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Saturday, October 11, 2008

In the midst of the intensifying global financial crisis, finance ministers and central bankers of the G7 nations – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom – met in Washington, D.C. and released a joint statement.

With failures of large financial institutions in the United States, the crisis rapidly evolved into a global crisis resulting in bank failures in Europe and the Americas, and sharp reductions in the value of stocks and commodities worldwide. The crisis further lead to a liquidity problem and the de-leveraging of world assets, which further accelerated the problem. The crisis has roots in the subprime mortgage crisis and is an acute phase of the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

After the meeting, a joint statement was released with a commitment to “stabilize financial markets and restore the flow of credit.” The statement outlined five steps to achieve these goals:

1. Take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure.
2. Take all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets and ensure that banks and other financial institutions have broad access to liquidity and funding.
3. Ensure that our banks and other major financial intermediaries, as needed, can raise capital from public as well as private sources, in sufficient amounts to re-establish confidence and permit them to continue lending to households and businesses.
4. Ensure that our respective national deposit insurance and guarantee programs are robust and consistent so that our retail depositors will continue to have confidence in the safety of their deposits.
5. Take action, where appropriate, to restart the secondary markets for mortgages and other securitized assets. Accurate valuation and transparent disclosure of assets and consistent implementation of high quality accounting standards are necessary.

“Central banks from around the world have acted together to provide additional liquidity for financial institutions, taking the necessary steps to support the global economy,” said US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson in a statement after the meeting.

“We have taken a lot of actions,” said European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. “My experience of markets is that it always takes a little time to capture the elements [of the decisions taken].”

The Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said: “Central banks will work together as we demonstrated this week, to ensure sufficient short term liquidity is provided to stabilise banking systems. But it is also vital that governments work together to ensure their banking systems are recapitalised to enable them to lend to finance spending in the real economy.”

Monday, January 2, 2006

Anyone riding the OC Transpo Ottawa municipal bus service’s express bus routes this morning and this afternoon, in the Ottawa area, was probably greeted with an empty bus, and inherently, a “fast and efficient” ride. This is in part because most government workers where off from work still celebrating their Christmas holidays and buses were operating on a “holiday schedule;” a lack of planning on behalf of OC Transpo.

Though, according to OC Transpo, the “Holiday Schedule” means buses this week shall be running a little less often, in reality there isn’t that much difference than the regular schedule. To be more precise, from 05h48 until 07h20, on the express 27 route there will be 5 less buses during the “Holiday Schedule” compared to the “Regular Schedule.”

“This is probably going to be fine for the rest of this week, when government employees start coming back to work”, said Yves Roy, an OC Transpo driver, “but today was a holiday and it appears that express routes only had an average of about 2 to 4 passengers.”

“On my ride in to work, at around 6:10 a.m. this morning, nobody else got on the bus. It was like having a personal stretch limo to myself,” said Patrick Roy, a guard for the commissionaires.

Also, at around 4:15 p.m. another OC Transpo bus driver, whom wished to remain anonymous, stated, “You are the first person I picked up today.” He had been working since the morning doing express runs. He then added, “This is a waste of tax payers money.”

Ottawa’s BRT “Transitway,” has indicated that it cost approximately 42.58$ CAN per hour to run a diesel bus. It is estimated that 729 express buses ran today for approximatelly 7 hours costing approximatelly 217,287$ CAN. The cost of operating OC Transpo is split between transit fares collected and the tax base (mostly municipal, with some federal and provincial contributions.)

“We then continued to talk about waste of fuel, employee pay, insurance liability issues and even went into details about such hot political items as the Kyoto Agreement and conservatism,” said Patrick. “Once the driver reached Place d’Orleans the second passenger joined in the conversation. The driver then took a faster alternate route and dropped us off not far from our homes.”

According to Peter Dickson, editor at The Ottawa Citizen, last year OC Transpo buses followed a ‘reduced’ Sunday schedule and this created havoc on the system. Peter asked, if “perhaps this year they where trying to compensate for this inefficiency?”

