Lost Time
A lot of time has passed since my last posting but I am back with every intention of staying. I am just recovering from a broken ankle which was pretty bad, three broken bones and a dislocated ankle. I now realise what it is like to be housebound and I don't envy anyone who is in that permanant position. It is now six months since the accident and yesterday was my first trip around the supermarket, my legs were killing me by the time we got round but I was so pleased, even though I normally hate shopping.
My holiday in Turkey turned into a nightmare when I slipped on some steps by the swimming pool and it was only the fourth day of my holiday, I spent the next five days in hospital and you could say that was the end of the holiday for me.
You would think that Turkish hospitals might be behind the times, but it was fantastic and I couldn't find a single fault.
If only the UK hospitals were as good. I have had my fill of hospitals in the UK. Hours waiting to see the consultant then in and out of my appointment in five minutes. Oh I could say so much more but it would be a waste of time, my problem was nothing compared to others.
DRUG SCARE SCHOOLKIDS 'OVERDOSED' ON MINTS
Staff feared it was ecstasy
By Jeremy Armstrong
A GROUP of pupils thought to have been poisoned by ecstasy were rushed to hospital - where doctors found a packet of old MINTS were to blame.
Teachers feared the drug had been handed out in the playground when 10 youngsters complained of feeling unwell and dizzy after being given "small, white pills".
They dialled 999 and the groggy kids were carted off in a fleet of ambulances and police vans.
But a probe at the Venerable Bede C of E secondary school found their illnesses were caused by out-of-date mints given out by another pupil.
Head teacher Ed Yeates said: "The mints were innocently shared out amongst friends but they made some of them feel unwell.
"Staff were alerted, the sweets taken away for further examination and health and safety procedures brought immediately into effect.
"As a precautionary measure those involved were taken to hospital where they were thoroughly examined and quickly released while their parents were contacted as soon as possible."
One father of a 13-year-old boy at the school in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, said: "My son told me someone from year eight had been handing out sweets saying it was ecstasy.
"They later started feeling sick and the next thing, police and ambulances starting turning up at the school. I am concerned as any parent would be about it. We have always told our son not to take anything handed to him by someone else.
"I hope they take this seriously, it sounds like a joke that got out of hand."
The mother of a 15-year-old pupil added: "All I heard was the word drugs and that kids had been taken poorly and taken to hospital. It is worrying and relief that it was just mints. It appears he got them from his nan."
Northumbria police referred Thursday's incident to the Health and Safety Executive.
A spokeswoman said: "Ten children were reported to have said they felt unwell and an ambulance was called and they were taken to Sunderland Royal Hospital as a precaution.
"It appears the cause of the problem was out-of-date sweets."
A hospital spokesman added: "A number of children were examined after it was believed they had eaten a white powdery substance.
"We gather this was probably mints and all were quickly discharged without any ill effects."
Bid to deport foreign prisoners
Home Secretary John Reid will continue talks with European justice and interior ministers as Britain's jails near bursting point.
Mr Reid travelled to Luxembourg for the first day of the talks, which he is holding with other justice and interior ministers from the European Union.
He has already made clear that he would like to see more foreign prisoners removed from the UK, possibly serving part or all of their sentences in their home countries.
Latest figures show the number of prisoners in England and Wales has reached 79,642, with capacity put by the Prison Service as 79,968. The population, already running at record levels, rose by another 357 in the week to September 29 and if that trend continues, jails could be full within days.
An announcement of emergency measures for reducing prison overcrowding is expected in the next few days.
A Home Office spokesman said officials were likely to present a series of options to Mr Reid regarding possible action if the prison population reaches capacity. He added that this was likely to include proposals for dealing with foreign national prisoners.
The BBC reported that these included deporting or transferring to immigration centres some of the 10,000 foreign prisoners who are being held. Officials are also reported to be considering releasing some inmates early to free up prison cells or using cells at police stations - a strategy known as Operation Safeguard - to house prisoners.
A Prison Service spokeswoman said that the prison population was something which was "closely monitored". She pointed to announcements in July to create thousands of new prison places by building new prisons as well as expanding existing ones.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "This is a situation which the Home Office, working alongside the Prison Service, keep under constant review, and it will be a matter for operational decisions as to how they manage it."
