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Monday, July 4, 2005

According to a recent report by the United States Census Bureau, the pecking order of the most populous U.S. cities has changed. The report, issued June 30, shows in 2004 San Jose, with an estimated population of 904,522 is the nation’s 10th-largest city, overtaking Detroit with its smaller population of 900,198.

The U.S. Census traditionally releases population figures for the year previous to the date the figures are made public.

According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, Mayor Ron Gonzales is saying the new ranking may help people across the U.S. be more interested in San Jose and think of it as a world-class city. “It puts us in a very distinguished class,” he told the paper.

But for many, northern California’s largest city, the self-proclaimed “Capital of Silicon Valley” remains an enigma. In a country not noted for its geographical knowledge prowess, many Americans have no idea where San Jose actually is. Culturally, the city may be best known as the title location of a Dionne Warwick hit song with the ironic title, Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

Many locals claim the city suffers from a self esteem problem stretching back to 1852 when San Jose lost the honor of being the California state capital to Sacramento. Additionally, for most of its existence, San Jose has been overshadowed by its smaller and more glamorous neighbor to the north, San Francisco.

“San Francisco has been in the limelight since 1849, and it was the capital of everything west of the Mississippi — it was a huge presence in the psyche of the world, and we can never replace that,” David Vossbrink, San Jose city spokesman, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

It doesn’t stop with San Francisco; San Jose is routinely outshined by other Bay Area cities such as Oakland, California, which is one-third its size. Additionally, the city’s own Silicon Valley suburbs, including Palo Alto and Cupertino, regularly steal the national spotlight from San Jose.

As far as the workkforce is concerned, San Jose continues to reel from the dot-com meltdown of the early 2000s. With an unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, it has a higher jobless rate than the national average of 5.1 percent. For a couple of years after the 2000 tech crash, San Jose lost population as thousands of unemployed fled to look for work elsewhere.

But the city is on the mend and does have some legitimate bragging rights aside from sheer size. Despite the unemployment, San Jose is America’s wealthiest big city with an average household annual income of $70,000. It consistently ranks as “The Safest Big City in America,” according to FBI crime statistics as having the lowest violent crime rate for any U.S. city with a population over 500,000. The local public university, San Jose State is the largest within the California State University system.

Economically, an increasing number of large companies also are opting to call San Jose home, including Cisco Systems, Knight Ridder, eBay and Adobe Systems.

For many media outlets covering San Jose’s ascendence into the ranks of the United States’ Top 10 cities, the real story has been the decline of Detroit and its symbol as a Midwestern industrial giant.

For decades, Detroit, the self-styled “Motor City,” rested its fortunes with the American automobile industry. Each of the Big Three automobile manufacturers, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, maintained headquarters there.

But with the shift of the U.S. economy away from heavy industry to services and technology, cities like Detroit suffered, while cities like San Jose prospered.

Detroit’s decline in population is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, the city had a population of about 1.8 million, ranking as the fourth-largest U.S. city. But its fortunes started changing in the 1970s with the OPEC oil embargo and the rise of Japan as an automobile-producing powerhouse. As the city’s fortunes waned, many residents fled Detroit for the suburbs or opted to leave Michigan altogether.

“It’s part of a pattern for the heavily industrialized cities, but I think Detroit is a specific case. There’s been an ongoing dynamic here of people, middle-class people in Detroit, fleeing the city looking for better schools, better lifestyles, better services. So it has been a particularly hard fall,” Dana Johnson, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Detroit said in an interview with the New York Times.

Detroit has also been taking its knocks in recent statistics. Unlike San Jose’s reputation for being a safe place to live, Detroit tops the list of most violent U.S. big cities. In the past year, Time magazine named Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick among the worst mayors in the U.S.

Along with the exodus of people and 7.8 percent unemployment rate, Detroit harbors a sight unseen in San Jose, blocks of vacant housing. For years these vacant buildings have been the targets of arsonists on the so-called Devil’s Night, where blocks of homes have been set ablaze in Detroit.

Additionally, unlike San Jose, which is in the process of moving 1,800 employees into a new $388 million city hall and faces shortage of police officers, shrinking Detroit faces a $300 million budget deficit and the prospect of laying off 700 police and fire-fighting personnel in the next few months.

