Split (1)

train · 2.6M rows

text stringlengths 13 81.7k
At the core of the Leeds argument is the assertion that HS2 would be good for the environment. But it conveniently ignores the fact that there is a second, greener, high speed proposal out there – the HSUK scheme, which promises to connect more cities, for around £20bn less.
No-one who has taken the train to Liverpool in the last year can be in any doubt about the turmoil the upgrade to King’s Cross will cause. Lime Street Station was the beneficiary of its biggest investment since the 19th century – a sign of how little there had been in the 20th – and the scale in north London is many ti...
The disruption will also overshadow the introduction of new trains on the East Coast Main Line – whose testing has, in any case, been halted because they interfere with the signalling.
But the upgrade is already a work in progress; a new concourse at King’s Cross, four times the size of the old one, was completed six years ago. Taken together, the new trains, tracks, signals and terminus will deliver enough of what HS2 promises to emasculate the remaining arguments in its favour.
Certainly, as I intimated last week, its benefits are vastly outweighed by the financial and human cost of ripping up communities to make way for it.
Given the weight of distrust and downright derision that surrounds the project, one might wonder why anyone is still in arguing its corner. But here is a case where money, quite literally, talks – because its cheerleaders are public servants with a vested interest in its continued existence.
HS2 Limited, which is Government-owned and taxpayer-funded, paid six-figure salaries to no fewer than 318 of its employees last year – around twice as many as the year before. It also doubled its spending on consultants, to £600m. All this so we can look forward to a generation of HS2 bus replacement services because t...
It’s a big, fat gravy train, and it’s no surprise that they don’t want to have to get off it at Peterborough.
Belmont Park's countdown to racing championships will continue tomorrow when six prize fillies compete in the Flower Bowl Invitational, a Grade I stake with a purse of $400,000 and stars in every stall in the starting gate.
Memories of Silver would have carried high weight in the race, but was held out to prepare for the $1 million Breeders' Cup Mile at Churchill Downs on Nov. 7. But two of her longtime rivals will make the race: Maxzene, who was nosed out by Yashmak in last year's Flower Bowl, and Auntie Mame, who won the New York Handic...
They will run the classic distance, a mile and a quarter, on the grass. And they are ranked this close: Maxzene will carry 122 pounds; Auntie Mame, 121.
I think the Flower Bowl is very much a jockey's race, said Angel Penna Jr., who trains Auntie Mame, because the horses are very similar in running styles. But Auntie Mame would not only have to win the Flower Bowl but win impressively for us to think about running in the Breeders' Cup.
Maxzene, who is trained by Tom Skiffington, has won three of her four starts this year and lost the fourth by a nose to Heaven's Command, who will also run in the Flower Bowl. Skiffington remembered that she was supposed to retire last year, but that it was decided to aim her for one more year, highlighted by the $2.6 ...
4932 sq ft of office space. Excellent 14x11 front reception room. Newer front office furniture, carpet, and paint. Total 14 separate office rooms, 4 large conference rooms, large upstairs conference room, or can be more office space. 3 bathrooms, conference rooms have sink & kitchenette area.
Two teachers at Concordia University have been suspended, just two days after the school's president denied hearing rumours of sexual misconduct within the creative writing program.
Two teachers at Concordia University have been removed from their classrooms, just two days after the school's president denied hearing rumours of sexual misconduct within the creative writing program.
According to the student-run association CASE (Concordia Association for Students in English), two teachers accused of impropriety have had their courses given to other instructors.
A spokesperson for the university would not comment on the matter, citing privacy reasons, but did confirm that an investigation "will be conducted by an external investigator."
The suspensions follow a letter obtained by CBC News showing students tried to tell the school about the "toxic" culture for women in the program in 2015.
The six signatories on the letter, all students, wrote to the chair of the English department three years ago expressing concern with the culture in the creative writing program.
They were responding in part to an essay by former student Emma Healey, published in the fall of 2014, which described an at-times abusive romantic relationship with a professor in the program.
But their letter went nowhere, said signatory Rudrapriya Rathore. After a meeting with a Human Resources employee, the subject was dropped.
This week, allegations of sexual misconduct rocked the creative writing program after an essay, published by former student Mike Spry, alleged professors were sleeping and drinking with students. He refers to professors routinely harassing students, as well as "drunken nights of misbehaviour."
Following Spry's essay, more than a dozen women have spoken to CBC, including celebrated writer Heather O'Neill, saying women have been warning each other about professors in the program for more than a decade.
The letter, addressed to the chair of the English department, describes a program reeling by the allegations made in Healey's piece.
"Student interaction with faculty as well as among peers has become strained," the letter read.
