Staffs for US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama caught making questionable edits to Wikipedia

>Click here for the EXCLUSIVE story.

Wikinews has learned through an investigation that the staffs for 2008 United States presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain have been spending some of their time making questionable edits to Wikipedia, the open content, online encyclopedia. The investigation also found that Obama's campaign staff seems to be removing more questionable edits more often than they are making them. McCain's campaign staff favored less, in most cases removing unflattering information regarding certain articles.

While using the online internet tool Wikiscanner, Wikinews was able to determine the Internet Protocol Address range for the campaign headquarters for Obama, Obama For America and McCain, mccain08hq.com. After determining the ranges, we were able determine the individual IP addresses used to edit Wikipedia and cross reference them to current edits as early as August of this year for both campaigns.

>Click here for the EXCLUSIVE story.

Wikinews interviews U.S. Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney

>>Click here for the full EXCLUSIVE interview

Wikinews held an exclusive interview with Cynthia McKinney, one of the candidates for the Green Party nomination for the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

McKinney is a former Democrat Congresswoman from Georgia. She was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1992 and held her seat for ten years until being defeated by Denise Majette in 2002. She was the first ever African American woman from her state to be elected to Congress.

We asked her why she made the recent switch to the Green Party. She replied, "Due to the importance of environmental issues, Green issues are the issues of today. The Ten Key Values of the Green Party stress us getting along with each other in harmony with the planet that gives us life."

When asked about how she would handle Iraq she replied, "I would instruct the Joint Chiefs to draw up a plan for the orderly withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the country. I would dismantle our military bases in the area, and I would also demand that U.S. and other international corporations relinquish any claims to Iraqi oil or other resources and withdraw as well."

McKinney is running for president because, basically, she thinks that "it's time that the people win".

>>Click here for the full EXCLUSIVE interview

Wikinews Picture of the Year 2007

The winner has been announced in the 2007 Wikinews Picture of the Year election. The photo was taken by Wikinews reporter and photographer David Shankbone, and captures the protest in front of Columbia University, that marked the controversial debate with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September.

Invited to participate in a debate during his visit to New York City this week to address the United Nations General Assembly, Ahmadinejad engaged University president Lee Bollinger on a number of topics, including his country's human rights record, opinions on Israel and the Holocaust and the role of nuclear weapons and terrorism on the global stage.

The images of the event are gathered in a designated category on Commons.

Tribal elder for Lakota People in US says 'no treaty withdrawal'

>>Full Story.

The Lakota Freedom Delegation, which in December declared that the Lakota people were withdrawing from their treaties with the United States and reasserting their sovereignty as an independent state, is acting without the support of the Treaty Council, the traditional government of the Lakota, Wikinews has learned.

Wikinews spoke with Floyd Looks-For-Buffalo Hand, an Oglala Lakota Treaty Delegate and Elder, also an author and a spiritual leader in the indigenous Lakota religion, and who is also blood uncle to Lakota Freedom Delegation member Canupa Gluha Mani.

The Lakota Freedom Delegation has claimed that, while the BIA-recognized tribal governments of the Lakota have not supported them, the Lakota Freedom Delegation's authority extends from support by the Treaty Council of the Elders of Lakota as well as from the 1974 International Indian Treaty Council.

"There was no treaty withdrawal. It was three people."

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Canupa Gluha Mani speaks about Lakota Oyate, Lakota freedom

>>Full Story

It's now been three weeks since the four-person Lakota Freedom Delegation declared that the Lakota people were withdrawing from their treaties with the United States and, though small, the movement still proves controversial: two U.S.-recognized Lakota tribal governments have rejected the Delegation's authority outright with at least one tribe stating it will consider the Delegation's, now Lakota Oyate's, proposal. The rest of the tribes have remained silent.

The central figure the movement has been Canupa Gluha Mani, a longtime activist whose tactics have led repeatedly to his arrest and imprisonment — most recently in June 2007, when Canupa Gluha Mani was one of six arrested who participated in blockading a road in Nebraska to keep outside alcohol from entering his dry reservation where it is banned. Wikinews talked to Mani about the movement and Lakota Oyate in an exclusive interview.

With regard to Russell Means, who has declared himself Chief Facilitator of the Republic of Lakotah, he said, "I've worked with my uncle Russell Means in positive venues. And I'm still behind him, I have love for him;" He emphasized the familial bond between himelf and Means, noting that Means had adopted him as a nephew. However, "the Lakota have to be recognized." It was "genocide", he said, that of all the races of humanity, American Indians are not represented at the United Nations.

