By-Tor.com

Postal Workers Set To Walk Out Over Pay
Updated: 11:43, Thursday June 07, 2007

Post Office workers have voted by a hugely majority to go out on strike in a row over pay.
About 130,000 members of the Communication Workers Union are now prepared to stage a series of walkouts.

Strike set to take placeThat is unless fresh talks lead to a breakthrough in the deadlocked dispute.

Ballots of three separate groups of Royal Mail workers showed overwhelming support for strikes, union leaders revealed.

They will meet next week to draw up plans for the first national strikes since 1996.

The union is in dispute with the Royal Mail over pay after leaders rejected a 2.5% pay offer in response for a demand that postal workers' pay should rise to the national average over the next five years.

Postal Workers Set To Walk Out Over Pay
Updated: 11:43, Thursday June 07, 2007

Post Office workers have voted by a hugely majority to go out on strike in a row over pay.
About 130,000 members of the Communication Workers Union are now prepared to stage a series of walkouts.

Strike set to take placeThat is unless fresh talks lead to a breakthrough in the deadlocked dispute.

Ballots of three separate groups of Royal Mail workers showed overwhelming support for strikes, union leaders revealed.

They will meet next week to draw up plans for the first national strikes since 1996.

The union is in dispute with the Royal Mail over pay after leaders rejected a 2.5% pay offer in response for a demand that postal workers' pay should rise to the national average over the next five years.

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The Royal Mail said the demand amounted to a 27% pay rise which the organisation "simply can't afford".

"Royal Mail workers have rejected the company's business plan, the company's leadership and an
unacceptable pay offer," the CWU's Dave Ward said.

"This is the clearest message we have had from the workforce so the Royal Mail has to listen, and return to serious negotiations."

A Royal Mail spokesman said: "The result of the ballot will not change the absolute need for Royal Mail to modernise, which is in the interests of everyone in the company.

The Royal Mail said the union's claim would cost Royal Mail ?1bn.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,, ... 07,00.html

Hey BrOgg, does this mean you'll be going on strike? And if so, do you go and do something like picketting or do you not have to show up until the strike is over? Whatever the methods, I wish you all the best and hope that it is a short intermission.

Big Blue Owl wrote:Hey BrOgg, does this mean you'll be going on strike? And if so, do you go and do something like picketting or do you not have to show up until the strike is over? Whatever the methods, I wish you all the best and hope that it is a short intermission.

We're hoping that with the 'Yes' vote managment will finally realise how serious we are BBrO.
I'm our office's local CWU Rep so Im really involved in the whole process. I dont want to strike but the job is not the job it once was. I usually work an extra 25 mins per day on top of what I used to so thats' two hours extra per week at least now...and they still want us to cut more hours and absorb the work, mad.

I hope everything works out fair and equitable for all involved.

I'm supporting you in solidarity Brutha Ogg.

Never agree to do more with less.

Kellogg To Raise Nutritional Value Of Kids' Food

In response to Obesity groups Kellogg's is changing the marketing blahblahblah...

Where the hell are the parents and why don't they say "No" to the kids when they ask- when we got this kind of food it was rare and more often than not it was Wheaties or Corn Flakes....


Burns my chaps that we have become a "blame everyone else but ourselves" society...

YYZ30 wrote:Kellogg To Raise Nutritional Value Of Kids' Food

In response to Obesity groups Kellogg's is changing the marketing blahblahblah...

Where the hell are the parents and why don't they say "No" to the kids when they ask- when we got this kind of food it was rare and more often than not it was Wheaties or Corn Flakes....


Burns my chaps that we have become a "blame everyone else but ourselves" society...

I was force-fed Shredded Wheat as a child.

My folks didn't go for the SUGAR stuff...

Lord knows we ate ENOUGH sugar (as kids) in other foods..

Interesting that Kellogg's, Post, etc. changed the NAMES of cereals
to make them APPEAR "healthier", for example:

Cereal names when I was a youngin':

SUGAR Pops

SUGAR Smacks

Those SAME cereal names NOW:

"CORN" POPS

Kellogg's "SMACKS"

Same cereals - now with a alias.

YYZ30 wrote: Burns my chaps that we have become a "blame everyone else but ourselves" society...

On that I couldn't possibly agree more. How delusional is one that creates/promotes/abets something that is or goes terribly wrong and then somehow tricks their own mind into thinking they are an innocent victim that needs bailed out by everybody else.

No lessons learned.

Cyg, remember all those Saturday morning cereal commercials? That's one way we all became fat bastards.

Also (sing along):
"Can't get enough of Super Sugar Crisp" is now "Can't get enough of Super Golden Crisp"

19th-Century Weapon Found In Whale

By ERIN CONROY, Associated Press Writer

Tue Jun 12, 9:47 PM ET

BOSTON - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the
Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment
embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar
hunt ? more than a century ago.

Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch
arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers
insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115
and 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John
Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling
Museum.

