Saturday, February 1, 2014

Thursday morning, members of the Parliament of New South Wales, Australia, discussed drafts of two bills relating to liquor intoxication assault crimes starting at 10 o’clock in the morning (AEDT; 2100 UTC), and approved them later during the day: the Lower House approved at midday and the Upper House at 7pm. The new legislation imposes harsher penalties on behaviour under alcohol influence, and a set of other restrictions in the Sydney central business district (CBD).

The full formal names of the bills are Liquor Amendment Bill 2014 and Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Assault and Intoxication) Bill 2014. The latter was assented, while the former was still pending assent from the Governor-General. The bills were cognate. The latter formally commenced on Thursday except for Schedule 5, maximum fines changes, subject to commence on a day appointed by proclamation.

The opposition said they would support the legislation before they saw it, citing support of any progress on such laws. The opposition leader, John Robertson, said “We will support the Government’s one-punch laws. The Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do something about alcohol-fuelled violence.”

The parties, while actively discussing the draft, did not support amendments raised during the discussion and the bill passed more quickly than usual, on the same day. However, Greens Member of Parliament (MP) John Kaye didn’t support the bills, naming some issues he didn’t expect the bill to address but found more important, such as “the dangerous promotions of deep discounting of alcohol, the failure to enforce responsible service of alcohol in venues and excessive liquor outlet density”.

One provision defined a new offense, assault causing death while intoxicated — by alcohol or other drugs — with an eight-year non-parole period. The penalty notice fines for misconduct and swearing in public were raised from AU$200 and $150 to $500, while the maximum fine for “continuation of intoxicated and disorderly behaviour following move on direction” — direction “to leave a public place and not return for a specified period” — was increased from 6 penalty units ($660) to 15 penalty units ($1,650).

The legislation also restricted sales of alcohol from bottle shops in the CBD until 10pm instead of midnight.

The bill was drafted in response to death of 18-year-old teenager named Daniel Christie on January 11, following eleven days in hospital after allegedly being punched by drunk Shaun McNeil, 25, at Kings Cross. He allegedly also attacked Daniel’s brother, Peter; McNeil’s court case has been adjourned until March.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Muslim Somali workers at a meat packing plant in Grand Island, Nebraska wanted to pray. Their colleagues from Latin America wanted to work. A dispute over the company’s break schedule led to formal discrimination claims, mass job walk-offs and public protests by both sides last month, and a reported 200 firings.

Tensions at the plant began after a Federal government raid in December 2006 removed 200 undocumented workers. An equal number of employees quit shortly afterward. Altogether, six government immigration raids at meat packing plants of Brazilian-owned JBS Swift & Co. had removed 1,200 employees from the company’s work force, which caused substantial production problems. Management at the Nebraska plant responded by hiring approximately 400 Somali immigrants who resided in the United States legally as political refugees. Stricter Federal enforcement of immigration laws has had a significant impact on the meat packing industry because few native-born Americans are willing to work in its low-wage factories. Employers advertise to immigrant communities and after the immigration crackdowns the company turned to the Somali community, which was unlikely to be targeted for deportation.

Many of the new Somali workers were observant Muslims who wanted to practice the traditional religious prayer schedule, and few spoke English. The existing union contract had been negotiated before Muslims became a significant part of the factory work force, when religious needs had not been an issue, and break times were assigned according to a rigid schedule to ensure continuous production and prevent workers from working too long without a break. The sharp knives the meat packers wield for their job pose a substantial risk of accidental injury.

At first the Somali workers prayed during scheduled breaks and visits to the rest room. A few Somalis were fired for “illegal breaks” they had spent praying. Rima Kapitan, a lawyer who represents the Muslim meat packers of Grand Island, told USA Today, “they shouldn’t be forced to choose between their job and their religion.” The Somalis offered to let their employer deduct pay for time at prayer, but supervisors considered it unworkable to lose the labor of hundreds of people simultaneously, even if the interruptions lasted less than five minutes.

Plant worker Fidencio Sandoval, a naturalized United States citizen who was born in Mexico, had polite reservations. “I kind of admire all the effort they make to follow that religion, but sometimes you have to adapt to the workplace.” An immigrant from El Salvador was less sympathetic. “They used to go to the bathroom,” said José Amaya, “but actually they’re praying and the rest of us have to do their work.” Raul A. García, a 73-year-old Mexican meat packer, told The New York Times, “The Latino is very humble, but they [the Somalis] are arrogant… They act like the United States owes them.”

