From Cork to Toronto

The San Francisco Chronicle reports : Israeli intelligence officials have complained to Britain and the United States that sensitive night-vision equipment recovered from Hezbollah fighters during the war in Lebanon had been exported by Britain to Iran. [snip] one of the pieces of equipment is a Thermo-vision 1000 LR tactical night-vision system, serial No. 155010, part No. 193960, manufactured by Agema, a high-tech equipment company with branches in Bedfordshire, England, and San Diego. [snip] The equipment, which needed special export-license approval from the British government, was passed to the Iranians through a program run and administered by the U.N. Drug Control Program. The equipment uses infrared imaging to provide nighttime surveillance that allows the user to detect people and vehicles moving in the dark at a range of several miles. The report quotes an anonymous British Foreign Office official: "We've been encouraging the Iranians as part of their anti-narcotics ...

If you own an iPod, as we do, this BBC story on conditions at an Apple iPod supplier in China is interesting. Apple themselves released a report reflecting interviews with 100 out of the BBC's figure of 30,000 Apple-related workers which included "Two employees reported that they had been disciplined by being made to stand at attention." This report in response to previous British media reports of conditions in the facility . The facility as a whole was reported by the Mail on Sunday as employing 200,000 workers but this may have included lines for other manufacturers. [seen on Slashdot ]

Like pretty much every blog, google tends to refer some odd searches here. I'd like to address two in particular. What's so special about "parking games"? It seems on a look at my logs that it comes up at minimum once a week. It tends to direct people to the account of Sam Sullivan practising flag waving in a car park . "From Cork to Toronto" is 5181 kilometres according to Great Circle Mapper (3219 miles in "old money").

Spotted this on realitycheck(dot)ie - a New Yorker article discussing researcher Ananth Karumanchi's research into possible causes of preeclampsia and strategies to combat it by looking at levels of certain soluble proteins. The article is as interesting for its examination of the "politics" (of a career nature) of research, of getting that research published and of obstetric research as it is for the discussion of the work to date. Don't know if it's going to lead to a cure but I'm glad he and now others are taking another swing at it.

Has Eric the King grown tired of beach football and acting? He doesn't say anything, not even gnomic references to trawlers and seagulls.

So said Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her opinion calling a halt to the warrantless, FISAless tapping of phones by US intelligence (sic) agencies. Slate has what seems a good article here , noting its follow-on to Hamdan vs Rumsfeld . Let's hope a similar, thorough examination of signing statements is not far behind. Taylor quotes Justice Black: The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who make laws which the President is to execute. The first section of the first article says that 'All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States' Taylor ends by quoting Justice Warren: Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the ...

Given Harper's performance over the last few weeks and his handpicked Senator's failure to make progress at Public Works, here's the news that will hopefully end his dreams of an overall majority and send him to Opposition - proof positive that Reformer and other social conservatives are simply unable to co-exist with progressive Conservatives. Halton Tory Youth have come out for Garth Turner's challenger (who isn't even admitting until recently he's running at all to keep things nice and secret). [Originally seen at Big Blue Wave] All this is being co-ordinated by Charles McVety and Rondo Thomas, and if you don't recall who these guys are then Zac at Behind the Headlines has some reminders for you . According to Turner the numbers turning out in public (via "Defend Marriage meetings") are small but not so small that he's ignoring it either - far from it. James Moore, Gerald Keddy, John Prentice and John Baird are also believed to be on the...

When you have bloggers such as Far and Wide's Steve V and Sicilian Notes' Richard Waghorne , the former a raging critic of Israeli operations in Lebanon and the latter a largely uncritical supporter, agreeing on something you can't help feeling like the unlikely has happened - France is doing something right. They have both criticised France's reluctance to increase UNIFIL troop numbers beyond a fairly token 400, up from their current commitment of 200. France's reluctance is mirrored by the Germans who have offered naval anti-smuggling patrols and perhaps border security, the UK and Denmark who have also offered ships, the Italians who are ready to send 3,000 but not yet and the Irish who have earmarked 200 (which would bring them up to the legal maximum of about 850 overseas at any time due to the Liberia mission) but who are also holding back . The reason is that which I posted on some days ago (albeit having taken a second swing at it) - Resolution 1701 does...

According to Adam Cohen in the New York Times (rego required or use Bugmenot) seminars on the Rehnquist Court are avoiding discussion of perhaps its most historic case . Cohen argues that Bush vs Gore was right in law but wrong in remedy, and that Democratic petitioners attempting to use Bush vs Gore to ensure electoral fairness are winning in lower courts but being reversed when the cases are heard en banc at the District Courts of Appeal. There are several problems with trying to airbrush Bush v. Gore from the law. It undermines the courts’ legitimacy when they depart sharply from the rules of precedent, and it gives support to those who have said that Bush v. Gore was not a legal decision but a raw assertion of power. The courts should also stand by Bush v. Gore’s equal protection analysis for the simple reason that it was right (even if the remedy of stopping the recount was not). Elections that systematically make it less likely that some voters will get to cast a vote that is c...

