Penalty clause, or politicians in the penalty box?

We’re supposed to be citizen journalists. Does that mean we can make a difference? I’d argue it most certainly should!

The query to the left is a letter which the Scotsman graciously published when I put it to them. Alas, not a single politician responded. But, things need not end there.

Edinburgh is coming up for a local election, councillors face defending their seats, and – those brave enough – will be appearing at local hustings. Can they answer the question in front of a large public audience of potential voters? I’ve every intention of finding out, and our local “stirrer”, as the Broughton Spurtle bills themselves, are keen to join in with the challenge.

I spoke to one of their reporters earlier today, and will be joining them on the front bench to make life uncomfortable for candidates. The lesson everyone involved with Wikinews should learn? A simple one: Taking an active interest in political matters, and putting challenging questions to political candidates does not make you non-neutral. Just because nobody else has come up with the question does not make it non-neutral. You’re not softballing politicos of a certain persuasion, you’re asking them something that someone else should have come up with, but didn’t.

They work for us, remember? Make their life difficult, and make them think, and think hard, about what being a representative means. If they can’t answer this simple question, would you trust them with your granny’s bus pass, or your neighbour’s leaky roof?

I wouldn’t, and my vote will be based on who can actually give, and hold to, a sensible answer to this question.

If the question hurts, then I want to know who funded them standing for office – was it, perchance, the people who took Edinburgh for fools and promised a tram system at an undeliverable cost?

We built into the W2G a requirement that participants write an article for Wikinews. In the process of meeting Brian at GLAM Camp and further conversations, I was even more excited. Reporter accreditation is seriously cool in terms of providing additional incentive to participate, especially for photographers. News stories go to Google News when published. You can cover topics in ways different and more meaningfully than you can on Wikipedia. The writing process as described is rather accessible for those who aren’t used to or don’t like Wikipedia’s formalistic, citation heavy editing style. It has useful help pages that don’t require digging 20 subpages into to find out how to edit within policy. The admins are accessible to request editing assistance from. This makes Wikinews accessible to a greater audience. I’m sold. I love using Wikinews for W2G and plan to encourage members of Wikimedia Australia to contribute. I plan to leverage Wikinews when I work with Australian sporting organisations to get them involved with WMF projects, because Wikinews is very useful tool.

Have I mentioned I loved Wikinews with out having published a story on Wikinews? About two and a half weeks ago, I decided to change this. I had permission to bring a photographer to test matches between Australia’s women’s national water polo team and Great Britain’s team. I bought a very nice camera after the second of five matches. I had notes I’d taken during these matches that included the score, attempts to identify player numbers by what other match attendees had told me, had several conversations with people attending the matches about what was going on. I could not record who scored how many goals and this information was not on a scoreboard.

After the fourth of five matches, I started drafting the article. I finished writing after the fifth and final test match. Writing for Wikinews felt as easy as I thought it would be. There were a few bumps along the way because I didn’t clearly read the instructions: Titles should be short, neutral and in active voice. Ooops. I moved changed the title after I created, and it was changed twice again to make sure it conformed with policy. The lead sentence is very important. It should be, according to the guidelines, interesting and answer the who, what, where, when, why and how questions. This was difficult for me. I required and received help from two other editors to get the lede into shape. The article needed to be three to four paragraphs long. I focused the first paragraph on answering the W questions. I used the last paragraph to provide box score information for all five matches. The second paragraph was a problem. I did not know what to say. I asked for help on the article talk page, on a user talk page and in the IRC channel. People told me I could write about how well the team performed. The second paragraph included these details. With the help of the regular writers, the lede paragraph became two paragraphs. The article finished with four paragraphs. I double checked the text to make sure it matched with policy: The text was written in active voice. Dates were expressed as yesterday, Sunday, last Tuesday instead of 21 February 2012. I created links to Wikinews and Wikipedia pages for relevant topics on the article.

