Noosa boaties say they are angry the State Government is not maintaining the health and safety of the Noosa River.

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Boaties protest state of river (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The VA Maryland Health Care System won the Robert W. Carey Performance Achievement Award for its excellent performance in patient care, patient satisfaction, quality, safety and business practices.

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VA Maryland Health Care System Receives Performance Achievement Carey Award (PRWeb via Yahoo! News)

The VA Maryland Health Care System won the Robert W. Carey Performance Achievement Award for its excellent performance in patient care, patient satisfaction, quality, safety and business practices. (PRWeb Nov 22, 2009) Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/11/prweb3238794.htm

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VA Maryland Health Care System Receives Performance Achievement Carey Award (PRWeb)

Four leading energy and transport companies have pledged to fund a further, five-year second phase of the of the Global Road Safety Initiative (GRSI), the worlds largest joint commitment of private sector resources toward road safety in low- and middle-income countries.

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Leading global businesses launch second phase of Global Road Safety Initiative (The Auto Channel)

(ARA) – When it comes to school safety and student health, our kids deserve the best protection possible. These days, schools have programs related to everything from gun violence to obesity prevention; but how safe are our nation’s schools when it comes to protecting kids from dangerous chemicals?

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Chemicals in schools: Is safety part of the equation? (Lexington Clipper-Herald)

Farm safety is firmly on the curriculum for the new intake of students at the Scottish Agricultural College, with practical advice and guidance from the Health and Safety Executive.

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Farming Out The Safety Message To Students, Scotland (Medical News Today)

Bong Joon-ho’s recent monster movie The Host was greeted with plaudits normally reserved for a master of the French New Wave, with an average Metacritic score of 85. It had a budget of $11,000,000, quite high for a non-American film, and special effects from Weta Digital, the New Zealand company co-founded by Peter Jackson which did SFX for all the Lord of the Rings films. But the ballyhoo was a bit overblown. It’s a well-constructed homage to classic monster movies that hits all the right notes, but never truly feels transcendent. At least the movie gets the big things right. The plot concerns a family, grandfather Park Hie-bong, his adult children Nam-il, Nam-joo, and Gang-du, all trying to liberate Gang-du’s daughter Hyun-seo, whom the mutant tadpole kidnapped on his opening rampage. In the meantime, Hyun-seo plans her escape from the belly of the beast, giving the film’s most compelling performance. Each adult is dysfunctional in his or her way, and each has a chance for massive screwup and then an earned redemption. The social satire is largely directed at America: the film opens with a boorish Army officer ordering a Korean to pour bottles of formaldehyde into the Han river near Seoul, and then U.S. Army officers later orchestrate a coverup of the monster’s true nature while brewing hideous chemicals to destroy it. Naturally, the American killer chemicals doesn’t exactly work as planned. It may be a requirement of the genre that at least one of the main characters is stultifyingly stupid, but Gang-du, the protagonist, is particularly noticeable. He’s a clumsy, narcoleptic simpleton who feeds his daughter beer, attacks the movie’s monster with a concrete metal sign, then mistakenly takes another girl’s hand when he’s trying to grab his daughter to run away from the beast, only to watch in slackjawed horror as the monster kidnaps his daughter. He is so breath-takingly incompetent that it’s hard for the audience to root for him, and even a touching monologue by his father late in the film does little to bring the audience to his side. Similarly, the special effects are slightly disappointing: the monster is of appropriate size and ferocity, but it feels peculiarly weightless: it’s frightening, but never feels truly menacing. It’s more on par with the monster in The Relic than Alien . And at two hours, the movie’s just a bit long. Lopping off about 20 minutes of runtime — giving less time to Gang-du and his siblings while keeping the focus on Hyun-seo — would have covered up a lot of sins. That said, it’s satisfying. It works as a cheesy late night action-horror movie, fitting effortlessly into a quintessentially American genre while poking fun at America. The fact is, there’s a relative dearth of satisfying B-movies in theaters these days, with money limited by the recession and scripts limited by fallout from the writers’ strike, and theaters have been rather fallow in general of late. (My favorite recent B-movie would probably be last year’s Doomsday , a complete ripoff/pastiche of Escape from New York and Mad Max , offering no redeeming social value and nary a dull moment, rating: 80 .) Bong is clearly a capable genre craftsman, but The Host feels more workmanlike than a labor of love. Rating: 66 Cross-posted on Remingtonstein . More on South Korea

