Wednesday, March 30, 2005UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been cleared of wrongdoing in an investigation of charges that he influenced the UN to award aid-screening contracts in Iraq to Swiss company Cotecna Inspection Services, which employed his son Kojo Annan. The investigation was led by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who said that the investigation initiated by Kofi Annan should instead have been referred to UN’s independent watchdog agency. The report issued was called by the secretary general a “second interim report” in his statement reported in the New Zealand Herald. The commission will issue its final report in the northern hemisphere summer of 2005.

While Kofi Annan was exonerated, two of his staff members, Iqbal Riza and Dileep Nair, were criticized by the report. Riza allegedly shredded documents related to the contracts under investigation after the secretary general ordered that they be retained. The New York Times said that Nair was “faulted for appointing a person to a high-level post with oil-for-food responsibilities who did almost no work on the program”.

According to the New York Times, the Secretary General said “I am deeply saddened by the evidence to the contrary that has emerged, and particularly by the fact that my son had failed to cooperate fully with the inquiry”. The Guardian reports that Annan’s son concealed from his father the fact that Cotecna continued to pay him for 6 years after “he left Cotecna in 1998”. It was not clear from the Guardian report why Cotecna was paying Kojo Annan if he had indeed left the company.

Asked whether he planned to step down as Secretary General, as called for by US Republican Senator Norm Coleman, among others, Kofi Annan responded, “Hell, no!” according to Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian, as well as an unattributed Sydney Morning Herald article. Senator Coleman continued to press forward with his criticism of Annan and calls for his resignation despite the report’s findings.

Monday, September 24, 2007

A woman found herself £226,000 richer, one the biggest ever payouts to a female client, after placing a series of bets on last weeks Champions League games, despite knowing nothing about football.

Kathrin Rotmann, 33, placed a £1,000 bet based on her tactics of supporting “teams that are strong and winning”.

“I am delighted. I only ever bet on football — last year I won £35,000 with one bet. I just keep a track of those teams which are playing well and bet on them. It was very exciting when the results went my way.”

She was delighted when she saw her bet multiply in front of her eyes, when her 226-1 odds of wins for Arsenal, Man United, Rangers, Slavia Prague, Barcelona, Roma, Fenerbahce and PSV come in on television.

The exact amount won was £226,834.36.

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Twenty-four cars of a west-bound Canada Pacific train were thrown from the tracks after the train collided with a semi tractor-trailer in poor weather and visibility near Regina, Saskatchewan around 11 a.m. Tuesday morning. The driver was rushed to hospital.

The accident took place on a level section of Highway 46 just north of Highway 1, about 25 kilometres east of Regina. The RCMP spokesperson reported the crossing is marked with lights, but weather may have played a role.

“Road conditions were wet and sloppy and it’s foggy,” RCMP Cpl. Brian Jones said to the CBC. The bad weather, including a heavy overnight snowfall, may have contributed to the accident.

Most of the 93 cars in the train were empty bulk transit cars, used for moving agricultural products such as grains. The RCMP report that neither train or truck were transporting any hazardous materials.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Malaysian officials stated Wednesday, some of the debris found in the Maldives will be brought back to Malaysia to determine if they are from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) as they now believe. A team arrived Tuesday in Maldives to take charge of the debris, which had previously been disposed of as trash.

“We [Malaysia] have an understanding with the authorities there [Maldives] …we think the parts which were found about a month ago were parts of the aircraft,” said Ab Aziz Kaprawi, the deputy transport minister for Malaysia as quoted by Bernama, a Malaysian government news agency. “They have to be further analysed and will be brought back to Malaysia for verification,” he added.

“The parts are currently undergoing few processes before they can be released and brought to Malaysia for further identification and verification,” said Seri Liow Tiong Lai, Malaysia’s transport minister during a press conference today. “If it belongs to Boeing 777 then we will have to carry out further analysis and verification,” he added. Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation will be in charge of examining the debris once it arrives in the country.

The debris washed ashore the Kaafu Atoll reportedly around May 31 and was recovered by employees of the Banyan Tree Vabbinfaru Resort. However the debris had been disposed of as trash before authorities could examine it. An investigation into the debris was launched after photos of it were uploaded to the social networking service Facebook, by an employee of the resort. The photographs show a large white object, possibly two, stained with algae and appear to be made of a fiberglass and honeycomb material.

Debris has since washed ashore on at least three other Maldives locations, the Baa Atoll, and the islands of Fehendhoo and Fulhahdhoo, but most of it isn’t believed to be from an aircraft. Abdulla Rasheed, a captain of a cargo boat which recently capsized in the waters off the Maldives stated, “From the pictures of the debris found on most of the islands, I can almost certainly say that they are from the cargo we were carrying.” Despite this possibility, any debris located is being gathered up until Malaysian authorities can examine it.

“We are collecting any unidentified debris and storing them in a warehouse so that the Malaysians can carry out tests and determine if it is from their plane or not,” said the office of the Maldives President in a statement reported by Haveeru Daily on Monday.