Differences of opinion arose over whether the prayers, which are a religious obligation five times a day for practicing Muslims and vary in exact time according the position of the sun, constitute a reasonable accommodation or an undue burden upon non-Muslim coworkers. Abdifatah Warsame, a Somali meat packer, told The New York Times that “Latinos were sometimes saying, ‘Don’t pray, don’t pray’”.

As the Muslim holy month of Ramadan approached during 2007 the Somalis requested time off for religious reasons. Observant Muslims fast throughout daylight hours during Ramadan. Management refused, believing it would affect the production line. Dozens of Somali workers quit their jobs temporarily in protest. Negotiations between the Somali workers and management broke down in October 2007. Some of the fired Somalis filed religious discrimination complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Problems resurfaced after September 10, 2008 when Somali workers approached plant general manager Dennis Sydow with a request to start their dinner half an hour before the usual schedule in order to break their Ramadan fast closer to sundown. Sydow refused due to concern the request would slow production and burden non-Muslim workers. During the same month a Somali woman complained that a plant supervisor had kicked her while she was praying. The union investigated the charge and the supervisor responded that he had not seen her while she bent in prayer and had only kicked the cardboard that was underneath her.

Somali workers walked out on strike September 15 and protested at Grand Island City Hall, asking for prayer time. The following day the union brokered a compromise with plant management to move the dinner break by 15 minutes. Plant scheduling rules would have reduced the work day by 15 minutes with resulting loss in pay for the hourly workers.

A Somali worker, Abdalla Omar, told the press “We had complaints from the whites, Hispanics and [Christian] Sudanese“. False rumors spread about further cuts to the work day and preferential concessions to the Somalis. Over 1,000 non-Somalis staged a counterprotest on September 17. Union and management returned to the original dinner schedule. Substantial numbers of Somali workers left the plant afterward and either quit or were fired as a result. Sources differ as to the number of Somalis who still work at the plant: The New York Times reports union leadership as saying 300 remain, while Somali community leaders assert the number is closer to 100.

The EEOC has sent staff to determine whether treatment of Somali workers has been in compliance with the The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Under the law, employers must make reasonable accommodation for religious practices, but the law grants exceptions if religious practice places substantial hardship on an employer’s business.

Doug Schult, the JBS Swift manager in charge of labor relations, expressed frustration at the inability to resolve the problem, which had surfaced in a Colorado plant as well as the Nebraska plant. He told The Wall Street Journal that his office had spent months trying to understand and comply with new EEOC guidelines in light of conflicting pressures. Local union chapter president Daniel O. Hoppes of United Food and Commercial Workers worries that similar problems could continue to arise at the plant. “Right now, this is a real kindling box”.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

A recent study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) shows that the oil and gas industry are creating earthquakes. New information from the Midwest region of the United States points out that these man-made earthquakes are happening more frequently than expected. While more frequent earthquakes are less of a problem for regions like the Midwest, a geology professor from the University of Southern Indiana, Dr. Paul K. Doss, believes the disposal of wastewater from the hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) process used in extracting oil and gas has the possibility to pose potential problems for groundwater.

“We are taking this fluid that has a whole host of chemicals in it that are useful for fracking and putting it back into the Earth,” Doss said. “From a purely seismic perspective these are not big earthquakes that are going to cause damage or initiate, as far as we know, any larger kinds of earthquakes activity for Midwest. [The issue] is a water quality issue in terms of the ground water resources that we use.”

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a technique used by the oil and gas industries which inject highly pressurized water down into the Earth’s crust to break rock and extract natural gas. Most of the fluids used for fracking are proprietary, so information about what chemicals are used in the various fluids are unknown to the public and to create a competitive edge.

Last Monday four researchers from the University of New Brunswick released an editorial that sheds light on the potential risks that the current wastewater disposal system could have on the province’s water resources. The researchers share the concern that Dr. Doss has and have come out to say that they believe fracking should be stopped in the province until there is an environ­mentally safe way to dispose the waste wastewater.

“If groundwater becomes contamin­ated, it takes years to decades to try to clean up an aquifer system,” University of New Brunswick professor Tom Al said.

While the USGS group which conducted the study says it is unclear how the earthquake rates may be related to oil and gas production, they’ve made the correlation between the disposal of wastewater used in fracking and the recent upsurge in earthquakes. Because of the recent information surfacing that shows this connection between the disposal process and earthquakes, individual states in the United States are now passing laws regarding disposal wells.

