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Sunday, December 6, 2009

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday that unemployment in the country edged down from 10.2% to 10% in November, with fewer jobs lost in the previous two months than anticipated. The latest monthly figure was discussed at a congressional hearing yesterday as president Barack Obama welcomed the news but said he is still not satisfied.

At a hearing of the bipartisan Joint Economic Committee at the Senate, lawmakers from both major US political parties cited the November unemployment figure as welcome progress. However, they also noted the economic pain many of their constituents are still feeling in an economy struggling with deep recession.

Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said Americans at all levels, but notably the middle class, continue to struggle. “While parts of our economy are clearly stabilizing, with the Dow Jones over 10,000 again, it is clear that other parts of the economy are still struggling. We need to make sure that all Americans, not just the folks who happen to work on Wall Street, feel that we are digging ourselves out of the hole,” she commented.

Despite a generally upward trend in recent months on Wall Street, Obama, administration officials, and economists continue to caution that employment will lag behind other indicators of economic recovery.

Keith Hall, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said the November figure, which still represents 15.4 million Americans out of work, is the lowest monthly job loss since the official beginning of the US recession in December 2007, and follows moderating figures in three previous months.

But in an economy that has lost jobs for 23 consecutive months, Hall noted that long-term unemployed continued to grow, rising by 293,000 to 5.9 million, with little change in the number of Americans employed part-time but seeking full-time work.

Democrat Carolyn Maloney asked him about economist’s predictions that it would take 10.7 million jobs created to return the country to full employment. “Well, without offering an opinion on that 10.7 million jobs, at that rate though, it would be about three years,” said Mr. Hall.

Opposition Republicans responded to the latest figures by focusing on specific sectors that continue to lag and renewing their assertions that steps President Obama has taken since he came to office, such as the $787 billion stimulus, have had little impact on the economy.

Kevin Brady is the Republican co-chair of the committee. He said while the November figures are good news, there is not much more to celebrate.”We can’t celebrate a 10 percent unemployment rate, especially when the long-term unemployment continues to grow in very troubling numbers.”

But Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings noted what he called a major improvement with job losses going from 700,000 per month at the start of the recession to 11,000 in November. “The report we received this morning is a clear indicator that the economy is slowly returning to growth,” he said.

In an appearance in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday, Obama called the jobs figure “modestly encouraging”, but noted that he will not be satisfied until there is sustained significant improvement. “We have still got a long way to go. I consider one job loss one job too many and as I said yesterday at a jobs conference in Washington. Good trends don’t pay the rent. We have got to actually grow jobs and get America back to work as quickly as we can,” he said.

The president had held a so-called jobs summit at the White House this week seeking support from business and union leaders for his economic recovery efforts.

Republicans responded with their own event on Capitol Hill, where economists such as Douglas Holtz Eakin, the former adviser to Senator John McCain who lost the 2008 election to Obama, questioned his approach to recovery. “Job creation in the United States is something that small businesses, entrepreneurs and the private sector will do but they cannot do it if they are burdened by a legacy of debt and the prospect of higher taxes to pay off that debt and that is the most troubling aspect of the policies this administration is pursuing,” he said.

In testimony to Congress this week, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke agreed with economists who caution that despite hopeful predictions of moderately strong economic growth unemployment is likely to remain high well into 2010.

Friday, April 28, 2017

Debian, a free and open source (FOSS) Linux-based operating system, on Tuesday announced they are to shut down Debian’s public File Transfer Protocol (FTP) in November, via their official website. The public FTPs are to be redirected to Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) from November 1.

On Debian’s announcement list, Cédric Boutillier, a Debian developer, called the file transfer protocol “inefficient”, saying “FTP servers have no support for caching or acceleration.” Boutillier also added that FTP servers are rarely used. For over a decade, Debian installers have not supported FTP access on mirrors. This decision, however, would not affect the developer services, which would still support FTP.

