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Wednesday, June 3, 2020

John Luk Jok, the South Sudanese minister for East African Affairs and a figure in independence from Sudan, died yesterday in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan. Luk, reportedly aged about 68, had suffered a prolonged illness, according to a family spokesperson. He is also credited with helping draft South Sudan’s Transitional Constitution prior to independence in 2011.

Michael Makuei, the Information Minister paid tribute to Luk. He said on Voice of America’s South Sudan in Focus programme “It is a great loss to the people of South Sudan, because John Luk had contributed a lot, and him and myself has done a lot in the legal sector and in the negotiations and in all aspects of governance system in South Sudan. So his death is not only a loss to the community, but a loss to the people and the government of South Sudan”.

One of South Sudan’s Vice Presidents, Rebecca Nyandeng De Mabior, also commented on Luk’s death to The EastAfrican. She said “John Luk was very honest, hardworking and a brilliant person who devoted his entire life to fight for South Sudan during the liberation processes until his death. He is a person the whole country will miss.”

Prior to holding the post of East African Affairs minister, Luk reportedly held positions as transport, justice, and petroleum, energy, and mining minster at different times since independence. Prior to the 2011 independence he served as a legal advisor during peace negotiations.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Virginia – Joshua Brady, a former Sprint Nextel customer, has had his cellular phone account shut off, but not because he wasn’t paying the phone bill, or even because he was late on payments, but because a customer service representative who assisted him, began to call him outside of her job, and make death threats to him in September of 2006. She was never fired for her actions, Brady says.

Brady has agreed to be interviewed by Wikinews to tell his story. All information and claims have been logged with Brady’s attorney and federal authorities.

The representative from Sprint Nextel, who for safety reasons is only being identified as Jessica, was working at the company’s call center in Ontario, Canada where Brady’s call to customer service was directed. According to Brady, Jessica then began to call him outside of her job duties at the call center after their first contact.

Brady called the center around 6:00 p.m. (eastern time) on a Saturday and attempted to receive help on a billing question and to find a way to stop prank calls. Brady requested a “soc code”, a code placed into the phone, that would allow for the number that was pranking him to be blocked. Unfortunately, Jessica did not know what that was, but tried unsuccessfully to find it. According to Brady, the only thing she could find was “the ANI feature call centers have.”

Brady then described to Jessica the billing issue he was having. He was being charged “for text messages I was not making”, even though he had unlimited text messaging with his billing plan. Meanwhile, Jessica called for a supervisor to help locate the code. As this customer service request over the phone was taking quite a bit of time, the two of them then started to discuss what two people would normally discuss if just chatting; sports, the weather, movies and music and if Virginia was a nice place to go on vacation. The supervisor then came by Jessica’s station with no luck on finding a code.

Later that night, around 10:30 p.m., Brady received a call. He answered it and much to his surprise, it was Jessica. He answered the phone with the usual “hello” and the voice on the other end answered with “hello Josh.” Brady was “surprised” that she had not said “hello Mr. Brady.”

“I then asked who it was, and she said Jessica. She told me about her day, and hoped that I did not mind her calling.” Then according to Brady, she started to describe how much she hated working in a call center, and how the job “pays the bills”, and asked if she could “come visit me sometime”. Brady said that he “immediately started to record” the call. Brady also stated that Jessica was not aware she was being recorded, and that further conversations were recorded without her knowing.

The call lasted about 15 minutes, but Brady said she “spoke so fast and moved along through things” that he “didn’t have a chance to talk if I wanted to. It [the call] ended with me interrupting her and telling her I had to go to dinner with a friend.”

Brady immediately called customer care back and reported Jessica’s actions to a supervisor (Jason), and the Floor Manager (Also named Jessica) at the Coos Bay call center, which is where his call happened to be directed. The advice he received was to “play along” and continue to report her actions until they could locate someone “better equipped” to handle the situation.

Jessica then began to call “about every other day or so” which turned out to be almost 30 calls, according to Brady who reported each call she made to Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Nextel then told Jessica to cease and desist all contact with Brady, but that didn’t stop Jessica from contacting him. She somehow found out the screen-name of his AOL Instant Messenger account, and left messages threatening to kill him. Brady logged the messages and faxed them to Sprint, who about a week later sent Brady a letter, saying that his accounts have been terminated.

