All posts by : Admin

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The 1999 and 2000 year model Honda Civic SiR tops the list of Canada’s most stolen cars.

Consumer popularity also assures the cars will be popular with thieves. Its the second year in a row the Honda SiR has topped the list.

Rick Dubin Vice President of Investigations for the Insurance Bureau of Canada said “The Civics are easy targets.”

Dubin said that once stolen, the cars are most often sold to “chop shops” where thieves completely dismantle the vehicles. The automobile’s individual parts are worth more than the entire car.

The sheer numbers of the cars and their lack of theft deterrent systems make them thieves’ preferred choices.

1999 and 2000 Honda Civics do not come with an electronic immobilizer, however all Hondas from 2001 and onward are equipped with an immobilizer. Immobilizers will be mandatory on all new cars sold beginning September 2007. The devices enable an engine computer to recognize an electronic code in the key. If the code in the key and the engine don’t match exactly, the vehicle can’t be started.

In third place was the 2004 Subaru Impreza, while the 1999 Acura Integra came in fourth, with the 1994 Honda Civic rounding out the top five.

In sixth place, the 1998 Acura Integra, and the 1993 Dodge Shadow completed seventh.

When asked why early model vehicles are selected, he said that, “auto thieves continue to find it easier to steal older vehicles lacking an IBC-approved immobilizer. We’ve seen this trend developing for several years, and these results confirm it.”

Another Honda automobile, the 1996 year model Civic filled eighth place, with the 2000 German Audi TT Quattro in ninth.

The American 1996 Chevrolet/GMC Blazer rounded out the top ten.

None of the above cars had an electronic immobilizer.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Vandals have caused thousands of British pounds worth of damage at a city railway station. The Bath Spa railway station in Bath was targeted by vandals over the weekend. Graffiti was sprayed over the new tourist centre as well as the stone work which is over 100 years old. The disabled toilets were also vandalised.

First Great Western who owns Bath Spa station released a statement through spokesman Dan Panes saying, “last year we invested a considerable amount of money improving the station environment at Bath Spa for our customers, and it’s a great shame that a couple of minutes of vandalism could cause so much damage.”

The vandalism comes just months after a mini police station was opened up in the station to combat anti-social behaviour. The behaviour in Bath was said to be worse than that of the centre of Liverpool.

CCTV has been passed on to the British Transport Police and are currently assessing the damage caused.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.

Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.

Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.

Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.

Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.

Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has suffered what some consider a humiliating political defeat after the House of Commons dismissed a controversial government proposal to permit the detention of terror suspects for up to 90 days without bringing charges. Under current UK anti-terrorism laws, suspects can be held for up to 14 days without any charges being made against them.

Members of Mr Blair’s Labour Party used the vote to rebel against the proposal, with a crucial 49 tipping the balance to reject it by 322 votes to 291. It was the first Commons defeat for Mr Blair in his 8 years as Prime Minister. Later, a second proposal to extend the detention time limit for terror suspects to 28 days was passed by 323 votes to 290.

The police called for new powers after the bomb attacks in London on July 7, 2005. They argued that because anti-terrorist investigations can take considerable time, the new powers would have been justified. Critics are sceptical of these claims. Opponents believe that by effectively giving the government the right to imprison for up to three months anyone who it alleged to have been involved in terrorism, without having to present any charges in court to justify the detention, the bill could have led to abuses of power.

Leaders of the opposition parties were delighted with the results. Conservative leader Michael Howard said the vote had “diminished” the Prime Minister’s authority and that he should tender his resignation. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, called Mr Blair a “lame duck”.

Speaking after the result of the vote was announced, Mr Blair accused those who’d opposed the measure of being “out of touch”, talking of a “worrying gap between parts of Parliament and the reality of the terrorist threat and public opinion”.

