Wednesday, May 26, 2010

A Cirrus SR-20 aircraft crashed into an office building in Markham, a town near Toronto, at 12:30 p.m. local time yesterday. Both people on board were killed.

The aircraft, which crashed into the roof of the two-storey building at Woodbine and Hooper streets, was engulfed in flames. Witnesses say that it looked as if the pilot was trying to find somewhere to land and that the aircraft was trailing smoke and rolled before it crashed.

First reports state that the pilot and passenger were killed on impact, and the 14 employees at Thinkway Toys manufacturing all escaped the two-storey building and explosions from the crash.

The crash site is near Buttonville airport where many amateur and flight training flights occur.

Warning: The information on this page may be incorrect and/or outdated. Don’t trust it.

Information about the world’s markets index, no longer maintained.

• Forex Gold Index: $424.30/barrel, $0.80

• 1 US Dollar (US$):

= STG£0.5349 = €0.7727 = ¥106.4000

• 1 Euro (€):

= STG£0.6923 = $1.2942 = ¥137.6900

• 1 Pound Sterling (STG£):

= US$1.8694 = €1.4443 = ¥198.8550

• 1 Japanese Yen (¥)

= STG£0.0050 = $0.0094 = €0.0073

(Commodities & currencies as of 2005-03-24 T 23:00 UTC, or last close were applicable. None of this data is guaranteed to be correct. Please read our General disclaimer and Risk disclaimer.)|}

• Market Data/Energy

Friday, January 16, 2009

American politician Roland Burris of the United States Democratic Party was sworn in Thursday as US president-elect Barack Obama’s replacement in the United States Senate.

Burris was initially not admitted into the Senate, even though Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich appointed him to the position, due to allegations that the governor tried to sell the seat. Blagojevich was arrested and has been impeached for the alleged crime. Burris was denied his position on January 6 by other Democratic members of the Congress because his appointment papers were not signed by Jesse White, the Illinois Secretary of State, who had refused to sign his name due to the charges faced by Blagojevich.

Burris was officially sworn in by United States Vice President Dick Cheney with no objections from other members of the Congress. Harry Reid, the senior Democratic senator from Nevada and majority leader, who had led the opposition to Burris being appointed, welcomed him into the Senate.

“On behalf of all senators, Democrats and Republicans, we welcome you as a colleague and a friend,” Reid said.

“No one’s ever had anything against Sen. Burris. Like any other senator, he’ll have to learn the ropes and not get lost getting to committee hearings, like I have. I think he’ll come in with people open to meeting with him and getting to know him. I think it will be just fine,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota on the matter. Most other comments by senators stated that they were not against Burris as a person, but were against his appointment by Rod Blagojevich.

With the appointment, Burris becomes the only African-American member of the United States Senate. This makes the count of Democrats to Republicans in the Senate 58 Democrats and 41 Republicans, with the final seat waiting on a vote recount ordered by Norm Coleman in his loss to Al Franken of Minnesota.

Saturday, June 4, 2005

On Friday, the U.S. military released the results of their investigation and confirmed that in 5 separate incidents, American guards at the Guantánamo Bay prison “mishandled” the Islamic holy book. However, they stress that guards were usually “respectful” of the Qur’an.

One incident involved splashing a Qur’an with urine by urinating near an air vent while others involved kicking, stepping on and writing in Qur’ans.

Brigadier-General Jay Hood, the commander of the jail, said that these incidents are the exception to the rule. In a statement issued late Friday, he said: “The inquiry … revealed a consistent, documented policy of respectful handling of the Qur’an dating back almost two-and-a-half years.”

Gen. Hood looked into the allegations, published and then retracted by Newsweek, that American personnel flushed a Qur’an down a toilet. He said that the inquiry did not find any evidence supporting this particular allegation. “The inquiry found no credible evidence that a member of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed a Qur’an down a toilet. This matter is considered closed.”

The incidents reported are:

• a guard kicking a prisoner’s Qur’an;
• Qur’ans wetted by water balloons thrown by guards;
• a “two-word obscenity” written, in English, inside the cover of a Qur’an. Military officials state that it is equally possible that a guard wrote this in the prisoner’s Qur’an or that the prisoner wrote this in his own Qur’an;
• a guard who urinated too close to an air vent, spraying a Qur’an with urine;
• an interrogator who stepped on a Qur’an during an interrogation.

The investigation also revealed 15 alleged cases of Qur’an mistreatment by detainees themselves. Detainees used Qur’ans as pillows, urinated on them, and, several times, tore pages out of copies of the books, according to the report. For example, the report states that a guard observed a “detainee place two Qur’ans in his toilet and state he no longer cared about the Qur’an or his religion,” on February 23, 2004. It is believed that such behavior is intended to cause disruption and problems for the guards.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

A former Marsh & McLennan Cos. executive has hit former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer with a $60 million defamation lawsuit over an online magazine article regarding an insurance bid-rigging scandal.

