Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Large parts of Victoria were hit with power outages after bushfires near Benalla knocked out power transmission lines connecting the state to the national electricity grid at approximately 4:00 p.m. local time. Melbourne, Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo were all affected.

Paul Price from the national electricity grid supervisor NEMMCO said that today set an all-time record for electricity demand.

Emma Daniell, from the power supplier SP AusNet said the result of the fires “prompted an automatic load reduction system to kick in, reducing power supply to customers”. These rolling blackouts are occurring across the surrounding suburbs lasting one hour a time.

The blackout affected about 200,000 homes, 1,200 traffic lights and “mobile base stations”. Trains and trams were reduced to a crawl, with buses replacing trains between Essendon and Kensington railway stations, and on the Werribee loop.

Geelong was the region worst affected, with the entire city losing power from 4 p.m. Power was restored to the central business district area shortly after 5 p.m., however many parts of the city were not restored until 8 p.m.

The Australian Open tennis tournament was not affected.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

Legendary boxing great Muhammed Ali died on Friday aged 74 in a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona in the United States. A family spokesperson said Ali had been admitted with respiratory problems. The former heavyweight champion lived with Parkinson’s disease for decades, diagnosed in 1984.

Born on January 17, 1942 as Cassius Marcellus Clay, he changed his name to Muhammed Ali after his 1964 conversion to Islam. In his professional career, Ali won 56 out of 61 fights — including 31 consecutive wins. He won the World Heavyweight Championship three times and had also won an Olympic gold medal in the light-heavyweight category.

Often considered the greatest boxer of all time, Ali was the world heavyweight champion in the 1960s and 1970s. His famous fights with George Foreman in 1974 when he won his title back and against Joe Frazier are considered by many as two of the greatest fights in the sport’s history. Ali had also defeated Sonny Liston to claim the championship title.

Ali was also known as a political activist. He came under considerable controversy after his decision to refuse the Vietnam War draft.

He lit the flame in the 1996 Olympics hosted in Atlanta.

His funeral is to be in Kentucky.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

On June 3rd, 2008, two United States Internet service providers (ISPs) announced they would begin tests to slow web access for their most active customers and charge them for extra speed. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, two of the largest ISPs in North America, both made separate announcements of their plans. The actions come in the wake of an investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), over whether Comcast had restricted some customers from sharing videos, music, and similar files. The FCC investigation led to a US Congress debate over whether and how much control ISPs should have over the flow of customer data.

Public interest groups complained in November 2007 to the FCC that Comcast had specifically targeted customers using applications that made use of the BitTorrent system, a popular form of file sharing. Free Press, an advocacy group that pushes for better oversight of cable operators such as Comcast, stated that Comcast practices were discriminatory towards users of the legal technology. “The cable companies see a hammer hovering above their heads and are scrambling to find ways to reduce the appearance of wrongdoing,” said Ben Scott, head of the group.

According to Roger Entner, a senior vice president from Nielsen IAG, as little as 5 percent of all Internet users may consume as much as 50 percent of all the bandwidth on the Internet. “This is the politically correct version of doing what Comcast had been doing before, though it takes the occasional [peer-to-peer] user off the hook,” Entner said. Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokesperson, said, “This says we won’t be looking at what type of traffic that there is, even though we still need to manage the network.”

Comcast’s tests are expected to begin in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Warrenton, Virginia.

While Comcast will attempt to throttle the speed of all its high-volume users, Time Warner Cable intends to use a different method. They will meter and bill clients, charging more money for faster speeds and larger amounts of transmitted data, functioning more like a traditional public utility, such as an electric company or cell phone service. Their metered billing test will begin on June 5 in Beaumont, Texas for newly enrolled customers. “Instead of raising prices across the board, consumers who are excessive users would pay,” said Alex Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesman. “It is clearly the fairest way to fund the investment that is going to be required to support that use.”

An Associated Press report that Time Warner Cable will bill customers between $29.95 to $54.90USD per month has been confirmed by the cable operator, with clients charged an extra $1 for each gigabyte (GB) by which they exceed their purchased plan. Art Brodsky, communications director of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group in Washington D.C., has expressed concerns about the Time Warner Cable plan. Time Warner Cable’s most expensive offering, $54.90, comes with 15 megabits-per-second of data transfer speed and a 40 gigabyte limit on total data transfer.

“An HD (high-definition) movie is 8GB or so, three movies is more than half your allowance for a month, and heaven knows what else you might want to watch,” Brodsky says. “This is not a relieving congestion scheme as much as it is a rationing scheme. All it does is protect an inadequate infrastructure from the cable company.”

