Author: Mike

The latest set of MP’s expenses have been released.

The figures for 2006/2007 show a 5% increase over the previous year with Scottish SNP MP’s coming top (£154,231) of the ‘averages’ table and the Northern Ireland DUP MP’s with a £122,328 average coming bottom.

More details from the House of Commons web site…

• The whole league table listing all MP’s
• Previous years league table (2005/2006)
• 2004/2005 League Table

Makes for some interesting reading.

At the de Menezes trial in London we now hear that he (de Menezes) had traces of cocaine in his urine! Also according to a Dr Kenneth Shorrock, de Menezes had traces of a breakdown product associated with cocaine in his bloodstream.

So is there now an effort that despite the fact that the Met managed to shoot the wrong person, someone is trying to blacken his name as if to provide some sort of last minute excuse! Please!!

It doesn’t matter if he had Tetley bitter running through his veins; the Met shot the wrong person!

That said, the fault does not lay with the individual officers who pulled the triggers – though I am sure that they very much regret the incident, it lays with the command and control mechanism in use that day.

If we (the public) want to have volunteers – that’s what the police are – to rush in our behalf, in without any regard for their own personal safety to protect us from suicide bombers, then they deserve to have the highest command and control systems in place to protect them and in the case of potential errors like this, prevent them from happening ever again.

Senior management in the police are to blame and nobody else.

First mentioned in a previous post, the subject of Fish Discards raised its head again over the weekend in this Sunday Telegraph article.

It seams that ‘we’ (the UK government) are again bending over backwards not to upset other fishing countries under the EU Fisheries policy. The UK allows Belgium and French trawlers to fish right up to the coastal edge of the UK, but at the same time DEFRA is increasing the landing fish size that UK trawlers can land from the very same fishing grounds! Guess what? Most of the fish is going to other countries!

It seems that this is yet another example of the UK implementing rules in excess of what the EU requires with other countries benefiting from our over zealous legislation.

I wonder what DEFRA fisheries minister Jonathan Shaw is going to do about it?

It seems that George Bush is slowing accepting that the USA has contributed to Global Warming.

In a report from EurekAlert, research has shown that industrial Soot deposits generated in the hundred years to 1950 that landed on Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheets seriously decreased the ice packs ability to reflect sun light thereby increasing the temperature of the pack ice.

The report goes on to the detail how the data was gathered and has contributed to the worlds overall problems with Global Warming!

George Bush, read on!!

Full report here

Other relevant information..

NASA study finds soot may be changing the Arctic environment

Arctic ice island breaks in half

As of today over 652 UK public bodies will legally be able to check through your mobile and land line phone records and build up an intimate profile of who you’re calling and who’s calling you!

Bringing the UK into line with EU directives – I wonder how many other EU countries have implemented these rules.

Going back to the 652 UK public bodies who will have access to your phone records’ It’s clear to me that the Police will always need to have – subject to a court order – access to phone records to progress investigations into crimes, the same can be said for the security services (although I am concerned as to who that includes), but why would the Gaming Board, the Food Standards Authority and every district and county council in the country need access.

If we take the number of district and county councils (623) from the 652, and the above already listed) that leaves another 26 that have phone record access. Who are they? We’ll have to see if the Home office will give up that information.

This is another good example of the ongoing plunge of the UK into a total surveillance country, what else can follow?

I listened to Costing the Earth, a BBC Radio 4 program two weeks ago about the state of the English fishing industry. One aspect of the program that I found astonishing was the amount of discards involved in the process of commercial fishing.

Discards are the fish that the commercial fishing industry have to throw back into the sea – in most cases as near or already dead fish – as they are above any of their specific quotas.

To give you some idea of how much these discards amount to, it is estimated that 0ver 24,000 tons (approx. 60,000) of fish were discarded between 2002 and 2005. See this Telegraph article for more details.

That’s a lot dead fish! When I hear so much spoken about fish conservation, why are first catching them, then throwing them back dead when they could easily be landed.

It seems a very crazy situation and if you run a Google on “commercial fishing in the UK discards“ it seems that many other people think the same.

Something must be done about this awful waste of a fast running out resource.

Yet another example of the casual way with which personal data is not protected and is then subsequently discovered on a recycled PC hard Drive being sold on EBay!!! The University of Glamorgan discovered this error as part of an investigation into recycled hard drives.

This latest incident asks many questions of the Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust about its Data Protection policy, its IT department management and who exactly is working in the IT department at the Dudley Group of Hospitals NHS Trust.

I wonder how many more of these incidents go unreported?

Seems that the poor broadband services in Britain are attracting more attention in the mainstream media – about time I would say!

Following recent statements by Stephen Timms carried in Computing Magazine it seems that OFCOM is at last is looking to force change in the UK broadband infrastructure.

According to this Guardian Unlimited article, OFCOM will launch a series of reviews and consultations tomorrow to decide how the UK should cope with broadband delivery technologies that in other countries are starting to overtake the UK.

Let’s hope that OFCOM gets it act together and delivers its recommendations as soon as possible before the UK ends up at the bottom of the broadband speed league tables.

Following on from some previous posts [1], [2] here is a link to a 10 Downing Street petition that I think is worth signing up for.

Any amount of feedback that can be sent back about the state of Broadband in the UK and how the ISP’s do not offer real value for money is a good thing.

Sign up and make your voice heard.

“The Department of Culture, Media and Sport have deemed the RAF Red Arrows as unsuitable for the 2012 Olympics because they are too British”.

I received two emails over the weekend quoting the above statement, it seems that this subject is making the rounds on a number of Blogs and Forums.

Seems that it may be just another one of those rumors that abound on the Web. Here’s an article from the Lincolnshire Echo quoting Red Arrows team spokesman Rachel Huxford as saying “We have had no discussions about the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics whatsoever.

Let’s see what the Department of Culture, Media and Sport says… It seems nothing at the moment!!!