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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
A look at the power struggle involving the family that runs Canada’s biggest wireless provider.
(BBC, approx 7 mins reading time)
Two separate groups of directors are now claiming to represent Rogers – exposing old family rivalries and unwanted turbulence ahead of a pending $26bn takeover of a rival telecoms firm. Already, shares of Rogers have slumped as the family drama plays out. The fallout could affect everything from professional sports to local politics.
How vehicle rammings have become part of protests, with little accountability.
(Boston Globe, approx 26 mins reading time)
The episode left Knight in a wheelchair and cost him his job. But to Oklahoma prosecutors, neither he nor the handful of others who were injured in the chaos are victims of a crime. That July, while Knight was still at a rehabilitation center in Colorado, the local district attorney announced no charges would be filed against the driver, whose identity was kept secret, saying that the man was scared for his family in the vehicle and acted in self-defense and that protesters had unnecessarily blocked the road.
Harriet Ware-Austin recounts how, as a child, she witnessed the plane crash that killed her sisters.
(BBC, 11 mins reading time)
Harriet didn’t return to Ethiopia until 2009 – 37 years later – on a trip connected with her job as a human rights consultant. It was a powerful experience, “excruciatingly difficult and emotion-ridden”, though she had to hide it all and get on with her work. She remembers landing at Addis Ababa airport and gazing from the plane window down the gully where her sisters’ plane had burst into flames.
The world-renowned pianist João Carlos Martins found himself unable to play the piano – until an inventor introduced him to his bionic gloves.
(GQ, approx 20 mins reading time)
Martins kept going, though his skills as a pianist were diminished. He even embarked on a decades-long quest to record the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1995, at the age of 54, he traveled 6,000 miles from his then home in Brazil to tape in this one theater in Sofia, Bulgaria, with great acoustics. He was walking back to his hotel late at night when two muggers ambushed him with a metal pipe, and—thwack!—they took off with his passport and wallet and left him for dead. When Martins woke up in the hospital, he couldn’t feel the right side of his body.
Tn interview with Dwayne Johnson about his life and career.
(Vanity Fair, approx 35 mins reading time)
His Black Canadian father, Rocky Johnson, was a successful wrestler, as was his Samoan maternal grandfather, Peter Maivia. This was wrestling before the large national audiences and big paydays. It wasn’t an easy life. Dwayne was born 49 years ago in Hayward, near San Francisco, but the family frequently moved wherever a sustained period of wrestling work could be found. There are two particular moments in Johnson’s life that he often refers to as low points from which he derives motivation. The second occurred much later, when—in the final indignity of his failed football career—he was cut from the Canadian Football League at the age of 22. As he was being driven back to live with his parents, he searched through his pockets to find all the money he had in the world: a five, a one, and some change. (Johnson would memorialize the moment in the name of his film company, Seven Bucks Productions.)
Lindsay and James Sulzer developed technologies to help people recover from disease or injury. Then their own daughter was injured in a freak accident, which changed their lives forever.
(The Atlantic, approx 32 mins reading time)
Working in an engineering lab, one tends to fixate on the engineering challenge: building the device. Whom exactly the device is for and what sorts of injuries it can help address are secondary concerns. Now that logic had flipped around as James sat beside his daughter. He knew that Livie’s brain could still send signals to her muscles, even if those signals weren’t strong enough—or clear enough—to make her muscles work. So he came up with a way for Livie to exercise her neurons while her body remained still. With the help of a graduate student, he attached electrodes to her limbs and neck, to pick up even feeble spurts of muscle activation; then he linked them to a music playlist. Whenever Livie twitched her biceps or her triceps, even just a tiny bit, a favorite song, such as “Baby Shark,” would play a little louder.
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
When a man realises his new house is haunted, he opens it to the public.
(Truly Adventurous, approx 35 mins reading time)
In his second week there, he was jarred out of a dead sleep. Since moving in, there had been no shortage of things on his mind to keep him awake. The what-ifs of his relationship with his wife, his son facing life without a father, the lost earning potential and career. This time, though, it wasn’t his thoughts that woke him, but a sound: A crash that shook the three-story brick structure. Jumping to his feet and grabbing the bedside flashlight, he rushed from his room in the rear of the house to the main hall. Standing beside a staircase and wondering if the crash had come from upstairs, he stood in the dark, listening.
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Maybe they could get rid the tax discs as well and use the same technology. Actually while they are at it scrap motor tax and put 1c on each litre of fuel that way everybody pays no motor tax dodging anymore and if your car I’d genuinely off the road you will not have to go a tell a guard.
Nothing like using a crisis for a big brother power grab.. Never let a good crisis go to waste as the old saying goes.
It makes more sense to git rid in tax disks. They are only checked by the Garda. Insurance disks are checked by people involved in an accident too.
