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Sunday, June 1, 2008

Yves Saint-Laurent, one of the major fashion designers of the 20th century, died Sunday evening of cancer at the age of 71, after four decades at the top of his profession. Friends say he died while at his home in Paris, France.

Saint-Laurent was born Yves Henri Donat Dave Mathieu-Saint-Laurent on August 1, 1936 in Oran, Algeria. Saint-Laurent was famous for designing women’s clothing and at age 21 he became the head designer for the company House of Dior. He was hired to take the place of the late Christian Dior, who died in 1957.

He retired from his job there and ultimately left the fashion industry in 2002, but not before starting his own clothing line and shop with Pierre Berge in 1962. It was once rumored that woman who wore his newly designed pantsuits were not allowed to eat at restaurants or stay in hotels in New York City and London, England.

“Fashion was not only supposed to make women beautiful, but to reassure them, to give them confidence, to allow them to come to terms with themselves,” Saint-Laurent once said.

Saint-Laurent not only fought the effects of cancer, but through the years dealt with drug use and depression.

“I’ve known fear and terrible solitude. Tranquilizers and drugs, those phony friends. The prison of depression and hospitals. I’ve emerged from all this, dazzled but sober,” stated Saint-Laurent.

Friday, November 7, 2014 Albuquerque, New Mexico — Online entertainment is a booming market, and plenty of players are making their play; back in March of this year The Walt Disney Company bought the multi-channel network Maker Studios. What is web entertainment, and the arts therein? And, who are the people venturing into this field? Wikinews interviewed Mario Lucero and Isabel Ruiz, the founders of Heaven Sent Gaming, a small entertainment team. This group has been responsible for several publications, within several different media formats; one successful example was aywv, a gaming news website, which was #1 in Gaming on YouTube in 2009, from September to November; Heaven Sent Gaming was also the subject of a referential book, released in 2014, entitled Internet Legends – Heaven Sent Gaming.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Once you get a chance to talk to West Palm Beach, Florida native Whitney Cunningham, who placed seventh on the eighth cycle of the popular reality TV series America’s Next Top Model, you begin to understand what host Tyra Banks meant when she described her as the “full package.”

First of all, she is confident and headstrong, which is a must on these kinds of shows, almost as much as it is to take a beautiful modelesque picture. Second, she turns that confidence into drive. She has been receiving steady work as a model since leaving the show, and still believes that her goal of being the first woman to wear a size ten dress on the cover of Vogue is in reach. Third, and probably most important to television viewers, she obliterates the age-old model stereotype that to be pretty and photograph well, one must also be vapid and without a thought. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Cunningham also dreams of becoming a writer, and is working toward dual goals: a model who can express herself like no other model before her.

Cunningham recently sat down with Wikinews reporter Mike Halterman in an impassioned interview, taking hours to field questions from the reporter as well as from fans of America’s Next Top Model. Always in high spirits, Cunningham shows that she is a distinct personality who has carved her own niche in the Top Model history books. At the same time, she exhibits a joie de vivre that is oddly reminiscent of earlier Top Model fan favorite Toccara Jones, who showed America just how to be “big, black, beautiful and loving it.” However, Cunningham is quick to remind everyone that she isn’t big at all; she is simply a regular woman.

This is the first in a series of interviews with America’s Next Top Model contestants. Interviews will be published sporadically.

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Friday, June 26, 2015

Annabel Goldie, Scottish Conservative Party leader from 2005 to 2011, has announced she will stand down as an MSP at the next elections in 2016. Goldie, who has been an MSP for the West Scotland (previously West of Scotland) electoral region since the Scottish Parliament’s formation in 1999, said she intends to focus on her role in the House of Lords, where she has been a peer since 2013.

In a statement today, Goldie said leading the party was an “enormous honour” for her. She also said: “It has afforded me both satisfaction and pleasure to serve my constituents and to serve the parliament and I will look back with great happiness at my time as an MSP. I am grateful to friends and colleagues from all parties for their support. Sometimes we found common ground, sometimes we disagreed but never I hope with rancour nor disrespect. Politics is a rough trade but we have built a strong parliament in Scotland of which we can all be rightly proud.” She said because of Ruth Davidson, her successor as Scottish Conservative leader, the party is now “in fine fettle and stands a great chance of making real progress in the years ahead,” concluding by saying: “I look forward to continuing to work as part of that effort in the House of Lords in the years to come.”

Davidson responded to the news by calling Goldie an “unstoppable force”, adding: “She has been an inspiration to a whole generation of Scottish Conservatives, and she has been a tremendous mentor, support and friend to me. In Holyrood, she has fostered both affection and respect from all members – regardless of their political affiliation – and her retirement from the Scottish Parliament will leave an Annabel-sized hole which won’t ever quite be filled. She is unique.” Meanwhile, David Cameron, UK Conservative leader and UK Prime Minister, said: “Annabel is one of those rare breeds in Scottish politics, somebody known by her first name alone. When she was Scottish Conservative leader, I valued her sage advice. She has been a towering strength to our party in Scotland, a doughty debater in the TV studios and Scottish Parliament and has one of the sharpest wits around. I wish her a long and happy retirement after 17 years unstinting service at Holyrood – but look forward to seeing her on the red benches of the Lords for years to come.”

