Telecom Workers Given Two Choices - Six Hundred Telecom workers have been told to sign new contracts without redundancy clauses or be made redundant. The workers have been given less than a week to sign up with EDS a multi-national company which will operate part of Telecom’s information systems. Engineering and Printing Union lawyer Andrew Little says staff will lose their rights to redundancy payouts under the new contract. He says to add insult to injury current terms and conditions will only appear as policy provisions in the new contract. This means EDS can change those provisions at any time as they are company policy and not an agreed part of the contract. These terms which can change include hours of work and superannuation.

Shell Ups Its Petrol Prices - Shell says it has no alternative but to join the latest round of petrol price rises. Mobil upped its price by 3 cents a litre at midnight last night, Shell has just followed suit. It is the third rise in one month, with a total rise of 9 cents a litre. A Shell spokesperson says it is all because of a rising price of crude oil and the company has no choice but to increase its prices also. BP says it is highly likely to follow suit and Challenge says it will make the move once the other companies do.

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>