Charles Bushell, leader of the Prison Governors Association, told the BBC: "We have reached bursting point. Anybody who says we should build more prisons needs to say how many and where the money is going to come from."
House of cards: why the party could be over for internet gambling
The poker face has finally cracked: US Congress’ decision to ban internet gambling has shocked the London-listed online gambling industry and knocked billions from share prices of its companies.
Many executives in the $12 billion industry had confidently faced down the growing threats from Congressmen, predicted that a ban would never make it into law and assured investors that online gambling could not be stopped.
Time to fold?
Now many in these firms are hinting they may no longer take bets from the US. The trouble is that the gambling habits of Americans account for between half and three-quarters of their business.
Catch a falling star…
Following news of the passage of legislation over the weekend, shares in online gaming firms PartyGaming, Sportingbet, 888 Holdings and Empire Online immediately dropped by around two-thirds on Monday morning, before investors had any chance to sell. Sportingbet, which had been in the process of taking over rival World Gaming, abandoned the transaction.
Specialist payment service Neteller, which allows gamblers to fund their habit and make withdrawals of winnings, was 62% lower at 145p. U.S. listed Optimal Group, whose FireOne subsidiary is a rival to Neteller, is declined further on Monday after a 15% fall late on Friday.
Firms like PlayTech, which makes gaming software, were not exempt. The shares more than halved in the first few minutes of trading. See intraday chart for Partygaming
See quote for 888 Holdings Neteller share price chart Bill Frist’s three card trick.
The law was passed late on Friday night, just before Congress packed up for a month’s campaigning for mid-term elections. Senate majority leader Bill Frist managed to get the controversial legislation tacked onto the end of another bill, one which deals with port security and whose passage before the recess was seen as vital. That allowed the anti-gambling bill, which was too far down the packed legislative schedule to make it into law, to jump the queue without having to be voted on.
What the rules mean
The new rules, something of a watered-down version of a bill which passed the House of Representatives in June, do not target those who gamble nor the offshore websites who offer the service, but the domestic banks which process their payments. Banks will no longer be allowed to route payments to these websites. President Bush has until November 7 to sign the bill into law, and the US banking and credit card industry has another 270 days to work out how to make it work.
Senator Jon Kyl, one of the architects of the bill, applauded its passage. "It's been over 10 years in the making,” he said.
“The enforcement provisions provided by this bill will go a long way to stop these illegal online operations."
Others were furious. "The American people should be outraged that Congress has hi-jacked a vital security bill with a poker prohibition that nearly three fourths of the country opposes," said Michael Bolcerek, president of the Poker Players Alliance, which has around 110,000 US-based members.
The maze of US gambling laws
US gambling rules are a mess and have been for decades. This latest law makes the morass even murkier.
Most gambling is illegal, though some states allow it in certain areas.
These include Florida, New Jersey and most prominently Nevada, which hosts a huge casino industry in Las Vegas. Other states also allow gambling where casinos are on native American land, or in specific places such as in floating casinos with all sorts of arcane rules over whether they should be moored or not when gambling starts. The upshot is that if you want to gamble, you can find legal ways to do it.
Most of the opposition to gambling comes on moral grounds: that gambling is addictive, that it corrupts individuals, ruins families and causes huge social problems. All this is true, though outlawing it has never been able to stop it entirely any more than the sale of alcohol was eradicated in the US during the prohibition era of the 1920s and 30s.
Those who oppose the new law maintain that regulation is a better way of dealing with gambling’s ills than driving it underground.
Different rules, different games
Moreover, the legal framework is riven with hypocrisy. The US has a thriving state lottery industry, including scratch-card games based on poker. Horse race betting remains legal while other kinds of sports betting are not. Any kind of betting that takes place over telephone or telegraph wires is in theory illegal under the 1961 Wire Line Act. The new law fails to clarify that Act in its application to the internet.
The Louisiana loophole
Louisiana, the state which tried and failed last month to get Sportingbet chairman Peter Dicks extradited from New York State because his company takes sports bets from its citizens, freely allows visitors to spend money at floating casinos and makes tax money from that gambling.
