Vladd’s view of the World

http://www.thisisjersey.com/2009/05/14/airports-novel-anti-terror-move/

Nice to see our airport security doing such a grand job, how dare this woman even think of taking a book with a picture of a gun on the cover onto a plane. Does she not realise how distressing such an item would be to any right thinking person, I hope they added her details to the relevant database and took her DNA for future reference. This act of bravery by our security forces rates up there with the bravery shown by the security personel who, with no thought of their own safety removed a comic, from a young child trying to board a plane, which in an example of total thoughtlessness to public feelings and safety had a small plastic gun taped to the front as a free gift. I don’t know about anyone else but I feel much safer knowing that airports are protected by such a high calibre of staff, and that such wonderful examples of common sense are an example to us all in these times.

Police order tourists to delete photographs of bus station | Politics | The Guardian

Since when did this become illegal? Even the Met claim not to know of any law making this illegal. I hope the officers concerned were properly disciplined for exceeding their authority. I presume they were actual police officers and not as in the Enfield park incident those jumped up traffic wardens or PCSOs. So are police officers now making the regulations up on the fly? The tourists should be thankful they weren’t citizens of our glorious nation otherwise they would probably have been detained, fingerprinted, and had their DNA taken to be illegally filed before they were finally released with no charge. The public appear to be slowly losing faith in our police and incidents such as this the pre emptive arrest of eco protesters and the police behaviour at the G20 protest followed by the misleading of Ian Tomlinsons family over the cause of his death are not helping.

IPCC chief slams tactics of G20 police at demo | Politics | The Observer

G20 protests: how the image of UK police took a beating | Politics | The Observer 

Labour plans compulsory community service for youngsters | Education | guardian.co.uk

Compulsory Voluntary work? This will not be voluntary it will be work done on the cheap, has someone realised just how impossible it will be to force everyone to stay in education until they are 18 and decided to find them something else to do. Now I am all for encouraging teenagers to volunteer to do community work,but the important word there is volunteer. Who will supervise these ‘volunteers’ and what will be the penalty for not hitting the 50 hour mark? This will not increase a sense of community in our young it will probably just bring about resentment at being forced to do this service.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5082582/Britains-sexiest-teacher-to-be-disciplined-over-lingerie-photos.html 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1166044/Teacher-faces-disciplinary-action-parent-uncovers-racy-lingerie-photos-online.html 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7974446.stm

Now this woman won a competition on national television and was voted Britains sexiest teacher, which I feel is far tackier than her having a career on the side as a model. Lets be honest here, these pictures are nothing special, they are not pornographic, they don’t involve pupils, they have no effect on her teaching abilities, in fact given she is a PE teacher it could be argued they show the benefits of exercise on the body . I find it sad not that a parent felt the need to complain, but they felt the need to complain anonymously. How do we know it was a parent who complained?

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7965058.stm

Now this joke, not that funny, is just a play on words it probably dates back to the days of Ghandi. Is it racist? Was the reaction of A Mr Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadhan Foundation – an organisation which exists to enhance a better understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West -over the top? He even managed to puff himself into such a rage that he accused Sir David of being out of touch with reality in portraying Pakistanis as cloakroom attendants.
‘He should have known better,’ he said. ‘Many top jobs in this country are held by British Muslims. He needs to be careful about what he says. He need to learn about the wealth of jobs held by Muslims.’
Now did anyone mention muslims? did anyone complain to the radio station? No. Was this an example of people trying to make news out of a regretable lack of judgement? More than likely.

Whodunnit: community baffled by severed feet washed up on shore

Five have been found since August but police are no nearer solving the mystery

• Dan Glaister in Vancouver
• The Guardian,
• Saturday June 21, 2008

Even on a bright, breezy summer’s day, there is something uninviting about Savage Road. Its single lane track runs straight as an arrow before stopping at the water’s edge on Westham Island, 15 miles from central Vancouver.

At one end, a farm shop offers honey, fresh eggs and prawns. Nearby is a rod and gun club. Beyond the flattened delta landscape, mountains shimmer on the horizon.

At the far end of Savage Road stands a boat yard. Hulking pieces of rusted machinery lie close to a concrete ramp leading to the water. It was here on Monday that the couple who own the yard found something not entirely unexpected in the water: a severed foot.

“We were just walking out in the morning, when we saw a shoe floating in the water, right there,” the man, who preferred not to give his name, recounted two days later.

“We thought: Oh no, there’s another one. Any time you see a shoe floating in the water, you kind of dread what you’re going to find.”