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Alex Remington: The Host: A Decent Monster Flick, But Nothing More

Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google’s head , and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger. For the past few weeks, Murdoch and his officers at News Corp. have been very vocal about their distaste for Google and their desire to lead other media companies in a boycott of sorts. Murdoch keeps threatening to stop letting Google index the WSJ.com and his other media sites, and wants other news sites to join him in this self-imposed silence. The folks at Microsoft’s Bing think this is a great idea. Not only that, but the FT reports that Microsoft is in fact in discussions with News Corp. and other publishers about the possibility of paying them to remove their sites from Google’s search index. This report comes on the heels of a meeting in Europe where Bing dangled the prospect of premium spots in search results to publishers and outright money for search R&D. Microsoft is not afraid to buy search market share, which is what it’s doing with the Yahoo search deal and even its Cashback program . But with these latest talks, it is literally trying to buy the news, or at least exclusive access to the news. Bing can’t buy all the news, it can only buy certain brands. If Bing can somehow become the only place you can find news results and working links to the Wall Street Journal and other top papers such as the New York Times , the Washington Post , and the LA Times , for instance, that would be a big reason to switch for a lot of folks. But it’s not clear how much Bing would have to pay the news companies of the world for them to give up all the traffic Google sends them in return for a fraction of that traffic and some cash. Even Google couldn’t afford to strike such deals. Says Murdoch , of Google, “If they were to pay everybody for everything they took from every newspaper in the world, and every magazine, they wouldn’t have any profits left.” In order to actually make a dent in Google’s market share, Bing would have to pay such exorbitant sums to so many different news companies that it would be difficult to recoup its investment. Bing certainly get some marketing buzz out of any such move, but that’s about it. The big problem with a search engine trying to buy market share by buying parts of the news is that information spreads so quickly these days, exclusives last about 30 seconds. That information will end up on a site that is indexed by Google. Or the same news will be broken by someone else on the Web before the WSJ.com even gets to it. Exclusive indexing goes against the Web’s inherent openness. Companies that try to curtail that openness don’t last long on the Web. Image via PhotoXpress . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Bing Tries To Buy The News

Go figure, right? You get a relatively hot phone out onto more carriers, and just like that, sales increase. It ain’t rocket science, buster. As AT&T grins happily while enjoying a death grip on Apple’s cash cow here in the States, things are a lot more wide open for consumers across the pond. In both France and the UK , the iPhone has been given the all-clear to be sold on multiple carriers, and according to research from Bernstein, the “widening of the distribution has boosted Apple’s value market share to 32 percent in the latest quarter from 21 percent just three months earlier.” The notes also mention that Apple’s increase is coming at the expense of RIM, with over 600,000 iPhone handsets being sold during Q3 2009 in France alone. The point to all this madness? Oh, not much — just to tell Sir Jobs that he can count on quite a bit more dough should he decide to sell this elusive “iPhone” device on Verizon in the US of A. The end of exclusivity leading to big iPhone sales in Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink ? Electronista ?|? MarketWatch ?|? Email this ?|? Comments

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The end of exclusivity leading to big iPhone sales in Europe

With just over a minute remaining in the Bears’ loss to the Philadelphia Eagles tonight, Jay Cutler threw an incomplete pass to Chicago wide receiver Devin Hester. As Hester was tackled, his pants came down his legs, exposing his rear end to a nationally televised audience on NBC. Unfortunately for the Bears, Hester’s vivid display was not enough to drive his team to victory. Cutler threw an interception three plays later, effectively ending the game. WATCH: More on Sports

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Devin Hester Pants VIDEO: Pantsed Hester Exposes Butt