Supporters of a ban are mainly drawn from Christian groups, and a body of Republican legislators, led by Senator Kyl and Congressman Bob Goodlatte, on whose bills the compromise legislation is fashioned. However, it was probably the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that put fire in their bellies. In a city that tolerates a huge amount of political donation and patronage, Abramoff’s free-spending activities on behalf of the gambling industry, and his defrauding of a number of Indian tribes was just too much.
It’s not quite over yet…maybe Investors in London-listed Internet gambling companies have a few straws to grasp at. First, the US banks responsible for identifying gambling transactions have already complained that their job will be both expensive and difficult. The Independent Community Bankers of America said in July that it there was currently no way of ‘coding’ electronic payments and personal cheques by the type of recipient in the way that credit card transaction can be.
One senior Republican politician, quoted by the gambling advocacy website Gambling911.com, said that the law as passed changed very little, because of the technical difficulties already involved in processing card payments. "The bill affects Visa/MasterCard transactions and it is getting impossible to use these cards anyway [for online gambling transactions],” he said.
Trade rule challenge
Second, in the longer term the US may face a challenge over the discriminatory nature of its attack on gambling. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2004 backed a complaint by Antigua and Barbuda that the US was in breach of trading rules for banning credit card companies from making payments to gambling web sites based on the islands, while allowing them to make payments to US-based casinos.
The US claims that it can use the ‘moral exception’ clause allowed under WTO rules, but that may not be sustainable as the new law has failed to deal with either state lotteries or horse racing.
What’s left for investors?
While almost all online gambling companies get the bulk of their business from the US, there have been big efforts to diversify into Europe and the Far East. Most of these newer ventures are not yet mature. The two-thirds fall in stocks today is probably a fair valuation of the remaining business assets, assuming the value of the US activities to be nil.
Investors in the online gambling sector should long have been aware of the legislative risks which have fuelled the volatility in their shares. Clearly, the industry has massively overplayed its hand. But, hey, that’s poker.
Gambleing Ban
The poker face has finally cracked: US Congress’ decision to ban internet gambling has shocked the London-listed online gambling industry and knocked billions from share prices of its companies.
Many executives in the $12 billion industry had confidently faced down the growing threats from Congressmen, predicted that a ban would never make it into law and assured investors that online gambling could not be stopped.
Time to fold?
Now many in these firms are hinting they may no longer take bets from the US. The trouble is that the gambling habits of Americans account for between half and three-quarters of their business.
Industry leader Partygaming today issued a statement saying it would suspend all "real money" gaming activities in the US if President George W Bush signed the bill into law, and warned that its profits would be hard hit. Another leading player, 888 Holdings, said it would stop taking US bets once the bill becomes law.
Catch a falling star…
Following news of the passage of legislation over the weekend, shares in online gaming firms PartyGaming, Sportingbet, 888 Holdings and Empire Online immediately dropped by around two-thirds on Monday morning, before investors had any chance to sell. Sportingbet, which had been in the process of taking over rival World Gaming, abandoned the transaction.
Specialist payment service Neteller, which allows gamblers to fund their habit and make withdrawals of winnings, was 62% lower at 145p. U.S. listed Optimal Group, whose FireOne subsidiary is a rival to Neteller, is declined further on Monday after a 15% fall late on Friday.
Firms like PlayTech, which makes gaming software, were not exempt. The shares more than halved in the first few minutes of trading.
Bill Frist’s three card trick
The law was passed late on Friday night, just before Congress packed up for a month’s campaigning for mid-term elections. Senate majority leader Bill Frist managed to get the controversial legislation tacked onto the end of another bill, one which deals with port security and whose passage before the recess was seen as vital. That allowed the anti-gambling bill, which was too far down the packed legislative schedule to make it into law, to jump the queue without having to be voted on.
What the rules mean
The new rules, something of a watered-down version of a bill which passed the House of Representatives in June, do not target those who gamble nor the offshore websites who offer the service, but the domestic banks which process their payments.
Banks will no longer be allowed to route payments to these websites. President Bush has until November 7 to sign the bill into law, and the US banking and credit card industry has another 270 days to work out how to make it work.
Senator Jon Kyl, one of the architects of the bill, applauded its passage. "It's been over 10 years in the making,” he said.
“The enforcement provisions provided by this bill will go a long way to stop these illegal online operations."
Others were furious. "The American people should be outraged that Congress has hi-jacked a vital security bill with a poker prohibition that nearly three fourths of the country opposes," said Michael Bolcerek, president of the Poker Players Alliance, which has around 110,000 US-based members.
