Tag Archives: fine
Barclays Fined $450m – FSA All-Time Record
How Will France Enforce Impending Burqa Ban?
Freedom of religion versus freedom from religion — that’s the ongoing debate in France now, as a law banning Muslim burqas — or, veiled face coverings — goes into effect Monday.
France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim population. Only around 2,000 women wear the veils–not many considering there’s an estimated four to six million Muslims in France. Neighboring countries also sometimes see the practice as a form of radical Islam. (Video: NBC)
Burqas and niqabs will be banned in public places, like restaurants, schools, and public transportation. So, how will France enforce such a ban? The Telegraph reports — it won’t be by handcuffs:
“Under the new law, women who wear face-covering Muslim veils… face being fined £125 or ordered to follow citizenship classes, or both… Husbands and fathers who force such veils on women and girls risk a year of prison and a £25,000 fine, with both penalties doubled if the victim is a minor.”
The fine, £125, calculates to just over $200 US. And £25,000 — nearly $41,000!
France is a secular country — insistent upon separation of church and state since the early 1900s. Leading up to Monday’s ban, French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party held a debate on secularism. But all this has media outlets wondering if it’s just a political ploy?
“The enactment of the law and the opening of the secularism debate come a year before French presidential elections, with a survey… showing late last month that Sarkozy doesn’t have enough support to make it through to the second round of the vote.”
The BBC says, maybe — but there COULD BE a real problem with immigrant assimilation into French society:
“Some politicians see it is a vote winner – and that may be true. But as Muslims become more visible, there is a concern that some of them are pushing separate identities. And that could lead to parallel, rather than integrated communities.”
American media — used to the idea of freedom of… well, everything — has struggled to report this story without bias. But in an Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, one writer explains how to look at this issue from both sides:
“We may not like their choice. We may find it disturbing and offensive. But it is, in its way, as much a form of free expression as cartoons of Mohammad, which these women, in turn, will find disturbing and offensive. And that’s the deal in a free society: The bur[q]a wearer has to put up with the cartoons; the cartoonist has to put up with the bur[q]as.”
In addition to the ban, the French Interior Minister Claude Guéant says the government wants to reduce the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally — for either work, or family reasons.
Facebook Privacy Update
Simplify the legal print – it’s what Facebook users want and what the social media site is looking to deliver.
The new privacy info page is more visually appealing – the text is larger and simplified for people of all reading levels. But the fine print did not change. So, will users still go for it? (Image Source: Facebook)
A tech blogger for MSNBC says Facebook makes everything much easier to understand.
“Seriously, at a glance, this seems entirely for the better. Take, for instance, the segment titled “How advertising works.” Not only does it explain that personalized ads can be delivered to you based on your location, age and interests, but it actually shows the tool used by advertisers to set their targeting preference — and even lets you try it out.”
And the policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California tells The Wall Street Journal more companies should be doing this.
“It is very good for companies to actually be making privacy policies easier to understand — but users should be looking for privacy policies that are not only readable, but actually protect their privacy.”
But the Facebook privacy policy is not yet entirely complete. The company wants to relaunch a feature which allows third-party apps to get ahold of personal information – like cell phone numbers and addresses. A professor from the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science tells the Huffington Post scams could skyrocket.
“[Scammers] might be able to impersonate you if they had your phone number … They’re saying, ‘Please give us your phone number,’ but they’re not telling you whether they’ll share it or whether they’ll sell it or use [it] for malicious purposes. In fact, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
But the American Morning crew on CNN has a simple answer – don’t post personal info – period.
ALI VELSHI: “The key point–you do have to opt in.”
STEPHANIE ELAM: “You do have to opt in.”
VELSHI: “Okay, so stop blaming Facebook for you putting your information on a free service and then getting all mad that they use it.”
ELAM: “And I do see people who put their home address on there.”
VELSHI: “Yeah, I don’t know why anyone would do that.”
ELAM: “I’m like, take that off. Or my cell phone number, I wouldn’t do that either.”
So, do you think users will like what they see on Facebook’s new privacy page – or is it the same invasion of privacy with a facelift?
Facebook Down???
Reports are coming in from all over the world that facebook is down, a report to CNN states:
– Facebook was down for many users for the second day in a row on Thursday.
A Facebook spokeswoman says Thursday’s issue is not related to the issue on Wednesday that shut or slowed down the site.
“We’re currently experiencing some site issues causing Facebook to be slow or unavailable for some users,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail. “We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
She said the issue was not related to the one from Wednesday, when problems with a third-party network provider shut the site down, or slowed it badly, for several hours.
With more than 500 million users, Facebook is the world’s largest social-networking site.
On Facebook’s blog for developers, a post said the site was “experiencing latency issues,” or a time delay, with its platform. But some tech observers speculated that the delay on the developers’ platform was unlikely to be the entire cause of the problem.
As usual, Facebook’s outage led thousands of social networkers to Twitter to, well … talk about Facebook.
“Somebody needs to fix Facebook ASAP,” wrote Gizmodo blogger Rosa Golijan on her Twitter feed. “I don’t like having to tweet to show that I ‘like’ all the stories about it being down.”
Several sarcastic Twitter users bemoaned the fate of the undernourished virtual plants and animals of FarmVille, while others (presumably with a degree of self-awareness) remarked on the ramifications of the outage.
“OPB BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down,” read a message on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s feed. “Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession.”
- Facebook was down for users Thursday, the second day in a row
- Spokeswoman says the problem isn’t related to a similar outage on Wednesday
- Users flock to Twitter … to talk about Facebook
News source Doug Gross, CNN
Just today in the UK, Facebook seemed to be working just fine as many users communicated and played their social network games, but at about 21:45 GMT, reports started to come in that people were unable to log in and in fact the site was down altogether. I myself tried logging into my account just to see if the reports were true.
Update: it is now 23:10 and it seems facebook is up and running just fine, so hopefully all the issues are now sorted.
