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June 13, 2010

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This is the heading for the June 13 show. All files and conversations for this show will take place here.


June 14, 2010

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This is the heading for the June 14 show. All files and conversations for this show will take place here. Today's cut-off time is 22:00 UTC. If you wish to contribute to today's show, I need to know before 21:00 UTC. I will be logged in around 22:00 UTC (same as the cut off time). I will have to make this a short show today because my work schedule is crazy all this week. Turtlestack (talk) 04:41, 13 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I just got home a little while ago and have to be back at 4am so I can't do a show today. I'll be on tomorrow. Turtlestack (talk) 01:06, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

June 15, 2010

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This is the heading for the June 15 show. All files and conversations for this show will take place here. My schedule is going to have be different this week (and the next few weeks too) due to work. I'm going to play around with trying to get a good schedule going here to compensate, so please bear with me as I wasn't counting on real life being so ... real :) Turtlestack (talk) 21:25, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, here are the articles for the show I'm going to run with today. What I think I'll have to do is have to choose which stories I'm going to air instead of doing all and since the the outro does say please visit wikinews.org for the latest stories, I think that's only fair. Turtlestack (talk) 21:25, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Starting to record now. Turtlestack (talk) 22:15, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Promo

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Today on Wikinews : The Red Cross condemns the Gaza blockade as Israel announces it will carry out an investigation into the death of the flotilla activists; women reveal accounts of forced abortion in Scientology; World Cup security officials walk off the job and, in history, the first human blood transfusion is administered.

On this day in history

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In 1667, Jean-Baptiste Denys administered the first fully documented human blood transfusion using about twelve ounces of sheep blood into a 15-year old boy, who had been bled with leeches 20 times. The boy, along with a second patient, a laborer, both survived though it was likely due to the small amount of blood that was actually transfused into them, allowing them to withstand the allergic reaction.

Then, in the winter of 1667, Denys performed several transfusions on Antoine Mauroy with calf's blood, who on the third account died. Much controversy surrounded his death as Mauroy's wife asserted Denys was responsible for her husband's death. Denys was charged with murder but was acquitted, and in an unusual twist, Mauroy's wife was accused of causing his death which was later determined to be from arsenic poisoning.

After the trial, Denys quit the practice of medicine and his experiments with animal blood provoked a heated controversy in France, which banned the procedure in 1670. It wasn't until after Karl Landsteiner's discovery of the four blood groups in 1902 that blood transfusions became safe and reliable.

June 16, 2010

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This is the heading for the June 16 show. All files and conversations for this show will take place here.

I'm going to do a different closing segment today; instead of This Day in History, I'm going to do Today I Learned. I used to be on reddit all the time and these were always interesting threads and the popular one today is about Numbers Stations. I think I'm going to start mixing up TDiH with TIL segments for fun. All the info still comes from Wikipedia so no CC issues there, by the way. Turtlestack (talk) 17:16, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm going to have to start recording now. Turtlestack (talk) 21:07, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Jimmy Buffet to host world's most drunken supper :)

Today I Learned

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25 miles northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki, sits the shortwave radio station UVB-76, better known as the Buzzer. Typically broadcasting on the frequency of 4625 kHz, the buzzer features a short, monotonous buzz tone, repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, 24 hours a day.

Despite much speculation, the actual purpose of this station remains unknown, yet because of the nature of the broadcast and the fact that its transmitter location is rumored to be a communications hub of the General Staff of the army, UVB-76 is widely believed to be used to transmit encoded messages to spies.

Commonly, this type of transmitter is known as a numbers station which generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children's voices are used.

The Buzzer has been observed since around 1982 and on rare occasions, the buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place, however only three to four such events have been noted.

Frequently, distant conversations and other background noises can be heard behind the buzzer: this suggests that the buzzing device is behind a live and constantly open microphone (rather than a recording or automated sound being fed through playback equipment) or that a microphone may have been turned on accidentally. One such occasion was on November 3, 2001, when a conversation in Russian was heard saying "[This is] 143. Not receiving the generator (oscillator)." "There's some work on the hardware."

Since the start of June 2010 the normal buzzing sound from UVB-76 has been replaced by a continuous high pitched noise, similar to that of a modem, with intermittent deeper tones like that of a foghorn.

While no government confirm the existance or use of these stations, in 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five, five Cuban intelligence officers convicted of espionage for Cuba as well as conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes. Evidence showed that the group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from a Cuban numbers station.

It has also been reported that the United States uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries.

Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War. According to the notes of The Conet Project, a recording of many transmissions from these transmitters, numbers stations have been reported since World War I. If that is accurate, this would make numbers stations among the earliest radio broadcasts.

June 17, 2010

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This is the heading for the June 17 show. All files and conversations for this show will take place here.

I'm going to do something a bit different today : considering how in-depth the Bloody Sunday article is and how historically significant the subject matter is, I'm just going to run with this story (I won't even do a TDiH or TIL segment). It's such a slow news day and it does not look like anything else will be dropping that's a major story that I really want to highlight just this one story. Basically what I'll do is promo the show with "Today on a special edition of wikinews, 'Bloody Sunday Inquiry' publishes report into British Army killing of activists in Northern Ireland" (or something like that). I'm even considering doing a slightly different (enhanced) version for the iTunes episode since I don't have to follow the CC requirements as closely as I do with files I up to the commons. I do want to add that I'm not making any judgments against the other two stories that are published here (Chile and ARF) but I just can't see fitting them (or a This Day In History segment) into the Bloody Sunday story. Turtlestack (talk) 21:26, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I just went with a simple piece of music at the end for both versions of the AW today. It seemed like a good idea at the time to outro with the U2 song ("Sunday Bloody Sunday") for the iTunes version but it just didn't work right since it took away from the reading of the names of the dead at the end of the article, so I just kept it low-key and respectful instead. Turtlestack (talk) 23:34, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

June 19, 2010

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Not exactly a big news day today, so no real need for an AW with only 2 really short articles to draw on. I'll be on the microphone for Monday so hopefully it will pick up since it's kinda been slow all week, actually. Turtlestack (talk) 00:03, 19 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]