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), OC Transpo’s union representative has indicated, “At current fleet levels, Ottawa’s roads would be choked with about 40,000 more cars each rush hour if not for OC Transpo.”[1] ATU suggests 70 per cent of trips in Ottawa are now made by car. However, seemingly, due to returning vacationers and other reasons, today may have created an increase in the use of cars and influenced this statistic. According to city councillor Clive Doucet’s web page “Currently, 17% of all trips residents make in Ottawa are on public transit, up from 15% in the mid-nineties. As a comparison, Paris’ modal split is 40% or higher taking public transit while Los Angeles’ modal split is around 2% for public transit.” Analysing ridership on a large scale seems to be an important element for the city.

According to Ottawa Mayor Bob Chiarelli, “We used to be able to plan a transit system for up to 12 years ahead, with assured funding.” This of course is in reference to provincial government funding.”It would make me happier if we took all of the (fuel taxes) and put them into the transportation infrastructure,” Mr. Hunt, president of the Canadian Automobile Association says. “But we don’t have a plan.”

“Usually OC Transpo bus drivers have two 4 months bookings, for the fall and the winter and two 2 months booking for the spring and for the summer,” said Yves Roy. “For the first time in March 2005, there was a special 1 week booking for the March break that rearranged and redistributed drivers of certain high school bus runs. During previous march breaks, drivers would show up usually waiting 30 or more minutes in an “idling” bus.”

Is there such thing as to much efficiency? Today is an example of buses and drivers being very efficient. On the other hand, it may be a lack of efficiency within OC Transpo’s booking department, upper management and the governments.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

An NBC employee won US$266 million from the California Lottery’s Mega Millions drawing.

The winner, wishing to remain anonymous, will receive $165 million in total, after federal taxes, reports spokesperson for the lottery Cathy Doyle Johnston.

David Reese, a KNBC assistant manager, was informed by the winner around 2:30 local time Wednesday. Reese told the employees working the night shift to keep the name a secret until the winner wishes to step forward.

Reese said the winner worked for NBC as a freelancer for four years, and her husband was laid off two weeks ago.

L & L Hawaiian BBQ in Pico Rivera, California, sold the winning ticket with the numbers 9, 21, 31, 36, 43, and the “Mega Number” 8. Danny He, the owner of the BBQ, will receive $1 million from the lottery for selling the winning ticket.

According to lottery officials, there was a 1 in 175,711,536 chance in winning with all six numbers with 38 other states and the District of Colombia playing as well.

Friday, October 24, 2008

On August 21, the Polish weekly Przekrój published an advertisement for Dan-Mark exercise books, bearing the logo of 4fun.tv, a Polish music/interactive TV station. Part of the advertisement contained a definition of the word “exercise book”. The wording looked familiar, and Wikinews consulted Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia.

Upon seeing the Wikipedia definition, it appeared that the entry quoted in the promotional material was identical to the initial two paragraphs of the relevant Wikipedia entry.

Freelance reporters for the Polish Wikinews decided to find out the reason for such a similarity and whether either of the texts (the advertisement’s or Wikipedia’s) might be a case of copyright violation.

The reporters contacted a Jaros?aw Janas, Creative Director of 4fun.tv., where the ad appeared. His reply included the following claim:

Copyright on text does not last for fifty years as claimed by Janas, but for 70 years after the death of the author.

To investigate the authenticity of the above claims, Wikinews asked the main author of the two paragraphs in question, Wikipedian Julo, about the sources used to write the entry. He confirmed that he had written the text in question, and not copied it from an encyclopedic publication as claimed by Jana.

It is therefore impossible that both Julo and the people responsible for the exercise book advertisement have used the same uncopyrighted encyclopedia, thus coincidentally creating identical texts. The reporters also noted that the first draft of the introduction to the article was written by WaldemarWolskiHuta (February 2006). Afterward the text had undergone some modifications by Julo (September 2006), as well as Picus viridis and Beno (March 2008). However, the text presented in the press promotional material, which – according to 4fun.tv – came from an old-print encyclopedia is identical to the Wikipedia entry after the changes mentioned above had been made. Julo added that he was still alive, together with the other authors of the article in question who constituted the group of the copyright co-holders. This naturally led to a conclusion that neither 50 nor 70 years could have passed since their death. He left 4fun.tv’s actions with a comment that although the contents he and the other Wikimedians had made public and free, they are far from making them available in any “free style”, but under a specified license.

