskin told Politico he would only get involved in the face of “evidence of technological tampering, ballot stuffing or the illegal purging of people from the rolls or exclusion of voters from the polls.” However, because these representatives were not able to recruit even one senator to join them, the objections were ruled out of order.

The organization Americans Take Action also claimed that roughly fifty presidential electors who supported Trump were ineligible to serve because they lived outside the districts they represented or held other government jobs. Although they did not claim that the voters in those districts did not actually cast for Trump or that the outcome would have been different with legitimate electors, eliminating those fifty votes would have put Trump below the 270 threshold that he would need to win. At that point, the Senate and House of Representatives would have chosen a president from among the three candidates who received the most electoral votes: Trump, Clinton and Powell. Both houses of congress currently have Republican party majorities.

In the United States, the president is not elected through a direct popular vote. Rather, each U.S. state is given one presidential elector for each of its senators and representatives. In most states, whoever wins the popular vote within that state is slated to receive all of that state’s electoral votes. Complicating this process is the fact that while tradition dictates that electors must vote their constituencies, only 28 U.S. states have laws requiring them to do so, and no elector who has broken those laws has ever been prosecuted. This year, there were seven faithless electors, with two of Trump’s electors and five of Hilary Clinton’s voting their own consciences. There were protesters present in the gallery as the votes were counted. Three of them were removed by security, with one man shouting “One person, one vote!”

Customarily, the votes are read out loud in alphabetical order by state name. In U.S. history, objections to electoral votes have been rare and have been overruled by the rest of Congress.

The presidency has gone to someone who lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote five times in U.S. history, most recently to Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000.