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Bodies found at crash site of US helicopter in Afghanistan Thirteen bodies have been found at the site where a US helicopter crashed on Tuesday in Afghanistan. A U.S. official in Washington said on Wednesday said all aboard were presumed dead, although the US military has yet to confirm the news. Maciej Zurawski accepts Celtic's offer Footballer Maciej Żurawski accepts an offer from Celtic F.C., and his former club, Wisla Krakow, are in negotiations with Celtic on his release. United States President George W. Bush makes speech to rally support for war in Iraq Speaking before an audience of 750 soldiers and airmen on Tuesday night at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, US President Bush began an effort to shore up waning support for military actions in Iraq.

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In Belgium, the Parliament Speaker Herman De Croo cancels a lunch with a delegation from the Iranian parliament, led by Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, because of the Iranians' insistence on not serving alcoholic drinks, and a meeting with senate president Anne-Marie Luzin because of the men in the delegation refusing to shake hands with her, a non-related woman. Indian police in Delhi have arrested tiger poacher Sansar Chand

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The Sudanese government releases jailed Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi and lifts a ban of his Popular Congress Party. He was detained for plotting a coup. Somalian gunmen hijack a ship carrying United Nations food aid and demand $500.000 ransom for the crew. Spain's parliament votes to legalize same-sex marriages, the third European country to do so after the Netherlands and Belgium, and in the same week as Canada. The vote passed with a margin of 40. International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo states that they have credible evidence of crimes against humanity in Darfur. Sudan refuses to extradite those suspected of war crimes. In France, a court in Paris convicts 14 militant separatists from ETA and Breton Revolutionary Army. In the Philippines, agriculture minister Arthur Yap resigns because of charges of tax evasion. In India, Gautam Goswami, main suspect of a massive flood relief scam connected to 2005 Indian Ocean earthquake, gives himself up after several weeks and is remanded to judicial custody. He is also under another investigation of misusing public funds meant for social programs. Time Magazine says that it will hand over records in compliance with a court order in the investigation of the leak of a covert CIA operative's name. The EPA says that a chemical used to make Teflon is "likely" to cause cancer. The compound is used in the creation of cookware and clothing. Survivors of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis claim that Iran's president-elect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was among their captors. The United States is looking into the matter.

Undercover investigation into protests planned for July's G8 summit

Scotland on Sunday published this Sunday the results of an undercover investigation into the protests planned for the 31st G8 summit. The investigation of the "anarchists and dissenters" of the movement lasted six months and was carried out by Scott McCulloch, on behalf of the Scottish newspaper's broadsheet Sunday edition.

McCulloch's report details the training camps of the protest groups that were held this weekend in preparation for the summit next month. Attendees were expected to learn how to cut or climb over fences and how to avoid injury from attacks by guard dogs. Factories making tubes that protesters use to lock themselves to other protesters are also being set up according to the report on the investigation. Massive road blocks are planned in an attempt to disrupt the summit.

The protests are expected to be coordinated from a central point at the Ecovillage in Forthbank, close to the city of Stirling in central Scotland. An area of land owned by the Council was approved as the location for the ecovillage by Stirling Council on Friday 24 June. The site is intended to be a solar powered campsite for an allegiance of groups making up a possible total of 5000 people. A license to hold the event at Forthbank was sought by Convergence 2005 after two other proposed sites had already been disallowed by the Council.

Despite last minute objections raised by Central Scotland Police, the Council decided that Forthbank would be the least disruptive location for the protesters to gather, and noted that security measures had been taken. Security measures are already visible at other camps, including a steel barrier around the campsite at Craigmillar, Edinburgh. More serious security measures, designed to protect the attendees of the Summit, will involve warships and army helicopters, according to an editorial by Murdo MacLeod in the Scotland On Sunday on Sunday 26. The paper also reports that Mike Smith, from Kings College London, says that security fences and police snipers are expected to be surrounding the area of the Summit.

The summit itself is taking place in Gleneagles, which is 20 miles away from the main campsite in Forthbank. The ecovillage is expected to open at the start of July.

Sharapova knocked out of Wimbledon 2005 in semi-final

Defending Wimbledon Ladies Singles champion Maria Sharapova has been beaten by Venus Williams in the 2005 semi-final by two sets to none. In the final game, Williams came to match point twice, just as rain began to fall. Both that and the preceding game were hard fought, with a succession of deuces.

The other semi-final, between Amelie Mauresmo and Lindsey Davenport, will resume tomorrow after rain forced an early end to play today. The match will resume with Davenport a break up in the final set. The previous sets both went to tie-breaks after both players exchanged breaks of serve.

Both matches were played at the same time - Williams and Sharapova on Centre Court, with Davenport and Mauresmo on No.1 - after early rain meant players could not get onto the courts until late afternoon.

