Sunday, March 15, 2009

200,000 litres of oil leaked into waters off the coast of Brisbane from the Pacific Adventurer when their fuel tanks were damaged in rough seas on Wednesday. The figure is about ten times higher than the original estimate of twenty thousand litres of oil. The devastating diesel oil spill has spread along 60 kilometres (37 miles) of the Queensland coast. In addition, 31 containers with 620 tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser flew overboard during the violent storm.

Questions are being asked why the Hong Kong cargo ship was out in seas with nine meter waves caused by Cyclone Hamish, a Category 5 tropical cyclone, as well as why the fertiliser containers were not properly secured. One of the overboard containers ruptured the hull of the Pacific Adventurer, causing between 30 to 100 tonnes of oil to spew from the severely damaged ship.

If the ammonium nitrate mixes with the heavy oil, an explosion could occur. None of the containers have been recovered. Some of these may float, but it is believed that they may have sunk which then may cause algal blooms.

Disaster zones have been declared at Bribie and Moreton Islands, and along the Sunshine coast.

The vessel’s owner, Swire Shipping, reported that a second leak began on Friday, when the ship began listing after docking at Hamilton for repairs. “As full soundings of the vessel’s tanks were being taken at the port to determine how much oil had leaked from the vessel, a small quantity of fuel oil escaped from the Pacific Adventurer,” it stated. The ship was brought upright, and a recovery vessel was used to suck up the oil from the water. The leak produced a 500m-long oil slick down the Brisbane River. Booms were placed around this oil spill so that a skimmer could clean up the second spill.

Swire Shipping could face clean up costs of AU$100,000 a day as well as fines up to AU$1.5million (US$977,000; £703,000) if found guilty of environmental breaches or negligence.

Sunshine Coast beaches are slowly starting to be reopened. The beach of Mooloolaba was still closed following reports of burning sensations from swimmers. 12 beaches remain closed; however, 13 have been reopened.

Over 300 state government and council workers are using buckets, rakes and spades in the clean up effort. Sunshine Coast Mayor Bob Abbott says the majority will be gone by Sunday afternoon. The full environmental impact on wildlife is not yet known. One turtle and seven pelicans have been found covered in oil.

There are concerns that the drinking water of Moreton Island is at risk, as the island uses water from the underground water table near the oil spill site.

“Every bucketload of contaminated sand has to be removed from the island by barge, and each bucketload from a front-end loader weighs about one tonne. It’s just an impossible task,” said Mr Trevor Hassard of the Tangalooma Dolphin Education Centre.

The commercial fishing industry has suffered from the incident. Trawlers won’t resume operations until Sunday evening, and any catches will be tested for human consumption.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

On the 20th birthday of Nintendo‘s mascots, Mario and his brother Luigi, Nintendo has released the newest addition to the popular Game Boy line.

The Game Boy Micro is the smallest handheld release by Nintendo to date. Unlike other handhelds in the Game Boy Advance series, the Game Boy Micro can only play Game Boy Advance games and not games designed for the original Game Boy system. The handheld features a new link port, includes multiple removable faceplates, and additional faceplates can be purchased separately. This system has an MSRP of USD$99.99.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Two more vessels have been hijacked in Somalia. Pirates have captured an Indonesian tugboat with a barge that was working for French oil firm Total and a Turkish container ship.

The Turkish vessel’s seizure was confirmed by a US Fifth Fleet spokesman. MV Bosphorus Prodigy is a 330 ft (100 m) container vessel flagged in Antigua and Barbuda. It is owned and operated by Isko Marine Company based in Istanbul.

The Fifth Fleet could not confirm the tugboat’s seizure, but an anonymous official with Total in Yemen could. He explained the boat and barge were headed to Malaysia from the Yemeni port of Mukalla. He said the crew consisted of both Indonesians and other nationalities, and that the vessels, which had been hired by a subcontractor, were not carrying any oil at the time.

The new hijackings came as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime asked for greater policing in the area by international bodies, and for the signing of agreements that allowed the arresting officer to take pirates back to the officer’s country for prosecution.

“Pirates cannot be keelhauled or forced to walk the plank, nor should they be dumped off the Somali coast,” said the office’s head Antonio Maria Costa. “They need to be brought to justice”.

Monday, November 19, 2007

Two students from Cologne, Germany, ages 17 and 18, are accused of plotting an attack at their school on November 20, the first anniversary of the shooting at Geschwister Scholl school in Emsdetten, in which 18-year old ex-student Sebastian Bosse carried an attack that left six people wounded by gunshot and others wounded by detonated smoke bombs before taking his own life.