"Many of us now feel uncomfortable and unsafe attending readings, events and seminars within the wider Montreal literary community because of Concordia professors' involvement and place at the centre of that community."
They received a note from Human Resources in February 2015 asking to discuss the issue further, but Rathore says the group of students was told Healey's piece constituted hearsay and because they were not abused firsthand, their concerns could not be elevated.
Concordia University president Alan Shepard said the university would not trying to 'sweep anything under the rug' after sexual misconduct allegations surfaced Monday regarding its creative writing program. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)On Wednesday, Concordia President Alan Shepard denied any prior knowledge of improp...
"I've been reading it's an open secret," said Shepard. "But it's not an open secret to me, and I do my best to pay attention to these kinds of rumours."
Shepard has been president of the university since 2012.
A spokesperson for Concordia University said Shepard stands by the statement he made.
She said the 2015 letter was handled in the appropriate way, and the department did meet with the students at the time.
"Over the last couple of years, like many institutions, we have adapted the way we handle allegations of sexual misconduct. A wider circle is now brought in and consulted on these matters," read the statement.
"Listening to Alan Shepherd was extremely disappointing," said Rathore in an emailed statement to CBC.
She's calling on the university to make it clear what's appropriate and inappropriate in the context of student-professor relationships, and says institutional change is needed.
"It is reprehensible that the school has so far seemingly avoided creating a policy around student-teacher relations precisely because they would then have to answer to its guidelines. Those answers are long overdue," she said.
Emergency calls to the ambulance service in relation to overdoses in Newmarket have risen by 36 per cent, according to figures released under a Freedom of Information request.
There were 118 cases of people in Newmarket reporting overdoses to the East of England Ambulance Service in 2015, but that figure rose to 161 last year.
Figures also show that the number of calls relating to psychiatric suicides in Newmarket rose by 24 per cent from 2015 to 2016.
Niamh Eastwood, from charity Release, drugs and drugs law specialists, told the News : “These figures are unsurprising given the unprecedented surge in drug-related deaths in Suffolk, and indeed across England and Wales. According to national data there has been a 33 per cent increase in drug-related deaths in Forest H...
“The rate of drug-related deaths in England and Wales is currently the highest since records began. This is a public health crisis, and both national and local government are failing to respond to it.
“Authorities must improve access to harm reduction services immediately to reduce the rate of overdoses and drug-related deaths.
At the end of a telephone assessment, each emergency call is given a category based on the information given by the caller. This includes a Red 1 and a Red 2 call.
R1 calls are immediately life threatening in relation to the most time-critical patients – for example, cardiac arrest. R2 calls are immediately life threatening. For example, serious breathing difficulties.
Overall, the figures in Newmarket show that there were 94 calls in relation to R1 concerns in 2015, but that figure rose to 121 in 2016.
The number of R2 calls in 2015 was at 1,792, but that figure rose to 2,014 last year.
When looking at individual categories, in 2015 the number of psychiatric suicide calls went from 89 to 110 in two years.
Other notable categories include the number of people calling about falls, which rose from 674 to 790, chest pains rose from 303 to 413, traumatic injuries rose from 143 to 180, sexual assaults rose from 72 to 78, and stab/gunshot/penetrating trauma rose from 6 to 11.
When asked about the figures relating to drug overdoses, a Suffolk Constabulary spokesman said: “It is difficult to ascertain any clear pattern to the calls we receive in relation to drug overdoses.
“There may be a variety of reasons behind an overdose – an attempt at suicide, mental health issues or people not reading the labels or instructions carefully in relation to pharmaceutical drugs. In respect of illicit street drugs, the purity of many drugs is currently much higher so this can also mean a potential over...
A ship expert from Dover managed to photograph a Russian Submarine just off the Kent Coast. Nigel Scutt got close enough to take pictures of the sub that's armed with missiles and torpedoes. It was being escorted through the channel by the Royal Navy. Fred spoke to Nigel.
Above: A Banner for Snap Inc. hangs on the facade of the the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on the eve of the company's IPO in New York, U.S., March 1, 2017.
It’s the day technology companies and investors have been waiting for: Snap, the parent company of disappearing-photo app Snapchat, has finally priced its stock in the most highly anticipated initial public offering in years.
Snap stock will begin trading Thursday at $17 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, under ticker symbol SNAP.
The IPO price is above Snap’s expected range of $14 to $16 per share, and values the company at $24 billion.
When can investors buy Snap stock? The U.S. stock market opens at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, and Snap shares are expected to start trading between 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Alibaba, for one—which will continue to hold its title as the biggest IPO on a U.S. stock exchange in history even after Snap goes public—began trading at...