“The problem is that we have never, as a human society, engineered a hole to go four miles down in the Earth’s crust that we have complete confidence that it won’t leak,” Doss said. “A perfect case-in-point is the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, that oil was being drilled at 18,000 feet but leaked at the surface. And that’s the concern because there’s no assurance that some of these unknown chemical cocktails won’t escape before it gets down to where they are trying to get rid of them.”

It was said in the study released by the New Brunswick University professors that if fracking wastewater would contaminate groundwater, that current conventional water treatment would not be sufficient enough to remove the high concentration of chemicals used in fracking. The researchers did find that the wastewater could be recycled, can also be disposed of at proper sites or even pumped further underground into saline aquifers.

The New Brunswick professors have come to the conclusion that current fracking methods used by companies, which use the water, should be replaced with carbon diox­ide or liquefied propane gas.

“You eliminate all the water-related issues that we’re raising, and that peo­ple have raised in general across North America,” Al said.

In New Brunswick liquefied propane gas has been used successfully in fracking some wells, but according to water specialist with the province’s Natural Resources De­partment Annie Daigle, it may not be the go-to solution for New Brunswick due its geological makeup.

“It has been used successfully by Corridor Resources here in New Bruns­wick for lower volume hydraulic frac­turing operations, but it is still a fairly new technology,” Daigle said.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working with U.S. states to come up with guidelines to manage seismic risks due to wastewater. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is the organization that also deals with the policies for wells.

Oil wells, which are under regulation, pump out salt water known as brine, and after brine is pumped out of the ground it’s disposed of by being pumped back into the ground. The difference between pumping brine and the high pressurized fracking fluid back in the ground is the volume that it is disposed of.

“Brine has never caused this kind of earthquake activity,” Doss said. “[The whole oil and gas industry] has developed around the removal of natural gas by fracking techniques and has outpaced regulatory development. The regulation is tied to the ‘the run-of-the-mill’ disposal of waste, in other words the rush to produce this gas has occurred before regulatory agencies have had the opportunity to respond.”

According to the USGS study, the increase in injecting wastewater into the ground may explain the sixfold increase of earthquakes in the central part of the United States from 2000 – 2011. USGS researchers also found that in decades prior to 2000 seismic events that happened in the midsection of the U.S. averaged 21 annually, in 2009 it spiked to 50 and in 2011 seismic events hit 134.

“The incredible volumes and intense disposal of fracking fluids in concentrated areas is what’s new,” Doss said. “There is not a body of regulation in place to manage the how these fluids are disposed of.”

The study by the USGS was presented at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America on April 18, 2012.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Space transport services company SpaceX launched their fifth Dragon resupply vehicle to the International Space Station yesterday. The spacecraft — containing more than 2,200kg (5,000 pounds) of food, experiments, and spare parts — successfully decoupled from the launch rocket and should reach the station early tomorrow.

The launch was postponed from Tuesday because of a technical issue on the second stage of the rocket. The shipment includes replacements for cargo aboard the spaceship Cygnus, destroyed during a failed launch in October. Cygnus belonged to the rival Orbital Sciences Corporation.

SpaceX tried unsuccessfully to land the Falcon 9 delivery rocket for reuse. The rocket reached an unmanned barge in the Atlantic, but landed too hard. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the landing “bodes well for the future, though”. The attempted salvage of the rocket was experimental, using new retractable fins. Next time they will add extra hydraulic fluid, Musk said.

The ship’s support equipment was damaged but, according to Musk, the barge is intact. Last year saw two successful SpaceX splashdowns but landing on such a small target as a ship is unique.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

In a somewhat unexpected turn of events, it emerged on Monday that Arrow Light Rail — the existing operators of Nottingham, England’s Express Transit (NET) system — were to have their contract ripped up, after the preferred bidder for the construction of Phase 2 was announced. The change means that the entire network will be able to be integrated throughout, rather than having two operators effectively running two separate systems.

Nottingham City Council have selected Tramlink Nottingham as their preferred bidder to construct and operate the NET Phase Two lines to Chilwell and Clifton, and will now enter talks with the consortium, made up of Alstom, Keolis, Trent Barton, VINCI Construction UK, OFI Infravia and Meridiam Infrastructure, to finalise the exact details of the contract. It is expected that the concessionary contract will be awarded during the coming summer, with construction starting before the end of the year. The contract will run for 23 years.

Tramlink Nottingham chairman Roger Harrison said: “Building on Arrow’s successful legacy, we are excited to be taking forward the next chapter in Nottingham’s tram story.

“Our focus now will be on working with Nottingham City Council to ensure NET Phase Two can be introduced at the earliest opportunity.”