Saturday, October 7, 2017

The Canadian federal government of Justin Trudeau yesterday responded to a group of lawsuits by agreeing to pay C$750 million to the survivors of the “Sixties Scoop” program, in which 20,000 First Nations children were removed from their parents’ households and placed with non-indigenous foster or adoptive parents. The plaintiffs claimed that this caused them mental and emotional problems, in addition to the loss of their ancestral culture. Carolyn Bennett, Canada’s Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister, announced the agreement.

“I have great hope that because we’ve reached this plateau, this will never, ever happen in Canada again,” Marcia Brown Martel, now Chief of the Beaverhouse First Nation, said of the decision. Martel was removed from her home as many as ten times before 1972. She and her sister were among the original plaintiffs. From the 1960s to 1980s, some of the children were sent out of the country to the United States, Europe or New Zealand. Some of the plaintiffs say they were abused by their foster families and others do not. A separate settlement has been offered to the 150,000 children who were instead sent to institutions, such as boarding schools.

“There is also no dispute about the fact that great harm was done,” wrote Ontario Supreme Court Justice Edward P. Belobaba in a preliminary decision in February. “The ‘scooped’ children lost contact with their families. They lost their aboriginal language, culture and identity. Neither the children nor their foster or adoptive parents were given information about the children’s aboriginal heritage or about the various educational and other benefits that they were entitled to receive. The removed children vanished ‘with scarcely a trace.’?” He did concede that the founders of the program meant well, but major sources agree it was subject to considerable culture clash, with social workers removing children from situations that were later found not to be abusive or neglectful.

According to a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs, Jeffrey Wilson, this is the first time anyone has argued that the loss of a cultural identity in a lawsuit in a Western country: “No First Nations case yet to this day has asked the question as to whether or not the loss of identity is an actionable wrong. Aboriginal title to property has been litigated, aboriginal title to identity has not,” he told the The Guardian.

The First Nations people make up approximately four percent of Canada’s population, at about 1.4 million people, and they suffer disproportionately from poverty, violence, addiction and crime.

Canada is not the only country where native children were taken away from their families. From 1910 to 1970, the Australian government collected Aboriginal children, who came to be called the Stolen Generations, and relocated them to schools and other institutions far from their communities. In 1978, the United States passed the Indian Child Welfare Act to curtail similar actions toward Native American children.

Manitoba was the first of Canada’s provinces to apologize for the scoop program, in 2015. The federal government has also announced plans to make a public apology.

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

New York – Time Warner Cable is close to a deal with Sprint Corp. to offer mobile telephone service under the TimeWarner brand to the cabler’s 11 million subscribers, according to a report in Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal.

If such a deal is struck, Time Warner will be the first cable company to offer the so-called “quadruple threat” in telecommunications, by offering voice, video, internet and mobile services in a single package.

The Journal reported that Time Warner would test market the new mobile service in Kansas City before the end of March.

Any such deal could strengthen Time Warner’s plans to expand its entry into the telephony market. The company said it expects to have 200 thousand voice customers when it closes its 2004 books Friday. As of mid-December, the company said it was adding about 10 thousand new wired voice customers per week.

For voice customers Time Warner is competing with regional telephone monopolies Verizon, SBC and BellSouth, which among them control the two largest mobile networks in the United States: Verizon and Cingular.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Zimbabwe has decided to abandon its currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, in favour of other currencies.

Acting Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa announced today that Zimbabweans will be allowed to make transactions in other currencies along with the local currency. “In line with the prevailing practices by the general public, [the] government is therefore allowing the use of multiple foreign currencies for business transactions alongside the Zimbabwean dollar,” he said, adding that the Zimbabwean dollar will not be removed from circulation and would be used alongside other currencies.

This decision comes during the current period of hyperinflation, which has massively devalued the Zimbabwean dollar. Banknotes up to $100 trillion have been printed, despite the removal of ten zeroes from the currency last summer to try to make transactions easier. The official inflation rate, last updated in July 2008, was 231,000,000% a year, although independent estimates place the number as high as 6.5×10¹⁰⁸, or 6.5 quindecillion novemdecillion, percent.

Up to now, only vendors with licenses were legally able to accept foreign currencies, although the practice was widespread — private businesses altogether refuse to accept the unstable Zimbabwean dollar.

Large sections of the workforce, including teachers and doctors, have gone on strike because hyperinflation rapidly renders their wages worthless. Representative groups said salaries, now measured in trillions of dollars, are insufficient to pay for even the bus fare to work.

Zimbabwe also faces other crises, including a cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of over 3,000 people, according to statistics from the World Health Organisation.

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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Penny Lucas is running for the Progressive Conservative in the Ontario provincial election, in the Kenora-Rainy River riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed regarding her values, her experience, and her campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

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