This article contains first-hand journalism by a Wikinews Reporter.

Bodies found at crash site of US helicopter in Afghanistan

Thirteen bodies have been found at the site where a US helicopter crashed yesterday in Afghanistan.

Seven more soldiers are unaccounted for - including soldiers who were fighting on the ground at the time of the crash

A U.S. official in Washington said on Wednesday said all aboard were presumed dead, although the US military has yet to confirm the news.

It is understood that the CH-47 Chinook was brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade fired by members of the Taleban, as it was carrying soldiers (including US Navy Seals) into the area to fight militants.

The search and rescue operation is being hampered by poor weather, difficult terrain and by militants operating in the area. Search and rescue personnel reached the site late on Wednesday night.

"It's a search and recovery operation in a tactical environment, which means we have to ensure security throughout," U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry O'Hara said.

In other news, the US Department of Defense has announced the death of two soldiers who were killed when their AH-64D Apache attack helicopter crashed in Iraq.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announces cooperation between KDE Group and Wikimedia

This article mentions the Wikimedia Foundation or one of its projects. Please note that Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation

A co-operation between the KDE group - makers of a free desktop for Linux - and the Wikimedia Foundation has been announced at the LinuxTag Conference in Karlsruhe. They intend to build a protocol which will make it possible to access Wikimedia project's data from any application, but especially from the KDE suite.

The KDE Group will try to integrate some of applications from the package with Wikimedia data. For example, AmaroK, media player, will use Wikipedia data to show information about music being played at the moment. Some other applications, including chemical database Kalzium, a database of information about the sky KStars and office suite KOffice will use data from Wikipedia, or from its sister projects.

It will be based on SOAP/WSDL technology, which is already used by the Google API. It could be used on almost every platform and programming environment.

It is also possible to include the Wikipedia archive in some of KDE's CD editions to make it possible to use the data from Wikipedia on machines without an internet connection.

OhmyNews forum discusses experiences in citizen journalism

Seoul – The OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters' Forum (see previous report) concluded on Saturday with several speeches and a visit to sponsoring companies in South Korea's technology sector. Some invited "citizen reporters" from around the world extended their stay by several days to tour the country. Since the conclusion of the conference, presentations and transcripts have been published on the OhmyNews web site.

The title slide from the presentation on Wikinews

The forum sessions took place in the conference center of the COEX Convention & Exhibition Center in Seoul. Interpreters provided translation services into English and Korean. Saturday began with a series of panels, each one consisting of three short presentations followed by a brief discussion with the audience. The first presentation was an introduction to Wikinews by Erik Möller (online copy). Möller described the history of the project and its relation to the well-known online encyclopedia Wikipedia, demonstrated a working copy of the wiki software MediaWiki, and showed some example Wikinews articles. He listed different possibilities for cooperation between Wikinews and OhmyNews, particularly content partnerships, shared communication channels and shared resource pools for citizen journalists. "I extend the hand of friendship to OhmyNews," Möller concluded.

A brief presentation of the history of OhmyNews by Jean K. Min, Director of the International Division, followed. Min cited media reports emphasizing the growing significance of the web site in Korea, and outlined the strategy of expansion to new markets. The English edition, officially launched in May 2004, is seen as a key project in this regard, a test for the feasibility of the OhmyNews model outside Korea. Contributors to both the English and the Korean version receive a small compensation for their work, and the Korean edition uses an integrated payment system that has led to donations ("tips") of thousands of dollars to some OhmyNews contributors.

In the panel discussion that followed, one audience member asked whether, given the for-profit nature of OhmyNews and the non-profit nature of Wikinews, there might be a potential for conflict. Möller responded that, in his view, it was the compatible philosophies of the projects that mattered, and that a for-profit endeavor did not necessarily mean that all competitors have to be destroyed. "I don't think Oh Yeon Ho wants to be a new Rupert Murdoch," he said.

The first speaker of the next session was Clyde Bentley, Associate Professor for online journalism at the University of Missouri. Bentley introduced the project MyMissourian.com, which he has founded together with journalism students. As in the case of OhmyNews, editors vet stories submitted by "citizen reporters." Bentley's group organized several special reporting events, such as one centering around Earth Day, a festival about environmental awareness: "We set up a booth, and we set up some wireless computers and some other materials, and let people come in and just write about Earth Day. It was very successful." The most successful part of the experiment, according to Bentley, was to lend digital cameras to let people take and share photos.

Bentley argued that alternative journalism was less needed in the United States than in South Korea due to its long democratic tradition. He sees the usefulness of projects like MyMissourian.com in raising awareness of local issues and stories that might otherwise be ignored. The challenge, Bentley concluded, is to build a new "journalism of sharing." Instead of being storytellers, journalists in such a scenario would be "story guides", assuring consistency and quality.

