Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Bed bug feeding on human skin. (credit: Getty | VW Pics)

British Airways has apologized to a Canadian family who reported being feasted upon by a pack of bedbugs during an overnight flight from Vancouver to London earlier this month, CTV Vancouver reported.

Passenger Heather Szilagyi was flying with her fiancé and eight-year-old daughter when she says she spotted several of the bugs on the seat in front of her. Szilagyi said that as someone who had worked in the hotel industry, she was primed to identify them. But when she flagged the flight attendant and asked to be moved, she got no help.

“She was like, 'Oh ok, sorry about that. We're sold out. We don't have anywhere to move you',” Szilagyi told CTV.

Enlarge (credit: Oliver Morris/Getty Images))

In response to an Ars report on a court hearing in New York on October 17, New York City and New York City Police Department officials attempted to clarify the nature of the issues surrounding a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit legal defense organization Bronx Defenders. In response to reporting that the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS) did not have database backups, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis said via e-mail, "Contrary to some published reports suggesting that NYPD does not electronically back up the data in its Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), all such data is backed up continuously in multiple data centers."

That statement would appear to be in direct conflict with an affidavit filed by city attorneys (PDF) in the case, in which NYPD Director of Strategic Technology Programs Christian Schnedler stated, "Currently, there is no secondary or back-up system, and no repository of the data in PETS outside of PETS itself."

Schindler's affidavit, which is part of the NYPD's effort to block an external audit of cash-seizure data recorded in PETS, claims that the system is so fragile that even just using a "Web scraping" tool to retrieve cash-seizure data could collapse the whole system. "The risk of introducing and running a generic Web scraping tool into a complex, functioning law enforcement database, which has no backup system, is to risk disrupting NYPD operations, corrupting and/or losing some or all of the data, without a way to retrieve it," Schnedler testified under oath.

(credit: PROUnknownNet Photography)

As the trend of backyard flock tending skyrocketed in recent years, so has deadly infections, the Associated Press reports.

Since 2015, the number of Salmonella infections from contact with backyard poultry has quadrupled across the nation. This year, nearly every state has been pecked by outbreak strains; only Alaska and Delaware can crow about dodging them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 1,120 cases. Nearly 250 of those involved hospitalization, and one person died.

But that is likely just scratching the surface of the real numbers, according to CDC veterinarian Megin Nichols. “For one Salmonella case we know of in an outbreak, there are up to 30 others that we don’t know about,” she told the AP.

Enlarge / Matthias Müller, CEO of Volkswagen, at the Volkswagen Preview Night prior to the 2017 Frankfurt Auto Show. (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Well, this one will certainly set the cat among the pigeons. Via the Daily Kanban, we came across this video of Volkswagen CEO Matthias Müller ripping Tesla during a panel discussion on the future of the automotive industry. Prompted by a comment from the moderator, Müller laid into the electric car company for its small production volumes, regular quarterly losses, and for firing hundreds of workers.

Per Daily Kanban's translation:

Now I really need to say a few words about Tesla: With all respect, there are some world champions of big announcements in this world—I don’t want to name names. There are companies that barely sell 80,000 cars a year. Then there are companies like Volkswagen that sell 11 million cars this year, and produce a profit of 13 or 14 billion euro. If I am correctly informed, Tesla each quarter destroys millions of dollars in the three digits, and it willy-nilly fires its workers. Social responsibility? Please. We should not not get carried away and compare apples with oranges.

The attack comes at a tough time for Tesla. The Model 3, the company's new mass-market EV, is mired in "production hell," with Tesla having little chance of meeting its goal of building 20,000 in the month of December. And there has been a spate of allegations of harassment at the company's factory, with workers reporting racial and now anti-LGBT abuse.