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...