Hot Headlines

Hot Headlines are snippets of longer articles published in other places. Click on the link at the bottom of the piece to view it in its entirety.

Fukushima: slow progress with old problems

Oct 012012

Hot headlines

And new problems arise for troubled Daichi nuclear power plants.

by Takashi Sugimoto

The operator is having difficulty pumping water into destroyed reactors at the Fukushima No 1 plant, tanks are rapidly filling with radioactive water, and hundreds of potentially volatile uranium fuel assemblies remain in a precarious storage pool that some warn could collapse in another strong earthquake.

But Tokyo Electric Power Co is working on solving those problems, with plans to build new storage tanks, to erect an overhead crane to lift the fuel, and to decommission the destroyed reactors within 40 years.

Anonymous busted, mostly in the UK

Sep 082012

Hot headlines

Youth welcomes prison as route to a good education.

by Carole Cadwalladr

Since 2008, the internet collective have hacked the CIA, the Sun newspaper, the Church of Scientology and a host of other large corporations, sparking a global police crackdown last year. But who and what are Anonymous? A radical new form of activism – or just bored teenagers? We talk to some of the 'hacktivists' and the experts who tracked them down in the deep web…

…. Anonymous suddenly had a face: and the face was of a furtive, greasy-haired youth, wearing a pair of dark glasses and carrying a book called Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science. If you had to imagine what a teenage computer hacker would look like, this was it.

The episode was front-page news on websites across the world, as a string of arrests were made: 19-year-old Ryan Cleary from Essex; 16-year-old Tflow from London; 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond from Chicago; a 25-year-old former soldier, Ryan Ackroyd, from Doncaster; 19-year-old Darren Martyn (or PwnSauce), from Galway, and Donncha O'Cearrbhail (or Palladium), also 19 and from Offaly, Ireland. The most recent arrest, 12 days ago, was of another American, 20-year-old Raynaldo Rivera of Arizona….

…What seems incredible, even now (and maybe, especially, to Jake), is how a slightly troubled teenager living on the two-sheep island of Yell, in the Shetland Isles – a place as isolated and remote as anywhere on Earth – came to find himself at the heart of a radical global political movement…

…What's surprising, at first, is that he's not unhappy that he was caught, or that he faces the prospect of several years in prison. "People say that prison is bad, but I lived in my bedroom with a computer for years. It's not going to be as bad as that. I just want to go and do my sentence and get my education in there. I want to get a really good education and just read loads of books."…

Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber-insurgents

Quebec students protest again

Jul 242012

Hot headlines

Court ruling on Loi 78 fails to deter demonstrators.

from Agence France Presse

MONTREAL, July 23, 2012 — About 15,000 Canadian students protested in Montreal on Sunday against rising tuition costs, with an eye toward rallying supporters against Quebec Premier Jean Charest in expected provincial polls. The protest at first was declared illegal under a controversial law enacted in the province to quell months of demonstrations over the tuition issue, as organizers did not make public their planned itinerary, but went ahead.

Yanick Gregoire, the vice president of one of the three main Quebec student groups, the FEUQ, said the protesters planned to head to Charest's offices in Montreal to denounce the fact that the tuition crisis "has not been settled."…

References
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Hospitals need cleanliness

May 152012

Hot headlines

Infections and errors due to understaffing: authors.

by Beatrice Fantoni for the Windsor Star

The problem of hospital-acquired infections and medical error is much worse than governments would have us believe, the authors of a new book say, and the cuts to Ontario's health care spending will exacerbate the problem.

The war over the Internet

Apr 042012

Hot headlines

193 nations will meet at year-end to renegotiate UN treaty.

by Michael Joseph Gross

…There is a war under way for control of the Internet, and every day brings word of new clashes on a shifting and widening battlefront. Governments, corporations, criminals, anarchists — they all have their own war aims.

In February, the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from three founders of the Pirate Bay, the world's largest illegal file-sharing Web site, who had been sentenced to prison for copyright infringement. The same day, one of those men issued an online call to arms, urging users to abandon the entertainment industry: "Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music… Remix, reuse, use, abuse." Shortly after that, Google was discovered to have been secretly bypassing privacy settings on Apple iPhones and computers that use the Safari browser; the company was monitoring Web activity by people who believed they'd blocked such tracking.