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Saturday, November 14, 2009 Four teenage boys are dead after a car crash in Birmingham, England. The collision, which occurred at around 0345 GMT in the suburb of Moseley, involved four boys crashing a blue Rover into a wall on Salisbury Road. The ages of the adolescents are reported as 15, 16, and 17; the age of the fourth teenager is unconfirmed. All four died at the scene. “Police can confirm three of the boys in the car were 17, 15 and 16 years old,” the West Midlands Police said…

Monday, June 16, 2008 The gas crisis in Western Australia continues to deepen with more businesses standing people down without pay. Businesses have been instructed to turn off non-essential items including limiting the number of lifts and reduced lighting; domestic customers are also urged to reduce energy use. In the Federal parliament today Resources Minister Martin Ferguson raised the prospect of activating the Liquid Fuel Emergency Act. “During such a situation, I can control the production, transfer and stock levels of crude and liquid fuel…While I sincerely hope that this…

Friday, January 15, 2010 Haiti was hit by a heavy earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 on Tuesday, killing an unknown number of people, and destroying up to ten percent of buildings in the capital, Port-au-Prince. No official death toll has been released as of yet, although the United Nations says that up to fifty thousand people may potentially have been killed. An estimated 300,000 more were left without homes. In a special photo report, Wikinews looks at the extensive damage caused by the disaster. To find more information about…

Thursday, April 1, 2010 The Servicio Médico Legal (in Spanish, Legal Medical Service) of Rancagua, Chile boss, Juan Díaz Menares, was suspended from his job for using a public bus to transport the body of three-year-old Juanita Carey. The decision was made by the administrative lawyer in the case, Hernán Rojas, who is heading the investigation into the irregular move of the body. Díaz defends the sending of the body via a public bus, ensuring that “the procedure was right, because it was sent as it is established”. “There’s an…

Monday, February 21, 2005 Los Angeles, California – A simple saliva test can predict whether children will get cavities, how many cavities they will get and which teeth are most vulnerable. Developed by researchers at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the test quantifies the genetic component of tooth decay, spotting the risk when something can be done about it. “When we apply this to young children, it allows us to predict what might be their future caries history—the number of cavities that they’ll get by, say, their…

Tuesday, November 20, 2007 Last night HBO premiered I Am An Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA. Since its inception, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has made headlines and raised eyebrows. They are almost single-handedly responsible for the movement against animal testing and their efforts have raised the suffering animals experience in a broad spectrum of consumer goods production and food processing into a cause célèbre. PETA first made headlines in the Silver Spring monkeys case, when Alex Pacheco, then a student at George Washington…

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 director of Stardust@home. Wikinews interviewed him for May’s Interview of the Month (IOTM) on May…

Wednesday, November 22, 2006 Methane gas was blamed for the explosion deaths of 8 miners in southern Polish‘s Halemba coal mine Tuesday, November 21. Officials say at least 15 are missing. Rescue efforts were halted because dangerously high levels of methane gas returned, according to Zbigniew Madej, spokesman for state-owned Coal Co., which operates the mine. The missing miners’ locater devices were not emitting signals, increasing rescurers’ concerns for their well-being. Grzegorz Pawlaszek, head of Coal Co., said the 15 missing miners’ fate is “not known,” but added that “there…