Laura Hale's first Wikinews article, on the site's main page

In preparing the article, I did original reporting. I read the policy page, asked for more help on the talk page and followed the directions. I tagged the article with original reporting. I wrote reporter notes on the collaboration page. No scanning of hand written notes was required. I wrote down notes from my iPhone, paper and pictures I took. I wrote these notes in about 10 minutes.

In preparing the article, I also relied on other sources. On Wikipedia, you source every fact after you write the fact. On Wikinews, you source facts at the end of the article and fewer are required. Individual scoring information came from sources I used. This was cited at the bottom of the article.

On English Wikipedia, you include an image with out citing who took the picture. As I went through the final checklist, I discovered I need to attribute the photographer in the image caption. I did that. Everything on the checklist looked good. I clicked the submit for review button. I went to bed. I woke up and found the submission had been approved. The article appeared on the main page.

Writing for Wikinews is easy. Follow the guidelines. Request help if you are not sure. If you do this, you should be able to get your news article published.  Here’s my article, slap-bang on the main page; try getting that sort of exposure on Wikipedia!

Wikinews: The free news source you can copy

If you care about news and, even casually, follow developments in news production, you will know many larger city papers find themselves forced to close foreign bureaux. If your nearest big city paper no longer has a correspondent in Paris, and another in Auckland, how can they provide you with quality international news?

They can’t. Well, they can’t — unless they pay a syndication source or wire service.

Once you understand this dynamic of news, you can start to see that the apparent explosion of news availability brought by the Internet is, largely, “smoke and mirrors“. Only the really, really big players will have a correspondent in Moscow; your coverage originates with them, right across the dozen or so news sources you might consult.

Wikinews, amongst other things, seeks to address this shift of power.

You could be the ‘correspondent in Auckland‘, or Paris, Moscow, London, Edinburgh, even Seoul, Tokyo, or Santiago. The learning-curve for new contributors is quite steep, but thankfully short. Getting some of our established contributors to go over the issues they met is something for another post. It’s about seven or eight years since I started contributing, so my memory is a little hazy; not to mention, Wikinews was a lot wilder, lacked the all-important formal review, and wasn’t listed in Google News.

But, what about the other side? If Wikinewsies are trying to fill a few of the gaps left by long-gone foreign bureaux, to offer high-quality alternate coverage with a focus on neutrality and integrity, is anyone actually using it?

In recently getting Google News to correct how their spider scans Wikinews, this starts to become more-apparent. I found a few examples in the week or-so since the listing update. As should please a couple of contributors, this includes a “real” newspaper; their writing was syndicated — albeit not for print use.

This afternoon I emailed The Raleigh Telegram, expressing delight at their syndication of Wikinews coverage of current U.S. Presidential campaigns. Their article, Mitt Romney Easily Wins Nevada, Florida Primaries, combines two from us: Mitt Romney wins 2012 Nevada caucuses and Mitt Romney wins 2012 Florida primary.

Moreover, they credit Wikinews clearly and right at the top of the published copy. Although they did mis-capitalise Wikinews, it was important to reach out to them and let them know we’re happy to see our work going to a wider audience. My opinion is it was a smart move to exploit our lack of a “no derivatives” clause in the license we use for publication; they could, with little work on their part, provide a quality report for their readers.

Romney, as covered in some Wikinews reporting, isn’t finding the public universally accepting and adoring him. This is where we find another reuse, or at least citation, of our coverage.

Over on Examiner.com, they’re ‘Spreading Romney‘. Accompanied with an amusing dog photo, and highlighting the 25-thousand strong Facebook group “Dogs against Romney“, they draw from our Valentine’s Day report Santorum neologism spreads to Romney. For those who’ve not seen this fun side of USian electioneering, Romney is in the dog-house over his record on animal rights. The story is, in 1983 Romney and family were making a 12-hour drive from Boston to Ontario; lacking space for the family’s Red Setter inside the car, Romney strapped Seamus’ crate to the car roof.

The neologism? Poor Seamus crapped all over the car windscreen during the marathon drive. Romney, apparently, simply stopped at a gas station and hosed both car and dog down. So, the verb form of Romney is being defined as: To defecate in terror.