The maze of US gambling laws
US gambling rules are a mess and have been for decades. This latest law makes the morass even murkier.
Most gambling is illegal, though some states allow it in certain areas. These include Florida, New Jersey and most prominently Nevada, which hosts a huge casino industry in Las Vegas.
Other states also allow gambling where casinos are on native American land, or in specific places such as in floating casinos with all sorts of arcane rules over whether they should be moored or not when gambling starts. The upshot is that if you want to gamble, you can find legal ways to do it.
Most of the opposition to gambling comes on moral grounds: that gambling is addictive, that it corrupts individuals, ruins families and causes huge social problems. All this is true, though outlawing it has never been able to stop it entirely any more than the sale of alcohol was eradicated in the US during the prohibition era of the 1920s and 30s. Those who oppose the new law maintain that regulation is a better way of dealing with gambling’s ills than driving it underground.
Different rules, different games
Moreover, the legal framework is riven with hypocrisy. The US has a thriving state lottery industry, including scratch-card games based on poker. Horse race betting remains legal while other kinds of sports betting are not.
Any kind of betting that takes place over telephone or telegraph wires is in theory illegal under the 1961 Wire Line Act. The new law fails to clarify that Act in its application to the internet.
The Louisiana loophole
Louisiana, the state which tried and failed last month to get Sportingbet chairman Peter Dicks extradited from New York State because his company takes sports bets from its citizens, freely allows visitors to spend money at floating casinos and makes tax money from that gambling.
Supporters of a ban are mainly drawn from Christian groups, and a body of Republican legislators, led by Senator Kyl and Congressman Bob Goodlatte, on whose bills the compromise legislation is fashioned. However, it was probably the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that put fire in their bellies.
In a city that tolerates a huge amount of political donation and patronage, Abramoff’s free-spending activities on behalf of the gambling industry, and his defrauding of a number of Indian tribes was just too much.
It’s not quite over yet…maybe
Investors in London-listed Internet gambling companies have a few straws to grasp at. First, the US banks responsible for identifying gambling transactions have already complained that their job will be both expensive and difficult.
The Independent Community Bankers of America said in July that it there was currently no way of ‘coding’ electronic payments and personal cheques by the type of recipient in the way that credit card transaction can be.
One senior Republican politician, quoted by the gambling advocacy website Gambling911.com, said that the law as passed changed very little, because of the technical difficulties already involved in processing card payments.
"The bill affects Visa/MasterCard transactions and it is getting impossible to use these cards anyway [for online gambling transactions],” he said.
Trade rule challenge
Second, in the longer term the US may face a challenge over the discriminatory nature of its attack on gambling.
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2004 backed a complaint by Antigua and Barbuda that the US was in breach of trading rules for banning credit card companies from making payments to gambling web sites based on the islands, while allowing them to make payments to US-based casinos.
The US claims that it can use the ‘moral exception’ clause allowed under WTO rules, but that may not be sustainable as the new law has failed to deal with either state lotteries or horse racing.
What’s left for investors?
While almost all online gambling companies get the bulk of their business from the US, there have been big efforts to diversify into Europe and the Far East. Most of these newer ventures are not yet mature. The two-thirds fall in stocks today is probably a fair valuation of the remaining business assets, assuming the value of the US activities to be nil.
Investors in the online gambling sector should long have been aware of the legislative risks which have fuelled the volatility in their shares. Clearly, the industry has massively overplayed its hand. But, hey, that’s poker.
Is this a Free Country or What !
According to the wikipedia encyclopedia, online chain letters to make money came into existence in 1988 and are classed as scams.
They become scams because people do not follow them through, it could be a perfect money maker if every one followed the rules and forwarded the $1 and sent out to the required number of people, because although it is a type of pyramid scheme it is one where, if people did receive the money promised they would continue to rejoin at intervals and so keep the scheme going.
This type of letter began long before 1988. In 1960 a friend of mine received one of these letters, I also received one but I did not follow it through where as she did.
It asked for the sum of 2/6p which is now an average of 25p.but the promise was not to receive money but a full dinner service if you followed up by sending out a further 25 letters to friends and family etc.