“The purpose of this letter is to inform our that our office has received a complaint regarding your recent questionable interactions with our customer care group. Recent interactions with our company have prompted us to formally contact you. Sprint Nextel terms and conditions state that “termination of services. consistent with this agreement…”, said the letter from Sprint Nextel.

Brady states that Jessica is still employed with Sprint Nextel, despite the fact that all instant messages left by Jessica were forwarded to Sprint Nextel.

As recently as July 10, 2007, as many as 1,000 accounts were terminated by Sprint Nextel because customers were complaining too much and asking too many questions about billing.

“While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs,” said one letter to a sprint customer as recent as June 29, 2007. The letter states that the service will be terminated just one day after the letter was written despite saying they “understand switching to a new carrier causes an inconvenience.”

Two weeks ago, Sprint addressed the media about the mass-cancellations. “These accounts have been researched very carefully,” Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton said. “We feel strongly that the decisions we made, we stand by them. These decisions weren’t made lightly.”

“If the average person is calling less than once per month and these people are calling 40 or 50 times more, that takes away from customer service,” Singleton said. “Our priority is to improve the customer experience.”

Wikinews sent e-mails to Sprint Nextel on July 20 regarding the Brady incident; to date no response has been received.

Update: On July 23, 2007, Wikinews received an email response from a Sprint representative, going to some length to explain the termination of the customers who were calling up to hundreds of times a month. No information was given on the Brady case covered in this article; “customer privacy considerations” were cited as the reason and “no comment” was Sprint’s reply.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

One of Mexico’s most successful cartoonists, Gabriel Vargas, died yesterday at the age of 95. His death was announced by the National Council of the Arts and Culture. Vargas had been ill for several years before his death, but no cause of death has yet been given.

Vargas’s most successful comic strip was “La Familia Burron” which he started in 1937. The strip looked at a low-income family struggling with everyday life. It sold up to 500,000 copies per week until the 1970s.

Later in his career he won several awards for his work, including Mexico’s National Journalism Prize in 1983 and the National Sciences and Arts prize in 2003.

There was a memorial viewing for Vargas at a funeral home in Mexico City yesterday.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Annabel Goldie, Scottish Conservative Party leader from 2005 to 2011, has announced she will stand down as an MSP at the next elections in 2016. Goldie, who has been an MSP for the West Scotland (previously West of Scotland) electoral region since the Scottish Parliament’s formation in 1999, said she intends to focus on her role in the House of Lords, where she has been a peer since 2013.File:Annabel Goldie.jpg

In a statement today, Goldie said leading the party was an “enormous honour” for her. She also said: “It has afforded me both satisfaction and pleasure to serve my constituents and to serve the parliament and I will look back with great happiness at my time as an MSP. I am grateful to friends and colleagues from all parties for their support. Sometimes we found common ground, sometimes we disagreed but never I hope with rancour nor disrespect. Politics is a rough trade but we have built a strong parliament in Scotland of which we can all be rightly proud.” She said because of Ruth Davidson, her successor as Scottish Conservative leader, the party is now “in fine fettle and stands a great chance of making real progress in the years ahead,” concluding by saying: “I look forward to continuing to work as part of that effort in the House of Lords in the years to come.”

Davidson responded to the news by calling Goldie an “unstoppable force”, adding: “She has been an inspiration to a whole generation of Scottish Conservatives, and she has been a tremendous mentor, support and friend to me. In Holyrood, she has fostered both affection and respect from all members – regardless of their political affiliation – and her retirement from the Scottish Parliament will leave an Annabel-sized hole which won’t ever quite be filled. She is unique.” Meanwhile, David Cameron, UK Conservative leader and UK Prime Minister, said: “Annabel is one of those rare breeds in Scottish politics, somebody known by her first name alone. When she was Scottish Conservative leader, I valued her sage advice. She has been a towering strength to our party in Scotland, a doughty debater in the TV studios and Scottish Parliament and has one of the sharpest wits around. I wish her a long and happy retirement after 17 years unstinting service at Holyrood – but look forward to seeing her on the red benches of the Lords for years to come.”