MH370, while flying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China, vanished on March 8, 2014. All 239 passengers and crew are believed to be dead. On the day the plane went missing, residents on the small Maldives island of Kudahuvadhoo claimed to have seen a very “low flying jumbo jet” crash into the Indian Ocean. Some also noted the colors appeared to resemble that of a Malaysia Airlines plane. “I’ve never seen a jet flying so low over our island before. We’ve seen seaplanes, but I’m sure that this was not one of those. I could even make out the doors on the plane clearly”, one resident was quoted as saying to the newspaper Haveeru Daily. Some claim the plane appeared to be headed in the direction of Diego Garcia, but Malaysian authorities have discounted those claims.

“Based on the monitoring up to date, no indication of Flight MH370 has been observed on any military radars in the country [Maldives]. Furthermore, the data of radars at Maldives airports have also been analysed and shows no indication of the said flight,” said Malaysia’s transport ministry at the time of the report.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

On Monday, Australian telecommunications company Telstra has introduced dual carrier HSPA+ standard for broadband Internet business customers in the Next G network. This is the first time this technology is being introduced on national scale. The bandwidths the users can deploy increased into two to three times, with Telstra becoming the world’s fastest national mobile broadband service. The switch started with enabling the service for premium users. After some feedback, Telstra may expand the plan.

The higher speeds for wireless are intended to simplify and ease multitasking of users.

John Paitaridis, Telstra’s executive director, network products and services in Enterprise & Government, said “One of the reasons we decided to launch first to Enterprise And Government and Business customers is that clients are saying that their ability to access applications quicker makes a difference to their business and when they start to equate time savings and doing calculations around productivity it does become a return on investment.”

Telstra Business Group Managing Director Deena Shiff also stated that the efforts aren’t as sudden as it might seem, having feedback of many users as the base.

Australians are telling us they can’t afford to be tied to the desk all day and these new speeds mean they can now access mobile broadband at speeds typically reserved for the office. We have been deploying the high-speed capability in the network since December 2009 and now, with the launch of the new Ultimate USB Modem, these new speeds are available to customers across all capital city CBDs and associated airports, selected metropolitan areas and in more than 100 regional locations. These high-speed zones cover approximately 50 per cent of the Australian population and match the areas of highest customer demand and will make the frustration of waiting around for files to download a thing of the past. In other metropolitan and regional areas, the Telstra Ultimate USB Modem offers typical download speeds ranging from 550kbps up to 8Mbps… Our customers have told us that they want higher speed mobile broadband so they can work more flexibly outside of the office and we are delighted to be the first in the world to offer these new blistering speeds on a national network. The new Telstra Ultimate USB Modem provides customers with the speeds needed to handle large files, multi-task and update cloud-hosted applications effortlessly on the go when they are in a coverage area.

Previous modems were able to reach peak speed 21Mbps, with real life speeds ranging from 0.5Mbps to 8 Mbps. The theoretically expected maximum of the new technology is 42Mbps with user speeds varying between 1.1 and 20 Mbps. The new speed is twice as fast. This is caused by that the dual-carrier “Evolved High-Speed Packet Access” technology allows networks to send and receive wireless data using two channels simultaneously. This technology can be deployed on Next G networks. Telstra switched to them in February, thus making the switch to HSPA possible now.

Telstra delayed the implementation of the new technology until elections end. This decision was intended to avoid wrong interpretation of them by Coalition. Coalition’s claims include that wireless networks can be an alternative to the Labor party “fibre-to-the-home” proposal to introduce more expensive wired Internet. The announcement of the new technology, initially planned on August 25, was delayed, with Telstra spokesman Craig Middleton explaining, “We just didn’t want to feel like we were influencing the [telecommunications] debate.”

The political parties have different plans on development and funds on the Internet. The Labor party aims to spend AUD 43 billion to bring 1 Gbps wired Internet nationwide, and the Coalition plans to spend AUD 6 billion to introduce a variety of improvements including upgrade of existing copper Internet as well as expansion of wireless Internet to support 12Mbps. Opposition leader Tony Abbott has said in the past that Australians shouldn’t assume wireless technologies won’t ever be comparable to fixed-line technology. Telstra’s upgrade shows that wireless broadband is reaching the 100 Mbps minimum speeds promised by Labor’s national broadband network.

Telstra has only 2000 devices which support the new technology. This is why the opportunity to try it out is being given only to the Business plan customers, and they receive it for the same price as they were paying for the previous NextG plan. Since October 5, the device will be available for sale, with the Business customers able to buy it with 75% discount and a prepaid data allowance. The upgrade is expected to cover roughly 50% of the population. This is happening at the same time as one of Telstra’s competitors Vodafone is doubling data download quotas on mobile cap plans.

As some testing showed, real life download speeds reached only about the half of the maximum. Telstra executive director of wireless Mike Wright explained that the predicted figures were the estimates, with real life speeds lower due to interfering environmental conditions: “It’s possible to achieve better than the typical user speed claims, but those claims occur in the ideal network environment with good signal quality. When you’re out on the streets you get a lot of variation where the network is subject to signal quality, your location and the network load.”