Six months went by and she had given up on it when one day a box was delivered by post, it was the promised dinner service and a really nice one, I was quite sorry that I had missed out on the chance.
It just goes to show that they can work if people really do follow them through.
I t is no wonder that the ones that were sweeping the country in the last two or three years failed and people lost a lot of money, it stands to reason that people would be wary of risking the large amount of money that changed hands, or they did not have that sort of money to hand out and it was bound to come to a sticky end sooner rather than later but people knew it was risky so why cry when it goes haywire.
But risking $1 is a different matter , thousands or millions of us risk more than that on the lottery every single week with millions to one chance of winning.
Isn't the lottery a similar type of thing ? except of course it is backed by the government.
What if one week you won the lottery and the millions you expected turned out to be just a few hundred because suddenly people decided it was a scam and didn't bother to have a go that week you would be rather upset and call it a big scam yourself.
We once lived in a country which we believed was a free country and we prided ourselves on that fact, but slowly but surely all our rights are disappearing and we can not choose for ourselves what we want to do.
Laws are being brought out banning this and that or being made illegal. Are we the people not capable of running our own lives any more?
It seems not because we are slowly but surely allowing any rights we had to be taken away.
We can not choose for ourselves any more, is that what we want?
If we want to take the risk of possibly making money or losing it in what they call scams or hypes why shouldn't we be allowed to make our own minds up.
I haven't seen them banning racing yet, horse and dog and other forms where you can lose your shirt, or even the casinos or bingo halls, WHY! because the government makes money out of them in taxes.
If they made money out of what they call the ponzi schemes there would be no hue and cry or any thoughts of making it illegal.
I was a member of 12 dailypro and like thousands of people I lost money, but I chose to take the risk and join, knowing it was a risk, but that risk was working until certain people decided to put an end to it and it wasn't the person that was running it.
What are stocks and shares aren't they risky ! And doesn't the government wheel and deal every day and feather their own nests in the process.
How do the banks invest their money don't they risk other peoples money, and insurance companies take your money then wheel and deal with it, yes they promise you big things but if they fail and lose the money in a crash who is at a loss ! us of course, but we are allowed to risk our money with them its all legal.
Am I wrong in my thinking, What do you think.?
http://www.woweeitsfree.com/affiliates
Bosses face a costly day
October 1 should be a date circled in red on business owners' calendars. That day will see the introduction of several key pieces of legislation, all of which could have a dramatic impact on the day-to-day running of most companies.
In less than a fortnight, wage bills will rise as the national minimum wage increases by 30p for adults to £5.35 an hour, 20p to £4.45 for 18 to 21-year-olds and by 30p to £3.30 for 16 to 17-year-olds.
Bosses will also have to digest changes to recruitment practices, training, pensions and staff benefits under the new age discrimination regulations.
The Work and Families Act that also comes into force on the first of the month will extend women's rights to paid maternity and adoption leave from six to nine months from April 2007.
The cost to business of complying with legislation introduced since 1998 has already exceeded £50bn, according to the British Chambers of Commerce. David Frost, the organisation's director-general, fears that this figure is set to increase dramatically.
'We expect to see a strong rise in the cost of compliance next year, particularly due to age discrimination laws. Businesses are aware of the changes, but are confused,' he says. 'They don't want the hard facts that the Government provides, they want an interpretation, but often can't afford a human resources manager.'
Martin Edwards, head of employment law at Liverpool and Manchester-based solicitor Mace & Jones, believes it is helpful to businesses that there are two key dates in April and October each year for the introduction of new laws.
He says: 'Having a couple of commencement dates makes small businesses less of a constantly moving target. But more practical help should be given beyond basic guidelines, with advice on how they can comply with new laws.'
While clear Government guidance is wanting, organisations such as the BCC, Federation of Small Businesses, and Forum of Private Business offer advice.
But one area of new legislation that many firms have overlooked is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which shifts responsibility for fire safety and prevention firmly on to the business owner.
Should they fail to assess the risk levels and take steps to prevent accidents, the company boss will be liable if there is a fire.
Peter Cook, fire service manager for Cams Fire & Security of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, which installs and maintains fire and intruder alarm systems, says: 'Government guidance has been hazy. Companies don't need to panic on October 1, but they need to nominate a person to take stock of what goes on in their premises.'
