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Saturday, July 22, 2006

The UK Film Council has said British films claimed a record one-third share of UK cinema takings last year.

The council has also revealed that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was Britain’s top-grossing film in 2005 after taking £435m ($808m) at the Box Office worldwide. It was one of eight British films to be included in the top 20 list of the world’s biggest grossing movies. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Batman Begins, Kingdom of Heaven, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Nanny McPhee and Pride and Prejudice took £1.8bn ($3.3) in total globally and were seen by 600 million people.

John Woodward, the chief executive officer of the UK Film Council, said: “The figures show that the public love British films and 2005 was a great year for British films at the cinema with the largest slice of Box Office takings since records began.”

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell|, who has exposed tax incentives aimed at luring filmmakers to the UK, said: “Harry Potter, Nanny McPhee and Willy Wonka have all been hits at home and abroad – helping us achieve great success at the Box Office. I hope that next year, buoyed by the new tax incentive, the UK film industry will be in even better health.”

The amount of British people viewing foreign language films also increased. More than 200 foreign language films in 32 different languages were shown at cinemas across the UK. Downfall, a German-produced movie depicting the final days of Adolf Hitler, was the most popular, according to the council.

Movies are classed as being UK-made if they are filmed in the country, star UK personalities, and invest money in the UK or on British staff and services.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

0 A.D. is a historical, open source, strategy game, published by Wildfire Games. It focuses on the period between 500BC and 500AD. The game will be released in two parts: the first covering the pre-AD period, and the second running to 500AD. With development well underway, Wikinews interviewed the development team.

Aviv Sharon, a 24-year-old Israeli student responsible for the project’s PR, compiled the below Q&A, which the full team approved prior to publication.

Sunday, October 2, 2005

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed 757 lawsuits against people who they alleged illegally shared music online. The vast majority of the lawsuits, 693, are against people who used peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as eDonkey and LimeWire to exchange music files. Of the remaining lawsuits, 64 are against students at 17 different universities who used the Abilene Network and a peer-to-peer file sharing program called i2hub.

The i2hub program is designed for use in sharing files over the Abilene Network. The Abilene Network is a high speed network in use by 207 U.S. universities. It was designed by Internet2 to provide a high speed alternative for researchers and other educators to share information. The Abilene Network allows for very high speed connections, many times faster than DSL or Cable connections. The RIAA became a corporate member of Internet2 two weeks ago.

Over the past two years, the RIAA has filed more than 14,800 lawsuits against people accused of illegally sharing music online. Over 3,400 of these cases were settled for an average of between $4,000 to $5,000 each. Almost 500 of these lawsuits were against students using the Internet2 network.

Friday, November 24, 2006

According to a report released by the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) for United Nation’s Development Plan, the per capita GNP in Eastern Turkey, an area predominantly inhabited by Kurdish people, is as low as seven percent of that of the European Union on average. The report analyzed a region of 21 cities in Eastern Turkey*. One of the cities included in the report, ??rnak, was reported to be as poor as Botswana, Southern Africa.

Other points highlighted in the report included:

• 60% of the population in the region was under the poverty line. If this situation persists, people may start to migrate to Northern Iraq.
• If 1% of the national income is spent on Eastern Turkey’s infrastructure and social investment for 7 years, the region will be enabled to finance itself. If the economic and social conditions in the region are fixed, the fragile relationship between the Turkish government and the Kurdish people of the region may improve.
• Access to health services is a primary human right. Without access to health services, one cannot expect that people of this region can live in confidence. Health institutions should employ nurses who speak Kurdish so the patients can communicate with the health services staff.
• The use of the private sector is not reliable as a solution. The government should act to remedy the lack of infrastructure in the region.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Defying government warnings against further demonstrations, as many as twenty-thousand Chinese protesters turned out for a second weekend of anti-Japan demonstrations in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Tianjin.

In Shanghai, a crowd broke many windows at the Japanese consulate, according to Kyodo News. The crowd also busted up a Japanese restaurant and set its sign on fire. The protesters then attacked a convenience store, according to the Los Angeles Times.

At the Japanese consulate, the crowd chanted “jia ru, jia ru” asking the police to “join us”. The police did not arrest the protesters, and stood by watching as the demonstration proceeded. The police permitted the protesters to throw eggs and rocks. Although the police provided at one point a sign which read “March route this way,” state-controlled media denied that the protesters had been given permission for their demonstration.

Southwest of Shanghai, in the city of Hangzhou, an estimated ten thousand protesters demonstrated against Japan, repeating recent demands for a boycott of Japanese products.

“Chinese people are angry,” student protester Michael Teng told Associated Press. “We will play along with Japan and smile nicely at them, but they have to know they have a large, angry neighbor,” Teng said.

In Beijing, Tiananmen Square was largely quiet as security tightened in anticipation of tomorrow’s visit by Japan’s foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura. Hundreds of police are guarding both Tiananmen Square and the Japanese embassy.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Friday seeking to reassure Japanese citizens and businesses operating in China.

“The Chinese government has attached great importance to the situation and has kept on urging the public to express their appeals in a calm, sane, law-abiding and orderly manner and to avoid extreme activities,” Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan said in a press release issued on Friday.

As the protests continued in China, Japan lodged a “strong protest” against China.

“We cannot but say that the security system in Shanghai is insufficient,” Machimura told reporters.

Despite the protests, Machimura announced that he is not cancelling plans to meet with China’s foreign minister Li Zhaoxing on Sunday to discuss Sino-Japanese relations.

“China has been increasing its regional economic and political influence,” Robert Broadfoot, managing director of Political & Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd. told Bloomberg from Hong Kong. “Japan doesn’t want to have its position in the region dictated by China. Japan is adopting a more assertive policy, and China is trying to block it,” Broadfoot said.

On Friday, the Japanese government warned its citizens in China to keep a low profile during the protests.

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Zach Scruggs, a lawyer for United States Senator Trent Lott, says that State Farm Insurance Company is destroying records related to claims for damage from Hurricane Katrina.

The records allegedly contain information saying that State Farm fraudulently denied insurance claims made by its policy holders, including Lott, that had homes there were damaged or destroyed when Hurricane Katrina came ashore on the Gulf Coast.

Scruggs said that Lott has “good faith belief” that many employees of the insurance company in Biloxi, Mississippi are destroying engineer’s reports that were inconclusive as to whether or not water or wind was the main cause of damage to the buildings affected by the hurricane.

Lott is among thousands of home and/or business owners who had their property damaged or destroyed during the hurricane and had their claims denied because State Farm claimed that their policies don’t cover damage caused by floods or water that was driven by the wind.

State Farm has not issued a statement on the matter so far.

Friday, July 22, 2005

Administrators PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) have announced that the British car company MG Rover and its engine manufacturer Powertrain Ltd has been sold to Chinese company Nanjing Automobile for an unknown sum of money. The company beat bids from Shanghai Automotive (SAIC), despite being the smaller of the two.

MG Rover collapsed this Spring, after struggling to make a profit for several years.

SAIC had tried to buy only the engine plant and then transfer it to China, but in June Nanjing Automobile approached PWC with a combined bid for both the car manufacturing company and Powertrain. This Monday SAIC bid for both but the offer was inferior to Nanjing’s.

Nanjing has indicated that it too will move the engine production plant to China, along with some car manufacturing. However it also intends to continue building cars in Britain, and establish an engineering research and design centre there in an effort to expand its sales globally. Nanjing intends to start hiring at once.