“We flipped it over with a stick and saw it was all yellow inside,” said the man. “You could see there was a foot in there. It was pretty nasty. And it stank.”

The man pointed across the water to a radio tower on another island, perhaps a mile away.

“That’s where they found the one last week,” he said.

The two feet encased in training shoes are merely the latest chapters in a whodunnit that has the locals in this fishing and ferrying community buzzing.

Five human feet have washed up on the island coastline around Vancouver since August last year, including two in the last four weeks. All but the one on Westham Island have been right feet; all but one appear to have been male and all have been wearing trainers – Reeboks, Nikes and Adidas. The first four were all size 12.

The most recent find made front page news in Canada: The Mystery of the Feet was the Vancouver Sun’s take on the story, while the normally staid National Post tried British Columbia’s Sixth Foot of Separation, following it up with the quizzical, Why Is it Always Feet? The Province, a somewhat racier local tabloid, took a more optimistic slant: Sixth Foot Raises Hopes, it proclaimed.

But the most recent foot turned out not to be human at all. A prankster had stuffed an animal paw into a trainer and then planted it on the beach. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were not amused.

“Whoever is responsible for this took the time to ensure that the remains were set up to closely resemble human remains,” said Inspector Brendan FitzPatrick. “Many families with missing loved ones are closely watching and wondering if it is their loved one who has been found. The insensitivity shown to the families and the victims involved is unbelievable.”

One of the first on the scene at Campbell river was Kirsten Stevens, whose brother was one of five men who died when their seaplane crashed three years ago minutes away from the site. Her brother’s remains were the only ones found.

“We are so frustrated,” she told the Globe and Mail. “This is the same spot where the plane took off from. It’s a constant reminder of the lack of closure.”

DNA profiles of the first three feet, found last year, do not match any missing-person cases, according to the coroner’s office. While the evidence has been gathered, there are few clues to the origin of the five feet.

“The big picture is that there are body parts washing up all over the place all the time,” said Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer-turned-beachcomber who is writing a book about flotsam and jetsam to be published next year titled The Floating World.

But this, he admits, is different. “I’ve never come across a time when we’ve had five of one kind at one time. It’s highly unusual.”

Ebbesmeyer got his start in the world of flotsam thanks, coincidentally, to Nike shoes. His interest in tracing the movements of ocean-borne objects was piqued by the loss in 1990 of 80,000 Nike shoes when five containers rolled off a ship in heavy waters off Alaska.

But shoes with feet in them are a different matter.

“The shoe is going to protect the foot pretty well,” Ebbesmeyer said. “Most shoes float, and sneakers tend to float sole up, so that would protect them from birds.”

Theories about the origins of the feet abound. Some suggest that they belong to victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, or that they may be from the victims of maritime or air accidents.

Others point to the large numbers of missing people in British Columbia. According to police there were 2,371 people listed as missing in the province at the end of May, with gang-related crime, drugs and homelessness all contributing to the problem. The exploits of a Vancouver area pig farmer, Robert Pickton, loom large. Pickton was convicted last year of the murder of six women, and according to the prosecution at his trial confessed to the murder of 43 others.

The suggestion that there may be a criminal element connected with the appearance of so many feet is bolstered by the conclusion of Ebbesmeyer and other oceanographers that the feet have most probably been carried down the Fraser river – which flows from the Rocky mountains before reaching the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver – swelled by the spring snow melt.

“This is such a highly improbable situation it begs the question of foul play,” said Ebbesmeyer.

The police are refusing to speculate.

“It is a unique situation but that doesn’t mean there is a link between them all,” said a Delta police spokeswoman, Sharlene Brooks. “Our forensic investigation will help us identify them, then hopefully we can establish the circumstances of death and determine if this was accidental or a criminal act. We’re treating it as a criminal investigation until we have reached that determination. That’s the prudent thing to do. We’d do that regardless of whether it was a foot.”

Back at Westham Island, the man who found foot number five has few doubts about its origin.

“This is coming down from the river, no question about it,” he said. “There’s someone doing this all right. Think about it: if they tied a chain around someone’s ankle and threw them overboard, the foot would just pop off. That could explain it. Maybe they got a lot of bodies stored up in a container and they got washed out. We don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff goes on over there,” he added, nodding toward the city.

One person’s misfortune, however, did bring him some reward.

“This is private property you’re on,” he said. “We’ve had just about everything here the last couple of days, helicopters, boats, TV. We even took a photograph and sold it to the TV for $800. If they can afford to fly people around the world to look at this, there must be some money for a photograph.”

