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Sunday, February 13, 2011

With a fourth-quarter investment earnings of $3.9 Billion CAD, largely driven by stock market rises, the Canada Pension Plan’s (CPP) assets rose to $140.1 Billion reported the CPP Investment Board on Thursday.

Rate of return for the quarter netted three percent, bringing the first nine months of the fiscal year to 8.3%. The fund’s broad exposure to equities, in concert with a good quarter for stocks both in Canada and internationally, was largely to be credited according to CEO David Deneson.

The assets value rose from $127.6 Billion March 31st 2010, to $138.6 B on September 30th, to $140.1 B December 31st. The $3.9 B investment earnings, 3.58 of which came from the 54% of the portfolio in equities, was partially offset by seasonal outlays of $2.4 B to plan members.

The fund was very active throughout the calendar year, and particularly active in infrastructure, real estate, and private equity. As part of a consortium they completed the $4.8 B purchase of UK-based Tomkins plc, as well as purchasing Australian-based Intoll for $3.4 B thus acquiring a 30% stake in the 407 Express Toll Route (ETR) near Toronto — which they expanded purchasing a further 10% stake from Spain’s Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. (CINTRA). They acquired a 25% equity stake in Westfield Stratford City, a retail complex adjacent to London’s Olympics venue, among many real estate ventures.

The CPP fund covers every province except Quebec, whose Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec is the only larger pension fund in Canada. The five-year annualised investment rate of return for the CPP reserve fund was 3.5%, its 10-year rate of return was 5.6%, at the close of 2010. The fund was established in 1997.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

A resident of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound his whole life, Correctional Services officer Paul Johnstone is running for the Ontario New Democratic Party in the Ontario provincial election. 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.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Buffalo, New York —

After nearly thirty years, Pano’s Restaurant at 1081 Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, New York will end a tradition of being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week by ending its overnight food service.

The tradition for Buffalonians, who are able to enjoy drinks at the bars and clubs until 4:00 a.m. will end sometime at the end of August or September, according to overnight manager Wendi Dittmar and restaurant accountant Roseanne Jones.

“We will be starting the closure of the overnight shift sometime in the next 2 weeks to a month,” said Dittmar in an exclusive interview with Wikinews.

Jones told Wikinews that owner Pano Georgiadis is “just fed up” with the “destruction, the walk-outs of bills and fights that the ‘drunk’ people cause” in his restaurant.

Pano’s opened in 1977 on the day of the blizzard of ’77’ and has “remained open for 24 hours since then”, only closing for an hour at a time on the weekends to clean up and prepare the restaurant for breakfast, said Georgiadis.

Artvoice, which holds the “Best of Buffalo” competition every year where readers vote for their favorite Buffalo place, has listed Pano’s as the Best of Buffalo for best brunch, best Greek restaurant, best patio and best super-cheap breakfasts for 2006.

Dittmar also says that Georgiadis is expected to make several “public service announcements” within the next few weeks to “thank customers for their patronage.”

Thursday, September 1, 2005

Air evacuation of the Superdome was temporarily halted Thursday after shots were reportedly fired at a military helicopter.

Evacuations by bus continue, despite an early news report to the contrary. Thousands of people taking temporary shelter in the Superdome and nearby areas in New Orleans are being evacuated after Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a complete evacuation of the city, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Evacuees will be taken to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas.

Looting has become an increasing concern, as looters and gangs are beginning to rob hotels and hospitals. Some looters have even been able to take guns from abandoned shops. Officials say that they are concerned about the increasing number of people with guns. Police officers stranded on the roof of a hotel reported shots fired at them.

President George W. Bush plans to visit the affected areas on Friday. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush are expected to lead a private fund-raising campaign for the victims of the hurricane, similar to the campaign after the oceanic earthquake and resulting tsunami in late 2004.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

While nearly all cover of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, the race for the White House also includes independents and third party candidates. These parties represent a variety of views that may not be acknowledged by the major party platforms.

As a non-partisan news source, Wikinews has impartially reached out to these candidates, throughout the campaign. The most recent of our interviews is Gaithersburg, Maryland’s Richard H. Clark (b. 1960), a senior software engineer and member of MENSA.

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

A car bomb that exploded at about 20:00 MDT Thursday (01:00 Friday UTC) in a violent area of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico killed several people and injured more.

Police spokesman Jacinto Seguro said Friday that Mexican federal police received a call that an officer was dead. Seguro went on to say, “When they went to check the car, there was a dead body in there, dressed up like a police officer, but it wasn’t one of ours. They put him in a civilian car but dressed him up in a municipal police uniform. That’s when the bomb went off. It’s like an act of terrorism.”

Federal police spokesman Ramon Salinas said the blast killed two officers, a paramedic, and one civilian, although Mayor Jose Reyes said that only three died. At least six others were injured, although reports have said the total injured may be as high as sixteen. Four remain in the hospital, including three paramedics and one civilian.

Mexican authorities say it was a car bomb, but counter-terrorism experts are still unsure as to what caused the vehicle to explode. Intelligence expert Fred Burton said, “For this to be an improvised grenade attack, in some capacity, it doesn’t surprise me.”