One of the suspects, age 17, killed himself on Friday after a confrontation with a high school teacher and police officers. The plot was uncovered when a school principal had discovered a Web page the 17-year old suspect had created, showcasing material that glorified the two perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre.

The second suspect, age 18, is in police custody, and has confessed to the plot.

Materials including two crossbows, two air guns, instructions on how to build a pipe bomb and a list of potential victims had been seized by Cologne police when they were alerted that the plot would have taken place at the Georg-Büchner Gymnasium, located in the western district of Weiden. The items had been confiscated at their homes.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

On Wednesday the online instant messaging service Telegram announced IFTTT (If This Then That) integration in its client. This feature allows the users to connect their Telegram account to other social networks and web applications. This change came as a part of the 3.15 release. The project team has announced these changes on the official Telegram blog.

IFTTT facilities allow users to connect to multiple services from one platform. The bidirectional facility of IFTTT means a user can opt-in for receiving notifications from the connected applications in Telegram and for updating them using commands from Telegram.

To get started, users needed to query a relay called “IFTTT bot”. According to Telegram, the IFTTT bot provides over 360 services and can also be invited into group chats to facilitate collaboration. Applets need to be enabled to start the IFTTT services. Some of the applets supported are Gmail, Dropbox, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive and Pinterest.

Telegram claimed to be the first messaging application to be fully integrated with IFTTT.

In the new release, Telegram also introduced an option to “pin” the chats. The “pinning” feature allowed a user to pin chats to the top of the chat list, including up to five chats and up to five secret chats, by long press on the chat in Android and left swipe in iOS.

Other introduced features included a new photo high precision crop and rotate tool — the rotate accuracy reached a tenth of a degree — and a new video player for YouTube and Vimeo videos, allowing the users to watch these videos natively from the application. The “picture-in-picture” option in the new player allowed to watch a video and chat at the same time by dragging the playing video around the screen while chatting. The video playing in picture-in-picture mode doesn’t stop playing even when user opens other application.

These last two features — crop and rotate, picture in picture — were made available only in Android. Telegram said they plan to release new updates before the year end.

Previously, Telegram had introduced Telegraph, a publishing medium; and an “instant view” feature which loads articles from Medium and TechCrunch instantly.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

London — The Open Rights Group, a pressure group pursuing reform of intellectual property law in the United Kingdom, held its first “ORGCon” yesterday at City University London. Approximately 100 delegates took part in six hours of panel discussions and workshops on a wide range of topics in intellectual property, discussing such subjects as “How To Talk To Your MP” and “ACTA: A Shady Business”, in what ORG billed as a “crash course in digital rights” designed to inspire campaigning on intellectual property issues.

Cory Doctorow, a fiction author and digital rights activist, led the keynote panel discussion “Thriving in the Real Digital Economy”, which opened the conference. Doctorow called for a “reframing” of the digital rights slogan “information wants to be free”. “The most important thing” about digital rights, he noted, “has nothing to do with art. We are refitting the information network with lots of control.” Digital rights management (DRM) technologies, Doctorow warns, build in limitations on how consumers exchange information and “abuse the market”. John Buckman of Magnatune followed up Doctorow’s comments, noting that DRM is “unsustainable” but that the public needed to “pressure companies into” open-source solutions.

A keynote speech by James Boyle compared the current age to the age just before application of the theories of Adam Smith and other early capitalist economists began breaking down the entrenched monopolies of mercantilism. Boyle called on the audience to come up with a “jaw droppingly simple” idea for a reformed copyright system; he gave his speech in front of a projection of the twitterfall as audience members commented on his words.

Boyle, like most of the conference, took a pro-reform but anti-piracy position, saying “It is a tragedy that an entire generation has lost the notion that breaking the law is wrong”. While several members of the Pirate Party UK, wearing matching t-shirts, attended the conference and held a fringe meeting during the last session, none spoke in the keynote sessions either as panelists or in the discussions.

Among the many workshops which comprised the last three hours of the day, Open Rights Group held a session on student groups and committed itself to establishing Open Rights Group Youth societies at universities across the United Kingdom. Young activists, such as Wikipedian Jdforrester, also dominated the “Your Shout” session in which any and all delegates could give three-minute speeches on any intellectual property subject which interested them.

The organisation hopes to host a second ORGCon in 2011.