Honda May Mass-Produce FCX Clarity Fuel-Cell Car in 10 Years

By Tetsuya Komatsu and Makiko Kitamura

June 16 (Bloomberg) — Honda Motor Co., Japan’s second- largest automaker, may start mass production of its FCX Clarity fuel-cell car within 10 years to meet growing demand for fuel- efficient models.

“If we can bring costs down by a certain amount, I think we can start mass-production,” President Takeo Fukui said in an interview at its new-model center today in Tochigi prefecture, northeast of Tokyo. Honda began production of the FCX Clarity at the center today.

Honda plans to lease 200 FCX Clarity vehicles in the U.S. and Japan over the next three years and has five customers for the car in the U.S., the company said in a statement. The carmaker is adding low-pollution models including fuel-cell and gasoline-electric hybrids as record-high oil prices and tougher carbon-emission rules boost demand for cars that use less fuel.

“There’s still a lot of research that’s left to be done” on fuel-cell cars, said Yuuki Sakurai, who helps manage the equivalent of 5.7 trillion yen ($53 billion) including Japanese auto stocks. “It’s difficult to fathom what the industry will look like ten years down the road.”

The FCX Clarity will initially be offered only in California, beginning in July, to take advantage of a network of hydrogen fueling stations being added across the state. The car, which has a top speed of 105 miles per hour, will be leased for $600 a month, the automaker said.

The model’s first U.S. customer is Ron Yerxa, who produced the Oscar-winning film Little Miss Sunshine. Actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest are also customers.

Fuel cells create electricity in a chemical process that combines hydrogen and oxygen. Ideally, water vapor is the only emission.

Emerging Market Hybrids

Honda may produce hybrid cars in an emerging market by the middle of the next decade, Fukui also said in the interview. Specifically, producing a hybrid Civic model in Thailand may be an option because emerging markets have high import duties on cars, he said. It currently builds gasoline-engine Civics in Thailand.

“We would add a hybrid system to a location where we already build a base model,” Fukui said.

Honda plans to add three new models to help raise sales of hybrid vehicles by ninefold to 500,000 units early in the next decade from 55,400 last year, the company said on May 21. Honda trails only Toyota Motor Corp. in building hybrids.

The Civic is the only model with a hybrid option now. It’s also developing the CR-Z hybrid sports car and will add a hybrid option to the Fit compact car.

Hybrid vehicles combine a conventional gasoline engine with an electric motor. The electric motor powers the vehicle at low speeds, and the gasoline engine takes over as the car accelerates. The motor’s battery pack is charged by the gasoline engine and by power regenerated by the brakes.

Honda was the first company to lease fuel-cell vehicles to consumers in 2005 with the FCX minivan, predecessor to the Clarity.

In Japan, Honda leases the FCX minivan to 11 central and local government officials with payments of 800,000 yen ($7,384) a month. The company leases 24 units to customers in the U.S. for $500 a month.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tetsuya Komatsu in Tokyo at tekomatsu@bloomberg.net

Greedy gorgers force strawberry farmer to end pick-your-own offer

By Amol Rajan
Friday, 20 June 2008

A family fruit farm has stopped allowing people to pick their own strawberries because customers were eating too many of the fruits without paying.

Hacker’s Fruit Farm, near Cambridge, has offered locals the chance to pick their own strawberries for 40 years.

But Mark Spight, who runs the farm, said that he was getting sick of watching people eat up to £15 worth of strawberries with clearly no intention of paying for them.

“The cheek of people was unbelievable. People were treating it like a giant open buffet. We’d expect to make about £40,000 during the strawberry season but we lost £10,000 of that to greedy gorgers,” Mr Spight said.

“One woman came up to the counter, covered in juice on her trousers, up her arms and even in her hair. But she handed over a punnet with four strawberries in,” he added.

Mr Spight said he had even spotted one family “sitting in the field with a bowl of water to wash them in and a bowl of cream that they then dipped them in.”

The farm has grown strawberries for 85 years and enjoyed its heyday in the mid-1980s, when the fruit covered 20 of its 35 acres. In time, however, competition from supermarkets in Cambridge has caused the size of the farm to diminish to just four acres, with the rest rented out to grow wheat.

Mr Spight took over the farm five years ago from his wife Hayley’s father and two uncles. They, in turn, had inherited the farm from their parents.

Now, however, with a gloomy economic climate and food prices around the world inflating fast, Mr Spight can no longer afford to be lenient in enforcing his “pick your own” policy.

He claims it was costing his family up to £225 a day. “Children would play in the fields ripping up the green fruit and throwing them at each other but the parents would get defensive if you confronted them. It’s vandalism. You wouldn’t do that in Tesco.”