FTP came into existence about 46 years ago for transferring files between two machines, without encryption. According to Boutillier, FTP “requires adding awkward kludges to firewalls and load-balancing daemons.” HTTP, which came after FTP, was designed for data flow between servers and clients. Popular Linux distros like Kali Linux and Canonical’s Ubuntu are based on Debian. The following websites are to be redirected to HTTP — rather than secure HTTPS — after October without changing the domain names:

1. http://ftp.debian.org
2. http://security.debian.org

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Michael Ignatieff, the frontrunner in the Liberal leadership race, said that Israel committed a war crime when it bombarded the Lebanese village of Qana in July.

“This is consistent with the anti-Israeli position that has been taken with virtually all of the candidates of the Liberal leadership, and I don’t think it’s helpful or useful,” said Harper, who has refused to back down from his comment. “I think we all remember last summer when the Liberals were making all these anti-Israeli comments.”

Harper told reporters that the only two of the eight Liberal leadership candidates who had distanced themselves from such remarks at the time were Joe Volpe and Scott Brison.

Ignatieff said yesterday that “it would be up to international bodies to determine whether Israel had committed war crimes at Qana.” He also said he thought both sides in the conflict were guilty of crimes against civilians and that it was “disgraceful for Harper to suggest the Liberals were anti-Israeli”.

“Canadians deserve a Prime Minister that helps Canadians from all communities to find a common language in which we can speak about difficult issues together,” Ignatieff said. “All communities in Canada have a right to contribute to the public debate about where Canada’s national interest lies but no community has the right to determine what can and cannot be said.” “And no Prime Minister has the right to say that anyone who voices criticism of Israel is an enemy of Israel.”

Liberal MP Ariela Cotler, whose husband Irwin Cotler is supporting Bob Rae’s campaign, announced that she has quit the party over Ignatieff’s assertion that Israel committed war crimes. Ignatieff lacks “moral integrity” and accused him of “sacrificing the truth for personal political gains in the upcoming leadership election.” She said she “and many of her friends” are no longer planning to attend the Liberals’ December leadership convention in Montreal, Ariela Cotler said on Friday, in a letter to the editor in the National Post.

Ignatieff’s comment last week has also cost him the co-chair of his Toronto campaign, MP Susan Kadis, who withdrew her support from his leadership bid on Wednesday.

Canadian Jewish groups criticized the candidate for his comments. Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, said Thursday that Ignatieff’s statement was “upsetting and disappointing.”

Bob Rae, commenting on the PM’s remarks, said it is dangerous “to suggest there is a pro-Israel party in Canada and an anti-Israel party in Canada.”

“It’s untrue. It’s a big lie. It’s a big smear. And it isn’t going to work on me. And if he thinks he can get away with it, he’s sadly mistaken,” Mr. Rae said. “It’s just a basically thoughtless, deeply divisive thing to say, and I think it’s something we have to put a stop to right now. That’s it. We cannot carry on politics in this country like this. It will not work. It divides Canadians. It’s something for which he should be thoroughly embarrassed.”

Stéphane Dion, one of the leadership candidates, said the Prime Minister insulted everyone who wanted to see a ceasefire in the fighting between Israel and Lebanon.

“He is insulting all the people that legitimately thought that the solution was a ceasefire. And these people are not anti-Israel. The vast majority of them, they thought that the best way to help a friend was to request a ceasefire,” Mr. Dion said. “I will not allow the Prime Minister to distort what was said in so shameful a way.”

Gerard Kennedy, another leadership candidate, described Mr. Harper’s “brand of politics as creating divisions within the country and diminishing Canada’s reputation” abroad. He said it was unfair and unacceptable to brand the Liberal Party as anti-Israel, and damaging to the quality of public life in the country.

Mr. Ignatieff said his initial comments on Qana were “ripped flagrantly out of context.”

Mr. Ignatieff said he’s accepted a Jewish group’s invitation to visit the Middle East next month to discuss longterm peace solutions, and will meet with the Israeli prime minister as well as Palestinian leaders.

