US Senate finance committee to vote on health care bill

Friday, October 9, 2009

US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that the Senate Finance Committee will vote on a sweeping health care reform bill next Tuesday. US President Barack Obama has made clear that extending health insurance coverage to as many Americans as possible is his top domestic priority.

Republican lawmakers, however, are still overwhelmingly opposed to the bill, saying it is too expensive and would expand the role of government in people’s health care.

Obama and his fellow Democrats in the Senate received some good news late Wednesday from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which put the total cost of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill at $829 billion over the next decade, below Obama’s stated goal of $900 billion. The budget watchdog organization also said the health care bill would help reduce the federal budget deficit over the next ten years.

Harry Reid said he believed health care reform was moving forward. “And so today we stand closer than ever to fulfilling that fundamental promise, one for which we have fought for more than 60 years,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, however said that the cost estimate was “irrelevant”, because the final bill that will actually emerge from both houses of Congress is likely to look very different and cost a lot more. “What matters is that the final bill will cost about a trillion dollars, vastly expand the role of government in people’s health care decisions, increase premiums and limit choice,” McConnell said.

McConnell said Republicans favor a step by step approach to health care reform, focusing on prevention and wellness programs and dealing with the high costs of malpractice insurance doctors have to pay due to fears of excessive lawsuits.

Under the Finance Committee’s bill, US residents would be required to get health insurance or face a penalty, and insurance companies would face tough new regulations. For example, insurance companies could no longer reject coverage for people due to pre-existing conditions.

The Senate Finance Committee is likely to pass the bill, which will then have to be merged with one passed by the Senate health committee before it goes to the full Senate floor for debate.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

On Friday, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ratified the next generation of Wi-Fi Alliance certification known as 802.11n. The path to ratification began on September 11, 2003 with 11 major drafts of the specification over the course of six years. Even though just approved, wireless devices have been available on the the market for over two years, running on what is known as “draft n” or “pre-N”.

The 802.11n standard operates on both the 2.4Ghz and 5.0Ghz frequencies. This will allow it to be backwards compatible with 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g, provided that the base station has dual radios. The speeds of 802.11n are substantially faster than that of its predecessors with a maximum theoretical throughput of 600Mbit/s.

Very few additions were made to the 802.11n draft standard over the last two years, so most if not all “draft n” hardware available on the market today is expected to be compatible with n-standard devices available in the future. In a similar process of the upgrade from “pre-G” to 802.11g, it is expected that most manufacturers of wireless hardware will release new firmware to bring all draft devices up to full standard compliance.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

The 2008 Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE 2008), organized by the Taipei Book Fair Foundation (TBFF), will start tomorrow and end next Monday (Feb. 18) at the Taipei World Trade Center in Hall 1 & 3 and in the Taipei Show (TWTC Hall 2). Before the opening of the main show, the TIBE changed significantly.

Since the Preview Exhibition was held in 1992 in Jhonghe City, Taipei County with the “History of books in China” theme, the preview exhibition wasn’t eventually held before the main show every year.

This pre-main-show exhibition style was replaced by a consuming battle between bookstores from actual to virtual (via Internet) and reading festivals from municipal libraries in Taiwan that the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China promoted. But in 2008, after the TBFF was regrouped last year, the preview exhibition finally returned on Feb 2 & 3 with the “Book Market” and “Arts and Crafts” in the Huashan Culture Park, Taipei. With the preview exhibition, the reading population is expected to expand rapidly and widely in Taiwan.

To gather on different cultures, the TBFF not only arranged a variety of seminars from book-cover designing, changes of publishing industry, publishing style, and strategies from global publishing industry, but also invited executives from the publishing industry worldwide such as Michel Le Bris, Gilles Lapouge, Shaun Tan, Markus Zusak, Tony Wheeler, and Maruen Wheeler and executives from the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Apart from seminars and executives, the Stiftung Buchkunst (Book Art Foundation) will showcase several awarded books from “Giant of Japanese Design” and some book design awards in the “Most Beautiful Book Designing” pavilion. Two book design awards by TBEE named the “2008 TIBE Prize” and “2008 Golden Butterfly Award” will be successively announced on Feb 13 & 14.

Not only on book-designing and pavilions, even though Australia was named as the main international pavilion, the TBFF chose the opening movie “What My Eyes Have Seen” from France and a closing movie named “The Edge of Heaven“ from Germany, those selected movies including the opening and closing ones will be screened at the movie pavilion. The Travel Literature Pavilion will show a different style varied from the 2007 Taipei International Travel Fair, not only just about traveling but also mixed with cultures and literature.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Tyler Currie is running as an Progressive Conservative candidate in the Ontario provincial election, in the riding of Trinity-Spadina. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Thursday, November 8, 2007

India is the latest of the countries where the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) experiment has started. Children from the village of Khairat were given the opportunity to learn how to use the XO laptop. During the last year XO was distributed to children from Arahuay in Peru, Ban Samkha in Thailand, Cardal in Uruguay and Galadima in Nigeria. The OLPC team are, in their reports on the startup of the trials, delighted with how the laptop has improved access to information and ability to carry out educational activities. Thailand’s The Nation has praised the project, describing the children as “enthusiastic” and keen to attend school with their laptops.

