A big thanks to Ole Saalmann, who let me know a couple of days ago that the Diba’s internet banking now works with Apple’s Safari web browser! He’s right – I just tried it out. That’s a huge improvement as previously it didn’t work with any of the browsers I had on my Mac, and I had to fire up a PC when I wanted to use the internet banking, which was a pain as the PC is in the cellar. One less reason to keep a Windows PC!
The families and lawyers of the US soldiers who have been accused of abusing and maltreating Iraqi prisoners say they were only following orders.
This was also the defence of the Germans prosecuted by the Allies (USA, USSR, Britain and France) for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg nearly 60 years ago.
At the end of April, the World Trade Organisation ruled that the approx. $3 billion / year subsidy that American cotton farmers get from their government is illegal. The EU also subsidizes its farmers heavily – both the EU and the USA spend a total of $1 million / day on agricultural subsidies. And the WTO is expected to rule against an EU subsidy to sugar farmers soon.
While it’s unlikely that either the EU or the USA will accept the decisions lying down – the talks in Cancun broke down last year because the richer countries refused to reduce farming subsidies – it would be much better in the long term, if they were to give in gracefully.
Subsidies distort trade and prevent the Third World countries from developing their economies though agriculture. At the same time consumers in the richer countries pay too much – not only for the subsidized goods that they buy, but also to reduce the price that the rest of the world pays for the exported surplus. If the Third World countries’ economies were able to develop though producing and exporting agricultural goods, resulting in more jobs, we would be encouraging an environment which was less likely to breed the levels of discontent that result in people being prepared to (suicide-) bomb the countries which they perceive as being the reason for their poor living conditions.
Of course, this is not the only driver for the terror attacks we have seen increasingly since the 1990’s. Nonetheless, a number of suicide bombers do come from communities where living conditions for many are poor, such as Palestine or Morocco, and we certainly aren’t doing ourselves a favour by encouraging large differentials in the standard of living around the world.
Update (2004-05-10):
The EU announced today (subject to the rest of the EU convincing France) that it intends to cut farming subsidies.
On the one hand, you can use a modern cell phone, such as the O2 Xda II (above) to capture the material for your photoblog, like Ute does at Lemming’s Trail. The blog concentrates on Ute’s journey to and from work; like me, she works in the city center in Frankfurt and many of the photos are of scenes I see nearly every day.
On the other hand, you can use the same phone to replace an expensive, difficult to install, taxi call processing system – as described in The Inquirer. The London cab company in question, Xeta, has reduced installation costs by 25% and is more flexible as a result of swapping their dedicated terminals and PMR radio links for the new system, which also provides GPS navigation for the cabbies.
I hadn’t noticed comments were broken – I’ve just fixed the problem by installing the latest daily build from WordPress.
There has been quite a lot of interest in the new Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius hybrid-powered cars.
But did you realise that if such a vehicle is involved in a crash, it can pose a deadly risk to rescuers? The cars contain a network of high voltage cables (500V), which run through the doors – often cut open if people have been trapped inside. In the USA, rescue services are now being trained to cut open the roof, rather than the doors and wear rubber boots and gloves when releasing victims from hybrid vehicles.
Well, I have now migrated this blog to WordPress – twice:
Last weekend, I was very impressed that the installation took only 5 minutes, and WordPress seemed to provide all the functionality I need. So I customised the style sheets and started migrating the non-blog pages of my site to WordPress.
I left the archives for the MovableType blog in place – mainly so that the links via Google would still work. And I made a big mistake in installing WordPress in the same location as MovableType. What I overlooked is, that if anyone posts a comment to the old blog, it causes the whole blog to be re-generated from the MT database. Well, it didn’t take long before that happened, and overwrote all my hard work (index.php and some other files)! Naturally, in my haste, I hadn’t yet backed up the new files that I had created. Well, I know now that once you have installed WordPress, you can’t reinstall it, if the database tables it uses in SQL still exist, and my backup of the SQL database that I had made contained a syntax error, so it wouldn’t restore. Of course, I only discovered that after I had dropped all the blog’s tables from the database…
Well, to cut a long story short, I have now repeated all last weekend’s work and can continue migrating the other parts of the site, such as our photo-album. If you are looking for an assessment of WordPress, from someone who knows what they are talking about, you can find several interesting articles on Shelly Power’s website at her Burningbird blog.
My reasons were quite simple—I had an ongoing series of problems with the combination of MovableType and my internet provider – lots of Server 500 error messages, timeouts and most seriously, the inability to make a full backup of the blog (which is not large) or in the last few days, to maintain my MT-Blacklist anti-comment-spam list, which is essential these days if you use MovableType. And looking around, WordPress seemed to provide what I was looking for and was easy to set up.
There’s still quite a bit of fine tuning and migration to be done, which will take some time, so be patient for a week or two until it’s finished.
Bad news not only for Germany, but for the EU as a whole.
Bild Zeitung reports that Gerhard Schroeder has given up trying to cut costs and reducing social security payments. Cost-cutting will not resume until the economy picks up. The surprising turn-around decision was, according to Bild, taken by senior members of both the SDP and the Green party.
While the British army is casting doubt on the authenticity of pictures published yesterday in The Daily Mirror, the New Yorker runs an article with more details from the previously secret American army report by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, which was completed in late February. In addition to the previously reported incidents, the report lists further abuses:
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
Whether the report in the Mirror turns out to be true or not, some troops would appear to have behaved in an utterly dispicable manner and I hope that the coalition governments ensure the individuals concerned are prosecuted for their war crimes.