Leaving behind the madness of politics in ‘The Land of the Free‘, and looking eastwards for news, we find The Nelson Daily reusing our Egyptian story: Egypt struggles to recover tourism, investment. Scratch that “eastwards” bit; Nelson is a sub-10,000 population town in British Columbia, Canada. However, it makes the point about people wanting quality international news.

It would be interesting to know how many people subscribe to The Nelson Daily. Assuming they carry local coverage, announcements and so on, a double-digit percentage of the local population may look at it on a semi-regular basis. And, if you search their site, you discover they’ve been quietly reusing Wikinews content since at least May 2010. Excellent! Just what we’d hope to start finding more sources doing.

Perhaps a few might even start contributing; you could, if you care about news.

Well, I just created another, shown here. I think this is slightly better put-together than the previous video report, but still has a few shortcomings.

The process of creating video reports such as this has one major drawback; it is very, very time-consuming. For this report, of just over fifteen minutes, I think I spent over 5 hours working on it.

I know, with practice, that time is going to come down; but, not as much as one might think. Anyone attempting a task like this is still going to need to watch the video clips they’re working from; video needs standardised to one resolution, and one aspect ratio. Titles need created, and then the entire project needs rendered.

All this, to-date, is without the added complexity of including any narration.

Before I attempt that particular task, I’ve decided I need to ‘convert’ a walk-in wardrobe into a small, and – yes – cramped, sound booth. It simply would not do to have a refrigerator buzzing in the background, traffic noises from the street. Or, considering where I live, some of the more choice ‘banter‘ from the street getting picked up (For the insatiably curious, there are still Trainspotters in Leith).

However, I should show-off some of these tools a little. That might encourage a few others to try their hand at video-editing. Linux isn’t all ‘transmission line-noise’ like sed, awk, grep, modprobe, touch and fsck; despite what you may have heard, it is perfectly usable by mere mortals.

Moving right along, You’re probably interested to see the two “most graphical” of the tools used to create this video. Those are GiMP and OpenShot.

Screenshot of GiMP running on Ubuntu 10.04-3 LTS

If you’ve not seen, or heard of, GiMP then, the simplest explanation is that it’s a Free replacement for Photoshop.

If you are a Photoshop user, you’ll need to un-learn certain ways of doing things. But, by-and-large, GiMP is a completely free functional replacement.Yes, the screenshot show here is huge (click to zoom-in); but as you’ll notice, GiMP is a multi-window application. You can work on a lot of images at any one time, build new images layer by layer, and a lot of effects are at your disposal.

What’s shown is version 2.6.8 of GiMP running on-top of Ubuntu version 10.04-3 LTS (Lucid Lynx).

It would seem, from checking the GiMP website, that I’ve got close to the latest-and-greatest version of the program. Whether or not there is a slightly later point release (i.e. I have 2.6.8 which is the .8 release of version 2.6) is not readily checked. Even better news for Windows and Mac OS users. There are downloadable version of GiMP you can use; meaning you can get rid of the three-versions-back pirate copy of Photoshop you got via torrent.

Would that I could say the same for OpenShot. Sadly, their website confirms the latest version is 1.4, and I’m only running version 1.1.3; nor is there a Windows or Mac OS version of the package.

OpenShot - 1.1.3 Running on Ubuntu 10.04-3 LTS

In theory, it’s possible to compile OpenShot for the Mac or Windows platforms, but that’s beyond me, and I’ve no need. Having discovered there is a more-current version, the instructions for upgrading to it, and staying current, are relatively straightforward.

Hopefully, with an upgrade, I will see less crashes from OpenShot. The improved layout shown in the video on the program’s website looks impressive.

I will be checking if the limitations I’ve experienced so far with OpenShot are removed. The most annoying of these I’ve met so-far is the 9999 seconds length limit on any clip you work with (2 hours 46 minutes and 39 seconds).