The Juárez Cartel, one of the two drug-traffickers in the area, claimed responsibility for the bombing in a graffiti message. “We have more car bombs,” the graffiti said.

Ciudad Juárez has a history for trafficking drugs to the United States, especially into Texas.

Before the explosion, the police arrested a suspected leader of the Juarez cartel, Jesus Armando Acosta Guerrero.

This year more than 7,000 people have died as a result of drug-related violence in Mexico since this year began. Attorney General Arturo Chavez on Friday said nearly 25,000 people have died in the last three and a half year period.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

One of the most important arguments in the run-up to the Iraq war made by Colin Powell in his United Nations speech and President Bush in his State of the Union address was that Iraq had an active biological weapons program and possessed mobile biological weapons labs. According to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the main source for this information was an Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball who was a source for the German central intelligence agency BND.

Several German intelligence officials responsible for Curveball have now told the LA Times that the Bush administration and the CIA have repeatedly exaggerated his claims and ignored warnings of the BND that the source was unreliable. Recounting his reaction after seeing Powell’s United Nations speech one German intelligence officer said: “We were shocked. Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence.” This corroborates reporting by the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit from 2003 and 2004 based on statements of unnamed senior German intelligence officials.

Nine months earlier, in May 2002, a fabricator warning was posted in Curveball’s file in U.S. intelligence databases. Powell was never warned that his United Nations speech contained material that both the DIA and CIA had determined was false, even though several people present at Powell’s CIA meetings were fully aware of this.

At this time German intelligence officers would not let the CIA meet directly with Curveball, but allowed a CIA doctor to draw blood samples. Questioning the validity of Curveball’s information in front of his CIA supervisor, the doctor was advised to “Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say and the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curveball knows what he’s talking about.”

Shortly after Powell’s UN speech and several days before the invasion, United Nations weapons inspectors attempted to directly verify several key claims made by Curveball, but concluded that they were unsustainable. The White House insisted on its WMD claims based on Curveball’s information.

Even after the invasion, when more and more of Curveball’s accounts were shown to be pure fabrication, the CIA and the Bush administration relied on Curveball’s information. When U.S. forces discovered trucks with lab equipment and Curveball claimed that these were identical to the ones he has been reporting about, the CIA rushed to publish a White Paper claiming that these trucks were part of Saddam Hussein’s secret biological weapons program and Bush claimed publicly that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” Several days later, twelve of the thirteen WMD experts who analyzed the trucks agreed that the equipment was not suited for biological weapons production, with the only dissenting voice coming from the author of the original White Paper.

The White Paper remains posted on the CIA website to this date, and President Bush has not yet retracted his statement that Iraq produced “germ warfare agents” made in his State of the Union address or his postwar assertions that “we found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Monday, December 2, 2013

Police in the West Midlands in England today said nearly 200 kilograms worth of drugs with value possibly as great as £30 million (about US$49 million or €36 million) has been seized from a unit in the town of Brownhills. In what an officer described as “one of the largest [seizures] in the force’s 39 year history”, West Midlands Police reported recovering six big cellophane-wrapped cardboard boxes containing cannabis, cocaine, and MDMA (“ecstasy”) in a police raid operation on the Maybrook Industrial Estate in the town on Wednesday.

The seized boxes, which had been loaded onto five freight pallets, contained 120 one-kilogram bags of cannabis, 50 one-kilogram bags of MDMA, and five one-kilogram bricks of cocaine. In a press release, West Midlands Police described what happened after officers found the drugs as they were being unloaded in the operation. “When officers opened the boxes they discovered a deep layer of protective foam chips beneath which the drugs were carefully layered”, the force said. “All the drugs were wrapped in thick plastic bags taped closed with the cannabis vacuum packed to prevent its distinctive pungent aroma from drawing unwanted attention.” Police moved the drugs via forklift truck to a flatbed lorry to remove them.

Detective Sergeant Carl Russell of West Midlands Police’s Force CID said the seizure was the largest he had ever made in the 24 years he has been in West Midlands Police and one of the biggest seizures the force has made since its formation in 1974. “The impact this seizure will have on drug dealing in the region and the UK as a whole cannot be underestimated”, he said. “The drugs had almost certainly been packed to order ready for shipping within Britain but possibly even further afield. Our operation will have a national effect and we are working closely with a range of law enforcement agencies to identify those involved in this crime at whatever level.”

Expert testing on the drugs is ongoing. Estimates described as “conservative” suggest the value of the drugs amounts to £10 million (about US$16.4 million or €12 million), although they could be worth as much as £30 million, subject to purity tests, police said.

Police arrested three men at the unit on suspicion of supplying a controlled drug. The men, a 50-year-old from Brownhills, a 51-year-old from the Norton area of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, and one aged 53 from Brownhills, have been released on bail as police investigations to “hunt those responsible” continue. West Midlands Police told Wikinews no person has yet been charged in connection with the seizure. Supplying a controlled drug is an imprisonable offence in England, although length of jail sentences vary according to the class and quantity of drugs and the significance of offenders’ roles in committing the crime.