The reshuffle of operating consortium means that Nottingham City Transport (NCT) — the main provider of bus services within Nottingham — will have no part to play in the extended network, despite the numerous awards and high satisfaction levels NET has had since its opening; it is the only one of Britain’s five light rail networks to be an instant success.

“We’re obviously very disappointed not to be part of the selected preferred consortium. Nottingham’s tram has won numerous awards and after seven years passengers continue to praise its operation. We would have relished the opportunity to have been part of this continuing success,” said NCT’s Managing Director Mark Fowles.

But the council stresses that they are still committed to the future of the company.

“This decision in no way reflects the excellent job Arrow Light Rail Limited has done operating the tram since its launch. Annual customer satisfaction figures remain very high and this is testament to this operation,” added Jane Todd. “The decision to appoint a new consortium to build and operate the extended tram network was made on the basis of selecting the best proposal to meet the council’s objectives for the future of the tram system. The overall offer from the Tramlink Nottingham consortium was stronger. Although disappointing for NCT it is nonetheless good news for the integration of public transport services that the city’s other major bus operator, Trent Barton, is part of the preferred bidder. I am certain NCT will continue to provide award winning bus services for the people of Nottingham.”

Staff currently employed by Arrow Light Rail are expected to be transferred over to Tramlink Nottingham around August, when further details of the contract will become clear. Other changes that are proposed for the network include ‘smart card’ ticketing — similar to the highly successful Oyster scheme that is in use across Transport for London’s service — and the phasing out of tram conductors in favour of on-platform ticketing machines. Current conductors will be offered new roles within the company, though talks are still on-going about how to combat any potential fare-dodgers.

Furthermore, an additional 22 tram vehicles will be built by consortium member Alstom for the extended network, though these will be of a different design to the 15 existing vehicles, which were built by Bombardier to their Incentro design for the system’s opening. The new trams will be part of Alstom’s Citadis family, and will bring the total tram fleet to 37. This will also allow for service frequencies to be increased and for overcrowding to be eased at peak times.

Ticketing arrangements for the network will also change when the new consortium takes over. Currently, combined tickets, cards and passes can be used for the tram and NCT buses, but these are due to be phased out and replaced with the new smart cards in time for the opening of the extensions. Prior to that, passengers will be able to use combined tickets, cards and passes for the tram and Trent Barton buses, in a similar arrangement to that which is already offered for NCT.

Pat Armstrong, director for NET, said: “The move is very much towards more sophisticated smart ticketing, like the Oyster card in London. You use the same card but the money goes back to the company you are travelling with.”

The extended network, new trams and numerous other changes should be fully operational by the end of 2014, but NET users and tramway enthusiasts had mixed views on the matter:

“I think it’s a bad idea to phase out the conductors,” said Andrew Blood, assistant editor of the Tramways Monthly e-magazine, “Not only do they help with revenue protection, but they are also responsible for the high passenger satisfaction levels on the system. In short, they keep tram users feeling safe.”

Greg Smith, from Hucknall, was pleased that service levels were going to increase: “The fact that the trams will be running more frequently is a massive bonus in my eyes. The service we get at [the Hucknall] end of the line is great already, but if [the trams] are running more frequently it’s just another advantage of the system over the bus.” But he was also wary of on-platform ticketing being brought into place: “I’m not sure that losing the conductors in favour of ticket machines is the way to go, though.”

Saturday, March 1, 2008

While nearly all coverage of the 2008 Presidential election has focused on the Democratic and Republican candidates, the race for the White House also includes independents and third party candidates. These parties represent a variety of views that may not be acknowledged by the major party platforms.

Wikinews has impartially reached out to these candidates, throughout the campaign. We now interview independent Presidential candidate Frank Moore, a performance artist.

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Several small earthquakes have been reported near Wells, Nevada after a large magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck the region at 6:16 a.m. PST (UTC-8).

The 6.0 quake, centered 12 miles (19 kilometers) from Wells had a depth of 5.6 miles (9 km) and caused at least 25 buildings to collapse. Damage to other buildings and windows was also reported, and at least two water mains were ruptured. Several cars were hit by bricks as they fell off buildings. One person was hospitalized for a broken arm, but no other injuries were reported.

At least 30 aftershocks ranging from a magnitude 2.0 to 4.0 have been reported since the early morning quake. The quake could be felt as far away as California, Idaho and Utah.

Officials in Nevada are currently inspecting roads and dams in the region for damage. FEMA is also on their way to the area to help in the inspections.