Thursday, May 28, 2015 Australian treasurer Joe Hockey has agreed to reconsider the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on tampons and other hygiene products after being confronted about the issue on Q&A Monday night. Mr Hockey was responding to a question from student activist Subeta Vimalarajah. “I started a petition against taxing the sanitary products under the GST. It now has over 86,000 signees and 11,000 submissions to the Better Tax Review. Mr Hockey, do you think that sanitary products are an essential health good for half the population?” she…
China overtakes Germany as world’s biggest exporter
Sunday, January 10, 2010 Chinese officials have said that their country’s exports surged last December to edge out Germany as the world’s biggest exporter. The official Xinhua news agency reported today that figures from the General Administration for Customs showed that exports jumped 17.7% in December from a year earlier. Over the whole of 2009 total Chinese exports reached US$1.2 trillion, above Germany’s forecast $1.17 trillion. Huang Guohua, a statistics official with the customs administration, said the December exports rebound was an important turning point for China’s export sector. He…
Why Insurance Claims Are Not Paid
Click Here For More Specific Information On: Dispute Resolution Gold Coast By Frank Egan – LAC Lawyers Normally there are a number of reasons why insurers fail to pay or deny insurance claims. The principal ones are: 1. Non Disclosure of material fact; 2. Failure to abide by the doctrine of the utmost good faith; 3. Fraud and/or overcapitalisation of loss but the latter only applies to deny that part of the claim; [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u9JAt6gFqM[/youtube] 4. Arson as a subset of fraud; 5. An inability of the insured to provide any…
Blizzard Entertainment’s victory over bnetd sealed in Appeals Court
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Blizzard Entertainment has won a federal ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals against the programmers of bnetd, a software package that emulates Blizzard’s Battle.net service. The court reaffirmed the original judgement, given in October, that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and click-through EULA’s prohibited the reverse engineering of Blizzard’s software in order to improve their playability. This was the first real test of the DMCA’s applicability. Bnetd, released under the GNU General Public License, was created to enable users to play multiplayer games, bypassing Blizzard’s…
Details emerge of Honda’s withdrawal from Formula One
Monday, December 8, 2008 Jensen Button driving one of the two 2008 Honda F1 cars at the Malaysian Grand Prix Image: flickr user kuda2001. More details have emerged over the weekend after the surprise announcement last week of Honda‘s intention to sell its Formula One racing team, Honda Racing F1. The team management, Nick Fry and Ross Brawn, have already announced confidence in their ability not only to find a buyer for the team but also to deliver the performance expected of Honda’s 2009 car. Prices as low as £1…
Death sentences in 2008 Chinese tainted milk scandal
Monday, January 26, 2009 Half a million participated in anti-China demonstrations on October 25, 2008 (“1025 demonstration”) in Taiwan.Image: MiNe. On Thursday, the municipal intermediate people’s court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, China pronounced sentences for 21 defendants implicated in the 2008 Chinese milk scandal which killed at least six infants and sickened nearly 300,000 others. In the local court’s decision, 17 accused were indicted for the crimes of “producing, adding melamine-laced ‘protein powder’ to infant milk or selling tainted, fake and substandard milk to Sanlu Group or 21 other dairy…
Mohamed ElBaradei: Highly enriched uranium found in Iran is “of little significance”
Sunday, May 14, 2006 Back in 2003, inspectors had discovered several sites in Iran that tested positive for highly enriched uranium, but the uranium was believed to have come from equipment that was previously from Pakistan. On Friday, Reuters published a report quoting UN diplomats from Vienna who wish to remain anonymous alleging that preliminary analysis of microscopic dust collected from equipment at the now razed Lavizan-Shiyan research center in Iran in January of 2005, contained traces of “highly enriched uranium”. “It’s no smoking gun. There could be many explanations.…
UK Party leaders questioned on BBC ‘Question Time’
Friday, April 29, 2005 With the UK general election on May 5, three party leaders from the largest parties in the election answered questions live on the BBC at 19:30 UTC Thursday. Charles Kennedy (Liberal Democrats), Michael Howard (Conservative Party, currently Opposition) and Tony Blair (Labour Party, incumbent) were asked questions by an audience representative of the British public. The politicians were given no advance notice of the questions. David Dimbleby hosted the discussion, as he has other Question Time debates. Topics that were raised included taxation and the new…
Japan suggests dumping Fukushima waste at sea as radiation hits lethal levels
Monday, September 2, 2013 Radiation at Japan’s damaged Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant yesterday spiked to lethal levels around a leaking tank. Today the national Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said contaminated water may be pumped into the sea. Tanks holding contaminated water at the site continue to leak; operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) says up to 300 metric tons may have leaked from one tank alone. Radiation at that tank soared to 1,800 millisieverts per hour yesterday, a rate lethal to an exposed human in about four hours. Japanese law…
Wikinews holds Reform Party USA presidential candidates forum
Tuesday, January 3, 2012 Logo for the Reform Party of the United States of America.Image: Reform Party National Committee. Three men are currently seeking the presidential nomination of the Reform Party of the United States of America: small business owner Andre Barnett, Earth Intelligence Network CEO Robert Steele, and former college football coach Robby Wells. Wikinews reached out to these candidates and asked each of them five questions about their campaigns. There were no space limits placed on the responses, and no candidate was exposed to another’s responses before making…