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Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Chairman warns of challenges ahead for New Forest National Park
A chairman has set out the challenges ahead for New Forest National Park. David Bence, chairman of the New Forest National Park Authority, described the area as being "at a crossroads" as the authority marks its 20th anniversary. Reflecting on progress, David said the authority had "made great strides in fulfilling that promise" of protecting the landscape for future generations, but warned that the coming decades would bring fresh and complex challenges. David said: "20 years ago we were entrusted with a responsibility: to protect, preserve, and enhance this special place for generations to come. "Thanks to the dedication of our staff, volunteers, commoners, local communities, and partner organisations, we've made great strides in fulfilling that promise." He identified a range of emerging pressures, including climate change, housing and development, rising visitor numbers, limited resources, and the future of commoning. David said: "Now we stand at a crossroads: with devolution, local government reorganisation, climate transition, and agricultural reform all converging at once. "These bring serious challenges, but also rare opportunities: to reinforce protections for the Forest, formally recognise its unique culture, support a vibrant green economy, and shape a resilient future for both nature and people." READ MORE: Test Valley parks retain national award for green space excellence He emphasised that the practice of commoning – grazing livestock on the open forest – is under threat from post-Brexit agricultural reforms. David added: "Without urgent action, we risk losing the conservation benefits commoning provides not just for the Forest, but for the nation." He also called for greater funding and support through the ongoing government spending review. David said: "We are ambitious for the New Forest and determined to be an exemplar of how a world-class environment can support a thriving, sustainable economy. "But to lead, we must be equipped." He highlighted two key projects: the £1.3m Species Survival Fund, which is restoring 250 hectares of habitat, and the £1.4m YouCAN (Youth for Climate and Nature) project, which supports youth-led nature and climate action from Bournemouth to Southampton. David added: "I issue a call to action: to continue working together, as guardians of the Forest, with respect for its past and responsibility for its future."
Fox News
20 hours ago
- Fox News
100-year-old WWII veteran reflects on 80th anniversary of Battle of Iwo Jima
'Fox News Sunday' anchor Shannon Bream talks with World War II veterans about the upcoming 80th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima.
WIRED
2 days ago
- WIRED
How One Wikipedia Editor Unraveled the ‘Single Largest Self-Promotion Operation' in the Site's History
Photograph:Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"? The answer is countries. Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13." But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages. You ... haven't heard of David Woodard? Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a "prequiem"—that is, a "pre requiem"—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh's execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it. According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, "Woodard's hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to 'cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'" According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard "says McVeigh is '33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution'—like Jesus Christ." Hoo boy. Woodard also had a scheme to help save Nueva Germania, an 1880s colony in Paraguay that was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews. Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, was one of the founding colonists. Elisabeth's husband killed himself as the colony collapsed; she returned to Europe. (Lest you subscribe to the common view that Nietzsche was himself some kind of crude racist, know that he loathed his brother-in-law's racism and cut ties with his sister when she left Europe. Unfortunately, due to his later madness, he eventually ended up under her care for several years, and she edited his works after his death in ways that made him look more like a proto-Nazi.) Some descendants of the colonists still live at Nueva Germania, but the colony is now poor and run-down, and Elisabeth's house is almost gone. "As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture," Woodard told SF Gate, "I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle." So what was a guy like this doing with articles in 335 different languages? Inquiring minds want to know, which is why people have posted questions to sites like Reddit over the last year asking about the Woodard situation. "Is he super important and this is the first I'm hearing of him?" one asked. "Is it a superfan polyglot who wants everyone to know about his favourite writer/composer? Is it someone using AI to artificially boost this guy's performance metrics?" The Investigation A Wikipedia editor who goes by "Grnrchst" recently decided to find out, diving deep into the articles about Woodard and into any edits that placed his name in other articles. The results of this lengthy and tedious investigation were written up in the August 9 edition of the Signpost, a volunteer-run online newspaper about Wikipedia. Grnrchst's conclusion was direct: "I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses." A network of accounts with an unusual interest in Woodard was identified, and its activities over the last decade were mapped. Starting in 2015, these accounts inserted Woodard's name "into no fewer than 93 articles (including 'Pliers,' 'Brown pelican,' and 'Bundesautobahn'), often referencing self-published sources by Woodard himself." And that was just in the English version of Wikipedia. From 2017 to 2019, the accounts "created articles about David Woodard in at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every six days on average... They started off with Latin-script European languages, but quickly branched out into other families and scripts from all corners of the globe, even writing articles in constructed languages; they also went from writing full-length article translations, to low-effort stub articles, which would go on to make up the vast majority of all translations (easily 90 percent or more)." Translated languages included Nahuatl, Extremaduran, and Kirundi. Grnrchst concluded that "this amount of translations across so many different languages would either imply this person is one of the most advanced polyglots in human history, or they were spamming machine translations; the latter is more likely." After a reduction in activity, things ramped up again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world started creating Woodard references and articles once more. For instance, "addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia ." Then things got "more sophisticated." From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 articles were created about Woodard, each in a different language's Wikipedia and each by a unique account. These accounts followed a pattern of behavior: They were "created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform." Grnrchst believes that all the activity was meant to "create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible... I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion." After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia's global stewards removed 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia instances with few users or administrators. Larger Wikipedias were free to make their own community decisions, and they removed another 80 articles and banned numerous accounts. "A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community," Grnrchst noted. In the end, just 20 articles about Woodard remain, such as this one in English, which does not mention the controversy. We were unable to get in touch with Woodard, whose personal website is password-protected and only available "by invitation." Could the whole thing be some kind of "art project," with the real payoff being exposure and being written about? Perhaps. But whatever the motive behind the decade-long effort to boost Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us just how much effort some people are willing to put into polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