In follow up messages to Jaros?aw Janas, Wikinews reporters confronted the creative director over his seemingly inaccurate claims.

Wikinews was told in a reply that 4fun.tv would ignore the claims unless they see permission from the author of the original content to investigate this story. They were also informed that further e-mails without any specifics sent by the reporter would be qualified as spam. 4fun.tv’s creative director further added that he found the reporter’s picture on the Internet and asked how the person would feel if this picture was to appear on billboards or press releases that advertised the TV station.

Wikipedia does allow copying of its content under certain conditions. The encyclopedia’s content is released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it can be copied, modified, and used commercially and non-commercially – under the conditions that the license’s text is included with the copied content and the five main authors are mentioned. If a part of the article is used, like in the example quoted in this news story, a “right to quote”, recognized by Polish law, may be used. In such a case it suffices to mention the source of the text (Polish Wikipedia) and the author of the excerpt. 4fun.tv met none of these conditions, meaning that copyright has been violated.

Over a year ago Polish Wikinews reported on a similar problem, regarding the use of free-licensed photographs. Since that time such “borrowings” have become less frequent, however photos are still being used in discordance with the license. Journalists have gotten used to citing sources, e.g. Wikipedia, although licensing conditions require attributing the actual author, not the source. So instead of attributing John Doe for his contribution, agencies like Polska Agencja Prasowa (Polish Press Agency) are attributing the source, Wikipedia.

In early September 2008 a similar situation occurred in relation to the Polish edition of Wiktionary. Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish daily, published an IKEA advertisement, on the opening page of which an almost word-for-word Wiktionary entry was placed; additionally the advertisement used the characteristic MediaWiki layout. The reference to the external source used was missing.

In April 2008, an example of an Australian professor was cited; the scientist, in a reply to a news story, quoted a Wikipedia definition almost word-for-word. The same professor condemned the use of Wikipedia in his previous press appearances.

In 2005 Wikipedia material was discovered in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, which acknowledged its fault and published appropriate apologies in place of the article in the online edition.

Frontline magazine in 2007 was found using an image from Wikipedia without proper credit. When pointed out the magazine acknowledged the failing and a correction was promptly given in the subsequent issue.

Monday, March 15, 2010

An undercover investigation by Naperville, Illinois law enforcement has led to the arrest last Thursday of four people allegedly involved in prostitution. The stings came after police received tips that people were using websites like Craigslist and Backpage.com to sell sexual performances in Naperville hotels. 

Patricia H. Scoleri of Naperville was arrested after an unidentified neighbor observed consistently suspicious activity at Scoleri’s home. Traffic was unusually heavy and consisted mostly of luxury cars in an otherwise quiet, middle-class neighborhood. Also, the visitors were mainly middle-aged men, and an odd string of lavender-colored lights were hung on the front window.

Police say Scoleri worked alone. She was arrested at 2 p.m. local time (2000 UTC) and is charged with violation of anti-prostitution laws, anti-cannabis laws, and the Massage Licensing Act. She apparently has four children, but the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has neither contacted her nor received a police report on her.

The second sting occurred at 5:30 p.m the same day (2330 UTC) and resulted in the arrest of Chicago resident Tonya M. Adams. She is charged with prostitution and driving without a license. Another sting about an hour later resulted in the arrests of Jessica M. Walley, a Skokie resident, and Mark A. Williams, a self-admitted Schaumburg gang member. “Walley was charged with prostitution and unlawful possession of cannabis. Williams was charged with pimping, obstructing a peace officer, driving with a suspended license and driving without insurance,” reports WBBM News Radio 780.