Friday, August 4, 2006

A 16 year old girl has crashed her car into a hollow tree stirring up the fury of a swarm of bees ten miles (16km) south of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ten people including the girl received treatment at a hospital.

Jacqueline Cossairt’s SUV crashed into the tree after she lost control on a gravel road.

Despite hot summer temperatures, firefighters wore full safety gear including face mask and oxygen tanks as they tried to rescue her from the wreck. The bees were doused with foam and water.

“Those bees were mad,” said Volunteer Fire Chief Kent Gilbert, who was stung at least 50 times while trying to pull her from the wreckage. “I’ve never seen bees, especially honeybees, attack like that.”

“I’m not too swelled up,” Gilbert said. “As long as I’m standing upright, I feel OK, but if I bend down I get a headache. The back of my head is real tender where they stung me.”

Jacqueline was taken to Lutheran Hospital with broken legs and multiple bee stings.

A neighbour, a paramedic and seven firefighters were also hospitalized due to heat and bee stings.

Stan Grove, a biology professor at Goshen College, said that bees were most active during summer as they try to keep their hives cool by flapping their wings.

“They don’t like to be jostled,” said Grove.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

A Scottish woman who set out before Christmas to purchase a turkey finally made it home on Monday, after being cut off by snow for a month. Kay Ure left the Lighthouse Keeper’s cottage on Cape Wrath, at the very northwest tip of Great Britain, in December. She was heading to Inverness on a shopping trip.

However on her return journey heavy snow and ice prevented her husband, John, from travelling the last 11 miles to pick her up. She was forced to wait a month in a friend’s caravan, before the weather improved and the couple could finally be reunited.

They were separated not just for Christmas and New Year, but also for Mr Ure’s 58th birthday. With no fresh supplies, he was reduced to celebrating with a tin of baked beans. He also ran out of coal, and had to feed the couple’s six springer spaniels on emergency army rations.

“It’s the first time we’ve been separated”, said Mr Ure in December. “We’ve been snowed in here for three weeks before, so we are well used to it and it’s quite nice to get a bit of peace and quiet.”

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

The trial began today for a Pennsylvania state trooper accused of killing his girlfriend’s estranged husband.

Kevin Foley, 43, is accused of cutting the throat of John Yelenic, a dentist who was in the final stages of finalizing a divorce from his wife, Michele. According to prosecutors, Foley “loathed Dr. Yelenic” so much that he asked another fellow trooper to help him commit the alleged murder, which occurred in Yelenic’s Blairsville home.

Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek told an Indiana County jury that Foley also prayed Yelenic would die, and spread false rumors that Yelenic molested his adopted son.

“You will see Kevin Foley has the motive, the opportunity and the ability to commit this crime, almost to the exclusion of anybody else,” Krastek said.

Foley’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Monzo, said during opening statements that DNA evidence was not conclusive. Monzo admitted to the jury that Foley did not like Yelenic, but said that does not mean he murdered him.

“Kevin Foley is innocent,” he said.

Prosecutors said they could call as many as 70 witnesses to try and prove Foley wanted Yelenic to die. The trial, at the Indiana County Courthouse, is expected to last about three weeks.

Foley, who is on unpaid suspension from the Pennsylvania State Police, is charged with criminal homicide. The jury has the option of convicting him of first-degree murder, which could put Foley in prison for life without parole, or of a lesser degree charge, like manslaughter.

John Yelenic was found dead in his home on April 13, 2006, one day before he was planning on signing his divorce papers. Prosecutors said Foley killed Yelenic after going to the dentist’s house to confront him over the terms of the divorce. Prosecutors claim Foley slashed Yelenic several times with a knife and pushed his head through a small window, causing a further gash on his neck. Yelenic bled to death.

Foley had been living with Michele Yelenic for two years at the time of the alleged homicide. Krastek said Michele also helped perpetuate rumors that Dr. Yelenic molested their son. John and Michele Yelenic had been separated in 2002. Michele Yelenic stood to collect Dr. Yelenic’s estate and a $1 million life insurance policy, and could lose about $2,500 a month in support if the divorce was finalized, a Pennsylvania grand jury previously determined.

