Category: Uncategorized

Ever tried to obtain general information from government departments about what you think should be public knowledge?

I’m still having a battle with the Department of Health about obtaining information for another web site about how much money is spent each year on buying new beds for the NHS!!

Take a look at this very interesting article about lobby group Transport 2000‘s (now re-branded Campaign for Better Transport) attempts to obtain information from the UK’s Department of Transport.

It’s another great example of typical government lip-service, championing the openness of government on the one hand, whilst being obstructive on the other.

Now, how many beds was that!!!

Well certainly not from some of the UK’s Nuclear power stations.

According to recent statements from British Energy they are still unable to restart four of their nuclear creators that were shut down last month.

Apart from a drop in its share value, the UK is still without its full electricity generating capacity. With winter on its way, could we be in for power blackouts as some ‘experts‘ have predicted.

Here’s some links with updates to the latest status reports from British Energy

Hartlepool and Heysham

Hinkley Point B power station

I’ve just downloaded the latest version of Windows Live Writer. Like many others, I tried a number of different Blog editing software and none, I repeat none, do what Windows Live Writer does… Create and Edit Blog entries easily and without any errors (that I have found yet.).

Well done Microsoft on a very good product – it’s still in Beta, but I’m wondering what they can do to make it even better!

Saw this news story about the State of the Planet on the BBC web site.

The small amount of info quoted in the article makes for interesting reading but is restricted to just a very small number of highlights!

 If you want the whole story you will have to download the entire report from here. It’s a 22 MB’s PDF file containing 572 pages long! So it’s best to ‘right click’ and ‘save as’.

Don’t let the size put you off, there are many graphs, images and table that explain just what has been going one and how all of us have to face up to the fact that the worlds resources are finite and in the end they will run out! How soon? That really depends on you and I!!!!!

Found this interesting site keeping track of expenditure for the 2012 Olympics. Good to see that someone is focusing on what I think will be the most expensive Olympics ever.

2012 Watchdog. Part of the Tax Payers Alliance web site.

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?