Trans species marriage legalised

by Sanjeev Gupta
San Francisco, November 6 2050

The Independent US City State of San Francisco voted in its State Legislature today to legalise marriage between humans and 'defined species', from 2051.

The long awaited law has been the subject of acrimonious debate since 2045 when it was first proposed by members of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA, as a means of creating greater protection for animals in society.

The list of defined species which can be wed with their human masters includes dogs, cats, horses, certain household bird species, rabbits, gerbils and housemice.

Contentious species such as snakes and other reptiles, or predatory birds, did not make the list.

"I have already booked the celebrant for our ceremony," said 43 year old dog lover, Sabine Sertains, of Santa Cruz. Sertains plans to wed her 5 year old Labrador, Theodore.

The law was passed despite strong opposition from Church leaders of all denominations, 126 of whom stood on the steps of the San Francisco legislature in protest on the day of final debate of the bill.

"Marriage is a sacred ceremony that should only be allowed between man and man, woman and woman, or man and woman. To extend it to pets demeans and degrades the sanctity of that union."

Sertains had one thing to say to Church leaders when she heard the news, "Give me a Labrador over a man any day!" she said, "He will never let you down."

European Republic on the verge of dissolution



Berlin, European Republic, October 23 2050

by ZI finance reporter, Kun Lee

As mass protests continue in European capitals for the fourth week, the government of the European Republic is debating a motion by the state of France to dissolve the Republic and return to a loose Federation of nation states.



Euro slum dwellers are refusing to pay super-tax

The people's revolution has already caused the resignation of the ER Finance Minister, Gerhardt Buller, after a rescue package designed to enable the Republic Government to avoid insolvency was rejected by the Chinese Legislative Yuan in Beijing on Thursday.

The crisis was provoked by the refusal of millions of Europeans to pay the new super-tax imposed by Berlin for the recovery and relocation work needed after the inundation of Holland by rising sea levels. The ER economy has already buckled under the demands of its remilitarisation program, intended to enable it to secure fresh water resources into the next century.

"They can build a great big wooden shoe and sail off in it for all I care," said Pedro Alondra, a café worker in Paris. "We don't even have running water 4 hours a day, and we are expected to open our doors, and our wallets, to 5 million Dutch who have known for 20 years this would happen?"

The time had come for every European state to take responsibility for its own citizens, said French governor, Phillipe Le Guymont.

"We can no longer expect the bureaucrats of Berlin to solve the problems of the squatters of Marseille, or the displaced from Rotterdam. Only the French can solve French problems, and the Dutch must solve their own."

It is 35 years since the national bankruptcies of  Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal led to the collapse of the then European Union, and the formation of a European Republic incorporating the free states of Germany, France, Benelux, Scandinavia and Austria.

Yahoogle update causes net chaos

Delhi, March 15, 2050: Omninet cloud traffic suffered a worldwide blackout for 13 minutes today when a bad security patch applied by Yahoogle caused satellite based routing to crash.

"It was 13 minutes where the world stood still," said Global OmniCall magnate, Majit Singh. "All our vidphone lines were down, updates to virtual billboards and store shelves stalled, television and direct to eyeware feed went black," he said.

Mr Singh has estimated it will take his company alone two days and millions of dollars to resolve all the customer issues created by the Yahoogle patch.

A spokesperson for Yahoogle Omninet said the company reacted immediately when the issue with the new patch became apparent, and normal service was continued for all non-satellite based traffic. She refused to speculate on the global economic cost of the blackout, "That will be an issue for our legal advisors to address," she said.

Not all consumer groups were upset at the blackout. "For 13 blessed minutes today there was silence," said the CEO of the anti-omninet Institute for Information Management, Maureen Haerdigan.

"The bus stops stopped hawking fast food at passengers, shopping center walls weren't strobing advertising, the prices on the supermarket shelves weren't changing in front of our eyes, and even the vidphone spammers couldn't get through," she said. "People on public transit took off their eyeware and talked to each other. It was a revolution."

European Republic Anti-Monopoly Trust chairperson, Yuri Vedloff, said the blackout was more evidence, if it was needed, of the dangers of concentrating global information traffic coordination in the hands of only one or two suppliers.

"People questioned our motives at the turn of the century, when we aggressively pursued large software and infrastructure monopolies for non-competitive behaviour," he said. "I think now they realise that our motives were based in fear of the reality we have seen again today."

Mr Vedloff was referring to a situation at the turn of the century where nearly all business and leisure computing systems relied on the operating system of a single provider. Concerted efforts by the EU to dismantle the monopoly were ineffective, largely due to the financial pressure the company was able to bring to bear against the EU legislators. Eventually that company went the way of the dinosaur, and Yahoogle emerged dominant.

"The genius of Yahoogle made the operating system irrelevent," Taiwan Provincial Bank Omninet Analyst Kevin Lee said, "Yahoogle services and applications can run on anything with a chip in it, as long as it is hooked up to Omninet."
"And what isn't?" he asked.
Today, for 13 minutes, a lot wasn't.

World Health Pandemic Organization Censured

Beijing, March 15, 2050: In a dramatic session of the UN Security Council in Beijing today the council voted to censure the World Health and Pandemic Organization for its recent public call for governments to devote significant resources to preparing for a PN-561 Rodent Flu pandemic.

Council Chairperson, Wen Hei, said the WHPO call was 'scaremongering of the most base kind, intended purely to improve the deterioriating financial situation of an organisation created to deal with pandemics which have never materialised.' The Council censure motion called for the WHPO to withdraw its current evaluation of the global risk of PN-561, but stopped short of calling for the WHPO to be disbanded. 'The WHPO has cried 'wolf' once too often. There is a credibility gap it needs to address,' Mr Hei said.

The WHPO recommended immediate financing of a new Rodent Flu educational campaign in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, an increase in stockpiling of the vaccine HOP-411 manufactured by pharmaceutical company Bristolofi, and an increase in WHPO funding of 209bn. Euro to pay for increased research and field intervention.

The Council was presented with a case study compiled by the University of Western China, looking at the 2014 WHPO led campaign against the H4-N3 bat virus, its first and most significant global campaign to date. The UWC report concluded that:

-the WHPO overstated the speed at which such a virus could mutate and pose a threat to humans
-it consistently overstated the likelihood of human to human transfer of the virus
-it provided funding to scientists whose research supported the Bat Flu Pandemic hypothesis, and cut or denied funding to scientists who argued against it
-it paid a global PR agency to track and publicise all cases of suspected Bat Flu, ensuring the issue remained high on the media agenda
-it received grants from vaccine manufacturers for Bat Flu related projects
-it more than quadrupled its operating budget in the period between 2008 and 2024, mostly as a result of funding related to Bat Flu research, PR and field work

The UWC noted that the WHOs own records demonstrated that between 2008 and 2019, only 1050 people globally died of Bat Flu, and no case of human to human transmission was ever proven. Investigators compared this to the approximately two million people who died of common influenza in China in the same period.