Oz to ban bosses from accessing job seekers’ Facebook accounts
SYDNEY: Under a potential change to Australia’s national privacy laws, bosses are likely to be banned from demanding access to job seekers’ Facebook or other social media pages or accounts. The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) said that the use of social media accounts to assess candidates for work, education and other opportunities was an area of growing concern.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the commission is considering whether new laws are needed to allow people to sue for serious breaches of privacy.
The report said that it is deemed illegal to ask job seekers for social media passwords in 13 US states, including California and New Jersey, and other states are following suit. The ALRC said that it may be appropriate to include such conduct as an example of a serious invasion of privacy for the purpose of a statutory cause of action or to amend laws dealing with workplace surveillance to prohibit such conduct. The commission will release draft recommendations in late February and a final report at the end of June next year, the report added. (ANI)
France jails four over crucifixion style exorcism
PARIS: A French court has sentenced four people to between three and six years in jail over a violent, crucifixion-style exorcism carried out on a 19-year-old woman.
The three men and a woman, members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, tied up the Cameroonian teenager in the position of Christ on the cross and kept her bound to a mattress for seven days in May 2011.
When police discovered the woman at a housing estate in Grigny in the southern Paris suburbs, she was emaciated, dehydrated, in a state of shock and showed signs of having been beaten. The four, who are all of French Caribbean origin, insisted throughout the trial that the victim, named as Antoinette, had consented to the exorcism.
The court found them guilty of kidnap, but dismissed charges of torture and barbarism, and the sentences were lower than the eight to 12 years that the prosecution had called for.
Antoinette’s former boyfriend, Eric Derond, was considered the instigator of the assault, and was given the longest sentence of six years.
Antoinette, now 21, was 16 when she met her assailants through the Seventh Day Adventists, a US-based millennialist Protestant church which has millions of followers worldwide but only 13,000 in France.
During the trial, she said she had been “brain-washed”, becoming convinced that Derond was God. Her father told the court he believed she would have died within two days if police had not found her when they did. (AFP)
Americans spend more time talking on mobiles: Poll
WASHINGTON: Americans spend more time talking on their mobile phones as compared to anyone else in the world, a new survey has revealed.
According to Statista, the average American logged 356 monthly minutes of outgoing calls in 2011 while the average German logged only 78 minutes of outgoing calls each month, Mashable reports. The poll shows the length of time that mobile subscribers in 10 different countries spent on the phone in 2011.
After the Americans, Canadians come close second, followed by Turkey, Norway and France, where an average individual user spent 188, 184, and 128 minutes respectively. (ANI)
7 killed in oil tanker explosion
Beijing: At least seven persons were killed and another injured today when an oil tanker exploded and caught fire in the coastal city of Ningbo in China’s eastern Zhejiang Province. The accident happened at Zhangjianqi shipyard in the city’s Zhenhai District when the 300-tonne vessel was being repaired, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. The fire was extinguished after two and half hour struggle by the fire fighters. (PTI)