Workers describe same pressure to upsell as their counterparts at the big banks

Dozens of employees from credit unions across the country tell Go Public they feel the same pressure as bank employees to meet high sales targets, often to the detriment of their members.

They're speaking out after employees from Canada's big five banks revealed they often push customers into expensive financial products they don't need to generate sales revenue and hold on to their jobs.

"We brag about being better than the banks, but when it comes to upselling we're exactly the same," said a former longtime employee at B.C.'s Coast Capital Savings, the third-largest credit union in the country based on assets.

CBC is concealing the identities of the former employees quoted here because they still work in the financial industry or hope to do so again in the future.

© Mydrim Jones

Police officer caught her with half-undressed schoolboy, a former pupil, in the back of her car at 2am earlier this week in Florida, USA, but initially said that he was the one seducing her

A drama teacher had an unscripted run in with the law while allegedly performing a sex act on an underage pupil in her car during the middle of the night.

Pamela Stigger, 33, claimed she was "only trying to mentor him" but the 15-year-old told police she had told him to go to the back seat where they took off their trousers and underwear and had sex.

The aspiring actress then reportedly got dressed and was performing oral sex on him when he told her a sheriff's deputy was walking towards the car.

The female officer swooped in Tamarac, Florida, after a call about a suspicious looking vehicle obstructing traffic with no one in the front seats at approximately 2am.

She said she saw Stigger in the back with the boy who was naked from the waist down.

The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 passed by Nixon changed everything.

Skyrocketing health care costs: Thanks President Nixon!

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally. And this is why the shameless pandering to robber baron corporations posing as "health providers" is such an egregious ... and obvious ... tactic to do nothing more than plump up insurance company profits.

And do you know who's to blame? Believe it or not, the downfall of the American health insurance system falls squarely on the shoulders of former President Richard M. Nixon.

In 1973, Nixon did a personal favor for his friend and campaign financier, Edgar Kaiser, then president and chairman of Kaiser-Permanente. Nixon signed into law, the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, in which medical insurance agencies, hospitals, clinics and even doctors, could begin functioning as for-profit business entities instead of the service organizations they were intended to be. And which insurance company got the first taste of federal subsidies to implement HMOA73 ... *gasp* ... why, it was Kaiser-Permanente! What are the odds? It's all right here to read for yourself.

An ordinary US federal government employee won a prestigious invitation-only chess tournament set up by diplomats to improve international relations between Russia, Norway and the US after coming in as a last minute replacement for another player.

"I got incredibly lucky, I am not a master, I don't speak Russian. But I knew someone else with good connections, but he had to go out of town, so he asked me to go in his stead. And it just worked!" said David Sherman after winning first prize in the 'Chess for Peace' tournament at the Russian embassy in DC on Saturday night.


Sherman, a keen amateur player, said he'd never even been to an embassy before and thought his chances of winning were just "fantasies" when he saw the caliber of his rivals in the 60-player field. But with no pressure he "had a blast" moving up the leaderboard.

With US-North Korea relations at their lowest point, you'd expect Americans would know a thing or two about the nation squaring up to its government. However, a new survey suggests many US citizens cannot even find the state on a map.

In March, the US cranked up the war rhetoric when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson admitted on a visit to South Korea that military action against the North was an "option on the table". Now a survey, commissioned by the New York Times, challenged Americans to point to North Korea's position on the globe - and that didn't go very well.

With President Donald Trump's administration also threatening increased sanctions against the Asian country, US citizens would be expected to take a particular interest in North Korea. Yet, of the 1,746 participants surveyed by the NYT, 64 percent were unable to correctly identify the location of the Kim Jong-un-led nation on an unmarked map.

Russians no longer see Turkey as a hostile state and half of the population supports cooperation between the two countries, regardless of existing political issues, according to recent research.

The state-run Russian public opinion research center VTSIOM reported on Monday that according to its latest poll, only 4 percent of Russians see relations with Turkey as hostile, while around a quarter (24 percent) see relations as strained. A year ago these shares amounted to 23 and 47 percent respectively.

Another poll, conducted by the independent agency Levada in mid-2016, showed that back then Turkey was in third place on the list of nations that Russians saw as most hostile (with first and second place occupied by the United States and Ukraine).

Do you remember the time you changed a stranger's political opinion on the Internet by using your logic and your accurate data?

Probably not. Because that rarely happens. If you were paying attention during the past year, you learned facts don't matter to our decisions. We think they do, but they don't. At least not for topics in which we are emotionally invested, such as politics. (Obviously facts do matter to the outcomes. But not to decisions.)

So how do you win a political debate on the Internet when people refuse to change their opinions? I propose the Cognitive Dissonance test. If you can trigger your opponent into cognitive dissonance, you win. That's usually as far as a political debate can go. Generally, you can't change people's minds, but you can back them into a corner and make them show a "tell" for cognitive dissonance. That's essentially a white flag that says, "I have no logical argument, so I will say something ridiculous and act as though it is not."

© Ashraf AmraPalestinians hold keys and Palestine flags during a rally marking the Nakba in Gaza city, on May 13, 2014.

It is possible...
It is possible at least sometimes...
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away...
It is possible for prison walls
To disappear.
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers
- Mahmoud Darwish

May 15, 2017 marks the 69th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist paramilitaries, and subsequently Israeli forces, made 750,000 to one million indigenous Palestinians into refugees to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine.

The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) calls on people of conscience the world over to further intensify BDS campaigns to end academic, cultural, sports, military and economic links of complicity with Israel's regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid. This is the most effective means of standing with the Palestinian people in pursuing our inherent and UN-stipulated rights, and nonviolently resisting the ongoing, intensifying Nakba.

The Israeli regime today is ruthlessly pursuing the one constant strategy of its settler-colonial project —the simultaneous pillage and colonization of as much Palestinian land as possible and the gradual ethnic cleansing of as many Palestinians as practical without evoking international sanctions.

Following in the footsteps of all previous Israeli governments, the current far-right government, the most openly racist in Israel's history, is heeding the words of the Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky who wrote in 1923:

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. [...] Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population—behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

Brisbane police thought they had come across a "halloween prank" when they found an Australian man 'cooking' his dead wife's feet in a pot after he allegedly killed her.

An inquest into the death of Mayang Prasetyo, a pre-operation transgender sex worker, was told that police encountered a particularly gruesome scene when they visited the couple's apartment.

Police were alerted to disturbances at the apartment by an electrician who was called on to fix the electricity supply, which was blown during a cooking mishap as Marcus Volke, 27, attempted to dispose of Prasetyo's body back in 2014.

"Yeah, I've got a bit of a problem. Umm, I was cooking on my stove. It's an electric stove and the stock boiled over, dripped down and umm, got in the oven," Volke explained in a call which was released following the murder.

"And it basically made this big bang and then all my power turned off. Does it sound like something you'd be able to fix today?"

A top private school in London has promised to introduce gender-neutral uniforms in a bid to support the soaring number of students questioning their identity.

Highgate School, in North London, is seeking to abolish the distinction between girls' and boys' dress, and introduce a mix-and-match uniform that would accommodate all pupils.

While girls at Highgate currently have the choice between gray trousers, dark blue jackets and ties, boys do not have the option to wear the same gray pleated skirts that girls can wear.

They also have to wait until they reach the age of 16 before they can get their ears pierced.

"This generation is really questioning [if we are] being binary in the way we look at things," Adam Pettitt, headmaster at Highgate, told the Times.

However, Pettitt added that some former pupils have spoken out against the new rules amid concerns they could be misleading.

"They write in and say if you left children to their own devices they would grow up differently and you are promoting the wrong ideas," Pettitt said.