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Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney received a hostile reception this week from some Quebec separatists as he prepares for his concert on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City on Sunday. The controversy began when Quebec artist Luc Archambault released an open letter last week criticising the concert as a "British invasion". The letter was also signed by some other separatists including a few Parti Québécois politicians. The concert is located at the site of the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham on which British and French troops battled. Quebe

Ayoub John Njie, a magistrate in Brikama, Gambia, has said that he will acquit all people detained for 72 hours without charge, due to the fact that he believes detention for more than three days is unconstitutional. Section 19 (1) of the Gambian constitution says that "no one shall be subject to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his or her liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedures as established by law." Njie stated that he believes that detention for over 72 hours is depriving someone of

A tsunami warning has been issued for some parts of Japan's eastern coast after an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 struck off the shore, near the city of Iwaki. It is believed, however, that the Tsunami warning was withdrawn as the Japan Meteorological Agency currently lists no Tsunami warnings, with two tsunami warnings from earlier today being listed in the past warnings section of the Agency's website. The initial reports from the scene of the earthquake shown no injuries, although buildings were observed being shook by the quake 300 kil

For nearly half a century the world's largest telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, has been observing our solar system and the universe around it. Completed by Cornell University along with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1963, Arecibo's enormous size gives it the ability to collect more light than any other telescope, allowing it to observe objects that are too faint for other radio telescopes to see. Its main purposes are radio astronomy, aeronomy and radar astronomy, but is probably most famous for its contin

On January 8, 2008 in Stephenville, Texas, one of the larger UFO sightings in the United States occurred. A few days ago the UFO investigative organization Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) released a 77-page report on the sighting. MUFON is a UFO investigative organization in the United States. Founded in 1969, it now has 3,000 members and is headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado. The MUFON report, entitled "Special Research Report Stephenville, Texas" was written by Glen Schulze and Ropert Powell. Shulze has radar experience from working at the W

Thursday saw the start of the fourth International Wikimedia Conference, better known as Wikimania 2008. The conference is being held in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a modern library with conference facilities for multiple tracks as well as a grand hall where the opening ceremony and first presentation were held. Speakers for the opening ceremony: His Excellency Dr. Ahmed Darwish, the Egyptian Minister of State for Administrative Development, Florence Devouard, the outgoing chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, Mohamed Ibrahim the active lead vol

A fire at a Rexam Plastics factory in China has claimed the lives of three firefighters. Nine more were injured in the accident in Shanghai's Fengxian District. The first emergency call was received by Shanghai Public Security Bureau's 110 Command Center at 12:20 p.m. and reported the Jinhui Town factory as alight. A total of fifty fire engines and around 300 firefighters were dispatched to the scene of the blaze at the Rexam Plastic Packaging (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. facility. Shortly after 2 p.m. a fifty-metre-long structural girder collapsed on

Documents leaked on Wikileaks and seen by Wikinews have revealed that Cuba signed a confidential deal with Venezuela to ensure that Cuba gets access to a high speed internet connection by 2010. The document stated, in Spanish, that the countries aim to "build and operate a line of fiber optic cables between Venezuela and Cuba." Julian Assange, an investigative editor on Wikileaks, claimed that the information in the documents "adds weight to Cuban statements that the United States economic embargo of the island has forced it to rely on slow an

North America's oldest retailer, Canada's Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), will be transferred from one American owner to another. NRDC Equity Partners, LLC, owners of U.S. department store Lord & Taylor, will purchase HBC from the estate of Jerry Zucker, who died in April. In 2006, the fate of HBC was first in doubt when Zucker bought it for $1.1 billion from another American owner. The businessman wanted to convert The Bay into a more upscale department-store chain. Zucker had also begun remodeling the company's Zellers chain to imitate the Targ

A man shot and killed a Broward County Sheriff's Office police dog in Miami Beach after a two-county chase in Florida early Thursday morning. The shooter, Delvin Lewis, 27, was firing shots at his girlfriend during a domestic dispute in Oakland Park. When police arrived, the suspect got into his car and fled, engaging roughly 20 cruisers in a 30-mile chase which ended near Mount Sinai Medical Center's emergency room in Miami Beach. An exchange of gunfire followed in which Lewis reportedly killed the dog. ER doctors tried to save the animal but

The United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has announced that inerting systems in airliner fuel tanks are to be made mandatory. The move, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), is in response to a recommendation made by the country's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as part of its investigation into a 1996 air disaster. TWA Flight 800 was a Boeing 747 that exploded in mid-air twelve years ago today, on July 17, 1996, above the Atlantic Ocean. All 230 people on board the New York to Paris flight wer

Thousands of people have fled an oil town in the Niger Delta, Nigeria yesterday after an unknown militant group said that all people not originally from the area who did not leave the town would be beheaded. The militants first visited Bonny Island, the town involved, two weeks ago, killing nine people. According to newspaper reports, they said that they would return yesterday to carry out the beheading. They did not return as promised, but many in the city of 100,000 took the threat seriously and left. Kingsley Adonis Pepple, a local residen