Olympus is considering suing its executives after an accounting cover-up at the firm called into question corporate governance in Japan.
The camera company said it had received the results of an investigation into management responsibility for the scandal.
It said it was now considering legal proceedings against current and former directors
.
Olympus has admitted that $1.5bn (£968m) in losses was covered up — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Greens leader Bob Brown has accused Federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson of turning Australia into a police state, after reports he pushed for increased surveillance of environmental activists.
A report in Fairfax newspapers details documents, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, that show Mr Ferguson requested additional monitoring of anti-coal mining groups and other environmental groups.
Senator Brown claims coal and fossil fuel companies pressured Mr Ferguson into having the federal police spy on environment groups who protest against energy companies — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.
This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.
Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as counterfeit
even though there is no such thing in the violin world.
The buyer was proud of himself, so he sent me a photo of the destroyed violin.
I am now out a violin that made it through WWII as well as $2500. This is of course, upsetting. But my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins and other antiquities that they know nothing about. It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn’t have the violin returned to me.
I spoke on the phone to numerous reps from PayPal who 100% defended their action and gave me the party line — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles
.
Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Mr Ronson spoke to scores of psychologists about their understanding of the damage that psychopaths could do to society. None of those psychologists could have imagined, I’m sure, the existence of a bank that used the science of spotting them as a recruiting mechanism — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Even as the holiday season comes to a close, it seems that there are no limitations on what sort of epic douchebaggery still lurks on the internet. Originally reported by Destructoid along with a posting on Reddit, today may live to be one of the worst days in PR history as Penny Arcade published an email thread that transpired between one of its readers and third party peripheral marketer, Ocean Marketing. Dave, the customer in question, preordered a pair of PlayStation 3 controllers that were supposed to be available prior to the Christmas weekend. Following over a month of zero communication, he emailed Paul Christoforo in regards to his order.
With a reply from Christoforo of simply, December 17
, there’s little to argue in the ambiguity therein, let alone the simple lack of customer service — especially when said buyer is still expected to pay full price for the preordered merchandise. Upon following up, Dave was told that his controllers had yet to ship from China and that any hope of delivery prior to Christmas could no longer be guaranteed. Setting a new precedence for lacking professionalism, Christoforo told his customer to put on [his] big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else
. Christoforo goes on to sound even more contrived by stating, feel free to cancel we need the units were back ordered 11,000 units so your 2 will be gone fast. Maybe I’ll put them on eBay for 150.00 myself
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
A few days ago thousands of customers turned against domain registrar GoDaddy for their support of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Transfer requests for thousands of domains were started, and even big players such as Wikipedia threatened to move.
In a response, GoDaddy was quick to drop their support for SOPA (but not really), and the company kindly asked customers to come back.
Many customers were nevertheless determined to move to other registrar, but that presented a new problem.
It turns out that GoDaddy is delaying a significant number of the domain transfers for reasons unknown. GoDaddy competitor Namecheap suggests that the transfers are blocked on purpose — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sydneysider Darryl Mason bought a new
portable hard drive from Dick Smith only to find that it was filled with pirated movies and potentially contained malware that has ruined crucial footage for his documentary.
The retailer has since admitted that it sells second hand hard drives as new, but in this instance forgot to wipe it clean.
The Minister for Fair Trading, Anthony Roberts, said he was very concerned
with Dick Smith’s actions and that the retailer may be liable for compensation under Australian consumer laws — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On our kitchen wall are photos of our two daughters as a toddler and a baby. The older one is in navy blue and dark green, the younger in a red-and-blue checked shirt and cute little red trousers. Only the other day, our 18-year-old asked, “Why did you dress us as boys when we were little, Mum?
The answer is that I didn’t. I just dressed them as children. When our daughters were little, Babygros came in white, pale blue, yellow, lilac, red, navy and, yes, pale pink. But there was no pressure to put the girls in pink. In fact, most of their baby clothes were hand-me-downs from their male cousins and no-one even noticed.
It is only in the past decade or so that saccharine pink girliness has spread through Britain like the Ebola virus. These days, most babywear websites have a girl
and a boy
section in which not just the clothes but the bibs, booties and blankets are colour-coded. (Kudos to Mothercare, which allows babies to be unisex
up to the age of one.) And the virus has spread to toys, too. If you’ve done any Christmas shopping for children this year, you’ll have seen the floor-to-ceiling walls of sickening pink fluffiness in the girls’ section and all the fun action and adventure toys in the boys’ — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Serco recently won a West Australian government contract to manage a new, one-of-a-kind youth prison that will house 18 to 24-year-old male offenders from mid-2012.
According to the WA Government, the 80-bed Young Adults Facility is designed to assist young men to take responsibility of their offending behaviour in a safe and supportive environment
. Its population will be primarily Indigenous, and most inmates will be first or second time offenders. Young men make up the majority of WA’s prison population, with extremely high rates of recidivism. The facility was created by the Barnett Government in an attempt to reduce re-offending by early intervention.
There is significant concern from community groups, unions, and the Labor Opposition about the way the contract was acquired, and how the centre will be run given Serco’s notorious track record at Australia’s immigration detention centres — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Every time a Blackwater centurion discharged his weapon in Iraq, the company filed a written report with the US State Department. Blackwater shot Iraq to shit. Here are the reports.
Blackwater, the private mercenary firm that became synonymous with Bush-era war profiteering and reckless combat-tourism, announced yesterday that it has changed its name to Academi (after a previous incarnation as Xe Services) in a bid to distance itself from its history of wanton lawlessness. We’ve obtained a 4,500-page record of that history in the form of State Department incident reports documenting every time a Blackwater guard shot at an Iraqi between 2005 and 2007.
