Author: Admin

Friday, October 7, 2005

British Columbia teachers have voted 91% in favour of withdrawing services, beginning today (October 7). This is in response to Bill 12 which, if passed, imposes a contract with neither pay raises nor caps on class sizes. It has passed third reading today and is expected to receive royal assent later today. B.C. teachers have had four such imposed contracts since 1993, spanning two different provincial governments. The B.C. Legislature has been meeting around the clock to try and get the motion through.

This issue has been escalating for some time. Already, B.C. teachers are greatly underpaid (in terms of lifetime earnings), in comparison to those in other provinces, due to the B.C. government’s zero wage increase policy for all public sector employees. In addition, they feel learning conditions are sub-par, with many classes overcrowded, and insufficient resources to provide for special needs children.

Hugh Finlayson, CEO of the BC Public School Employers’ Association, representing the government, has asked the Labour Relations Board to halt the action. He has said that the walk out, which would affect 600,000 students, would break labour code, since education is, by B.C. law, an essential service.

The labour board ruled at 11:00 PM October 6, 2005 that the action is illegal. It has ordered teachers to return to normal duties and schedules. They have also been asked not to picket at or near schools. This has had no effect on the teacher’s planned action.

Being categorized as an essential service makes any striking action illegal, unless approved by the Labour Board. The intent of the teachers’ original job action was to seek this approval, but this was halted by the passing of Bill 12. The International Labour Organization, the United Nations agency involved in upholding labour standards worldwide, has even urged Gordon Campbell’s government to repeal the law making education an essential service.

The government has threatened legal action against the union, and possibly even jail for the union leader, but the teachers are arguing that this action is not a strike, merely political protest, and is therefore covered under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The situation could escalate quickly such as what occurred in the HEU strike. A general strike is not out of the question. Many unions have noted that they would stand-behined the BCTF.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The Icelandic internet bank, Icesave, has suspended all 300,000 of its UK customer accounts, leaving account holders in the United Kingdom unable to withdraw or deposit any funds. A message on its website posted this morning states:

“We are not currently processing any deposits or any withdrawal requests through our Icesave internet accounts. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause our customers. We hope to provide you with more information shortly.”

The internet bank, owned by the Icelandic bank, Landsbanki (Landsbankinn), which was recently nationalised in an attempt to rescue it, has been hit by the global financial crisis. Reports from the United Kingdom suggest that the traders and city are preparing for the parent company to be declared insolvent, leaving customers to recover their monies through a financial compensation scheme being backed by the Icelandic Government. The plan will cover the first € 20,887 (Approx £16,300 / $28,720), the remainder of the customers funds being recovered through the UK’s own financial compensation system.

Following the decision to nationalise Landsbanki, the Icelandic Prime Minister, Geir Haarde, who introduced and signed the emergency legislation into law, stated:

In describing and explaining its actions in nationalising the bank, the Icelandic Financial Supervisory Authority issued this brief statement:

In response to the deepening world financial situation, the Dutch government has this afternoon increased its savers protection from €38,000 to €80,000 effective immediately, to help secure the financial status of its savers within Holland. Icesave also has a Dutch branch, icesave.nl – their website was unreachable at the time of this article.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Twelve suspected Taliban insurgents were killed by Pakistani forces in the Orakzai region of the North-West Frontier Province. The attack came a day after nearly 100 rebels died in airstrikes, 54 of them from the Orakzai area.

Three hideouts of suspected insurgents were blown up by fighter jets, according to officials. Khaista Gul, a local government official, told Reuters agency that three “Taliban hideouts have been destroyed and 12 militants have been killed in Orakzai.” Samiullah Khan, another local official confirmed the death toll and added the attack was in the Sangram area of Orakzai.

Also, early on Sunday, a police patrol was attacked by rebels near the town of Mardan according to local police official Jawed Khan. Two were injured while one cop died in the incident. Khan added that the body of another police official, whose throat had been cut, was found at a checkpoint near the site where the police vehicle was ambushed.

Sunday, April 1, 2007

In Estonia, a mouse made its nest in a cash machine and spent the weekend eating tens of thousands of kroons in bank notes. The critter was discovered after a customer making a withdrawal got half-eaten bills from the machine.

Experts are now investigating how the rodent was able to get into the ATM.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

CRAIG, Alaska —Rachelle Waterman, (aka Rachelle Ann Monica Waterman and “smchyrocky”), a 16-year-old girl from Craig, Alaska, USA, has been charged with the first degree murder of her mother.

