Business

On the morning of January 4, 2008, while at the 2008 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships, 19-year-old goalie Steve Mason received a phone call from Canada informing him that he was traded by the Ontario Hockey League's London Knights to the Kitchener Rangers. In a press release Friday, Kitchener Rangers Head coach and General Manager Peter DeBoer announced the trade to the Knights. In return for obtaining Mason, the Rangers have sent the Knights, Centre Phil Varone, Defenceman Steve Tarasuk along with 2nd, 3rd and 4th round draft picks in 20

Israel is planning measures to curb settlement activity in the occupied territories in response to pressure from the United States. Vice Premier Haim Ramon told Israel Radio that he expects the government to take action against the outposts during and after the visit of President Bush to Israel and the West Bank next week. The outposts are often built on West Bank hilltops, and usually consist of a few trailers or makeshift structures. Israel is obligated to dismantle about 100 outposts under the internationally backed "Roadmap" peace plan, w

Unemployment in the United States rose sharply last month and government figures released late Friday show the number of new jobs was at its lowest level in four years. President Bush is considering more tax cuts in an effort to boost the nation's sagging economy. American unemployment rose to five percent last month, the highest rate since 2005 and new employment statistics released Friday show the U.S. economy added only 18,000 new jobs in December, far fewer than most economists expected. "This economy of ours is on a solid foundation, but

An office block fire in Ürümqi, northwest China has claimed the lives of three firefighters and injured a fourth. The 12-storey dual-purpose office and market building was completely destroyed in the blaze, which also spread to and severely damaged an adjacent hotel. According to a spokesman for Xinjiang fire brigade, an eyewitness reported that the fire, which started at around 8:20 p.m. local time on Wednesday night, originated in a stall selling mops on the first floor of the Dehui International Plaza. According to a security guard, the bui

AOL has decided to discontinue development of the Netscape web browser which brought surfing the Internet to the masses, until its user base began to erode during the "browser wars" of the mid-1990s and resulted in the birth of Mozilla project. Tom Drapeau, the director of Netscape inside AOL announced on the Netscape blog that support for the recently released Netscape Navigator 9 and all of Netscape's browsers back to version 1.0, will end because it was unable to gain market share and a low number of users that continues to dwindle. Drapeau

Arbitrators at the World Trade Organization (WTO) have granted the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda a special dispensation to ignore United States copyright law. In their report, the WTO panel stated that Antigua possessed "no effective trade sanctions against the USA" and agreed to allow the country to ignore up to US$21 million worth of US copyrights a year. While this amount falls significantly short of the US$3.4 billion per year dispensation that Antigua was seeking, it is far higher than the US$500,000 per year allocation that U

Larger and bigger than the Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC), the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall (TWTC Nangang) was finally completed on December 24. According to the hall owner, Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), TWTC Nangang owned 2650 booths twice larger than current TWTC (1300 booths), several companies from different industries wanted to exhibit in TWTC Nangang by participating in some international shows, but the competition was apparently intensive because of limitations on booths and scales. Recently

Israel has announced two new housing projects in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, continuing to expand its settlements. Officials have stated that a bill to be approved by parliament this week, would set aside $25 million for the expansion of development projects in Har Homa and Maale Adumim. The bill would create 500 apartments in the Har Homa area and another 240 in Maale Adumim. Last month, both Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signed a statement of "joint understanding" at the 2007 Annapolis Conferen

The "NBA 2K8 Asia Championship" Taiwan Qualifier, organized by NBA Asia Corp. and sponsored by Microsoft Taiwan, was held on December 22 & 23. According to the organizer, Taiwan was chosen as the first on-site stage tournament because of some of the market share factor on the gaming industry and the gaming population. In Taiwan's qualifier, the organizer successively invited models from Catwalk Production House and two Taiwanese bands (Yummy, 2moro) for friendship matches with the public. With the entertainers' participation, it attracted medi

Sporting games are more popular with younger gamers and sporting people with a conjunction from two industries, between sporting and gaming. Although games from the NBA series are not the official games of the World Cyber Games, but with fashions of the NBA, and PC gaming population having a stable scale, the NBA game series attracted not only basketball and game fans but also sporting and gaming media world-wide, and its market was progressively expanded from America and Europe to Asia and other countries. With those issues in mind, Wikinews

Eight men and five Brookyln-based Spinka charitable organizations have been charged with tax fraud and money laundering. Six have been arrested, and two are still at large. The men charged are Naftali Tzi Weisz, 59, a Grand Rabbi from Brooklyn; Gabbai Moseh E. Zigelman, 60, also from Brooklyn and Weisz' assistant; Yaacov Zeivald, 43, of Valley Village; Yosef Nachum Naiman, 55, of Los Angeles; Alan Jay Friedman, 43, of Los Angeles; Joseph Roth, 66, an international accounts manager at a bank in Israel from Tel Aviv; diamond merchant Moshe Ari

Cathal Ryan, an early board member of Irish non-designated flag carrier, and son of late co-founder Tony Ryan, has died. He was 48, and had been diagnosed with cancer. Cathal bacame one of Ryanair's first pilots, having trained as one in the 1980s in Sri Lanka, when his father set up the airline in 1985 in trust for his three sons, of which Cathal was the eldest. He left the Far East specifically to join the airline. In 1986 he became the head of London European Airways, a business in which Ryanair had bought an 85% stake. This position, howe