Mr Spight’s strawberries, which cost just £1 for a pound, are now being replaced by rows of berries, including gooseberries, loganberries, tayberries and currants.

The berries’ acidic taste will mean they, unlike the strawberries, will continue to be sold on a “pick your own” basis.

“We still allow ‘pick your own’ for the berries as they are far too sharp for people to gorge themselves on,” Mr Spight said. “But we will only allow in people who look likely to behave.”

www.giftsafari.co.uk

Europe struggles to keep reform plans alive after Irish reject treaty

By John Lichfield in Paris and Vanessa Mock in Brussels
Saturday, 14 June 2008

FRANCOIS LENOIR/REUTERS

‘No’ campaign supporters watch the results of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in a bar near EU headquarters in Brussels

Political leaders across Europe were trying desperately last night to keep EU reform plans on track after Irish voters overwhelmingly rejected the Lisbon Treaty.

The French and German governments led calls for the other 26 EU nations to push ahead regardless with the ratification of the treaty. But senior officials in Brussels accepted that – unless Ireland could be persuaded to stage a second referendum next year – seven years of painful negotiations to simplify and streamline the governance of the EU had come to nothing.

The European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso, called on the Irish government to suggest possible “solutions” at an EU summit in Brussels next week. He said: “I believe the treaty is alive. Eighteen member states have already approved the treaty and the European Commission believes that the remaining ratifications should continue.”

However, another senior European commissioner, speaking off the record, said: “There will be no repeat vote in Ireland. That means the treaty is dead. It’s part of a general disenchantment with the EU. We would have had similar results if there had been referendums in other European Union states.”

A group of countries, led by France, which assumes the EU presidency next month, is expected to try to minimise the importance of the Irish “no” vote. If other countries ratify the treaty, they argue privately, Ireland will be obliged to have a second vote.

Other countries could agree on declarations, they say, guaranteeing respect for Irish neutrality, or on Ireland’s low business tax status. The Irish electorate might then in a second referendum vote “yes” as they did with the Nice Treaty in October 2002.

And if Ireland refuses? Legally, the new treaty must be ratified by all 27 member states to come into force. Officials in some capitals, notably Berlin, argue that Ireland, with 4 million people, is too small to be allowed to hold up the plans of governments representing almost 500 million people. Dublin would have to be bullied into accepting some kind of semi-detached European status, like that of Norway.

Officials in Brussels said they doubted whether that could work. In any case, they said, why should Ireland be menaced with de facto expulsion when France and the Netherlands escaped any threat after their popular “no” votes in 2005? Besides, the officials said, it would be dangerous to ride rough-shod over a popular vote.

EU capitals are confronted with a depressing conundrum. The peoples of the European Union – even those who have manifestly benefited from the enterprise such as the French and the Dutch and now the Irish – feel threatened, rather than inspired or protected, by their membership of the enlarged EU.

The Lisbon Treaty is not, as sometimes claimed, a blueprint for a federal united states of Europe. In some respects, it buried that idea for ever. The treaty is an absurdly complex attempt to try to make an absurdly complex system, designed for six countries, work better – or simply work – with 27 countries.

In truth, officials recognised, EU governments have only four options.

First, they can agree to renegotiate the treaty (again) to take account of the Irish electorate’s disparate objections. This is practically a non-runner.

Second, they can press ahead with their own ratification processes. When 26 countries have signed up, they can turn to Ireland and ask for a second referendum. A few rhetorical concessions could be made to Dublin in annexes or declarations. Third, Ireland, as the only non-signatory, can be asked to leave the EU.

Fourth, the EU can forget the whole thing (for now) and continue with its existing rules.

There will be some voices – maybe including British ones – suggesting that the EU should now concentrate on practical problems which directly concern its citizens – climate, globalisation, immigration, terrorism – rather than continue to argue about itself.

This may be the de facto outcome, whatever governments say in the next days and weeks. Whether the old EU rules will permit any progress to be made on practical issues is open to doubt.

Brown vows to press on

Gordon Brown will reject pressure to halt the passage of the Lisbon Treaty through Parliament following Ireland’s rejection of the blueprint.

The Irish “no” vote provides a headache for Mr Brown, who has adopted a low-key approach to ratifying the treaty in an attempt to avoid alienating public opinion and Britain’s Eurosceptic newspapers.

Ironically, his “softly softly” approach had almost worked. The Bill implementing the reform of EU institutions is due to complete its passage through Parliament next week. But the Europe issue reignited again yesterday as the Tories and Liberal Democrats urged the Government to think again.