The average motorist may use 40 /50 ltrs per week . 50 cent per week I think you would see an increase of at least 10 cent per ltr for it to work. Not to bad if you use 50 ltr pw but I use 150ltr pw !! In a car not van or truck. Should I pay up to €800 per year on Tax
Lot of people have gotten rid of tax discs anyway…simply can’t afford them.
@Lee Jones: Good idea but as it wouldn’t have a guaranteed revenue they’ll never go for it. At least they can have an almost flawless projection on the amount of registered cars with the disc. Anything that is of benefit to you usually doesn’t happen.
@Barry Davidson: €710 road tax for a 00 e class,madness.
They abolished discs in the U.K. a few years ago. Automatic plate recognition by DVLA cars and police – not paid/up to date means you can’t get an MOT test and no insurance means you can’t Tax your car etc. All 3 systems can be checked (MOT/tax/insurance).
Australian system works well. Around $700 per year registration which covers tax and third party insurance. If you want to get fully comp you arrange it yourself.
But that would make sense. Sense doesn’t work in Ireland, greed does.
@guru that’s about €1000 in todays money. Quite expensive. Halve the price and you got a deal.
No it’s not. It’s a shade under €500. So there’s half the price. We got a deal?
I just looked up the Garda.ie website and it says that “An Garda Síochána uses Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR)……the roll out of ANPR in An Garda Síochána was completed in 2010. Am I missing something as if this is true then simply it should only need a connection to the Insurance database. Is there any joined up thinking between the Garda, the Minister and the insurance industry?
I’m sure whatever happens it’s going to cost tens of millions.
And probably can’t handle muddy reg plates.
@Frank, I got a fixed penalty notice for a mondeo breaking the speed limit in Tuam, yet I’ve never driven in Tuam, and don’t have a mondeo. The mondeo in question had 1 number different to my motorbike and the camera read in incorrectly. Stupid computer!
How is the government spending a fortune on a computer system to stop you receiving an insurance disc going to save you money on insurance premiums? In order to monitor driver patterns they’d have to be cameras on every road recording everything you do. Sounds like a sales pitch for their mates
They follow driving patterns by the insurance company’s putting a gps tracker in your car. The data will of course be spun in a way that in the long run we will end up paying the same as what we are now (if not more)
Buy into the UK system. No insurance, tax or NCT discs used in the U.K. In addition you have valid insurance in place before you can tax a vehicle.
Anpr is already fitted in Garda cars and at toll booths.
They don’t need to put cameras everywhere, it just means the Garda can check the cars insurance/tax/nct details without stopping you. They already do this for tax anyway! The computer system (pulse) is already there too so cost would be minimal.
I wouldn’t like to have gps fitted to my car though, that’s a step in the wrong direction.
The real agenda is fraud. When something becomes so expensive, people are forced into fraudulent methods of avoiding spiralling costs.
Printing discs and driving without insurance going up, hence insurance premiums going up.
There are thousands of untaxed cars on our roads. A fuel levy instead of road tax would ensure that most if not all of the dodgers have to pay up and also the more you drive the more you pay as you use the roads more often.
John do you actually think you are the first person to think of that ?
@Steven Cee: Absolutely not. I am sure it was thought about by hundreds of people over the years. The trouble is the people who can do something about it are not thinking at all.
Will ANPR have the same gut feel or intuition that a guard has that something just not right and requires further investigation when stopping someone at a checkpoint. This technology is further removing the average guard from the beat and this to me is not a good thing.
Just wait, number plate cloning will be the next problem.
And it’s very easy to do. €10 will get you a new number plate made up in any motor factor’s. No questions asked.
Already a thing of the past for a lot of people who don’t bother with insurance
Untaxed and uninsured cars should be seized and crushed no matter who is driving them .
@William Mcgee: With the occupants still in the vehicle???
The insurance companies will only produce 30percent of the information available… and out goverment accept this. Give me a break… Noonan told the insurance companies to increase the premiems when ever they can . He said this3 years ago
How people can still get a away with not paying road tax and insurance in the age of smartphones etc is laughable. Its the uninsured people on the road that worry me the most
Paper insurance disks are great. You can easily check when your tax and insurance is up with a quick glance. I think paper disks should stay.
1st paragraph 2nd line should be ‘be’ not ‘me’
@JohnMcGuinness : It was your Fianna Fail party introduced the 2-Tier Motor Tax system .. the most regressive in the EU.
placing high tax burden on the most vulnerable low paid in Irish society. UK MPs refused to pass this odious law but you did.
https://www.change.org/p/unfair-car-tax-law
read what 4000 comments have to say about it https://www.change.org/p/unfair-car-tax-law/c
ANPR great system for catching criminals, has it reduced premiums in England? No! The fact is the insurance companies in Ireland have been un regulated like the banks and have got out of control, greed & profit raises its ugly head again. Simple system you don’t have an accident premium drops have an accident premium goes up. There must be an independent insurance regulator to keep an on the insurance company’s and cost of premiums
Agenda 21 David Icke Dublin 21 jan 2017
have your say