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, March 21, 2007

In a Public Safety Bulletin released March 20, 2007, a coroner in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, warns on the dangers of purchasing pills from online companies.

Rose Stanton, Regional Coroner for the Vancouver Island area, has linked the purchase of pills on the Internet to the recent death of a British Columbia woman.

The woman, a 57-year old from the Campbell River area, died from poisoning, according to preliminary test results. The precise cause of death is still being investigated by police and the coroners service, according to Stanton.

In late December 2006, the woman had told friends of feeling unwell with flu-like symptoms, and had experienced hair-loss and blurred vision. She died a few days later.

Pills found in the possession of the dead woman were traced back to a purchase the woman made on a health-related website. The death is thought to be the first in Canada caused by pills purchased on the Internet.

Analysis of the pills by the Provincial Toxicology Centre revealed that some contained an anti-anxiety drug, obtained normally with a prescription in Canada. In addition, the pills contained a sedative not legally sold in Canada, which has been linked to overdose deaths in other countries.

On further testing, the pills were found to contain a non-medicinal filler and revealed the presence of heavy metals, some of which can cause serious illness, according to the Bulletin.

“We cannot impress upon the public strongly enough the dangers of buying medications online from a company you don’t know,” said Stanton. “There is just no way of knowing what you are getting.”

The website in question belonged to a group of companies which, according to the coroner’s investigation, change websites and Internet addresses every few days.

The B.C. Coroners Service is recommending that if someone has purchased drugs over the Internet that they are uncertain about, they should bring them, in the original packaging, to a pharmacy for proper disposal.

Friday, June 3, 2022

Leaked correspondence between Tesla, Inc. boss Elon Musk and members of his executive team sent on Tuesday but published on Wednesday reveal his insistence that employees maintain an in-office presence for 40 hours per week “or depart Tesla.”

One email first published by Electrek and corroborated by Reuters with the subject line “Remote work is no longer [acceptable]” read in part: “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.”

A second email reiterated: “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.”

Though Electrek writes rolling back Covid-19 work-from-home policies is being considered by “every other company,” Reuters reports major Silicon Valley, California companies do not require a full-time return to the office. Google announced a “hybrid working approach,” where employees work in office three days per week but remain at home for two, effective since April.

In the second email, Musk justified his position: “There are of course companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while […] Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.”

He added his own experience having “lived in the factory so much” while production at his Fremont facility slowed between 2017-18. “If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt,” he wrote.

Workers’ health group Worksafe’s executive director, Stephen Knight wrote to Reuters that, although employers “…are finding that mandating a return of all employees is a recipe for outbreaks,” adding “Tesla’s disregard for worker safety is well documented, including their flouting of the county public health department at the start of the pandemic.”

In May 2020, Musk reopened a factory in Fremont despite local guidance, and the facility reported 440 coronavirus cases in the following seven months. Musk recently praised Chinese workers for “burning the 3 am oil,” whilst Americans try “to avoid going to work at all.”

A January Pew Research Center survey published February 16 found 61% of US adults currently working from home are doing so out of choice, and 77% reported teleworking at least some of the time.

In a tweet dated March 3, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal wrote: “Wherever you feel most productive and creative is where you will work and that includes working from home full-time forever. Office every day? That works too. Some days in office, some days from home? Of course.”

On May 13, Musk suspended a USD44 billion deal to acquire Twitter, citing a May 2 Reuters article that included an estimate of the percent of active users that were fake or spam accounts. CNN Business said Musk’s reasoning to do so was unclear.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

Konami Cup Asia Series 2007 battled in Tokyo Dome today, with 2007 BWC in Taiwan and upcoming 2007 Asian Baseball Championship chained on the qualification of 2008 Summer Olympics, this series may varied Asian’s teams recently.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter.

The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion.

Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He commented that the jump was an indication that exporters have emerged from their downslide.

“We can say that China’s export enterprises have completely emerged from their all-time low in exports,” he said.

However, although China overtook Germany in exports, China’s total foreign trade — both exports and imports — fell 13.9% last year.

Monday, June 25, 2018

On Saturday, the plastic ban in the Indian state of Maharashtra came into force. In an attempt to minimise pollution, the state government has introduced a ban on single-use plastics.

The leader of the Yuya Sena political party, Aaditya Thackeray, said on Twitter, “The ban on single use disposable plastic cups, plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic plates and cutlery, styrofoam cutlery and non woven bags”. He added, “these are global issues now and we have taken a step to combat it”.

Plastic pollution has led to the choking of drains, marine pollution and a risk of animals consuming plastics. This year, India’s motto for World Environment Day — June 5 — was “Beat Plastic Pollution”. People violating the plastic ban are to face a fine of 5,000 Indian Rupees (INR) for the first offence. For the second offence, the fine is INR 10,000 and the third time offence is INR 25,000 and a three-month prison term. Deputy municipal commissioner Nidhi Choudhary said, “To weed out corruption, we plan to give inspectors payment gadgets for electronic receipts of the fines”.

The Maharashtra government has given a 90-day period for manufacturers to dispose of existing polyethylene terephthalate (PET/PETE) plastic spoons and plates, while shopkeepers and citizens in general have six months to dispose of plastics. However, the ban does not prohibit plastic usage for wrapping medicines or milk cartons thicker than 50 microns.

The state government had announced the decision for the plastic ban on March 23. According to NDTV’s report, Maharashtra is the eighteenth Indian state to enforce a state-wide plastic ban. Aaditya Thackeray also said, “I congratulate the citizens for making this into a movement, even before the ban was enforceable, giving up single use disposable plastic.”

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Emigrant Rufino Lopez, born in Cedeira, Galicia, Spain in 1955, was awarded on Wednesday with the 2013 Spanish-American International Award by the Spanish Benevolent Society of New York.

Graduated in literature by the Lehman College of CUNY in 1976, Rufino Lopez has preserved his admiration to the great figures of Spanish literary and philosophical tradition, as Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, or Cervantes, while shaping the Solera Restaurant, located in the city of New York for more than twenty years, near the United Nations Headquarters. Rufino is the only son of Galician Francisco Lopez, who emigrated to New York City as a construction worker in 1971.

While studying, Rufino Lopez worked in Italian and French restaurants, finding no Spanish restaurants that could represent the high value of Spanish cuisine in the Big Apple. In 1987 he founded his first restaurant, called Alcalá, in the Upper West Side in Manhattan, and in 1991 founded Solera Restaurant. Since its opening, in the days when the paella was made ??in Manhattan in a pot with a lid instead of the regional authentic way as made in Valencia, with a pan, the Executive Chef of Solera Restaurant at that time, Dominick Cerrone, began incorporating Spanish regional dishes prepared with fidelity to its Spanish origin, one of the marks of the restaurant.

The history of the Spanish-American International Award began in 2012, when the writer and filmmaker Artur Balder was awarded. Artur Balder, now a US citizen, directed the documentary Little Spain, which displayed the historical memory of the Spanish district of Manhattan. According to the website of the organization, the award was created with the mission to promote the image of Spanish emigration in the United States, and is given to promote the work of those who are contributing to the consolidation of the Spanish-American identity in the United States. The Spanish-American International Prize was created to support emigrants who have made an outstanding contribution to the Spanish-American identity and the American heritage.