Michele Yelenic is expected to testify that Foley was home with her when the alleged murder occurred. Krastek told the jury DNA under Yelenic’s fingerprints will ultimately link him to the murder, as will bloody shoe prints found at the crime scene that match athletic shoes Foley is known to wear.

Monzo also said authorities have failed to investigate several other suspects, including Yelenic’s neighbor. Monzo said Yelenic was on very friendly terms with the neighbor’s wife, which could have given him a motive to commit the murder.

Prior to the trial, Foley’s defense attorneys unsuccessfully sought a change of venue because an overwhelming majority of the jury pool was familiar with the allegations. The change was denied when jurors insisted they had not formed an opinion about the charges.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

The upcoming 2006 Brampton municipal election, to be held November 13, features an array of candidates looking to represent their wards in city council or the council of the Peel Region.

Wikinews contributor Nick Moreau contacted many of the candidates, including Vicky Colbourne, asking them to answer common questions sent in an email. This ward’s incumbent is Paul Palleschi; also challenging Colbourne is David A. Esho and Curtis Grant.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Two weeks after a disastrous earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, the situation at the severely damaged Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant has been described by the Prime Minister as “very grave and serious”. In a nationally televised report to the nation on Friday, Naoto Kan said the Japanese government was “not in a position where we can be optimistic.”

Radiation is reported to still be leaking from the plant, in Fukushima prefecture. “The source of the radiation seems to be the reactor core,” said Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency official Hidehiko Nishiyama, adding that radiation was “more likely” coming from the core than from the reactor’s spent fuel pool.

On Thursday three workers stepped into contaminated cooling water in the reactor’s turbine room while trying to replace cables at reactor No. 3, Nishiyama said. The water seeped into the the boots of two of the workers, touching their skin and causing lesions; the third worker’s clothing protected him from the water. The two workers with skin lesions were hospitalized for radiation exposure. The radiation level of the contaminated water measured 10,000 times the level of cooling water in an undamaged reactor.File:Fukushima I by Digital Globe 2.jpg

Work has been stopped on attempts to reattach a permanent power line to the cooling system in reactor No. 3, and the building has been evacuated. Nishiyama could give no predictions of when work would resume. The possibility that water is leaking from the core of reactor No. 3 increases the danger for workers who attempt to cool the crippled plant. The reactors must be cooled before more safety work can begin.

Japan had been using seawater for cooling since the disaster crippled the power plant’s cooling systems, but U.S. officials were concerned that saltwater could harm the equipment, causing it to seize up and corrode, thereby worsening the situation.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

In a media event on March 2, Apple Inc. unveiled its iPad 2 tablet computer, the successor to the company’s iPad. The announcement was made at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. CEO Steve Jobs appeared at the event and introduced the new product, with FaceTime video messaging (with front and rear cameras) as well as a new dual-core Apple A5 processor.

The iPad 2 is an all new design and has several improvements over the original iPad. The device runs on an dual-core Apple A5 CPU. According to Jobs, the CPU’s new dual-core capability enhances multitasking and doubles the processing speed. Apple additionally introduced a magnetic ‘Smart Cover’ accessory that snaps to the front screen of the device along with several new apps ported from the Mac OS X operating system and the iPhone. These include iMovie, GarageBand, and Photo Booth. The new iPad introduces front and rear cameras which enable FaceTime. The new tablet is 15% lighter and 33% thinner than the previous version – thinner than an iPhone 4 – and has beveled edges. It will be available in black and white. The device continues to be capable of ten hours of battery life on a single charge.

The announcement comes after months of rumors about a successor to the original iPad. Competitors have designed tablets to compete with the iPad such as Motorola’s Xoom powered by the Android operating system. One research analyst predicted that iPads would still make up at least 20 million of the more than 24 million tablet computers sold in the United States in 2011. Another analyst credited the Apple’s App store for iPad’s continued success. The device will become available in the United States on March 11, 2011, available in 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes. iPad 2’s 3G models can connect to the wireless networks of AT&T or Verizon Wireless and Wi-Fi. The iPad 2 will start at US$499. In tandem with the announcement, Apple reduced the price of its original iPad to US$399. Shares of Apple inc. rose $2.81, closing at US$352.12 the day of the announcement.