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually
gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find
one that has lived more than a century, but experts say
the oldest were close to 200 years old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the
whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in
New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a
major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder
gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with
explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode
seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was
meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from
escaping.

"The device exploded and probably injured the whale"
Bockstoce said.

"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him
in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that
bothered if he lived for another 100 years."

The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years
old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B.
Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction
troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison
unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar
projectile last month, and the older device was found buried
beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for
harvesting.

"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew
immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig
George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough
Department of Wildlife Management, who was called down to
the site soon after it was found.

The revelation led George to return to a similar piece found
in a whale hunted near St. Lawrence Island in 1980, which
he sent to Bockstoce to compare.

"We didn't make anything of it at the time, and no one had
any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead
could be that old," George said.

Bockstoce said he was impressed by notches carved into the
head of the arrow used in the 19th century hunt, a traditional
way for the Alaskan hunters to indicate ownership of the whale.

Whaling has always been a prominent source of food for
Alaskans, and is monitored by the International Whaling
Commission.

A hunting quota for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission
was recently renewed, allowing 255 whales to be harvested by
10 Alaskan villages over five years.

After it is analyzed, the fragment will be displayed at the Inupiat
Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska.

One Little Victory

June 15, 2007

SEVEN members of a terror cell run by al-Qaeda "general" Dhiren Barot were jailed for a total of 136 years today.

Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, Junade Feroze, Zia Ul Haq, Abdul Aziz Jalil, Omar Abdur Rehman, Qaisar Shaffi and Nadeem Tarmohamed were vital to his deadly plans to attack the UK and the US, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

Barot was jailed for life last year for plotting to kill "hundreds if not thousands" of people using explosives-packed limousines and a "dirty" radiation bomb.

Sentencing the men at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Justice Butterfield said: "Barot was the instigator of this terrorist planning, he was by some considerable distance the principal participant in the conspiracy.

"Each one of you was recruited by Barot and assisted him at his request."

"Anyone who chooses to participate in such a plan ... will receive little sympathy from the courts."

The judge told the defendants the suffering their families would experience "is but a tiny fraction of the suffering that would have been experienced had your plans been translated into reality".

Jalil, 34, from Luton, Bedfordshire, was jailed for 26 years, Feroze, 31, from Blackburn, Lancashire, for 22 years and Bhatti, 27, from Harrow, north London and Tarmohamed, 29, from Willesden, north west London, for 20 years each.

ElfDude wrote:One Little Victory

June 15, 2007

SEVEN members of a terror cell run by al-Qaeda "general" Dhiren Barot were jailed for a total of 136 years today.

Mohammed Naveed Bhatti, Junade Feroze, Zia Ul Haq, Abdul Aziz Jalil, Omar Abdur Rehman, Qaisar Shaffi and Nadeem Tarmohamed were vital to his deadly plans to attack the UK and the US, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

Barot was jailed for life last year for plotting to kill "hundreds if not thousands" of people using explosives-packed limousines and a "dirty" radiation bomb.

Sentencing the men at Woolwich Crown Court, Mr Justice Butterfield said: "Barot was the instigator of this terrorist planning, he was by some considerable distance the principal participant in the conspiracy.

"Each one of you was recruited by Barot and assisted him at his request."

"Anyone who chooses to participate in such a plan ... will receive little sympathy from the courts."

The judge told the defendants the suffering their families would experience "is but a tiny fraction of the suffering that would have been experienced had your plans been translated into reality".

Jalil, 34, from Luton, Bedfordshire, was jailed for 26 years, Feroze, 31, from Blackburn, Lancashire, for 22 years and Bhatti, 27, from Harrow, north London and Tarmohamed, 29, from Willesden, north west London, for 20 years each.

JEEEZUS those light British sentences are depressing.

....they may as well have smacked their hands, gave 'em a donut
and told 'em to stick to church-oriented activities...

(Thanks to Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage lyrics for that analogy)

CygnusX1 wrote:Never agree to do more with less.

That's my primary job focus. Do more with technology so we can have less workers.

by-tor wrote: That's my primary job focus. Do more with technology so we can have less workers.

If that's your gig By-tor....great.

Customers love talking to automation.

Myself - I'll buy from someone with a heartbeat.

And......I don't have to press 1 for english.

CygnusX1 wrote:

by-tor wrote: That's my primary job focus. Do more with technology so we can have less workers.

If that's your gig By-tor....great.

Customers love talking to automation.

Myself - I'll buy from someone with a heartbeat.

And......I don't have to press 1 for english.

My automation is a bit more behind the scenes. The things I code make your order go through the system easier without the need for constant human intervention.

CygnusX1 wrote:

by-tor wrote: That's my primary job focus. Do more with technology so we can have less workers.

If that's your gig By-tor....great.

Customers love talking to automation.

Myself - I'll buy from someone with a heartbeat.

And......I don't have to press 1 for english.