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A compilation of brief news reports for Tuesday, September 25, 2007.

Canadian workers with the Canadian Auto Workers Union have gone on strike due to 70,000 American employees of United Auto Workers Union (UAW) forced to strike against General Motors (GM), just one day ago.

GM Canada’s Windsor, Ontario plant, which employs 1,400 people shut down on Monday. On Tuesday Car Plant 1 in Oshawa, Ontario, which employs 3,000, closed at 3:00am ET. Car Plant 2, also in Oshawa, which employs 2,500 workers, could make a speedy close today or tomorrow. Other GM car plants in Ontario are also feared to close during the strike.

If the strike in the U.S. stays, up to 100,000 Canadian UAW workers could be laid off, according to Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers Union. Eighty-thousand Canadians work for the auto-parts industry in Canada, and 40,000 could be laid off, Hargrove also says.

According to the BBC, analysts say the strike will only last for two weeks. The UAW last called a national strike on GM 30 years ago.

Related news

• “70,000 General Motors employees go on strike” — Wikinews, September 24, 2007

Sources

• “Strikes close Canadian GM plants” — BBC News Online, September 25, 2007
• John McCrank. “More Canadian layoffs on day 2 of GM strike in U.S.” — Reuters, September 25, 2007

Findings on a new “sleep survey” seem to be mixed as a sleep analysis of 10,308 government workers over seventeen years was recently made public. The study was conducted by the University of Warwick and the University College London in the United Kingdom.

The participants were aged 35-55. Researchers examined the participants’ sleeping habits between the years of 1995 to 1998, and 1992 to 1993, and mortality rates until 2004. It also compared the social lives of the participants to sleeping habits.

The study shows that, if a person cuts their sleep from seven hours to five hours they ultimately risk an increase of death and death from cardiovascular problems. But sleeping more than eight hours doubles the risk of death, and death would be triggered from non-cardiovascular diseases. Sleeping less than five hours per night increases a risk of weight gain, Type 2 diabetes, and other diseases, which could end up in leading to death.

“A third of the population of the UK and over 40 percent in the U.S. regularly sleep less than five hours a night, so it is not a trivial problem,” said Francesco Cappuccio, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Warwick. “The current pressures in society to cut out sleep, in order to squeeze in more, may not be a good idea — particularly if you go below five hours.”

“This change, largely the result of sleep curtailment to create more time for leisure and shift-work, has meant that reports of fatigue, tiredness and excessive daytime sleepiness are more common than a few decades ago. Sleep represents the daily process of physiological restitution and recovery, and lack of sleep has far-reaching effects,” he said on the university’s website.

“In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health,” Cappuccio added.

The new findings have been published on medical journal SLEEP‘s website. It will officially be published in the magazines next issue.

Sources

• Press Release: “Researchers say lack of sleep doubles risk of death… but so can too much sleep” — University of Warwick, September 25, 2007
• Ben Hirschler. “Lack of sleep may be deadly” — Reuters, September 25, 2007
• “Too much sleep as harmful as not enough: study” — CTV, September 25, 2007

Friday, December 2, 2011

The following is the first in a monthly series chronicling the U.S. 2012 presidential election. It will feature original material compiled throughout the previous month after a brief mention of some of the month’s biggest stories.

In this month’s edition on the campaign trail: the Party for Socialism and Liberation nominates an underaged presidential ticket; a college football coach announces that he is running for president; and a candidate excluded from the GOP debates answers whether or not he would run under a third party label.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A Proton rocket which was intended to launch the JCSAT-11 satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit lifted off and successfully completed its first stage burn, but the second stage failed leading to loss of the rocket and satellite.

The launch vehicle was a Proton M booster with a Breeze M upper stage. More than 300 Proton rockets have been launched, all from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Following the launch failure, Kazakhstan suspended the launch of Proton rockets from Baikonur, Interfax news agency reported.

JSAT Corporation immediately placed an order with Lockheed Martin, the satellite manufacturer, for an identical replacement satellite based on the A2100AX design.

Monday, March 27, 2006

Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, an organic meatpacking company based in Arkansas City, Kansas, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for what the company claims is threats by the USDA that it would face prosecution if it proceeds with plans to test nearly 100% of its beef for Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease or BSE.

The USDA position is that allowing any meatpacking company to test every cow would undermine the agency’s official position, a position that holds to random testing as a scientifically adequate measure to assure safety. It also claims that 100% testing does not ensure food safety because the disease is difficult to detect in younger animals.

The USDA currently tests about 1% of cattle slaughtered in the U.S. The USDA’s objection is believed to be the result of pressure from larger meatpacking operations. In 2004, the president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association told the Washington Post that “If testing is allowed at Creekstone, we think it would become the international standard and the domestic standard, too.” Creekstone Farms says tests cost about $20 per animal, increasing the cost of beef by about 10 cents per pound.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

The labour dispute between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and its union the Canadian Media Guild continues, with no sign that the sides will return to contract negotiations. The CBC has locked out about 5500 of its union employees, which include broadcasters and technicians. The main disagreement is over the proportion of permanent workers CBC hires.

CBC management wants to increase the number of employees hired under a fixed-term contract basis, as opposed to permanent staff, saying it will give them more flexibility. The Canadian Media Guild calls CBC management’s contract offer “little more than a veiled attempt to buy off employees with their own money”.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

An American inventor has patented a pair of new time formats with a footprint less than 50% of that of conventional four-digit time. The more unusual of the two new formats, called “TWELV”, dispenses with numerals altogether. In place of clock hands or digits, the new clock uses color to convey the hour and a moon image to convey the minute, which moon slowly grows throughout the course of an hour from a narrow crescent to a full-fledged circle.

The second and more approachable of the new formats retains numerical digits to indicate the minute but uses colors to convey the hour.

Early critics question whether the aesthetic benefits of the moon-clock will be sufficient to encourage users to learn the color-based time-telling system. However, the size advantages of the new system may make it particularly suitable for mobile applications, particularly cell phones, wearable computers, and head-mounted displays.

Friday, October 19, 2007

The 7th Taipei International Hardware & DIY Show, organized by Kaigo Taiwan (The representative of Koelnmesse in Taiwan) and Koelnmesse GmbH, started on October 18-20 at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 3. This show has 183 participants using 300 booths to exhibit accessories and tools on esoteric fabricating, home-living applications, and security.

With people in Taiwan valuing on the quality of home-living, the organizer set a pre-show pavilion of “2008 Taipei Home & Lifestyle Fair” and invited B&Q & HomeBox holding DIY workshops for visitors.

This exhibition is conjuncted with industry and applications, and pursuing with three main topics of “Quality, Innovation and Competitiveness”. International factories such as Hitachi, Rexon, Ryobi participated this show for the export opportunity in the hardware industry.

After the “Product Certificates and Testing” pavilion in TAITRONICS Autumn, Bureau of Standards, Metrology & Inspection, M.O.E.A., R.O.C. (Taiwan) and DIY in Europe magazine were invited for speeches focused on certifications on hardware & DIY products and environment issues in EU.

• Spoty Enterprise Co., Ltd.

• Double Dynasty Co., Ltd.