All four suspects are free, having paid the required ten percent of their $1,000 bail. They may face additional charges related to crack cocaine discovered during the police investigation. Arraignment is scheduled for next month at the DuPage County Circuit Courthouse in Wheaton.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), one of Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, announced Tuesday that it is in talks with a consortium of Canadian pension funds to explore the possible sale of the company.

If successful in their bid, the consortium would take the publicly-traded company private, which would mean an end to the trading of BCE shares on the Toronto (TSX: BCE), New York (NYSE: BCE) and the Swiss (SWX: BCE) stock exchanges. BCE is one of the most widely held stocks in Canada.

BCE revealed that the potential takeover group includes the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Each of the pension funds involved have signed non-disclosure and standstill agreements with BCE. It was also revealed that New York-based private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) would join the Canadian-led consortium as a minority partner.

“We are pleased to be a partner with this consortium of leading Canadian institutional fund managers and look forward to working closely together in this transaction.” said Henry Kravis, co-founding member of KKR. “Our experience in large, complex transactions of comparable size will be of significant value to this process,” continued Kravis.

BCE is also leaving the door open to rival bids, “taking into consideration the need to meet all legislative and regulatory requirements, including ensuring the Company remains Canadian to meet existing foreign ownership restrictions,” the company stated. In addition, BCE may retain the status quo if it does not receive a bid that it feels would enhance shareholder value.

One other pension fund that has expressed interest is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP). “We are pleased that this process is not exclusive and we will continue to review our options, including leading an alternative Canadian consortium,” said Jim Leech, Senior Vice-President, Teachers’ Private Capital. OTPP is currently BCE’s largest single shareholder, with an approximate ownership stake of 5.3 percent.

BCE, as Bell Canada, has been in business for 127 years. It provides phone service, satellite television, Internet access, wireless services, and other technologies to residential and business customers.

If analyst estimates are accurate, the sale of BCE could be worth about CA$32 billion or roughly $40 per share. On Tuesday, BCE shares were up CA$2.34 to close at $38.60 on the TSX, and up US$2.03 to close at $34.10 on the NYSE.

Saturday, June 11, 2005

A House subcommittee voted Thursday to sharply reduce the federal government’s financial spending for Fiscal Year ’06, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help produce such shows as Sesame Street and Arthur.

The spending cutbacks far exceeded even those requested by the White House. Among initiatives slated for reduction are $39 million for conversion to digital programming and $50 million for upgrading PBS’s aging satellite technology.

The subcommittee also acted to eliminate federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a body created by Congress to pass funds on to public broadcasters. The CPB would see a 25 percent reduction in next year’s budget, down from $400 million to $300 million, funds that currently account for 14.9% of all public broadcasting revenues[1].

Ideological concerns over publicly-financed content have recently become a point of contention for the Republican-controlled CPB. The day after the new budget was approved, CNN obtained an internal memo by NPR’s executive vice president Ken Stern that blamed the cuts on “recent public turbulence caused by CPB chairman Ken Tomlinson’s irresponsible attacks on public broadcasting.” Stern’s memo also told staffers the cut would not hurt NPR directly because it receives little direct support from the CPB. Instead, he emphasized, smaller local stations that rely upon federal dollars are most likely to be affected, which could in turn take a bite out of regular dues and fees, NPR’s largest revenue source.

Under the budget, the Ready to Learn program’s $23 million appropriation for children’s shows is rescinded in its entirety. John Lawson, president of the Association of Public Television Stations, said the cut was retribution for an episode of “Postcards From Buster” featuring a pair of lesbian parents from Vermont. A spokesman for the Appropriations Committee, John Scofield, denied the claim.

“Ready to Learn was one of more than 50 programs terminated in the spending bill,” he told the New York Times. “It might be a nice program to do, but not in a flat budget with large budget deficits. We felt the same way about 49 other programs.”

Overall, the cuts would signal the most dramatic cutback of public broadcasting since Congress created the CPB in 1967. The spending bill is expected to pass the Appropriations Committee and the House, but final legislation will be negotiated with the Senate.