The other irksome limitation is how long you can run a “still” for; a “still” being a static .jpg or .png image which you stretch out. The perfect example of this would be the top-right Wikinews logo with which I branded the above video. Since the longest you can run a “still” in this version is 300 seconds, (five minutes) I had to repeat it three times across the video editing. If you take a closer look at the screenshot, you’ll see the branding is on track 3 and starts about 8 seconds into the video.

Since this screenshot is right at the start of the video, you can see how I’ve constructed the title sequence.

Openshot numbers tracks from bottom to top, so I put the music clip in on Track 1. On track 2 I’ve placed a white still for background, and track 3 fades in and out the full-screen Wikinews logo before switching to running the top-left ‘branding’ version of the logo.

Track 4 isn’t used much beyond what you see here; fade in/out the two “stills” with title information on them. This is one point where I know I need to improve my editing; the two “stills” share a common heading, and that should not fade out and back in again. However, having seen the advances between this version (1.1.3) of OpenShot and the latest (1.4), I expect there are significantly different options for achieving those results.

Beyond the credits, I simply cross-fade from one clip to another, or to a different point within any clip. Closing credits are, unsurprisingly, a slightly more simple reverse of the opening credits.

With that said, I’m off to remove OpenShot and Blender from my system, add the library for the latest version of OpenShot to my selected software repositories and, install the lot from scratch.

I would be curious to know what free software exists for Windows and/or Mac OS that provides the same functionality.

A sample Wikinews reporters' business card

At long last we’ve got funding, and the go-ahead, for Wikinewsies to have press IDs. They won’t look like the business card design to the left, but that will be a starting point.

As highlighted by Wikimedia UK, a code of conduct for those issued credentials by Wikinews is our final prerequisite.

In the modern world, where the UK’s Lord Leveson is dragging the country’s tabloid press across hot coals, it may seem archaic or strange that a code of conduct or ethics applies anywhere in journalism. But, it does.

Reporters and photojournalists are a publication’s “ambassadors”. We most certainly will not have people camping out in the bushes, with long lenses, trying to catch celebrities enjoying otherwise-private moments. Our guidelines for Original Reporting already cover a fair amount of ground on what is, and is not, appropriate behaviour.

There are a slew of documents to go over. I am of the opinion that a code of conduct should be combined with a code of ethics to provide a “Principles of Wikinewsies“. At the moment I am reviewing the following documents with a view to working to produce a base document which is workable globally, not just within the English-speaking world. Those documents are:

• NUJ Code of Conduct
• SPJ Code of Ethics
• BBC Editorial Guidelines
• CBC – Radio Canada – Code of Conduct
• Sydney Morning Herald Code of Ethics

That is probably quite enough reading for anyone going forward. However, if you know of any other important publications with English-language versions of their codes of ethics/conduct, I’d be delighted to add them to the list.

For those with an interest in the minutiae, the Wikimedia UK discussion granting us funding for ID cards is here.

Before I waffle off into lawn-minding territory, let’s just say I wholeheartedly agree that Unity is the “Windows Vista moment” in Ubuntu’s development history. If you’re not looking to criticise my commentary and get told to “get off my lawn“, you can click here and skip the curmudgeonly reminiscing. Whatever you do, don’t mention Windows ME!

I’ve dabbled with Linux on-and-off over the years, but my main use of UNIX-ey systems was with Big Iron — Sun, d|i|g|i|t|a|l, IBM, HP and so on. To this day I would still prefer to work on VMS boxen but, am not going back to a four-foot-high monster in my office. Besides, HP/Compaq screwed the pooch on the hardware side.

Thirty years playing, and working, with computers. I cut my GUI teeth on SunOS 3.2 back in the late 1980s, also dabbling with the original Macintosh for some desktop publishing work; but, the main place work got done using computers was at the command line.

Fast-forward through 20-odd years using various systems, paralleled by the rise and rise of Microsoft Windows, I was relatively at-ease with Windows XP. I’ve heard various remarks about Microsoft making it “too good”; well, no surprise there. As Gates did to Apple with the original version of Windows, he’d done the same to VMS for the underlying system by taking all the good bits for the Windows NT core.