I've been thinking some more about the AIDS Conference, and especially given the media coverage of the Federal Government's participation. It's clear that this event has caused a complete meltdown as far as the Tories are concerned, not merely because of the mileage Harper's decision to go to Alert (like Ottawa wasn't far enough away - 4,300km Harper? Seriously, you wouldn't have caught anything, not even at 1/10,000,000th the distance.) but also the bewildering performance of Tony Clement and Josee Verner, cancelling press conferences twice now. It is true that Chretien didn't go in Vancouver in 1996 but if the p'tit gars de Shawinigan is the standard against which the Tories wish to be judged now the next election can't come soon enough. What this is really about is Harper being booed. Once again we see the American influence at work, but instead of "free speech zones" far from the President, Harper is keeping himself far from anywhe...

"I make this simple request to the Afghan people: Reach out and grab on to the help we offer to you in good faith. Together, and only together, can we succeed," she said. Angela Reid, mother of Corporal Christopher Reid who was killed by a roadside bomb, speaking at his funeral in Truro, Nova Scotia. [ CBC video report - Realplayer ]

Personally I suspect that the opinions that Soviet style methodology is at work in Havana (Fidel is sick when he's really already dead) might be proved wrong, but here are two articles I noticed about the situation - one by Alexandre Trudeau reminiscing about the good old days when his Dad hung out with Castro but this one in the Jamaican Gleaner gives what I think is a more realistic view of Cuba today.

Security Council Resolution 1701 section 12: Acting in support of a request from the government of Lebanon to deploy an international force to assist it to exercise its authority throughout the territory, authorizes Unifil to take all necessary action in areas of deployment of its forces and as it deems within its capabilities, to ensure that its area of operations is not utilised for hostile activities of any kind, to resist attempts by forceful means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the mandate of the Security Council , and to protect United Nations personnel, facilities, installations and equipment, ensure the security and freedom of movement of United Nations personnel, humanitarian workers, and, without prejudice to the responsibility of the government of Lebanon, to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence; What a pity it has taken several invasions of Lebanon to get these words which most people probably thought a UN force would have had befor...

From his Globe and Mail column today : This latest alleged bomb plot has thrown international aviation into chaos. Flights are delayed, airline stocks have tumbled. And we'll be forced to drink Air Canada's coffee. Damn you international terrorist masterminds!

Maria Minna's sense of national interest in her reaction to Wajid Khan's appointment as Harper's special adviser mirrors Benjamin Disraeli's nineteenth century thinking. I must say I hadn't considered myself lucky to live west of Coxwell Avenue (and thus Jack Layton's constituent rather than Minna's) for quite a while but today I do. Hedy Fry makes it clear that she is all for the same kind of ideological uniformity the Tories are regularly accused of. Jim Karaygiannis' attack is probably not entirely unrelated to the fact that Khan recently replaced him as leadership campaign chair of Joe "Youth for" Volpe. It's a bit startling (but as an immigrant also encouraging) to watch the rapid rise of the former head honcho at Dufferin Mazda and the object of many FAN590 morning show comedy sketches. He had already been in the news for confronting Qayyum Abdul Jamal , one of the 17 arrested on terrorism charges, at a Muslim centre in his ri...

When you subscribe to blog aggregators like OntarioBlogs or IrishBlogs, you come across a lot of varied and wonderful stuff but also a lot of one-note blogs and a lot of one-track minds. God knows I have often been wrong about stuff I have written and commented but I hope that when it gets to the stage where I reflexively abuse people personally simply for thinking differently that someone like Twenty will less than gently smack me upside the head and I will find something else to do with my time. The problem is that sometimes an interesting sounding subject line will have me clicking on the aggregator link before I realise whose blog it is and then my heart sinks on discovering where I've landed. Even if I don't click on it, sometimes scrolling down through the aggregator brings post after post which are cut and pastes from other outlets favouring their positions and little if any content of their own. Having made this comment in some frustration on one such blog, I then no...

On CBC's the National, another report on AIDS - this time from South Africa. It is frightening how quickly we have become inured to AIDS and in particular AIDS in Africa. [Realplayer, begins at 25:30, link will work until evening of 10th Aug] So many blogs and so many journalists have weighed the tens and hundreds of deaths in Israel and Lebanon, looking for a few more killed on the side they favour to prove some kind of point. In Africa the deaths come in thousands, and tens of thousands. The crises in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan have so many fewer deaths than the conflicts in Somalia, in Congo, in Sudan, and in the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa but so many more column inches. One thousand is the number of AIDS deaths each day in South Africa. The documentary made no mention of the Mbeki regime's disastrous attitude to AIDS - if the apartheid regime had acted one tenth as culpably there would be demonstrations about genocide in every university, every union hall, eve...