Here’s your Daily Digest for Thursday, Oct. 13
First, some good news for anyone who has been inconvenienced by the BlackBerry blackout over the last three days: the system went back to normal early this morning.
The Associated Press reported today that Research in Motion, Ltd., the company that makes the phones, apologized for the worldwide outage of emails and internet services. Those who may still be experiencing problems though the system went live again today might need to take out the battery and put it back in to regain service, Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis told the AP over a conference call.
Part of BlackBerry’s European network went out Monday. Though the underlying issue was fixed, the backlog of emails and messages piling up at Blackberry data centers caused the entire system to slow down. Service slowed for U.S. users on Wednesday.
Animal rights activists in Russia were hoping President Dmitry Medvedev is a dog-lover as they urged him to stop a plan by Moscow authorities to deport 26,000 stray dogs from the city, according to the Associated Press.
Moscow’s plan to send the dogs to a camp 150 miles from the city has been under fire since last February. The city has tabled the plan for now, but the dog lovers “want assurances that it will be abandoned once and for all.”
The activists worry that the move would be dangerous for the dogs’ health and the facility will be too cramped and spread disease.
“The animals will just die there. We won’t know about it, and the money will continue to finance the facility,” Lyudmila Fokina, a volunteer at one of Moscow’s animal shelters, told the AP.
Target Corp. announced today that it will commit to only selling sustainable fish by 2015.
The L.A. Times reported that Target already stopped selling farmed salmon and Chilean sea bass in 2010.
“We thought this larger commitment to fully eliminate anything that’s not certified by 2015 would be the right thing to do to encourage our guests to make the right decisions,” said Shawn Gensch, vice president of marketing for Target’s sustainability initiatives, told the LA Times.
They are now partnering with FishWise, a marine conservation nonprofit, to “assess all Target seafood products with vendor surveys to understand how the seafood is caught or farmed” and determine the environmental impact.
Tracing the fish will be difficult since there is currently no U.S. Food and Drug Administration seafood tracking database or other national tracking policy.