The next speaker on the panel was Jeremy Iggers, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune who did not, however, speak as a representative of his newspaper. He gave a prepared speech [2] contrasting his early efforts promoting civic journalism with his latest endeavors in citizen journalism. "I can trace this interest in citizen journalism back to the early 90s, when I created a public journalism project called Minnesota's Talking for the Minneapolis Star Tribune," Iggers said. Readers were invited to join monthly issue discussion groups in private homes, community centers, libraries, and sometimes churches. "At the peak, we had around 100 meeting sites, with over 1,000 participants."

However, this and similar experiments in civic journalism were cancelled, which Iggers called "really unfortunate." As a revitalization of these abortive efforts online, Iggers has founded the Twin Cities Media Alliance, which he wants to use to bootstrap a "Community Newswire" following a similar model to OhmyNews. Beyond reports by citizens, Iggers also wants to make use of stories published by local community newspapers in Minneapolis. He emphasized that this project is independent from his work for the Star Tribune, and that it might be viewed as a conflict of interest.

The final speaker of this panel was Neil Thurman, Associate Professor at the City University London. Thurman has conducted extensive studies on how traditional media in the United Kingdom make use of "user-generated content" on the Internet: "The Guardian, for example, which is the most popular British news website, allows unedited and unselected comments on its pages; none of the other newspapers in the UK does." Thurman also argued that "the amounts of user participation that's archived on message boards varies a great deal, you can see with the Daily Mail, there's over a million posts, whereas the Financial Times has barely 10,000."

One of Thurman's key observations is that many user forums and feedback mechanisms were shut down or strongly restricted due to a perceived lack of control over the nature of the comments published in this way. Government-funded or non-profit efforts, Thurman observed, are generally more open to the idea of experimenting with user-created content.

Goh Tae Jin, a citizen columnist for the Korean edition of OhmyNews, described how he became a passionate OhmyNews user

The afternoon sessions focused mostly on the individual stories of OhmyNews citizen reporters from Korea and around the world. This included testimonials from:

Kim Hye Won, who introduced herself as "a traditional Korean housewife who lives together with a husband, two children and an 86-year-old mother-in-law." She wrote many of the "life stories" that are typical for OhmyNews, such as "I Donated Blood to See a Movie for Free” and "Daddy’s Depressed, Son’s Taking Tests, And I'm Worried." These stories exist between the fields of traditional journalism and blogs, as they do not report significant events, but they are nevertheless edited by the OhmyNews staff like regular stories. According to many speakers at the conference, they embody Oh Yeon Ho's vision of "every citizen as a reporter."

Goh Tae Jin, a Korean business owner who mostly contributes columns to OhmyNews. He described his experience of joining OhmyNews, originally to rebut a column published on the site -- and suddenly finding that his rebuttal "was chosen as the top article and suddenly sparked numerous heated opinions." In spite of the many political columns he wrote since then, Goh Tae Jin emphasized that he felt that the key element of OhmyNews were "life stories" such as those written by Kim Hye Won.

Ana Maria Brambilla, an OhmyNews reporter from Brazil and a graduate student in communications. Brambilla contrasted the OhmyNews approach to citizen journalism with open source software development and referred to OhmyNews as an example of "open source journalism" due to the fact that anyone has access to the tools of publishing.

Sung Nag-Sun, staff editor at OhmyNews and responsible for submissions by citizen reporters, described his job as polishing stories to get them ready for publication. In the question and answer session, he was asked whether OhmyNews would accept legal liability for stories written by citizen reporters, and took a clear stand in favor of that position: If his team approved a story, he argued, they had to do everything to make sure that it is correct, and would take a large part of the responsibility if it is not. Volunteer writers would be offered legal protection on a case-by-case basis.

Added to these and other perspectives from reporters for OhmyNews were independent views such as that of Omid Habibinia, an exiled Iranian living in Switzerland and an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime. Habibinia cited the famous case of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-born journalist who, many believe, was tortured and killed by Iranian officials. He criticized the extensive measures the Islamic regime had taken against press freedom: "Just days after the revolution in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini banned newspapers critical of the new government, beginning 26 years of terror, torture, imprisonment, exile and mass killing in Iran. In the last 25 years more than 1,000 newspapers and magazines have been banned in Iran."

A different story of citizen journalism was told by Ken Takeuchi, the CEO of JanJan, a Japanese citizen journalism site functioning similarly to OhmyNews. Takeuchi argued that the OhmyNews model faced different challenges in Japan than in Korea, particularly a reluctance to express strong opinions (which Takeuchi deemed a different "national character" from Korea), and a widespread feeling that the existing media are doing an adequate job. Due to these and other problems, Takeuchi argued, JanJan had not yet gained a foothold in the Japanese media landscape, receiving about 2 million pageviews a month in May 2005 and publishing about 15 to 20 articles per day.