Snap stock will come with a few caveats that investors should be aware of before buying. Snap grew revenue roughly 600% in 2016 to more than $404 million, but it is still not profitable, losing nearly $515 million last year.
Also, in an unprecedented move for U.S. publicly traded companies, Snap stock will have zero voting rights. That means Snap shareholders will not have standard checks and balances that are considered a pillar of corporate governance. They won’t be able to nominate or replace directors on the board, vote for or against ...
Investors will be watching Snap stock closely Thursday to see if it goes up or down—indications of whether investment bankers priced the shares appropriately. But in any case, Snap, which raised $3.4 billion in its IPO, is now officially the biggest American technology offering since Facebook, which raised more than $1...
There is one positive sign that Snap has timed its IPO perfectly: U.S. stocks hit new highs on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones industrial average rising more than 300 points to above 21,000 for the first time.
Max Eddy PureVPN PureVPN boasts an outstanding network of international VPN servers, but its user experience leaves something to be desired, and some features didn't work in testing.
Tedious to get online. Comparatively few servers. Unclear where virtual servers are located. Unfamiliar legal situation. Some features didn't work in testing.
PureVPN boasts an outstanding network of international VPN servers, but its user experience leaves something to be desired, and some features didn't work in testing.
With a VPN, or virtual private network, you can ensure that your data is secure on your network and hidden from prying eyes. PureVPN has a large collection of VPN servers across the world, offering some of the best geographic diversity we've seen. It could use some brushing-up in the UI department, however, and it has ...
When you use a VPN, your web traffic travels through an encrypted tunnel to the VPN service's secure server before heading out into the wider internet. This means that any bad guys monitoring your network won't be able to see your web traffic or trace your movements on the internet back to you. The next time you use a ...
VPNs protect your privacy, but they can also unlock restricted content. In countries with oppressive internet policies, activists and journalists use VPNs to sidestep government censorship and contact the outside world. VPNs can also be used to access region-locked content, such as BBC and Netflix streaming services, t...
While using a VPN is a great step toward better security, it's important to know the limitations of VPNs, too. Although VPNs obscure your IP address, the Tor service is far better at providing true anonymization. Also, if the site you're headed to doesn't use HTTPS, your traffic may be intercepted along the way, anyhow...
There's a good chance that you may have never laid hands on a VPN before. If that's the case, don't worry! We've got a whole feature on how to set up and use a VPN.
PureVPN currently offers neither a free version nor a free trial of its product. There is, however, a seven-day money-back guarantee. If you're unwilling to plunk down cash for a VPN, consider the numerous excellent free VPN services on the market. TunnelBear and ProtonVPN, for example, have excellent (albeit limited) ...
PureVPN costs $10.95 per month, though there are usually discounts on offer. You can also opt to pay $59.00 for a one-year subscription. Subscription payments can be made via just about every means you could desire: credit card, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), PayPal, and so on. You can even pay with gift cards f...
PureVPN has a reasonable monthly price, but one that is just slightly above the $10.50 average monthly fee I'm used to seeing. NordVPN, costs only one more dollar per month, and offers unique specialized servers for specific needs. Private Internet Access has many times the servers that PureVPN offers, and is far more ...
When you go to complete your transaction, PureVPN gives you the chance to purchase add-on services. These include an additional firewall and other extras, which I discuss in detail later.
Whichever plan you choose, you get five licenses to spread across all your devices. PureVPN has clients for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as mobile clients for Android and iOS. You can also secure just your browser traffic with the PureVPN Chrome plug-in.
There is also a business version of PureVPN, priced on a per-seat basis. It's $8.00 per person per month, with additional plans that include more features.
PureVPN also offers software for routers and streaming devices, including the Amazon Fire Stick, Android TV boxes, and Kodi-powered systems. TorGuard VPN sells routers and Apple TVs with its software preinstalled, as does Private Internet Access. Running VPN software on your router can be a smart way to extend protecti...
Other benefits include PureVPN's allowing P2P file sharing and BitTorrent traffic on more than 200 of its servers. Its Split Tunneling feature also lets you select specific traffic to go through the VPN, which is excellent. That way, you can keep certain activities secure and allow more data-hungry but less sensitive f...
PureVPN doesn't do everything, however. For instance, it doesn't provide access to the Tor network, in addition to its VPN protection, which NordVPN does. The absence of such fringe features doesn't hurt PureVPN's score, however, though their presence can help boost the profile of the competition.
VPN technology has been around for a long time; as a result, there is more than one way to create an encrypted tunnel. PureVPN supports several VPN protocols, including: IKEv2, L2TP, PPTP, OpenVPN, and SSTP. All of these provide 256-bit encryption, except PPTP, which offers only 128-bit encryption. Generally, I recomme...
