A textmessage costs about 25 cents — but for retailer Modestie Boutique it cost it nearly $10,000.
In what was described as a pretty appalling
way to fire someone, Sedina Sokolovic was sacked by text message after her boss complained she had swapped shifts without permission and was late for work — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Unemployment is a terrible scourge across much of the Western world. Almost 14 million Americans are jobless, and millions more are stuck with part-time work or jobs that fail to use their skills. Some European countries have it even worse: 21 percent of Spanish workers are unemployed.
Nor is the situation showing rapid improvement. This is a continuing tragedy, and in a rational world bringing an end to this tragedy would be our top economic priority.
Yet a strange thing has happened to policy discussion: on both sides of the Atlantic, a consensus has emerged among movers and shakers that nothing can or should be done about jobs. Instead of a determination to do something about the ongoing suffering and economic waste, one sees a proliferation of excuses for inaction, garbed in the language of wisdom and responsibility.
So someone needs to say the obvious: inventing reasons not to put the unemployed back to work is neither wise nor responsible. It is, instead, a grotesque abdication of responsibility — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A judge in Spain has ordered the arrest of 20 military officers from El Salvador for the 1989 killing of six Jesuit priests and two women.
The priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were shot dead by soldiers during El Salvador’s civil war.
The case was filed using Spain’s universal jurisdiction law, which holds that some crimes are so grave that they can be tried anywhere.
Among those indicted are two former defence ministers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The new head of corporate watchdog ASIC has ordered a greater use of telephone and wire taps and email intercepts to nail corporate crooks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
One of the Church of Scientology’s most senior figures, Jan Eastgate, has been arrested and charged in Sydney.
She has been charged with perverting the course of justice in relation to allegations she coached an 11-year-old girl to lie to police and community services about the sexual abuse she suffered from her stepfather who was a member of the Church of Scientology — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Protesting members of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church were met with an unlikely group of counter-protesters Monday at Arlington Cemetery.
Hours before President Barack Obama led the nation’s Memorial Day observances at the Tomb of the Unknowns, three members of the Westboro Baptist Church were challenged by others who disagreed with them — including members claiming to be from the Ku Klux Klan — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Florida police are investigating an incident that saw a husband and wife engage in drunken shooting antics, which ended up with a washing machine being shot — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you’ll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.
Indeed, unless you associate exclusively with editors and prescriptivists, you can find copious examples of the “outside” technique—which readers of Virginia Woolf and The Guardian will recognize as the British style—no further away than your Twitter or Facebook feed. I certainly can — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Pharyngula
These days the pretence of fair play is all but gone. The default position of the Opposition is to smear and traduce anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them or express any sympathy with a government policy. One wonders what Joyce would have said if Blanchett’s name was Gina Hancock. You suspect her free enterprise spirit and entrepreneurial flair would have been proclaimed loudly and long.
The dumbed-down populism of the tabloid press is nothing new but it has about it now a vehemence and viciousness that can still surprise, especially in its casual, off-hand dismissal of an Australian citizen’s right to speak her mind — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Consumers need to be smarter about keeping track of their digital footprint
and be cautious about sharing personal information online to avoid cyber crime — via The Sydney Morning Herald
A British newspaper has published leaked figures which show the world’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year.
The Guardian published estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) which showed the world economy’s return to growth in 2010 coincided with a 1.6 gigatonne rise in carbon dioxide emissions — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The US internet giant Google has avoided paying more than pound stg. 3 billion ($4.63bn) in tax in Britain and other countries over the past five years — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists have set a new data speed record using just a single laser to transmit the equivalent of 700 DVDs in one second.
They say their discovery will not only help to fulfil the world’s burgeoning high-capacity bandwidth needs of cloud computing and 3D high definition TV, but provide an environmentally-friendly way of transmitting data over long distances — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The New South Wales Government is following through on its promise to reduce the price for longer-term tickets for Sydney train commuters — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A police officer is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot in the face during an armed hold-up on Queensland’s Gold Coast.
Senior Constable Damian Leeding, 34, from Coomera was responding to a triple-0 call at the Pacific Pines Tavern when he was shot in the face as he approached the tavern — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Three children have been injured – one seriously – after a bouncy castle broke loose from its tether, police said — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For the first time ever, spammers are establishing their own their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec.
This new spamming activity has contributed to this month’s increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Key players behind the Australian-New Zealand joint bid to host the $2.1 billion Square Kilometre Array radio telescope will launch a grid Cloud computing initiative by September with the aim of potentially harvesting the computing and storage power of desktops worldwide.
The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), along with iVEC, the company running the $80 million high performance computing Pawsey Centre at CSIRO in Western Australia, are set to launch a citizen science
application this year based on the open source Nereus V Cloud computing technology developed at Oxford University. The application, dubbed theskynet
by Australian researchers, would grant anyone not affiliated with the global telescope project access to the datasets formed out of the array’s work — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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