Recent good news for the project sees Uruguay having ordered 100,000 of the machines which are to be given to children aged six to twelve. Should all go according to plan a further 300,000 machines will be purchased by 2009 to give one to every child in the country. As the first to order, Uruguay chose the OLPC XO laptop over its rival from Intel, the Classmate PC. In parallel with the delivery of the laptops network connectivity will be provided to schools involved in the project.

The remainder of this article is based on Carla G. Munroy’s Khairat Chronicle, which is available from the OLPC Wiki. Additional sources are listed at the end.

Saturday, August 29, 2015

Four foreign men have today gone before a court in Hungary on suspicion of people smuggling. Their detention relates to Thursday’s discovery of a lorry full of corpses in Austria. The death toll was yesterday finalised at 71.

The lorry had been abandoned since Wednesday on the hard shoulder of the “Eastern Motorway”, near the Hungarian border. Roadworkers became suspicious of dark liquid seeping from the vehicle, and responding police found the bodies. Initial police estimates were that 20–50 were suffocated in the back of the lorry which was near Parndorf.

The arrested men are thought to include the vehicle’s owner and at least two drivers. Three are Bulgarian and one is from Afghanistan. Criminal suspects in Hungary can generally be held for 72 hours before charge but prosecutors, citing the seriousness of the case, want the period extended. Extradition to Austria is possible.

Of the 71 dead, 59 are men, eight are women, and four are children. The children are thought to be aged three, eight, and ten years, alongside an eighteen-month-old baby. “There was also a Syrian travel document found” police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil told journalists “so of course our first assumption is that these people were migrants, and likely a group of Syrian migrants. We can rule out that they were Africans”.

The four accused were escorted into court in Kecskemet, central Hungary, by a police convoy. Reportedly the lorry traveled from Kecskemet. Hungary is presently building a border fence across the Serbian frontier, as migrants from war-torn Syria and other regions seek access to the Schengen Area of free movement, which covers most of the EU.

Slovak chicken meat company Hyza, a previous owner, previously told Wikinews the lorry has changed hands several times in roughly the last year. After they sold it they say it was exported to Hungary; it now bears Hungarian plates but still features Hyza branding including pictures of meat.

On the day of the discovery Hyza quickly removed a graphic from their homepage featuring cartoon chicken stowaways in a car being inspected at a customs post. The stowaways also appeared with a line through them alongside the word “imigranti” and the site www.imigranti.sk in one corner. On the other side was Hyza’s logo. Imigranti.sk is also unavailable.

Police today found 26 migrants in a lorry near Braunau am Inn, Austria. The driver, from Romania, refused to stop for police and was arrested following a chase. Police said three children were hospitalised for “severe dehydration”. Found near the German border, the migrants were from Afghanistan, Syria, and Bangladesh.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Police in Jersey City, New Jersey in the United States say that they have found a 20 year old rocket launcher tube, capable of shooting down planes, on the front yard of a home that is reported to be directly in the path of Newark Liberty International Airport. Police say that the weapon was not in operating condition.

“I was shocked. I read it and it and [there was the word missile] on it. There was little ‘missile’ writing on it. I was afraid because of what people want to do to this country,” said Niranjana Besai who was born in India and has lived in the U.S. for 25 years who discovered the weapon at about 8:00 a.m EDT (UTC-4) when she was leaving the house to go to work.

According to Modern Firearms, the weapon can only be used once, saying it “is a disposable, single shot, recoilless weapon” and can hit a target with a range of “up to 150 meters [to use] against moving targets, and about 300 meters against stationary targets.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives confirms that the weapon is of military issue and has been identified as a model AT-4, primarily used as an anti-tank weapon. It is manufactured by Saab Bofors Dynamics in Sweden. No explosive devices have been located at the scene. The Associated Press says that the weapon was made to be used during training missions and anti-tank artillery. The U.S. Army at Fort Monmouth in Oceanport, New Jersey is now in possession of the weapon.

“The device has been turned over to United States Army officials at Fort Monmouth,” said Jersey City police in a statement to the press which also confirmed the weapon was a U.S. military issued launcher and was “no longer operable and not considered to be a hazard to public safety.”

It is not known how the weapon ended up in Besai’s yard. The Joint Terrorism Task Force and FBI have confiscated the weapon, before turning it over to the army, and they are investigating the incident.