After the presentations on citizen journalism, Yoo Hyun-oh, President and CEO of the SK Corporation, one of the sponsors of the conference, gave a presentation on Cyworld, a very popular online community operated by SK Communications. It offers visitors a so-called "minihompy", a homepage which can be custom-designed using animated avatars and background music. These additions can be purchased using a currency called "acorns." Conference attendees had an opportunity to take a closer look at Cyworld in a visit to SK Corporation in Seoul, including a step into the "monitoring room" where Cyworld staff observe the operations of the website.

Another sponsor, NHN Corporation, also received a brief visit from the illustrious group of citizen reporters. NHN operates a search engine called Naver, which, according to its own data, is more popular than Google in South Korea. NHN attributes this in part to its user-created content: If the search engine does not supply an answer to a query, users are invited to write it. This model, perhaps similar to that of Wikipedia, has led to a large database of answers.

The International Citizen Reporters' Forum ended with a closing ceremony and Korean buffet sponsored by the Korea National Tourism Organization. Conversations that began here continued into the night while intoxication increased, and several attendees extended their stay in Seoul to continue socializing and to discover Seoul and the Korean peninsula.

This article contains first-hand journalism by a Wikinews Reporter

Rwandan businessmen sentenced for War Crimes

Two Rwandan businessmen were sentenced to 10 and 12 years for their role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The two, tried in Belgium, could have faced up to 25 years in prison, the court decided on a lesser sentence as the convicted businessmen played no direct role in the killings. They were convicted based on their offers of transportation and weapons to Hutu militas in the planned massacre of Tutsis in a church and a municipal building where Tutsis and Hutus had met.

The trial was one of only two ground-breaking trials held in Belgium since local law changed to allow Belgian courts to prosecute violations of the Geneva conventions on the conduct of war regardless of where the violations occured. The law was revised in 2003 to limit its scope as activists had attempted to seek the prosecution of world leaders including United States President George W. Bush. As Belgian citizens, the two Rwandans were subject to the new law.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was an eruption of ethnic conflict where Hutu militia, supported by the Hutu dominated government and encouraged by 'hate radio', attempted to ethnically cleanse the minority Tutsi. Despite numerous warnings the international community did not take serious action to prevent the atrocities, which included hacking people to death with machetes, and forcing people into buildings that were then destroyed with bulldozers. Estimates place the number killed at up to one million.

Football: Kežman goes to Madrid

Serbia and Montenegro international, Mateja Kežman, will sign a three year contract with Atlético de Madrid today. The striker spent an unsuccessful season with Chelsea and all three parties have agreed to this 7 million Euro transfer.

Kežman started his career in Serbia and Montenegro, where he became popular while playing for Partizan, Belgrade. He was bought by the Dutch team PSV, where he was a prolific striker, setting a record number of goals per season. His year in Chelsea was not as successful, as he mostly started games as a substitute and managed to score only seven goals in official games.

Other teams that demonstrated an interest in Kežman this summer included Sevilla, Olympique de Marseille and Schalke 04.

Flash floods hit Australia's eastern coast

6,000 residents of Lismore in NSW have been told to evacuate their homes.

A couple is missing on the Gold Coast in Queensland and countless more are trapped in cars all over the region. State Emergency Services (SES) workers are currently preparing to evacuate a number of nursing homes in the suburbs of Southport and Burleigh.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) have said that South East Queensland has recorded rainfalls of 368mm in the last 24 hours and that the Gold Coast suburb of Coolangatta has been averaging 80mm per hour for at least two hours.

Police have urged people to stay in their homes.

Today in History
1867 - Canada Day: Province of Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia united in Confederation.

1904 - The first Olympic Games in North America opened in St. Louis, Missouri.

1916 - The First day on the Somme, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.

1991 - The Warsaw Pact was officially dissolved.

1997 - The United Kingdom returns control of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China.

Quote of the Day

"We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it's just like old times." ~ "Sir Humphrey" on European unity, in the comedy series Yes, Minister

About Wikinews
We are a group of volunteer journalists whose mission is to create a diverse community where citizens from around the globe (including you) can collaborate to report the news on a wide variety of current events.If you would like to write, publish or edit articles, visit en.wikinews.org All stories on Wikinews are in the public domain. By making our content perpetually available for free redistribution and use, we hope to contribute to a global digital commons. Wikinews also aims to write stories from a neutral point of view.
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Audio Wikinews is a public domain, non point-of-view news radio program recorded daily. News Briefs are short, on-the-hours breaking news updates; while Full Reports are a thorough review of the day's news. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews
About Wikinews Print Edition
For more information about Wikinews Print Edition visit: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Print_edition

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