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Goodbye from MacNN, and Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele This is it. The last unique words on the MacNN homepage, barring some miracle. Hey gang, I'm Mike Wuerthele, and I've been your host here for the last couple of years, so it's only fitting that I'm the one turning off the lights. |
Mississauga Mayor Bonnie Crombie said the person who died in Mississauga’s home explosion on Tuesday was a female.(Toronto Star)
Close to 58 homes were evacuated as a safety precaution after one home on Hickory Dr. in Mississauga exploded. Residents have been asked to stay out of their homes as police continue their investigation in the area, she told CP24 Wednesday morning.
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Residents on the quiet Mississauga street were thrown into shock and confusion after the explosion at a house on Hickory Dr. that killed one person, wiped out three homes and caused moderate damage to six to eight others.
“It was like pictures from a hurricane … that’s what it looked like. Everything was strewn all over, tons of 2-by-4s, aluminum, bricks,” said Claudio Cugliari.
Although the cause remains under investigation, authorities confirmed that one person had died and nine others assessed for minor injuries. Firefighters were conducting a search and rescue operation Tuesday evening.
In one photo taken by Cugliari, a woman can be seen being carried from a home by a police officer amid the rubble.
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A man with whom the Star spoke at the police tape line, but who didn't want to be identified, showed the Star images of handwritten letters he said a friend recovered on the street immediately following the blast.
According to a text message conversation, these pieces of paper were collected by the friend on the street in front of the destroyed house, put in a grocery bag and handed off to police.
"Dear God, as of next week everything will fall apart for us," begins the note.
It goes on to say: "We owe mortgage, company, house taxes, water bill, gas bill, hydro bill" and "our outside looks like crap, unkept lawn, overgrown plants, bricks on wall cracking."
The note concludes: "The upstairs bathroom electricity is off, the back bathroom shower has problems and we have No Money to fix or pay anyone."
The note's author is unknown. It is also unclear whether it is related to the explosion.
Asked about the note, Peel Police Const. Rachel Gibbs said it’s "too early to speculate" on what happened Tuesday.
Stop us if you've heard this one before: KFC changed its name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because, legally, they can't describe the product they sell—made up of mutant, eight-legged birds without feathers!—as "chicken." The company's chief marketing officer, Kevin Hochman, has heard that one, too. "Over the years, a lot of customers, believe it or not, think that we can't legally say the word 'chicken,'" he laughs. "And the shame of the whole thing is that all of our chickens are from farms right here in Arkansas and Georgia and states that you know. We don't use any steroids or added hormones to our chickens. That's illegal. I would go to jail if that were the case."(FastCoCreate)
These are the things that you have to address if you work in the fast-food business sometimes, but Hochman has been hard at work to change the image of Kentucky Fried Chicken, words that appear in bright red letters on their packaging and website once more, over the past few years. Part of that process has involved hiring a slew of famous faces—Darrell Hammond, Norm Macdonald, Jim Gaffigan, and now George Hamilton—to step into the bright white suit of its founder and mascot, Colonel Harland David Sanders.
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..."the golden bronze of Mr. George Hamilton" was tapped because "the majority of our customers don't know that we have extra crispy, a second recipe for fried chicken, at our restaurant."
In the 1990s, the Nova Scotia government entered into public–private partnerships in order to facilitate the construction of 39 schools across the province. Over the intervening years the total cost of those leases has been about a billion dollars. Over the next few years the 20-year leases are expiring and the province is faced with some tough choices: extend the leases another five years, walk away from the schools, or buy them outright for about $230 million.(Halifax Examiner)
This week we speak with Christine Saulnier, Nova Scotia Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The CCPA recently released an in-depth examination of the P3 process for building schools and concluded it was a flawed process and that much of that billion dollars served to line the bank accounts of a handful of private developers with no real value to taxpayers.
A Muslim woman shopping with her four-month-old son was attacked in a London, Ont., supermarket Monday, according to police.(CBC or Global News for those who can't bring themselves to click on a CBC story))
The woman was at the Superking Supermarket at 785 Wonderland Rd. S. at approximately 5 p.m. when another woman approached her and began yelling at her for no apparent reason, police said.
The woman, unknown to the shopper, allegedly spit on the victim, punched her several times and then tried to pull off the victim's and pulling her hair, police said.
The suspect then left the store.
Police are looking for a woman standing five feet five inches and weighing 150 pounds. She is about 40 years old with a medium build, long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was wearing a red Canada T-shirt and black pants and was carrying a green purse.
Police say the suspect spoke with a "heavy accent" but are unsure which language she was speaking.
The victim sustained minor injuries.
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This is the fourth publicly reported attack against visible minorities in London in the past eight months.
Pennsylvania authorities discovered 12 children in the home of a man who has been charged with sexually assaulting them over the span of three years.(IndependentUK)
NBC10 reports the girls’ ages ranged between as little as six months to 18 years. The man is accused of assaulting them between 2012 and 2015, according to the Lower Southampton Police Department.
The 18-year-old victim gave birth to two of the children, allegedly fathered by the suspect, 51-year-old Lee Kaplan.