Former Conservative ministers Peter Lilley and Stephen Dorrell criticised the government for using senior police officers to lobby MPs over the vote. They characterised this as the “politicisation of the police”.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Despite the hopes of many University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) students, The Onion was not named after their student center. “People always ask questions about where the name The Onion came from,” said President Sean Mills in an interview with David Shankbone, “and when I recently asked Tim Keck, who was one of the founders, he told me the name—I’ve never heard this story about ‘see you at the un-yun’—he said it was literally that his Uncle said he should call it The Onion when he saw him and Chris Johnson eating an onion sandwich. They had literally just cut up the onion and put it on bread.” According to Editorial Manager Chet Clem, their food budget was so low when they started the paper that they were down to white bread and onions.

Long before The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Heck and Johnson envisioned a publication that would parody the news—and news reporting—when they were students at UW in 1988. Since its inception, The Onion has become a veritable news parody empire, with a print edition, a website that drew 5,000,000 unique visitors in the month of October, personal ads, a 24 hour news network, podcasts, and a recently launched world atlas called Our Dumb World. Al Gore and General Tommy Franks casually rattle off their favorite headlines (Gore’s was when The Onion reported he and Tipper were having the best sex of their lives after his 2000 Electoral College defeat). Many of their writers have gone on to wield great influence on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert‘s news parody shows.

And we are sorry to break the news to all you amateur headline writers: your submissions do not even get read.

Below is David Shankbone’s interview with Chet Clem and Sean Mills about the news empire that has become The Onion.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

A federal jury found Bernard Ebbers guilty of all nine counts in the indictment brought against him. The verdict was handed down by a New York jury after 8 days of deliberation on the former WorldCom CEO and mastermind behind the accounting scandal that brought down the telcom giant.

AP writer Erin McClam reports, “Ebbers’ face reddened.”, as the verdict was read. Sentencing is set for June 13 when he will face up to 85 years in prison.

Ebbers testified in his own defence, saying he left the details of the company’s accounting to others and that he had no knowledge of shady practices. But Scott Sullivan, ex-chief financial officer and key prosecution witness, directly linked Ebbers to the fraud. He had agreed to co-operate with prosecutors in the hopes of receiving a lenient sentence for his own involvement in the fraud.

The demise of WordCom sparked a massive class action law suit by investors. The drastic plunge of WorldCom’s stock value cost upwards to $11 billion as the scandal unravelled. Secuities fraud case filings stemming from the suits will probably break new legal ground whereby the actions of investment banks and public accounting firms will be called into legal question.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

A US Coast Guard official said today that BP’s latest effort to plug the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been successful in slowing the amount of oil leaking from the well.

The official, Admiral Thad Allen, said that the procedure, known as a “top kill” operation, has been able to block some of the leaking oil at the source, the top of the damaged well. The operation involves pumping material into the well to plug the leak before cement is used to permanently seal the leak. Allen said the operation has “been able to force mud down and not allow any hydrocarbons to come up.”

BP hasn’t confirmed the success of the top kill operation, saying only that the “operation is proceeding as we planned it,” and that there had been no major incidents thus far. Although the possibility of failure is still present, experts say that the longer the procedure continues, the less likely it will be that anything goes wrong.

The procedure began yesterday afternoon, after diagnostics on the damaged equipment on the ocean’s surface indicated that it could withstand the added pressure of the mud being pumped into the well. Although engineers involved with the operation wore concerned that the pressure of the mud might not be able to overcome that of the oil, that has thus far not been the case.

Separately, a group of US scientists announced new estimates of how much oil was flowing from the well, ranging from 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day, far higher than BP’s original estimate of 5,000 barrels a day, a figure which BP warned was possibly inaccurate.

In a press conference Thursday afternoon, US president Barack Obama also announced new measures in response to the spill, which include:

• Suspending off-shore test drilling for six months
• Extending the moratorium on issuing drilling permits for an additional six months
• Cancelling the sale of leases for off-shore drilling.

In statements, Obama criticized the “scandalously close relationship” between government officials and oil companies in the past, saying that the Mineral Management Service, which is the agency responsible for monitoring off-shore drilling, had been corrupt for years.