Nurses from overseas face the axe
The News Review:
- Nurses from overseas face the axe
- Britain, Lowering Threat Level, Will Ease Carry-On Ban
- Students attend a class at a madrassah in Karachi. (Reuters)
- Efficiency with ERP
- ‘Simpsons’ Booted From Chinese Prime Time
- Home front
Nurses from overseas face the axe
Telegraph.co.uk – Aug 14, 2006
The RCN blames the shortages, and the ban on foreign recruits, on deficits and job freezes caused by the financial crisis in the National Health Service. The college believes that the job shortage is only short term, and that without overseas nurses it will prove impossible to replace the 180,000 nurses due to retire over the next 10 years. “Our big concern is that we’re going to stop overseas nurses coming over, then not be able to fill the spaces that will exist after this deficits crisis is finished with home-grown nurses,” said the spokesman. “These are not newly qualified nurses we’re talking about,” she added. “These are nurses who on average we’ve found have 14 years of experience and specialist skills, and it’s unrealistic to assume that newly qualified home-grown nurses will be able to fulfil those kinds of roles right at the beginning of their careers. “More than three quarters of a class of student midwives have been left unemployed in one of the first indicators of the scale of the financial crisis hitting maternity services across the country. Only eight of 35 graduates at the University of Salford, each of whom cost tens of thousands of pounds to train, have found a job.
Britain, Lowering Threat Level, Will Ease Carry-On Ban
New York Times – Aug 14, 2006
One airline boss, Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of low-cost carrier Ryanair, said the government “by insisting on these heavy-handed security measures is allowing the extremists to achieve many of their objectives. “The threat of new attacks, as depicted by Mr. Reid, has sharpened an increasingly divisive debate over the links between home-grown Islamic terror attacks and Britain’s actions in the Muslim world. In a remarkable open letter on Saturday, 38 Islamic groups along with Muslim legislators and peers said British policies as an ally of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had provided “ammunition to extremists that threaten us all. “The letter drew a tart response by a phalanx of government ministers, including Mr. Reid, who called it on Sunday a “dreadful misjudgment.
Students attend a class at a madrassah in Karachi. (Reuters)
Islam Online – Aug 14, 2006
"It is Muslims born there and brought up there
who are doing these attacks," he said, criticizing President
Pervez Musharraf for cowing in to London and Washington. Pakistani Ambassador to the United Nations Munir
Akram has said that it was the years spent in Britain that transformed
22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer into a suicide bomber. He said Britain was now a "breeding ground for
terrorists too" and has its own radical preachers and
"home-grown suicide bombers". The ambassador said that a particular concern was
integrating Muslims into mainstream British life. London has always rejected any link between its
foreign policy and terrorism. A Home Office’s inquiry into the terrorist
bombings, however, has conceded that the bombers were motivated by
London’s foreign policy, principally the decision to invade Iraq
alongside the US.
Efficiency with ERP
Express Computers – Aug 14, 2006
The ERP implementation
has been a milestone for this 40-year-old pharmaceutical company, which is growing
at the rate of 25 to 30 percent every year. Too many systems
Associated Capsules has five manufacturing plants situated in Maharashtra servicing
about 1,000 customers worldwide. Each plant had a different home-grown application
system with no process integration. The information generated from each plant
had to be collected manually and later consolidated at the corporate headquarters
in Mumbai for generating MIS reports. People were spending lot of time in generating
these reports, which could not be generated before the 8th or 10th of each month,
hampering decision-making. There were also inaccuracies in report generation
as each manufacturing plant had a different ‘codification’ system
(codes given to the gelatine capsules) and when it came to integration of information
from different plants it was a problem for the report generation team as there
was no integration of information. The finance, store and purchase departments of the company were using Ramco
Marshall ERP, whereas production and sales departments were utilising FoxPro.
‘Simpsons’ Booted From Chinese Prime Time
Forbes – Aug 14, 2006
Chinese kids apparently love Disney epics, Warner Bros. ‘ subversive Looney Tunes and Japan’s Pokemon far more than any native animation. And the ochre-hued Homer and Bart et al. are inarguably global pop stars: The News Corp.
Home front
Telegraph.co.uk – Aug 14, 2006
I, for one, am eternally grateful to the BBC for the unalloyed joy of lying on the beach listening to the dulcet tones of Blowers and CMJ describing the scene at some far-away ground. What else? The country pub, the newspapers, the Cornish pasty, fish and chips, the National Trust, a pint of bitter, the second-hand bookshop, the village fete, the beauty of the shoreline, the glory of the countryside, with the hay bales now dotting the patchwork of fields, the churches and the castles: considering the misery currently being inflicted on people in many other parts of the world, this island still is, to quote its greatest writer, a blessed plot. Or am I just getting carried away, stricken with a touch of sunstroke from this hitherto baking summer? After all, we have home-grown terrorists trying to blow us up, violent crime is rising, our infrastructure, especially in the South-East, is creaking under the pressure of too many people, the water is running out, the Government continues to waste vast sums of our money on half-baked and unwanted initiatives such as the ID card or through its sheer incompetent running of the public services. Our troops are bogged down in Iraq and in deadly peril in Afghanistan, where they appear to have been sent to fight a war without adequate equipment and in insufficient numbers, a policy decision bordering on the criminal. Debt is growing inexorably, bankruptcies are at an all-time high, interest rates have gone up and are likely to rise again, an actor playing Churchill is banned from smoking a cigar on stage in Scotland, and there is talk of lower speed limits and more roadside cameras. And if that little lot isn’t enough to make you depressed, we are now treated to the farcical tussle between John Prescott and John Reid over who runs the country. But this is holiday time and, supposedly, the month when little happens, though the First World War began in August and the Second almost did.