Read the full interview.

Lakota activists declare secession from US

>>Full Story.

A delegation from the Lakota Indian Tribe, an Indian nation on United States soil, have signed a document stating that their tribe withdraws and or cancels all treaties with the U.S. and formally establish independence from the country. The letter was hand delivered by activists for the tribe to Deputy to the Public Liaison at the State Department, Daniel Turner.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us. This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution. It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Russell Means, an activist for Native American rights to reporters at a press conference on Wednesday in Washington, D.C..

The delegation wrote a formal letter to the Department of State which was hand-delivered by activists of the tribe announcing their secession. So far, the U.S. has not issued a public response regarding their decision. Wikinews attempted to contact the State Department, but in an e-mail Director of the Office of Media Affairs Kirsten Petree stated that "this is not an issue for the State Department" and referred us to the Department of the Interior.

John Reed on Orwell, God, self-destruction and the future of writing

It can be difficult to be John Reed.

Christopher Hitchens called him a "Bin Ladenist" and Cathy Young editorialized in The Boston Globe that he "blames the victims of terrorism" when he puts out a novel like Snowball's Chance, a biting send-up of George Orwell's Animal Farm he was inspired to write after the terrorist attacks on September 11. "The clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell's name into disrepute in the U.S.," wrote William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate. That process had already begun: it was revealed Orwell gave the British Foreign Office a list of people he suspected of being "crypto-Communists and fellow travelers," labeling some of them as Jews and homosexuals. "I really wanted to explode that book," Reed told The New York Times. "I wanted to completely undermine it."

Is this man who wants to blow up the classic literary canon taught to children in schools a menace, or a messiah? David Shankbone went to interview him for Wikinews and found that, as often is the case, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

Reed is electrified by the changes that surround him that channel through a lens of inspiration wrought by his children. "The kids have made me a better writer," Reed said. In his new untitled novel, which he calls a "new play by William Shakespeare," he takes lines from The Bard's classics to form an original work. He began it in 2003, but only with the birth of his children could he finish it. "I didn't understand the characters who had children. I didn't really understand them. And once I had had kids, I could approach them differently."

Taking the old to make it new is a theme in his work and in his world view. Reed foresees new narrative forms being born, Biblical epics that will be played out across print and electronic mediums. He is pulled forward by revolutions of the past, a search for a spiritual sensibility, and a desire to locate himself in the process.

Below is David Shankbone's conversation with novelist John Reed.

GO HERE TO READ THE INTERVIEW.

Interview: US Senator Sam Brownback on running for President, gay rights, the Middle East and religion

>>Full Interview

Sam Brownback is perplexed. The U.S. Senator from Kansas and Presidential candidate is a Republican Catholic whose politics--he is against marriage for gay people, he is against abortion, and he has a clean image in a party tainted by scandal--should speak favorably to the party's base. But it has not. "I'm baffled by that myself," Senator Brownback told David Shankbone. "We haven't been able to raise money."

A recent poll in Iowa has put him in eighth place, with 2% supporting his campaign. "If we don't finish fourth or better in Iowa...we'll pull out."

Senator Brownback's relationship with God infuses almost every answer you find below. Although he doesn't feel "competent" to explain why God would dislike gays, he does feel strongly that allowing two men or two women to enter into the union of marriage will destroy it for heterosexuals. Pointing to the research of Stanley Kurtz at The Hoover Institute, Brownback asserts that Northern Europeans have "taken the sacredness out of the institution."

In the interview, Senator Brownback discusses the tug-and-pull that befalls him when his constituents show up at his office and say, "Look, I'm a conservative, but we need this bridge, we need this subsidy, we need this hospital.” Brownback feels this spending system needs to be changed; however, when it comes to energy policy, Brownback is there for his constituents. David Shankbone asked the Kansas Senator, a supporter of cellulosic ethanol, why he doesn't support the lowering of tariffs on sugar since sugar ethanol delivers 8 times the energy output of cellulosic ethanol. Brazil, in particular, has become energy independent because of its sugar ethanol program. It's cheaper to produce, and there is vastly more bang for the buck in sugar fuel than in corn fuel; an entire country no longer needs to import oil because of it. Federal tariffs currently make sugar ethanol too expensive in the United States. "You're going to kill the ethanol industry here just as it gets going," was Senator Brownback's response. However, there is a debate over whether the process to make corn ethanol uses more energy than the ethanol itself produces.