We got them in response to a Freedom of Information Act request we filed four years ago. They come from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which was charged with overseeing and monitoring the contractors hired by State to secure its diplomats and other VIPs in the war zone — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A mysterious epidemic is sweeping Central America — it’s the second biggest cause of death among men in El Salvador, and in Nicaragua it’s a bigger killer of men than HIV and diabetes combined. It’s unexplained but the latest theory is that the victims are literally working themselves to death — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Former prime minister John Howard has lent his support to a book aimed at school children which argues the theory of human-induced global warming is a scam.
Last night, the former prime minister launched the publication, the latest from controversial geologist Professor Ian Plimer.
The book, called How to Get Expelled From School, rejects the predominant scientific opinion on climate change.
The book is billed as an anti-global warmist manual for the younger reader
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. In the case of the copyright industry, they have learned that they can get new monopoly benefits and rent-seeker’s benefits every time there is a new technology, if they just complain loudly enough to the legislators.
The past 100 years have seen a vast array of technical advances in broadcasting, multiplication and transmissions of culture, but equally much misguided legislators who sought to preserve the old at expense of the new, just because the old was complaining. First, let’s take a look at what the copyright industry tried to ban and outlaw, or at least receive taxpayer money in compensation for its existence:
It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn’t make a living off of middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano. A famous letter in 1906 claims that both the gramophone and the self-playing piano will be the end of artistry, and indeed, the end of a vivid, songful humanity — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you are travelling to Boston on the Mass Pike Wednesday night, part of your trip will be a little less expensive, thanks to a famous online retailer.
Between 5:00pm and 7:00pm, the online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos.com will be paying the cost of tolls going in both directions at the Allston/Brighton toll plaza. Both cash and Fast Lane customers will be able to pass through the normally $1.50 toll plaza for free — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Iron Maiden frontman and pilot Bruce Dickinson has vowed to resurrect a UK airline which has gone into administration.
In the past Dickinson flew for Astraeus Airlines and this week he captained its last flight, flying a Boeing passenger jet from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to Manchester.
The singer is forming a plan to save the airline, which was owned by an Icelandic-based travel group but is based at Crawley in West Sussex. It is understood that the business would continue to work by leasing planes to major carriers to cover routes when needed, as it did previously — via redwolf.newsvine.com
QANTAS’ attempt at social media promotion has turned into a classic PR disaster, with users hijacking the promotional tag to insult the airline.
The airline’s official Twitter account asked its followers: What is your dream luxury inflight experience? (Be creative!) Answer must include #QantasLuxury
.
But things quickly turned sour as many Twitter users barraged the airline’s account with negative submissions, as disputes with workers’ unions drag on.
User smurray38 wrote #qantasluxury is seeing your planes on Getaway not Four Corners
.
Another user Beta_Boy said #QantasLuxury is grounding the fleet so I can fly with @VirginAtlantic instead
.
#qantasluxury is outsourcing your unionized workforce but keeping your marketing team,
said Obfusc8 — via
The website for controversial anti-piracy organisation Movie Rights Group has inexplicably vanished from the Internet and its vice president of sales and marketing has quit, leading to speculation that the organisation has been shut down for good.
The website had previously featured a prominent notice informing visitors that one of its chief services was settling lawsuits with Internet users who had allegedly infringed its clients’ copyright. However, Reddit users noted in the past several days that the organisation’s website had disappeared from the Internet.
In addition, Walker, who had acted as the company’s only known spokesperson, has updated his LinkedIn profile to note that he no longer works for the company as at November and was now a small to medium business development business consultant based in Brisbane. Walker has not responded to an emailed request for comment on the issue — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The chief executive of HJ Heinz, one of the world’s biggest food manufacturers, has again taken aim at Coles and Woolworths for flooding the market with private label goods, which has forced it to shut one factory and downsize two others as its margins are squeezed to breaking point.
William Johnson, executive chairman, CEO and president of the $US16.4 billion Pittsburgh-based Heinz, told investors the company has had to rework its strategy in Australia to cope with the growing domination of private label goods and the never-ending discounting on branded goods by the supermarket chains.
The reality on Australia [is that it has] almost come to the point that it’s … immaterial to us going forward because it has taken such a hit,
Mr Johnson said. We are confronting a combination of weak categories, relentless promotional pressure and growing private label, as well as executional issues
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Not long ago, an unusual visitor arrived at the sleek headquarters of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.
It wasn’t some CEO, or a pol from Athens or Washington, or even a sign-waving occupier from Zuccotti Park.
It was Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St Francis of Philadelphia. And the slight, soft-spoken nun had a few not-so-humble suggestions for the world’s most powerful investment bank.
Way up on the 41st floor, in a conference room overlooking the World Trade Centre site, Sister Nora and her team from the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility laid out their advice for three Goldman executives. The Wall Street bank, they said, should protect consumers, rein in executive pay, increase its transparency and remember the poor.
In short, Goldman should do God’s work — something that its chairman and chief executive, Lloyd C Blankfein, once remarked that he did. (The joke bombed) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
With a couple of Macs, the internet and a great idea, Melbourne entrepreneur Martin Hosking has built a global business with more than 7 million unique products — a number that grows by more than 5000 a day.
The business, Red Bubble, is a kind of iTunes app store for artists and its success has some of iTunes’ hallmarks. All business transactions are completed online and now all in the cloud, even its accounts and personnel files.
It sells fascinating stuff at modest prices, is as fanatical as Apple about quality and its community has some of the cult aspects you find among Apple devotees.
It’s an all-Macintosh environment, even to the iMacs used to run daily Skype video conferences between the company’s headquarters in Melbourne and the US office it opened recently in Palo Alto, California — via redwolf.newsvine.com
RSS – Posts