Monday, July 24, 2006 The auction house Bonhams and Goodman have sold the last privately owned Victoria Cross(VC) awarded at the World War I Gallipoli campaign in Sydney tonight. The medal was awarded to New Zealand-born Australian soldier Captain Alfred Shout. The sale price of $A 1 million surpassed the previous record of $A575,000 set in 2004 for the VC medal awarded to Sergeant Norman Jackson of the RAF 1944. The Victoria Cross is the…

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This exclusive interview features first-hand journalism by a Wikinews reporter. See the collaboration page for more details. Friday, November 3, 2006 On November 13, Torontoians will be heading to the polls to vote for their ward’s councillor and for mayor. Among Toronto’s ridings is Eglinton—Lawrence (Ward 16). Two candidates responded to Wikinews’ requests for an interview. This ward’s candidates include Steven Bosnick, Charm Darby, Albert Pantaleo, Yigal Rifkind, Karen Stintz (incumbent), and Steve Watt. For…

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Monday, September 5, 2005 OpenTheGovernment.Org, a coalition of conservative and liberal nonprofit groups, released a 2005 report (PDF, 12 pages) saying that all branches of the U.S. Federal Government are being significantly more secretive, and spending significantly more money on document secrecy. In 2004, federal officials classified 15.6 million new documents, which is 81 percent more than in 2001. Over the same period, the cost of classifying those new documents rose from $4.7 billion to…

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005 On Tuesday, Juventud Rebelde reported that the Central Administration of Cuba is organizing a migration to free and open source software. The announcement was made during a free software workshop organized at the “Convención Internacional Informática 2005” by the director of the state office of information technology, Roberto del Puerto. The plan is to use the Linux operating system as a base, though the administration currently uses Microsoft Windows. The transition…

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Sunday, May 28, 2006 Stardust is a NASA space capsule that collected samples from comet 81P/Wild (also known as “Wild 2) in deep space and landed back on Earth on January 15, 2006. It was decided that a collaborative online review process would be used to “discover” the microscopically small samples the capsule collected. The project is called Stardust@home. Unlike distributed computing projects like SETI@home, Stardust@home relies entirely on human intelligence. Andrew Westphal is the…

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Friday, February 19, 2021 A series of winter blasts have struck the US state of Texas in recent days, leaving at least ten people dead in the aftermath. On Wednesday, the second wave of the storms impacted utilities and water systems, with cities asking citizens to conserve water usage. Reports early Wednesday indicated more than two and a half million homes and businesses were without power. Texas is the only one of the 48 contiguous…

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Thursday, March 9, 2006 Toronto’s public utility, Toronto Hydro Telecom, will make Canada’s largest city into a huge wireless hotspot. “This is both an exciting and very important initiative for the city of Toronto”, said Toronto’s mayor, David Miller. “It puts us on the leading edge of the telecommunications industry nationwide and globally.” Toronto Hydro Telecom will offer customers free access for the first six months. After that, it will begin to charge for services.…

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