It's safe to assume that a VPN company will add or remove servers as demand increases or slacks, but the number and location of servers are useful indicators of a VPN service's robustness. The more servers there are, the more bandwidth is available to each user on each server. The more server locations there are, the m...
PureVPN currently offers users some 750 servers across 140 countries in 180 different locations. The list includes servers in Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America, Europe, North America, and South America. In fact, it offers some of the best geographic diversity I have yet seen among VPN companies. Simply having VP...
But not everything is necessarily as it seems. PureVPN told me that 54 of the 141 country locations are physical servers while the other 87 are virtual locations. A virtual server is a software-defined server; basically, a physical server running multiple virtual servers that can be configured in different ways, includ...
Virtual servers can be an issue if you want to know exactly which countries are handling your data. That's difficult with PureVPN. Although you can find out which servers are virtual, a representative explained to me virtual servers are placed "in a location nearest to the actual physical location." That's not an exact...
Both NordVPN and Private Internet Access offer well over 3,000 servers. These companies also do not use any virtual locations and own physical hardware in each of the countries they serve.
Note that PureVPN also offers servers in China, Russia, and Turkey. That's particularly notable as these countries have oppressive internet policies. While many VPN companies no longer offer servers in China or Russia in the face of restrictive local laws, PureVPN still does.
In general, I don't think it's possible to make a final judgment about the privacy powers of a given company based solely on the country in which it operates. It is, however, important to know what the policies of the company are and the legal framework they operate within. I suggest would-be consumers consider the fac...
A VPN is intended to improve your privacy, but that only works if the company providing the service takes steps to make sure that your information is secure. After all, if a VPN is keeping tabs on what you do, it's no better than a spy that you're paying for, or an ISP.
It does, however, note when you connect to a server and the total bandwidth used during your session. This kind of data gathering is not unusual among VPN services. The records that are kept, the company says, could not "associate any specific activity to a specific user."
A company representative for PureVPN told me that the company only gathers revenue from subscription sales. That's good, as some VPN companies have intercepted user web traffic to insert ads. Still, others have sold anonymized user information, a practice by ISPs that many use a VPN to prevent in the first place.
Note that PureVPN is headquartered in Hong Kong. This is a bit ironic, given how repressive some of China's internet regulations are. Hong Kong doesn't have mandatory data-retention laws, though, so PureVPN is not required to store data on users or their behavior. However, the Chinese government has been working to ban...
I'm not a legal expert, but PureVPN's representatives explained that Hong Kong maintains its own "legislative, judiciary [...], sets its own rules on immigration, public order, education, civil aviation, and monetary system." The practical upshot, PureVPN's representatives explained, is that, "PureVPN does not have to ...
For this review, I installed PureVPN on a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 running Windows 10. Installation on my test system was quick, but it did require a separate installation of Microsoft Visual C++ 2013.
When you create an account for billing purposes with PureVPN, you enter an email and a password (a mere 12 characters, with no special characters—hardly secure). But this isn't the password or login information you use with the actual PureVPN app. Instead, you receive an email with the password and username in plaintex...
When you launch PureVPN, a screen prompts you to select one of five options: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, File Sharing, and Dedicated IP. Depending on what you select, PureVPN delivers a customized experience. This is clever since it elevates features users might not be familiar with by presenting situat...
Clicking any of these buttons activates the VPN, but the idea is to give you access to the best tools for whatever you're trying to accomplish. Privacy, it turns out, is what I would consider to be the default experience for a VPN client, letting you search the available servers and select one for connection. Stream, o...
There are other settings buried within the app. The Protocols pull-down menu lets you choose from the available VPN protocols, as well as PureVPN's custom Stealth protocol. Each option is accompanied by a rating for speed and security, which is certainly helpful. By default, PureVPN is set to Auto and chooses the proto...
The Global Map tab on the left lets you bypass PureVPN's recommendations and simply select one of the company's servers. Personally, I prefer this kind of interface, and I wonder why PureVPN decided not to use it as the centerpiece of its app.
The PureVPN client feels much zippier since the last time I used it. While it is bright, the use of colorful photos sometimes makes it difficult to read. Once connected, you see your connection status, your current IP address, and your session duration in the lower half of the interface. There's also a traffic chart, s...
There are still borders in cyberspace, particularly when it comes to streaming video online. Services offer differing content based on customers' locations. Because you can use a VPN to hide or spoof your location, many streaming services attempt to block VPN traffic.
One thing to note is that if you plan on watching Netflix, PureVPN won't be much help, as mentioned above. In my testing, I found that Netflix detected that I was using a VPN and blocked streaming. I had the same issue even when I was using PureVPN's streaming mode. That's doubly disappointing.

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.