The case has rapidly received a wide following on the Internet, partly because Waterman kept a public record of her thoughts and activities on LiveJournal, a popular blogging service. The last entry, which has since been removed from public view, was posted on November 18, 2004 and read:

Just to let everyone know, my mother was murdered.

I won’t have computer acess [sic] until the weekend or so because the police took my computer to go through the hard drive. I thank everyone for their thoughts and e-mails, I hope to talk to you when I get my computer back.

A diverse group of users, both friends and strangers, have posted over 5,000 comments on the journal, positive and negative, transforming the case into an Internet phenomenon. Every entry since March 2004 has apparently now been deleted or hidden, but a ZIP archive of the entire weblog, from before the entries were deleted, is available on Deadly Blogging.

Waterman was a tenth-grade honor (A-average) student in her second year at Craig High School. She was also a member of the Academic Decathlon team (ACDC) and sang in the choir, a profile that has left many people questioning her involvement in the killing and asking what motive there might be. At the time police say the killing occurred, Rachelle Waterman was apparently playing in a volleyball tournament in Anchorage, Alaska.

Apart from the online diary Rachelle kept, the case is also unusual because matricide committed by female minors is extremely rare.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

The name Robert Cailliau may not ring a bell to the general public, but his invention is the reason why you are reading this: Dr. Cailliau together with his colleague Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, making the internet accessible so it could grow from an academic tool to a mass communication medium. Last January Dr. Cailliau retired from CERN, the European particle physics lab where the WWW emerged.

Wikinews offered the engineer a virtual beer from his native country Belgium, and conducted an e-mail interview with him (which started about three weeks ago) about the history and the future of the web and his life and work.

Wikinews: At the start of this interview, we would like to offer you a fresh pint on a terrace, but since this is an e-mail interview, we will limit ourselves to a virtual beer, which you can enjoy here.

Robert Cailliau: Yes, I myself once (at the 2nd international WWW Conference, Chicago) said that there is no such thing as a virtual beer: people will still want to sit together. Anyway, here we go.

Wednesday, August 3, 2005

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is deploying its new Homeland Security Information Network – Secret (HSIN-Secret) in all 50 state Emergency Operations Centers as well as 18 additional state and local law enforcement sites. “The secret network is a component of the HSIN, which is the primary conduit for DHS to share information on terrorist threats, suspicious activity and incident management with state, local, tribal and private-sector officials.” reports Government Computer News.

Development on this $350 million system by Northrop Grumman Corporation was begun in March of 2004 with basic operation achieved in just 4 months.

“The Homeland is more secure when each hometown is more secure,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge in DHS’s February 24, 2004 press release that launched the program. “Future program expansion will include the county level, communication at the classified SECRET level, and the involvement of the private sector.” it continues.

With the “Secret” component in place, classified information can now be disseminated to authorized individuals at all levels of government and business throughout the country almost instantly. HSIN lets most government agencies as well as many private companies doing business with the government share information on the whereabouts and suspicious activities of anyone that comes to their attention. Internal policies and the judgement of the system’s users provide privacy and civil rights protections, while who can access the system is determined by DHS.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Social networking website Twitter announced an advertising platform to enable paid tweets to be displayed at the top of search results. This new feature is called Promoted Tweets; Best Buy Co., Sony Pictures, Starbucks Corp. and Virgin America are some of the participants in this.

Twitter has not allowed advertising in the past. According to Biz Stone, the co-founder of the site said that such tweets must “resonate with users” and be conversational in nature. Promoted tweets should be “ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users”.

Promoted Tweets would initially appear only in search results in Twitter, according to the company. Only one such Tweet will be allowed in a search results page. This follows Twitter’s acquisition of Atebits, the developer of “Tweetie”, an iPhone application used to access the site, announced during the weekend by company officials.

Analysts mentioned that there were some risks involved with allowing advertising, saying that Promoted Tweets could become unpopular with users.

Christine Overby of research company Forrester mentions that there is a possibility that users “may get turned off by too much advertising,” “But I think this risk is easy to manage – they can look at how Google for example has handled this,” she added.

She mentioned that the company’s “pay for resonance” model could prove to be risky as advertisers would be paid for how much user attention a tweet receives. “Advertisers are accustomed to ‘pay per click’ or ‘pay per thousand’ [advertising units] models,” she said. “They may not appreciate this model – there will certainly be a discussion as to what the ‘pay for resonance’ model actually is.”