William Gilman, a former Marsh managing director, filed a complaint last Friday in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, over allegations Mr. Spitzer defamed him in a Slate article published a year ago. A copy of the complaint was made public on Monday.

Gilman, who had a final insurance fraud charge dismissed in January, said Spitzer acted with “actual malice” by suggesting that he was guilty of crimes of which he was never accused.

Although he wasn’t named in the article, Mr. Gilman complained that Spitzer defamed him by writing that “Marsh’s behavior was a blatant abuse of law and market power: price-fixing, bid-rigging and kickbacks all designed to harm their customers and the market while Marsh and its employees pocketed the increased fees and kickbacks.”

“While Mr. Spitzer’s statements do not refer to Mr. Gilman by name, Mr. Gilman is readily identifiable as the subject of the defamatory comments,” said the complaint. “Mr. Spitzer was well aware of his own allegations as attorney general and the resolution of those allegations in favor of Mr. Gilman and yet, recklessly disregarded these facts.”

In 2004 Mr. Spizter, then the state’s Attorney General, announced an investigation into the practices at Marsh & McLennan, particularly fees paid by insures to brokers who place business with them. Gilman, who worked for the company at the time, was charged in 2005 with 37 counts of insurance fraud. Gilman’s final charge was dropped last January.

“I haven’t seen the lawsuit and so will not comment on it,” said Spitzer. “The illegalities rampant at Marsh & McLennan leading to their fine of $850 million and the multiple judicial findings of illegality are clear from the public record.”

Mr. Gilman is now seeking at least $10 million in compensatory damages; $20 million in general damages, including damage to his reputation; and $30 million in punitive damages.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

On Monday, at 10.14 pm UTC, the Wikimedia server cluster experienced a total power failure, taking down Wikipedia, Wikinews, and all other Wikimedia websites.

The servers are housed in a colocation facility (colo) in Tampa, Florida, USA. They occupy two racks, with each rack receiving electricity from two independent supplies. However, both supplies have circuit-breakers in them, and both opened at the same time, leading to a total power failure. All computers immediately went down. It’s normal for fire safety regulations to prohibit uninterruptible power supplies in colos, with the colo providing its own UPS and generator instead. The circuit breakers were on the computer side of this emergency power system, so none of the computers continued to receive power to survive the breaker trip or shut down safely.

The actual reason why the circuit breakers tripped is currently unknown.

When power was restored, it was discovered that most of the MySQL databases that store the data which makes up Wikipedia et al had been corrupted. The main database and the four slaves had all damaged the data on their hard disk drives beyond the ability of the auto-correction to repair. Only one copy survived safely, on a machine that is used for report generation and maintenance tasks, which remained 31 hours backlogged while catching up after an unusually heavy update load during the previous week.

Volunteer Wikimedia engineers worked through the night rebuilding the databases from the sole good copy onto the other servers. The Wikipedia database is over 180Gb in size, making the copying process last 1.5 – 2 hours for every server it was performed upon.

Regular back-ups of the database of Wikipedia projects are maintained – the encyclopedia in its entirety was not at risk. The last database download was made on February 9; all edits since then could only have been laboriously rebuilt from logs and recovered from the damaged database requiring much more time and effort.

Limited read-only service was established late Tuesday afternoon, with editing becoming possible 24 hours after the power failure. Final repairs continue now, as well as upgrades to prevent similar issues in the future. Server-intensive features, such as categories and ‘watchlists’ that display recent changes to selected articles to registered users, remain disabled to ease the load on the recovering systems.

The process which led to the damage originated with the operating system, disk controllers, or hard drives failing to flush the data correctly.

If the power to a database server is cut mid-write, the database may be corrupted and unreadable, however the operating system, hardware, and software are designed to make this very unlikely. In a previous incident in 2004 power was also lost to a server but the database was undamaged.

To avoid such damage, each database server saves a copy of an edit to be applied to the database on a separate storage system before making the actual update to the database itself. This so-called ‘write-ahead logging’ should ensure that in the event of a system crash, the database can be rebuilt from a ‘last-good’ state by replaying the edits saved in the log.

Earlier this year popular blogging site LiveJournal suffered a similar power failure when another customer at their colocation facility pressed an Emergency Power Off button, intended for use only by firefighters. The company suffered database corruption similar to that seen at Wikimedia.

LiveJournal are now fitting UPS to their servers to ensure that they have time to shut down safely in the event of a power failure. Wikimedia was said to be investigating the possibility of fitting similar equipment at the time of this failure.

Several pundits have suggested that the use of another database, such as the proprietary database Oracle or the free PostgreSQL, would have avoided the database corruption seen at the server cluster. A post-mortem of the incident show the failure was in the operating system, or the hardware, or some combination of the two. LiveJournal, which also uses MySQL, reported similar database corruption after their power cut.

The Wikimedia foundation only allows the use of free software on its systems, and future versions of the Mediawiki software will support the PostgreSQL database.

Users are reminded that during times of system failure or excessive demand, they can still search Wikipedia using Google. The articles may be viewed using Google’s cache.