The Toddlers’' Truce was a piece of early British television scheduling policy that required transmissions to terminate for an hour each weekday between 6pm and 7pm. This was from the end of Children's TV to the start of the evening schedule, so that young children could be put to bed.
The ITA had encouraged the ITV companies to seek abolition of the Truce. Action was taken finally in July 1956, probably the result of a lack of effective cooperation between the companies rather than political objection. The Postmaster General, Charles Hill, had disliked the policy as an example of the BBC's paternalism toward its audience:
This restriction seemed to me absurd and I said so. It was the responsibility of parents, not the state, to put their children to bed at the right time... I invited the BBC and the ITA to agree to its abolition[...]
The BBC could not, however, be persuaded to accept the abolition or even to a compromise of reducing the period to 30 minutes. Hill tired of the disagreement and asked Parliament for the abolition which was agreed on 31 October 1956. However, the BBC and ITA could not even agree a date for the abolition to take place. Hill decided on Saturday, 16th February 1957.
The BBC filled the hour with a music programme, Six-Five Special, from the first Saturday and with the Tonight news magazine from Monday to Friday. The BBC however continued to close from 6.15-7.00pm on Sundays, the time of evening church services, until Songs of Praise was launched on 1 October 1961. Until 1992 this time on Sundays was used for religious programmes on BBC1 and ITV. The 6-7pm slot has since then been devoted to news, especially regional news, in the weekday schedules of both BBC1 and ITV, though Crossroads was also shown in this period in most ITV regions.
The first public dial-up Bulletin Board System was developed by Ward Christensen. Christensen, born in West Bend, Wisconsin, U.S., is the founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online. Christensen, along with partner Randy Seuss, started development during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, and officially established CBBS four weeks later, on the 16th February, 1978. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Chicago, Christensen along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began preliminary work on the Computerised Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. CBBS, which kept a count of callers, reportedly connected 253,301 callers before it was finally retired.
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The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC or FCCC), aimed at fighting global warming. The UNFCCC is an international environmental treaty with the goal of achieving the "stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
The Protocol was initially adopted on 11 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, and entered into force on 16th February 2005. As of September 2011, 191 states have signed and ratified the protocol. The only remaining signatory not to have ratified the protocol is the United States. Other United Nations member states which did not ratify the protocol are Afghanistan, Andorra and South Sudan. In December 2011, Canada denounced the Protocol.
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Participation in the Kyoto Protocol, as of December 2011, Brown = Countries that have signed and ratified the treaty (Annex I & II countries in dark brown) Blue = No intention to ratify at this stage. Dark blue = Canada, which withdrew from the Protocol in December 2011.
Grey = no position taken or position unknown |
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