But ministers said the European Union (Amendment) Bill would receive its Third Reading in the Lords next Wednesday, and will receive Royal Assent.

What is The Lisbon Treaty?

*The Lisbon Treaty would replace the aborted draft constitution voted down by French and Dutch voters in 2005.

*The 50-article charter contains a list of well-established rights, including freedom of speech and religion. Britain and Poland obtained opt-outs.

*The EU would get a president and a foreign policy chief to control the EU’s aid budget and its extensive network of diplomats and civil servants.

*The European Commission would be cut from 27 members to 18 as of 2014. Commissioners would be selected on a rotation system among the states, and will sit for five-year terms.

*The European Parliament would win more power to influence or reject EU legislation. MEPs capped at 751 members from the current 785.

*To streamline decision making for 27 states, decisions would be taken by majority rather than unanimous voting in 50 new areas including judicial and police co-operation; Britain and Ireland had negotiated opt-outs in these.

www.giftsafari.co.uk

Andreas Whittam Smith: Irish voters have stated the truth for all of us

The countries outside the eurozone have done better than those inside

Monday, 16 June 2008

Ireland is in danger of being bullied. The big boys planning the assault are France and Germany. That is the plain meaning of the statement they issued on Friday in response to the news that Irish voters had rejected the Lisbon Treaty designed to streamline the European Union.

The two countries urged that the small number of member states that had not yet completed their processes of ratification should do so – even though, strictly speaking, without unanimous backing the treaty cannot come into force. The circumstances which France and Germany are trying to create are those in which 26 out of 27 member countries accept the treaty and only tiny Ireland, four million people out of 450 million, the one state to have submitted the new arrangements to a referendum, holds out.

The desired scene would resemble a skyscraper city in which, bizarrely, one old building has survived and you wonder how long it can last until it, too, is replaced by an office block. How would the pressure be applied? I discount the notion that Ireland could be offered one or two special “opt-outs” from the treaty clauses and asked to vote again. The Irish exceptions could not amount to much, otherwise the balance of the treaty would be upset. Nor would it be a particularly democratic thing to do, seeing that participation in the referendum vote was at a respectable level.

In effect, European leaders would be saying to Ireland, “look, you have made a mistake and here is a face-saving way of getting out of the mess you have created”. That sounds like exactly the wrong thing to say to any European electorate.

Instead, if France and Germany were to have their way, the Irish might be asked to proceed with the elements of the treaty that do not require a referendum and opt out of those which do. Then the other 26 members would proceed along their path and leave Ireland tagging along behind as a sort of associate member. The country would lose influence as a result.

Big countries can opt out of this and that and yet still retain the leverage they require. This benefit isn’t available for small countries. It would be an unpleasant prospect. Or, worse still, if everybody else signs up, then Ireland could be asked to leave the European Union.

In all this, the attitude of Britain will be crucial. If we were to side with France and Germany, Ireland’s fate would be sealed. If not, not.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has said that the few remaining stages of our process of ratification will be completed. However, I do not think that this has much significance. We will do what we have promised to do, but make no commitment as to what would happen after that. In fact, I think it unlikely that we would join others in bringing pressure to bear on our Irish neighbour.

The Prime Minister knows very well that a referendum would also have been lost if the British had been offered one. Moreover, Irish attitudes to the notion of a European entity are like our own. A recent Eurobarometer survey asked Irish people, “In the near future, do you see yourself as Irish only, Irish and European, European and Irish, or European only?”. Some 59 per cent – second only to Britain and followed by the three Baltic states – rejected the proffered degrees of European identity and opted for an exclusive Irish identity. Thus British pressure on Ireland would appear as the ultimate example of British hypocrisy. It won’t happen.

However, even when the Lisbon Treaty is finally declared null and void, as it must eventually be, there will surface an old idea that would put Britain, as well as Ireland, into the same, undesirable place – a Europe of two speeds, an inner group which combines more tightly together and an outer group, Britain and Ireland included, which continues to use the European Union as essentially a free-trade area and gets nothing else out of it.

This is usually put forward on the footing that the inner ring countries would be treated as first-class members and the outer ring as second-class. But the way that the eurozone, with its common currency, the euro, has developed with the rest of us outside, retaining our economic independence, shows how bogus is the two-speed argument. For the countries outside the eurozone have done better than those inside, while the inner group grows ever more restive with its arrangements.

In its way, then, the Irish vote will prove to have been historic. The Irish will not be bullied into submission. The present arrangements for the European Union, with all their imperfections, will endure. Only one people has spoken, but it is likely that the Irish have stated the matter for all of us.

www.giftsafari.co.uk