Ryanair grounds pin-up crew
A rethink is afoot at Dublin-based discount airliner Ryanair Ltd. after somebody took a look at a calendar and discovered it's 2014. In recent years the carrier has produced a charity fundraising calendar called The Girls of Ryanair, featuring female cabin crew posing in bikinis or underwear that "was likely to cause widespread offence," noted Britain`s Advertising Standards Agency in 2012 when it concluded the calendar breached their code.
Boss Michael O'Leary is no stranger to widespread offence himself; many of his eye-raising comments were rounded up in a Guardian article entitled "Michael O'Learys 33 daftest quotes." (One of the more printable ones: "Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get low fares.").
But despite the ASA decision, the Ryanair chief didn't feel an ad campaign promising "RED HOT FARES AND CREW" was in any way demeaning, noting the flight attendants volunteered to pose. However Mr. O'Leary finally relented last week, the Irish Times reported, and said in an interview with Irish radio station Today FM that the calendar's days are over.
Were you in the ketchup war, daddy?
U.S. trade rules are definitely not cool with federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. For the third time in five years, as the Globe's Barrie McKenna reported this week, the WTO has ruled against the American meat-labelling laws known as country-of-origin legislation (COOL) that discriminate against Canada and Mexico.
Mr. Ritz has bared his teeth, vowing Canada will use "any and all means" to force the United States to repeal the law, including slapping tariffs on a wide range of American products, including ketchup.
In addition to the red stuff, California wine, Vermont maple syrup and Florida orange juice that Mr. McKenna pointed to on Ottawa's list, other potential targets include "cherries (other than sour cherries)," communion wafers (!), swivel seats with variable height adjustments, and wooden furniture "of a kind used in offices."
The doctor will see you now
The number of Chinese visitors to Canada has edged out French tourists in August for the first time, Statistics Canada reported this week, with Britain retaining the second spot and the U.S. still well in the lead.
The figure for China rose to 43,102, while French visitors numbered 42,761. A total of 62,570 Brits arrived on Canadian shores, while approximately 1.68 million Americans crossed the border during the month, Statscan said.
The survey comes just a week after the U.S.-based, global non-profit Medical Tourism Association published its own numbers. A survey of its members rated Canada the No. 1 destination in the world for medical treatment. Britain took the second spot, while Israel rounded out the top three.
Britain pulls plug on online fakes
Brits looking for a new counterfeit Cartier watch to impress their friends are going to find their options have just got a little narrower.
Swiss-based luxury goods group Compagnie Financière Richemont SA, whose brands include Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Montblanc, has won a possibly precedent-setting court order in Britain that compels Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut off websites selling counterfeit goods.
Justice Richard Arnold said ISPs should "block, or at least impede, access" to six sites, including cartierloveonline.com, selling what the complainants call cheap replicas, according to the ruling.
Until the site is shut down or choked off, eager beaver shoppers in Britain can pick up a Cartier watch for that special person for under £150 ($270), or a necklace for about £32 (with free shipping available!).
A bird? A plane? No, it's a PlexiDrone
So you've got yourself a brand new drone of your own, but you're not sure how to fly it safely? Fortunately, federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt this week launched a new safety awareness campaign for flyers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that walks you through the do's and don'ts so that you and your family can enjoy many happy days of incident-free droning.
And although droners require a Special Flight Operations Certificate to drone for commercial purposes, just be thankful you live in freedom-loving Canada rather than red-tape-wrapped America, where commercial droning is still illegal. Even commercial flights made for more humanitarian reasons – such as delivering beer to fishermen in huts on frozen lakes – have been clamped down on, as the makers of Lakemaid Beer discovered this past winter.
But opportunities for the commercial sector in Canada prompted Klever Freire, a 30-year-old aeronautics engineer, to found Toronto-based Dream Qii in 2012 while he was working at Bombardier Aerospace, and encouraged him to develop a product with greater capabilities than recreational drones, he recently told Michael del Castillo at Upstart Business Journal. Mr. Freire's PlexiDrone craft is slated to start rolling off the lines in early 2015.
Apple motherboard hits the motherlode
Auction house Bonhams made a landmark sale on Wednesday when it brought the hammer down on an "Apple Computer 1" for more than a million ($905,000 U.S., actually) at a New York sale. Dating from the premodern era (1976), the hand-assembled motherboard was Apple's first attempt at a personal computer.
Bonhams touted it as having "exceptional provenance and in beautiful working condition," but its description was a little fuzzy on one aspect of its origins: "The Apple-1 was built by Wozniak in the Jobs family garage (or possibly Jobs's sister's bedroom.)"
With files from Barrie McKenna, Bloomberg, Upstart Business Journal