Goldie, the Scottish Conservatives’ first ever female leader, was elected unopposed. She took up the role in the aftermath of David McLetchie’s resignation from the role in an expenses usage controversy and subsequent resignation of Brian Monteith from his Conservative whip role in the Scottish Parliament for briefing the media against him. Meanwhile, as Scottish Conservatives won 18 seats in the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and 2003, the party had been less successful in UK general elections in Scotland; Conservatives went up from zero out of a possible 72 UK MPs in Scotland in 1997 to one in 2001. This led to Goldie remarking in her inaugural speech in 2005 that: “The wheels are back on the wagon – and I’m the nag hitched up to tow it.” She also said: “The party is still way ahead of where it was in 1997. And my first task is to take it forward to 2007.” However, under Goldie’s leadership, the number of seats the Scottish Conservatives won in the Scottish Parliament slightly decreased from 18 in 2003 to 17 in 2007 and to 15 in 2011. At the same time, the number of Conservative MPs stood at one out of a possible 59 after the 2010 UK general election.

In the aforementioned 2005 speech, she also said the party could be trusted with devolution in Scotland, adding: “making devolution work better means real devolution: not the lumbering and cripplingly expensive array of government departments, government advisers, consultants, quangos, quasi-quangos and agencies with all their expensive appendages, but devolving down to people and their communities, their right to make their own decisions about their lives, how for example they procure healthcare and how they educate their children.” Goldie would go on to sit on the advisory board for the Smith Commission, which was set up to examine which further political powers should be devolved to Scotland following the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. More recently, Goldie supported a reduction in the voting age for Scottish Parliament elections from 18 to 16 in a vote earlier this month, commenting: “I think it is an opportunity for them to continue their high level of engagement in topical affairs that we saw with the independence referendum.”

Goldie, a member of the Salvation Army’s West of Scotland Advisory Board and a Church of Scotland elder, is not the only Scottish Conservative MSP intending to stand down in 2016. Mary Scanlon, Gavin Brown, Alex Fergusson and Nanette Milne all reportedly intend to leave the Scottish Parliament next year.

A compilation of brief news reports for Saturday, August 8, 2009.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

With Bay Street in turmoil in sympathy with Wall Street, Canadian party leaders traded slurs over the slowing economy and measures to secure it against the slump happening south of the border.

“We have the worst economy in the G8, our labour productivity has fallen for nine months straight and over the summer in July we saw the largest single month of jobs losses in 17 years,” Stéphane Dion said as the Liberal leader worked through St. John’s, N.L. Dion is hoping to sweep Newfoundland and Labrador’s 7 seats, capitalizing on N.L. Premier Danny Williams’s feud with the federal Conservatives over broken promises made by Stephen Harper in the Atlantic Accord.

Campaigning in Nova Scotia, New Democratic Party‘s Jack Layton lashed the Conservatives for failing to protect consumers. “Of course with Mr. Harper, we don’t see any willingness to really address the need to stand on behalf of Canadian consumers. He won’t even support the notion of the monitoring of gas prices, let alone the kinds of initiatives that really should be taken here in Canada to make sure that the consumers of investment products are being protected.”

Harper was working the Liberal-held riding of Ottawa-Vanier, where he announced a program to allow entrepreneur’s to extend their maternal leave up to 6 months using the Employment Insurance program with an estimated cost of $147 million. He said the country wasn’t ready for “wild experiments”, but should adopt a cautious approach to the economy in uncertain times.

“Canada has been brought to the brink of a deficit for the first time in over a decade,” Elizabeth May of the Greens said in a press release on their website on Monday. “Stephen Harper’s leadership deficit is driving us into economic deficit and his failure to manage the economy in uncertain times must not be allowed to continue.”

The parties also threw out economic planks for their platforms: to support the fishermen of N.L as well as the environment, Dion announced a $250 million dollar fund to help fishermen upgrade their equipment with “green” technology as well as $70 million to retire licenses. The Greens suggested their financial plan, which includes embracing a low-carbon economy, would improve Canada’s economic outlook. The NDP promised $1 billion over 5 years for more nurses and doctors.

The backdrop to all these economic statements was a 515 point drop on the TSX as markets reacted to the bankruptcy filing of 158 year old financial firm Lehman Brothers, as well as a surprising drop in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar which itself lost ground against the Euro and other world currencies. Even as the dollar dropped, so did the price of oil futures and gold, partially explaining the Canadian dollar’s weakness.