Click here to read David Shankbone's interview with Senator Sam Brownback.

Wikinews originals: Awards, monarchies and presidents

Irish president opens new park dedicated to Irish refugees in Toronto, Canada

Wikinews user Joshua Sherurcij reports the activities of Irish president Mary McAleese (pictured) from Toronto. The president wrapped up a two-day visit to Toronto, Canada on Thursday by cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new park. The city's Ireland Park is dedicated to the Irish immigrants who fled the great famine to start a new life in Canada 160 years ago.


MMVAs handed out in Toronto, Canada; Wikinews was there

Nicolas Moreau (User:Zanimum) managed to get yet another professional photographer to get quality images of stars on Commons for all Wikimedia projects to benefit from... without paying the photographer! This time it was at the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto. Some of the stars include Avril Lavigne (pictured), Joss Stone and Hilary Duff.

Noel Cox talks to Wikinews about New Zealand's constitutional monarchy

Gabriel Pollard, who has been very active with interview with New Zealand's finest lately, conducted an e-mail interview with the chairman of the Monarchist League of New Zealand Incorporated", who told him: "In this time of increasing globalisation it is also good to remember that we are already part of an international family of nations, sharing the Queen with Australia, Britain, Canada and so on."

Wikinews reporters are everywhere

Yesterday I had the pleasure of stepping out and doing a spot of Original Reporting for Wikinews. Earlier this week I had heard in mainstream media that Australian Prime Minister John Howard was going to be in my home town of Bathurst to do a spot of campaigning for the local MP. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to get out and do some original reporting on the streets of Bathurst.

Two days before Mr Howard's visit I heard that a group of protesters were arranging a protest to greet him on his arrival to a Liberal Party luncheon. I then googled for details of the protest's organiser, a unionist by the name of Daniel Walton. He told me that protesters would be assembling shortly after 11:30AM on Friday and to look out for "the guy in the red shirt" to have a chat and get some quotes.

So I took my Pentax Optio 60, a notebook, pen and my Wikinews press card and headed for the protest. Once there, I was surprised by the attitude of police towards me given the relative unknowness of Wikinews in Australia. Police told me I was pretty much free to wander around, take photos and write notes so long as I followed their orders. While I was being told this, I was seeing other people being ushered towards the barracades where protesters were standing behind by police.

Once I spoke to the police, I went looking for Daniel Walton. To my surprise (or perhaps his sense of humour) there were quite a number of people in red t-shirts. I wandered around the protest crowd, talking to protesters and gathering comments until I was approached by another organiser Michael Foggarty. He was more than happy to be interviewed, asked some questions about Wikinews and then introduced me to Daniel Walton.

I interviewed Daniel, took some more photos and then noticed people were beginning to enter the luncheon venue across the street. I crossed the road where I was stopped momentarily by riot police, who told me "Protesters aren't allowed over there". Once I flashed my Wikinews press card and explained what I was doing, the officer apologised and sent me on my way.

Half way across the road, I spotted perhaps the highlight of my day - a young man impersonating our PM. Having a chuckle to myself I continued on my way and requested a few comments from luncheon attendees, all who refused. Even the Deputy Mayor of Bathurst refused, telling me he "doesn't speak to journalist trash", despite walking only a few steps further down the street and speaking to reporters from the local newspaper!

As antendees were walking in, protesters made their voices heard, calling atendees Chumps (which I learned on Urban Dictionary means a stupid or gullible person) and yelling chants about the PM and our local MP.

After standing opposite the street from the protesters for a short time, I noticed the police were beginning to barracade the street block off. Knowing Mr Howard wasn't too far away I moved into a good vantage point to capture a photo for when he arrived. I was able to stand probably two metres behind the rear of his Holden Caprice as it pulled into the kerb.

When Mr Howard exited his vehicle, I caught a shot of him stepping up the curb. I then turned and took a shot of the protesters with their backs to him.

It was the first time I had seen Mr Howard in real life and would have been standing not more than five metres from him.

The most difficult part of putting the article together for Wikinews was the lack of comment from luncheon attendees, this made it difficult to comply with the neutrality policy. Fortunately, the Prime Minister's speech to those at the luncheon was transcribed on the internet, where he had commented on his industrial reforms the protesters were discontent with.

I am looking forward to covering the next major event in Bathurst to publish on Wikinews when it happens!