But, Vista? Nooooo!

Some money-grubbing moron in the bowels of Redmond City (and, I mean that as-in they need cast back into the sewers from whence they came) decided development of the next incarnation of their desktop was taking too long. Vista is the result of handing a pre-alpha piece of software to a marketing team. Lipstick on a pig, followed by extensive use of Photoshop. I suspect their sole concern technical quality-wise was avoiding a repeat of the Windows 98 keynote BSOD. Everything else was a disaster.

Myself, virtually the entire business community, and other more tech-savvy computer users stuck to Windows XP for years. You’ll still find XP in a huge number of offices, and the pressure was such that Microsoft withdrew — at least twice — planned end-of-support schedules. Enough really big companies rely on thousands of XP desktop installs to make failure to provide security fixes something that could see Microsoft in court, and crucified throughout the press.

I recall interviewing for a contract, and being asked about Vista by the hiring manager. He was unaware Windows 7 was in the works, and my advice to not allow staff Vista pending the Microsoft developers fixing marketing’s screw-up didn’t go down too well. Had I been brutally frank, I would have told him, “anyone coming into the office asking for Vista on their desktop or laptop because they, have got it at home and, like it urgently needs removed from any decision-making process beyond which colour paperclips are ordered”.

When a Vista laptop entered our house, one that was a victim of Microsoft’s pressure on vendors not to write XP device drivers for newer hardware, I stuck SUSE Linux on it. It was perfect for my Monster, and he spent an enormous amount of time playing various games on it — and doing the odd bit of homework.

By 2008, I was dual-booting my desktop machine; XP for work developing software that required Windows, and Ubuntu to dabble with. Moving back to the UK, and catching up with old friends, saw me starting to switch other people over to Ubuntu. There’s more than one friend who’s a musician, so I took a good long look at the Ubuntu Studio derivative. Immediately disliked the desktop, so started looking at selectively installing relevant packages on top of ‘base’ Ubuntu. Well, we didn’t get the band back together again but, I found a pretty impressive set of tools.

Common job(s), common needs

Now, having sworn off Ubuntu due to Unity, I’m looking at Linux Mint. If I can get the full set of audio-visual tools installed, that’s where I’m heading.

Prior to going though, I’ve learned a few tricks to Ubuntu customisation and intend to apply them. Being open-source, it’s relatively easy to make things just the way you’d like them. I’ve created bootable USB versions several times; they’re incredibly useful when it comes to quickly installing a system. Now, though, I’m going to attempt something a little more ambitious – a Live version which suits me, contains a toolset geared to general use, and a setup which is conducive to working on Wikinews.

To keep on-topic for the Editors´ blog, a brief digression into news…

Several days ago, one of my fellow Wikinewsies pointed me at this brave soul streaming his city’s bombardment live from Syria. As with all wars, it involves long periods of boredom punctuated with bouts of extreme violence.

One session of streaming, nearly four-and-a-half hours long, saw the building the camera is in hit. Another strike close-by came a few minutes later. The clip/”report” you see to the right is excerpts from the entire 4½ hrs of footage, obtained using Linux tools.

Those tools should, relatively easily, all fit on a bootable single-layer DVD. Not just those, but an extensive range of other useful programs. Graphics manipulation, sound editing, office tools, and on and on.

Not only would such a DVD be useful for getting a familiar environment at any PC you sit down in front of, security is important. An environment secure, and comprehensive, enough that “Baba Omer” in Homs could use it to get information out; that a more-comfortably situated editor can edit the footage, and prepare relevant graphics; edit, spell-check and grammar-check, the appropriate copy.

That self-same “comfortably situated” editor may have their own needs for security and privacy. Government after government is instituting poorly thought-out laws which could easily see an enthusiastic citizen journalist jailed.

Taking what I know, and the building blocks offered throughout the Linux ecosphere, let’s see how I get on making a Wikinewsie’s Live DVD.