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, August 29, 2007

An English lawyer has pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice. He faked a legal judgment and sent it to a father who was pleading in Taunton family court to be able to remain involved in his child’s upbringing. The lawyer, London barrister Bruce Hyman, now awaits his sentence. The judge indicated that he could receive a prison sentence. Bruce Hyman is well-known in media circles, having produced The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on BBC Radio. He also produced a series with Clive Anderson, at Above the Title Productions, called Unreliable Evidence.

The father, a former City financier, had attended a series of court hearings in order to make suitable arrangements to see his child following an acrimonious divorce. Shortly before one of these hearings he received an email, ostensibly from a self-help group to which he belonged, which had attached a Court of Appeal case that appeared favourable to an application he had made for the judge to stand down from the case. The father, who was representing himself, duly showed the case to the judge. At this point, Bruce Hyman, the lawyer representing the former wife, claimed to the judge that the case was a forgery, which indeed it turned out to be.

After confirming that the self-help group had not sent him the email, the father then embarked on some detective work his own. The fraudulent email was traced via its header to a dial-up internet connection and a phone number belonging to a shop in London. The shop was able to recover CCTV footage which showed a man sending the email from an Apple laptop. The man turned out to be Bruce Hyman.

Sentencing of Hyman is due in Bristol Crown Court on the 19th of September.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

The Independent Monitoring Commission has reported that the Provisional Irish Republican Army has undergone major changes within their military structure and shows that the IRA Army Council wants to put its military campaign behind it. The Commission consists of John Alderdice, a former Alliance Party leader; Joe Brosnan, former Secretary General of the Department of Justice, Republic of Ireland; John Grieve, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and former head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terror Branch; and Dick Kerr, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Agency.

The report states the IRA no longer has the capacity to mount a military campaign anymore or return to one. The units that have been shut down were responsible for weapons-making, arms smuggling and training. The IRA decommissioned their arms last year.

The report also mentions that the IRA has also put its criminality beyond use and is “clamping down” on criminals within the organization, said Lord Alderdice, as he presented the report. He also added, “That doesn’t mean that criminal activity by all members has stopped but the leadership has made public statements and internal directions, investigated incidents of breach of the policy, even expelled some members and has emphasised the importance of ensuring that business affairs are conducted in a legitimate way.”

Finally, the report added that there is not enough evidence or intelligence to identify who killed Denis Donaldson, a British spy who infiltrated the IRA and Sinn Fein, before revealing his status as a spy.

However, the report added that splinter groups like the Real IRA (RIRA) and Continuity IRA (CIRA) are still threats and are still continuing their activity. The Real IRA was the group behind the deadly 1998 Omagh bombing. The Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) “was not capable of undertaking a sustained campaign [against the British State], nor does it aspire to” according to the report.

It is also noted the creation of two new organizations, Oglaigh na hEireann (Irish Gaelic for “Volunteers of Ireland” and is used by the Irish Defence Forces and the various IRAs.) and the Republican Defence Army. However, the groups are small dissident factions according to the report.

The report also added that the two loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) are also beginning to move from violence but at slower pace and not at a grassroots level like the IRA. Another loyalist paramilitary, the Loyalist Volunteer Force

The report was received warmly by Irish Toaiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Ahern, said “These positive and clear-cut findings are of the utmost importance and significance. It is time to make decisions and for Northern Ireland to look to the future.”

“The IRA has done what we asked it to do, and while issues like policing remain to be solved, the door is now open to a final settlement, which is why the talks next week in Scotland are going to be so important.” said Tony Blair in a live statement.

In a surprising reaction, the notoriously hardline leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley, also welcomed the report. He believes that his party’s pressure is working and if Sinn Fein signs up to policing there could be a deal. Paisley said, “If the police question is settled absolutely on a democratic basis and principle we would have come a long way along the road.”

Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said “The DUP don’t have anything other than very limited options. They will or will not participate in power-sharing arrangements. If they don’t participate they are condemning people here, but particularly their own constituents, to second class public services, run by second class fly-in, fly-out British ministers. All the DUP can do is to delay, is to attempt to slow down, but they can’t stop the process of changing.”