English Time with Yves

  A 58-year-old grandmother has been banned from flying with Australia's national carrier Qantas after she got drunk and punched a man in the face on a flight from Australia to New Zealand. Courts also ordered the granny (Mrs M) to pay the airline nearly US$18,000 for having to return to Melbourne Airport. She also received a 4-month jail sentence suspended for two years. Mrs M had a history of anti-social behaviour on airplanes. She was involved in an incident on a Virgin Airlines flight on last year and was fined for using bad language and smoking on the flight. If she is found guilty again of such behaviour, she will end up in prison. Qantas has banned her from its flights for at least ten years. Mrs M, a former nurse, was flying to New Zealand to see her children. She got drunk on the flight and began verbally abusing other passengers and the flight attendants. She then started punching and headbutting the seat in front of her. A male passenger then asked her to be quiet. At ...

In a true case of David and Goliath, two British conservationists have won a court case in the European Court of Human Rights against the British government’s libel laws. Helen Steel, 39 & Dave Morris, 50, also known as the McLibel 2, campaigned in the early 1990s against what they saw as McDonald’s’ immoral operating practices. They distributed leaflets in the streets of London entitled “What’s wrong with McDonald’s – Everything they don’t want you to know”. They were also awarded 35,000 euros ($45,000) between them . The hamburger chain sued the pair for libel, spending $10 million on lawyers. The McLibel 2 had no money for legal representation, and the British legal system did not at that time allow legal aid in libel cases. McDonald’s won the case and were awarded $70,000 in damages . The pair never paid a penny of it. It was a huge public relations disaster for McDonald’s. The presiding judge damningly stated, “McDonald's marketing has “pretended to have a positive n...

  A top British official has said the UK government should set a target date for everybody in England to speak English. Dame Louise Casey is an expert on social welfare and community interaction. She said a "common language" would help to "heal rifts across Britain". Ms Casey has been a long-time critic of successive governments, who she deems have failed to focus on integration in an ever-increasingly multicultural Britain. She said politicians had continually failed to keep up with the "unprecedented pace and scale of immigration" over the past decade. She said that many communities were becoming increasingly divided, and a lack of ability in English was a key factor in creating division. The UK's Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid, revealed that 770,000 people who live in England either speak no English whatsoever or hardly any. He warned that up to 70 per cent of those whose English skills were lacking were women, mostly from Pakistani and Bangla...

  The television maker Vizio has agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle claims that it collected data from 11 million people without their consent. The lawsuit against the flat-panel TV maker was filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the USA. The FTC discovered that Vizio had been gathering and selling data on customers without permission for years. The FTC claimed Vizio began making televisions in 2014 that automatically tracked what people were watching. They fitted tracking devices to TVs made before 2014 by using software updates. The FTC said: "Consumers didn’t know that while they were watching their TVs, Vizio was watching them." The FTC said Vizio captured second-by-second information about what people were watching. The company also recorded people's IP addresses. The FTC said this was a breach of privacy and security. It said: "The data generated when you watch television can reveal a lot about you and your household." Vizio sold information t...