I suspect there is enough work in this to merit its own blog for coordination and discussion,…

You knew they would, didn't you?

Well, Godaddy had their chance(s); they failed — on an epic scale.

The wikinewsie.org codebase is zipped up and downloaded, databases backed up and new hosting plan in-place.

Partway through the process of removing their stupid “Privacy protection” from the domain. This, if you’ve not had the experience, is a clever ploy to lock you in and make migrating out a real pain.

My Amerikan fellow Wikinewsies may be slightly annoyed as the site is moving to an Amsterdam-based host. However, we’ll cease having to pay separately for email hosting which is limited  in terms of the number of supported accounts. And, we’ll finally have a “proper” mailing list.

So where are we off to? ITEC Hosting, that’s where. Getting used to CPanel as-opposed to the perpetually changing proprietary interface offered by those SOPA-supporters from Arizona is interesting but, with well-nigh 30 years of geekdom, I’ll cope.

I, personally, cannot say enough bad things about dealing with Godaddy support — and I’ve worked tech. support. That means I know a good 60-70% of the problems you deal with fall into the PiCNiC (Problem in Chair, Not in Computer) category. When they do not, your support has to shine. If it’s taken a customer three or four attempts to get support to acknowledge a problem, you don’t just pass the buck to second line — you keep checking it, make sure second line fixes it, and follow up with the customer to ensure they’re satisfied.

We experienced two disastrous problems with Godaddy. The first: they never, never-ever, thought to notify us we were on their “legacy” hosting package (read: only fit for static pages, frequently sub-1% CPU time available). The second: one of their so-called “One Click” package installers is broken. Naturally, it would be the one for MediaWiki.

You quickly grow tired of “click-click-send” responses from an uncaring support team. And, having to craft a script to check CPU loading because normally-available commands aren’t is just, well, tiresome.

Once I actually got clear on the second of these problems I was indeed royally pissed-off; what Godaddy’s installer for MediaWiki did was flat-out wrong. It clearly violated the instructions as-provided in MediaWiki’s documentation. Guess what, Godaddy? I know Brion Vibber; met him at Wikimania 2008 in Egypt, and he’s the lead programmer on MediaWiki. He would likely laugh, and shake his head sadly, at your second line team installing a open-to-all ‘test’ wiki in my account to check my complaint. That they didn’t clean up after themselves speaks volumes.

Farewell then Godaddy, may your server farm go up in a puff of blue smoke! ‘cos I’m sure-as-hell sick of your support staff trying to blow smoke up my ass!

Today saw Edinburgh’s Scottish National Portrait Gallery reopen following a two-and-a-half-year, £17.6m (US$27.4m) refurbishment. Conversion of office and storage areas sees 60% more space available for displays, and the world’s first purpose-built portrait space is redefining what a portrait gallery should contain; amongst the displays are photographs of the Scottish landscape—portraits of the country itself.

First opened in 1889, Sir Robert Rowand Anderson’s red sandstone building was gifted to the nation by John Ritchie Findlay, then-owner of The Scotsman newspaper and, a well-known philanthropist. The original cost of construction between 1885 and 1890 is estimated at over 70,000 pounds sterling. Up until 1954, the building also housed the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland who moved to the National Museum of Scotland buildings on Chambers Street. The society’s original meeting table now sits in the public part of the portrait gallery’s library, stared down on by an array of busts and phrenological artefacts.

Four people, including Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN) journalist Roberto Bruce Pruzzo, are confirmed dead after a Chilean military plane crashed near the Robinson Crusoe Island of the Juan Fernández Archipelago on Friday. Twenty-one people were aboard, with such figures as prominent Chilean television presenter and co-host of breakfast programme Buenos Días a Todos (Good Morning Everyone) Felipe Camiroaga Fernández, and businessman and founder of the Desafío: Levantemos Chile (Challenge: Let’s Bring Chile Up) project Felipe Cubillos.