“This child gave birth to two other children thorugh an inappropriate relationship,” Lt John Krimmel said.
Police are investigating allegations that the 18-year-old had been "gifted" to Kaplan by another family when she was 14, according to the Bucks County Courier.
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According to reports, a hacker has stolen 45 million records from 1,100 websites and forums hosted by VerticalScope, a Toronto-based media company that owns properties like HTCFlyerforums, TopHosts, Galaxy S2Forums, and DigitalHome. On its website, the company boasts 84 million unique visitors monthly and 540 million page views monthly. |
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Better Siri, Photos, and Music, while Maps and Messages are open to developers. There will be a public beta available in July, and it will be a free upgrade to all compatible devices this fall. There will also be a developer preview available today. Apple made the announcement at its WWDC keynote. iOS 10 has a redesigned control center with interactive notifications and improvements to widgets (such as those that show calendar and weather information). 3D Touch can now do more: for example, you can press your screen to clear all notifications at once. Siri is getting improvements, with the ability to book rides on services like Uber and Lyft, start and pause workouts, and make payments to send money to friends with Square Cash and other services. Siri will be more intelligent in messaging. For example, if a friend asks for the contact information of another friend, Siri can automatically provide the contact. Siri can also pull up calendar availability in message threads and let you do multilingual typing without switching the keyboard language. Apple also promised more intelligent photo management, including facial recognition technology to identify people in photos. The phone and tablet photo tools will help users sort photos by what's in them, such as specific people or objects (like a horse or mountain). Photos can also be sorted by automatically generated topics, like "on the water" or "at the beach." A new "memories" feed in the Photos app will take advantage of the new sorting tools. Maps improvements include: the ability to pan and zoom further ahead to see traffic conditions, quick controls to see route details, and locations of food and gas stations on your route. Maps will tell you how much longer it will take to go to any of these places. Apple is opening Maps to developers with Maps Extensions, which lets you make reservations through OpenTable and will enable other types of integrations. |
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Two Calgary real estate developers have been charged with fraud and theft after 864 investors in Alberta lost in excess of $33 million in a proposed resort development project in Crowsnest Pass. The alleged offences are related to the use of investors' money by Bridgecreek Development Corporation between 2006 and 2007. The investigation by the Alberta RCMP began in 2012. William Lloyd Bradley, 68, and Colin Joseph Becker, 49, both of Calgary, have been charged with committing fraud and theft. Both men were officers and directors of Bridgecreek Development Corporation during the time of the offences |
You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture.
That’s where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime.
Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
It’s called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.
Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.
“We’re gonna look for different factors in the way that you’re acting,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent said. “We’re gonna look for if there’s a difference in your story. If there’s someway that we can prove that you’re falsifying information to us about your business.”
Troopers insist this isn’t just about seizing cash.
(News9 via cryptogon)
The University of Calgary says it paid a ransom of $20,000 demanded after a recent cyberattack in order to regain access to its own email system.(The Star)
The school said in a news release Tuesday that staff were able to isolate some of the attack and were working to ensure its computer systems are operational.
Linda Dalgetty, a university vice-president, said there’s no indication that any personal data was released to the public.
Dalgetty said while its unfortunate to pay the ransom, the university could not risk losing critical data.
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This type of attack involves an unknown cyber-attacker locking or encrypting computers or computer networks until a ransom is paid, and when it is, keys, or methods of decryption, are provided.
The attacks started at the end of May, locking staff, students and faculty out of their emails.
Now that a ransom has been paid, the university hopes it can regain control of its systems quickly.
The university said Calgary police were investigating.
The Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre issued a joint alert with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security earlier this year warning about the proliferation of ransomware.
It estimates that there were more than 1,600 ransomware attacks per day in 2015 against Canadians.
Muhammad Ali has been put on a life support machine after being rushed to hospital with respiratory problems.(Joe)
Arguably the greatest boxer in the history of the sport is in hospital and four of his nine children are reportedly at his bedside.
Doctors have told them that they fear he 'is near the end' in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Ali's condition is complicated by the Parkinson's Disease he has been living with since the 1980s.
Three of the 74-year-old's daughters - Laila, Hana and Maryum - flew in to be with him on Thursday.
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If you were expecting the upcoming fall iPhone to blow you out of the water, think again. Apple may switch its major iPhone cycle to once every three years, which would bring the next big upgrade to 2017, not 2016. Interest in getting the latest and greatest smartphone is waning, and why wouldn’t it — budget phones are now getting equipped with almost all the bells and whistles you would typically find on more expensive devices, and newer devices don’t offer anything new except updated internals. To adapt, rather than releasing a major iPhone upgrade every two years, Apple may be considering waiting an extra year. The rumor comes from Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, which also says*Apple will only make incremental updates to the highly anticipated iPhone 7 this year. We can’t verify this report, so take this information with a grain of salt. Apple did not immediately respond for comment. Nikkei’s report says we can expect to see minor changes to the rumored iPhone 7 this fall, such as “improved camera quality,” better water resistance, and a higher*battery capacity. The headphone jack will likely be removed, and Nikkei mentions a possible “high-end” version of the device, which can offer alternative photo capabilities. |