Goldie, the Scottish Conservatives’ first ever female leader, was elected unopposed. She took up the role in the aftermath of David McLetchie’s resignation from the role in an expenses usage controversy and subsequent resignation of Brian Monteith from his Conservative whip role in the Scottish Parliament for briefing the media against him. Meanwhile, as Scottish Conservatives won 18 seats in the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and 2003, the party had been less successful in UK general elections in Scotland; Conservatives went up from zero out of a possible 72 UK MPs in Scotland in 1997 to one in 2001. This led to Goldie remarking in her inaugural speech in 2005 that: “The wheels are back on the wagon – and I’m the nag hitched up to tow it.” She also said: “The party is still way ahead of where it was in 1997. And my first task is to take it forward to 2007.” However, under Goldie’s leadership, the number of seats the Scottish Conservatives won in the Scottish Parliament slightly decreased from 18 in 2003 to 17 in 2007 and to 15 in 2011. At the same time, the number of Conservative MPs stood at one out of a possible 59 after the 2010 UK general election.

In the aforementioned 2005 speech, she also said the party could be trusted with devolution in Scotland, adding: “making devolution work better means real devolution: not the lumbering and cripplingly expensive array of government departments, government advisers, consultants, quangos, quasi-quangos and agencies with all their expensive appendages, but devolving down to people and their communities, their right to make their own decisions about their lives, how for example they procure healthcare and how they educate their children.” Goldie would go on to sit on the advisory board for the Smith Commission, which was set up to examine which further political powers should be devolved to Scotland following the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. More recently, Goldie supported a reduction in the voting age for Scottish Parliament elections from 18 to 16 in a vote earlier this month, commenting: “I think it is an opportunity for them to continue their high level of engagement in topical affairs that we saw with the independence referendum.”

Goldie, a member of the Salvation Army’s West of Scotland Advisory Board and a Church of Scotland elder, is not the only Scottish Conservative MSP intending to stand down in 2016. Mary Scanlon, Gavin Brown, Alex Fergusson and Nanette Milne all reportedly intend to leave the Scottish Parliament next year.

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Sunday, January 27, 2013File:Australian Mitre 10 logo.jpg

Wednesday, an over-90-year-old Manns Mitre 10 hardware store, run by Alex P Mann Pty Ltd, closed until further notice after a rent dispute in Port Adelaide, South Australia. The rent dispute involved $315,060.70 of rent for months of September 2012 to January 2013 unpaid to the landlord, Fourteen Sails Pty Ltd. The site was distrained. The store had to fire about 40–50 employees without a warning in advance.

The store was closed three days before Australia Day, January 26, Saturday.

The store administrator, Tim Clifton, said they had to ring the workers out of the blue: “I was advised the landlord had distrained for unpaid rent over the business and that left the directors in the position where the business was untenable. I presume at this stage trading was poor and the company just didn’t have the money to pay the rent. … Unfortunately they had to terminate their employment this morning and we’ve rung them all. We’ll do our best to get them their entitlements under the government schemes, and we calculate what they’re owed in the next few days and hopefully get that underway for them. … It’s a sad day. It’s a sign of the times isn’t it. Things are tough out there.”

Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union state secretary Dave Kirner said workers were not allowed to collect their personal belongings left inside of the store: “I spoke with a worker who said the locks have been changed, they were asked to leave and all their personal belongings are in there”.

On Saturday, Wikinews took photos of the documents available at the store entrance. The rent dispute details and an inventory were available for everyone to read. During the ten minutes of taking photos, around seven people visited the closed entrance and read the documents a first time. One of them commented, “oh hey, Bunnings will be stronger”.

The store owner, Jarred Spearman, reported negotiations ongoing with the landlord and said he would “hopefully try to work [our] way out of this … We are pretty lucky to have the customers and staff we had”.

Port Adelaide Mayor Gary Johanson said the loss of the store is a significant loss as Port Adelaide is being redeveloped: “Their staff were extremely good, the service levels were high, the store was always well stocked and it was a great example of a family business. That will be a great loss to the Port.” “The landlord is not at fault here. The landlord is acting within their rights. … This is the sort of thing we cannot afford to lose if we’re serious about the Port being redeveloped. This is not a multinational company. This is a franchise of a bigger company but it is a family franchise and it employs a lot of staff. The staff that they employ are local people and they’re employing large amounts of staff in relation to their turnover. We need to take stock of what local businesses we have left and say, how can we ensure they stay with us?”