The accident involved a CASA C-212 Aviocar aircraft. Minister of Defence Andrés Allamand said on Televisión Nacional the crash “occurred in the late [Friday] afternoon near the remote Juan Fernández archipelago. [...] The scenario which we are facing is particularly adverse.” The plane tried twice tried to land at the Robinson Crusoe Island aerodrome before going missing. The Defence Ministry sent a frigate with a specialized rescue helicopter, and an aircraft to the crash site to help search for survivors on early Saturday.

Mayor of Juan Fernández Mr. Leopoldo González Charpentier reported conditions were “rough and windy,” and “aviation authorities lost communication with the plane as it approached the islands.” “We assume that there was an accident and that there are no survivors. [...] Clothing, passengers’ suitcases and some sandals have been found in waters about one kilometre [0.6 mile] from the islands’ landing strip,” González stated.

A report published last week in the Toronto Star by Professor Michael Geist of Canada’s University of Ottawa claims a copyright case under the Class Proceedings Act of 1992 may see the country’s largest players in the music industry facing upwards of C$6 billion in penalties.

The case is being led by the family and estate of the late jazz musician Chet Baker; moving to take legal action against four major labels in the country, and their parent companies. The dispute centres around unpaid royalties and licensing fees for use of Baker’s music, and hundreds of thousands of other works. The suit was initially filed in August last year, but amended and reissued on October 6, two months later. At that point both the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency (CMRRA) and Society for Reproduction Rights of Authors (SODRAC) were also named defendants.

January this year SODRAC and CMRRA switch sides, joining Baker et al. as plaintiffs against Sony BMG Music, EMI Music Canada, Universal Music Canada and Warner Music Canada. David A. Basskin, President and CEO of CMRRA, with a professional law background, stated in a sworn affidavit that his organisation made numerous attempts over the last 20 years to reduce what is known as the “pending list”, a list of works not correctly licensed for reproduction; a list of copyright infringements in the eyes of the Baker legal team.

Teräsbetoni means “steel-reinforced concrete”, and is also the name of a Finnish heavy metal band formed in 2002. Their music, which centres on an honourable warrior lifestyle or on metal itself, quickly became popular in 2003 on the Internet, resulting in a petition by fans being sent to several record labels demanding a recording deal. In late 2004 the band signed to Warner Music Finland, and the following year debut single Taivas lyö tulta rose to number one in the Finnish charts, and debut album Metallitotuus hit number two and went platinum, and has now sold about 47,000 copies.

The band, who sing exclusively in Finnish, have just released their third album, Myrskyntuoja. The lead single on this album is Missä miehet ratsastaa, which Teräsbetoni decided to enter in the Finnish selections for the 2008 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, where it was selected to go on to the semi-final in Belgrade, Serbia as Finland’s representative this year. Although Finland has seen limited success in the contest, their only victory was with a comparable group. In 2006 hard rock band Lordi – whose monster costumes and pyrotechnic displays are famed – achieved a record 292 points in the final with Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Teräsbetoni’s frontman, vocalist and bass guitarist Jarkko Ahola’s fame extends beyond the band he heads. He also features in Finnish symphonic power metal cover supergroup Northern Kings, alongside Marco Hietala of Nightwish and Tarot, Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica and Juha-Pekka Leppäluoto of Charon.

On Friday, a strong earthquake in Japan triggered a massive tsunami throughout the Pacific Ocean. Chilean President Sebastián Piñera declared a “preventive tsunami warning” that morning. “I want to express my, and Chilean people’s solidarity with the Japanese government and people, who were hit by one of the worse earthquakes and tsunamis in the history of mankind,” Piñera said. Later that day, the tsunami first reached Chilean territory in Easter Island, without causing any damage.

Meanwhile, in Pichilemu, O’Higgins Region, the tsunami warning caused panic amid people. “It reminds me of 4 October 1994 [after an earthquake in Russia provoked a tsunami throughout the Pacific], when we had to leave everything and either go to the hill or Santa Cruz,”((es)) a fisherman told Wikinews.