Saturday, January 6, 2007

An avalanche on U.S. Route 40, which was 100 feet wide and 15 feet deep, has buried many cars, caused other cars to be pushed over the edge of an expressway, and injured eight people, just outside of Denver, Colorado. The avalanche started at 10:30 AM, starting about 12 miles off Interstate 70, and taking three different paths down the mountain before coming to a stop.

“Our crews said it was the largest they have ever seen. It took three paths,” said a spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation, Stacey Stegman.

All eight (7 adults, 1 minor) have been taken to the St. Anthony Central Hospital in Denver. According to a hospital spokeswoman, all of the victims suffered minor injuries. Seven patients were released on Saturday. There were no casualties.

U.S. route 40 is currently closed to traffic. According to Winter Park spokesman Matt Sugar, there are no plans to close the ski hills. “We’ve gotten calls from all over the country asking if the resort is closed,” he said, “and the answer is no.”

This is the third snow storm to hit the Denver area in three weeks.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

The hijab, or “Muslim headscarf”, is an item of clothing which is regarded by some Muslims as “compulsory” for women to wear. But for the first time in Britain, a Muslim school has declared that all girl students, including non-Muslims, will be required to wear the hijab.

Ten-percent of places at the Madani High School, a new school, will be allocated to students who are not of the Islamic faith, meaning that there will be 60 places for non-Muslim girls, who will all be expected to wear the headscarf.

The school asserts that it may require the headscarf as part of the uniform. The Commission for Racial Equality responded that the school should consider all pupils when putting together a uniform policy.

Shadow education secretary David Willetts said the move would “harm hopes of integrating communities and drive non-Muslims away”.

Earlier this month Jack Straw called upon Muslim women not to wear the veil (know as a Burqa or Niqab) when meeting with MPs, saying its makes relations between different communities more difficult.

Monday, April 4, 2005

San Francisco, California — A year after buying the struggling Newsworld International 24-hour U.S. and Canada cable news channel, former U.S. vice president Al Gore and his partner, millionaire Ohio attorney and politician Joel Hyatt, plan to re-launch the channel with a new name, a new concept and a new target audience.

Starting August 1, the channel will be known as Current and will aim its news programming at the 18-34 year old demographic that traditionally does not tune into cable news. “The Internet opened a floodgate for young people whose passions are finally being heard, but TV hasn’t followed suit. Young adults have a powerful voice, but you can’t hear that voice on television … yet,” Gore said in a press release issued from the network’s San Francisco studios.

Gore said the new channel will be partly created by citizen journalists, where viewer-created reports will find their way on air. “We want to transform the television medium itself, giving a national platform to those who are hungry to help create the TV they want to watch. We’re creating a powerful new brand of television that doesn’t treat audiences as merely viewers, but as collaborators,” Gore said in the release. The network posted submission guidelines on its new website which launched Monday.

Gore bought Newsworld International (NWI) from Vivendi Universal last year for $70 million. It was the only TV asset of Vivendi’s not snapped up by NBC in the creation of the NBC Universal media conglomerate. NBC already had two struggling cable news channels of its own. NWI’s current news content is mostly rebroadcasts of news produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Originally, the network was going to be remodled as a liberal counterpart to the popular Fox News Channel, which some critics claim is a conservative-slanted newscast despite the network’s denial that it is “fair and balanced” in its reporting. But after market research, the new owners of NWI decided that a liberal news network was not financially feasible.

Instead, they focused on a youth-skewed news channel under the code name “INdTV” (pronounced “Indy Tee Vee”). The new name, Current, and re-launch date announcement was timed to coincide with the annual National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention, which is being held this week in San Francisco, the same city as Channel’s new headquarters.

Sunday, February 13, 2005

New York –”Buy cheap Viagra through us – no prescription required!” Anyone with an active email account will recognize lines like this one. According to some reports, unsolicited advertisements (spam) for Viagra and similar drugs account for one in four spam messages.

Ever since pharmaceutical giant Pfizer promised to cure erectile dysfunction once and for all with its blue pills containing the drug sildenafil citrate, spammers have tried to tap into male anxiety by offering prescription-free sales of unapproved “generic” Viagra and clones such as Cialis soft tabs. Legislation like the U.S. CAN-SPAM act has done little to stem the tide of email advertising the products.

Now Pfizer has entered a pledge with Microsoft Corporation, the world’s largest software company, to address the problem. The joint effort will focus on lawsuits against spammers as well as the companies they advertise. “Pfizer is joining with Microsoft on these actions as part of our shared pledge to reduce the sale of these products and to fight the senders of unsolicited e-mail that overwhelms people’s inboxes,” said Jeff Kindler, executive vice president at Pfizer.

Microsoft has filed civil actions against spammers advertising the websites CanadianPharmacy and E-Pharmacy Direct. Pfizer has filed lawsuits against the two companies, and has taken actions against websites which use the word “Viagra” in their domain names. Sales of controlled drugs from Canadian pharmacies to the United States are illegal, but most drugs sold in Canada have nevertheless undergone testing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This is not the case for many of the Viagra clones sold by Internet companies and manufactured in countries like China and India. While it was not clear that CanadianPharmacy was actually shipping drugs from Canada, Pfizer’s general counsel, Beth Levine, claimed that the company filled orders using a call center in Montreal, reported the Toronto Star.

For Microsoft’s part, they allege that the joint effort with Pfizer is part of their “multi-pronged attack on the barrage of spam.” As the creator of the popular email program Outlook, Microsoft has been criticized in the past for the product’s spam filtering process. Recently, Microsoft added anti-spam measures to its popular Exchange server. Exchange 2003 now includes support for accessing so-called real-time block lists, or RTBLs. An RTBL is a list of the IP addresses maintained by a third party; the addresses on the list are those of mailservers thought to have sent spam recently. Exchange 2003 can query the list for each message it receives.