Friday, March 10, 2017 UK chancellor Philip Hammond announced his 2017 budget on Wednesday, which included a £2 billion pledge to social care and a tax hike on the self-employed. It was accused of breaking Conservative Party manifesto promises. It was announced there will be a 2% increase in national insurance contributions for the self-employed, with chancellor Philip Hammond citing worries that people were choosing to become self-employed in order to pay lower taxes and…

Continue reading

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 Also try the 2008 World News Quiz of the year. What would you tell your grandchildren about 2008 if they asked you about it in, let’s say, 20 years’ time? If the answer to a quiz question was 2008, what would the question be? The year that markets collapsed, or perhaps the year that Obama became US president? Or the year Heath Ledger died? Let’s take a look at some of…

Continue reading

Tuesday, February 26, 2013 Yesterday evening in La Molina, Spain, Wikinews sat down and talked with Irene Villa to discuss para-alpine skiing, disability sport, women’s sport, and her own sporting career. Villa was in town as part of activities taking place around the 2013 IPC Alpine World Championships, where one of her skiing club teammates is competing as a member of the Spanish team. Her high profile in Spain has brought additional interest to para-alpine…

Continue reading

Sunday, February 13, 2005 New York –”Buy cheap Viagra through us – no prescription required!” Anyone with an active email account will recognize lines like this one. According to some reports, unsolicited advertisements (spam) for Viagra and similar drugs account for one in four spam messages. BACKGROUND Spamming remains one of the biggest problems facing email users today. While users and systems administrators have improved their defenses against unsolicited email, many spammers now insert random…

Continue reading

Tuesday, August 31, 2010 Every September, the Apple iPod is redesigned. Last year saw the release of the iPod Nano 5th generation, bringing a video camera and a large range of colours to the Nano for the first time. But as Apple again prepares to unveil a redesigned product, the company has released their quarterly sales figures—and revealed that they have sold only 9m iPods for the quarter to June—the lowest number of sales since…

Continue reading

Tuesday, August 14, 2012 Fitness model Andre Barnett of Poughkeepsie, New York won the presidential nomination of the Reform Party of the United States at its national convention in Philadelphia last weekend. Consultant Kenneth Cross was selected as his running mate. Barnett, who founded the company WiseDome, became a fitness model after suffering an injury in a 2000 helicopter incident while serving in the U.S. Army. He participated in last January’s Wikinews Reform Party USA…

Continue reading

Sunday, January 11, 2009 While it was just a joke, the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia doesn’t find a recent “Mother Goose and Grimm” comic terribly funny. In what the coffee growers association calls “an attack on national dignity and the reputation of Colombian coffee,” the characters in a comic strip by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Peters call into question the relationship of Colombian coffee growers and the crime syndicates of Columbia. The cartoonist…

Continue reading

Saturday, January 5, 2019 A road accident followed by a fire on a Florida highway near Gainesville on Thursday killed five children in a church bus and two truck drivers. One semi truck and a car broke through the center guardrail before colliding with other vehicles; around 50 gallons of diesel fuel, officials said, spilled and ignited. The children were all from Marksville, Louisiana. The Avoyelles House of Mercy, a Pentecostal church, had been travelling…

Continue reading

Friday, June 26, 2009 According to a documentary about journalism students at the University of British Columbia tracking electronic waste (e-waste), details of United States defense contracts and confidential military data were left on a donated hard drive which was purchased for US$35 in Ghana. The purchased hard drive was a donation by Northrop Grumman Corporation, an American aerospace and defense technology company. The PBS investigative documentary, Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, tracked what happened to…

Continue reading

Thursday, December 1, 2011 Today saw Edinburgh’s Scottish National Portrait Gallery reopen following a two-and-a-half-year, £17.6m (US$27.4m) refurbishment. Conversion of office and storage areas sees 60% more space available for displays, and the world’s first purpose-built portrait space is redefining what a portrait gallery should contain; amongst the displays are photographs of the Scottish landscape—portraits of the country itself. First opened in 1889, Sir Robert Rowand Anderson’s red sandstone building was gifted to the nation…

Continue reading