Keys Corner

When I read this in today’s Guardian, my first reaction was “but it’s not the 1st of April yet”. One the one hand data privacy experts in the EU has been fighting tooth and nail over the last years to prevent the USA getting a pile of personal data each time someone flies to or from the USA; on the other hand, the EU is considering similar measures, which the UK is lobbying to extend to track EU citizens traveling within the EU:

Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to “profile” suspects.

Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries…

In fact, according to a recent article by John Lettice, some of the protest from the EU against the USA’s data collection is caused because the EU bureaucracy has been unable to coordinate an agreement with the USA fast enough to stop the USA forming bilateral agreements with some EU-states which don’t have a visa waiver agreement in place with the USA, thus undermining the EU’s position when negotiating deals with the USA. Given that the UK government has been regularly involuntarily leaking data about millions of its citizens recently (lost DVDs and CDs have become a regular topic in the British press in the last 2-3 months), this enthusiasm for collecting even more data really can’t be considered a good idea.

Jeremy Clarkson, the BBC Top Gear presenter, is regretting mocking the fuss made about the British government losing CDs with millions of sets of personal data on them. He published an article in the Sunday Times which included his bank account details, claiming that concerns about identity theft were exaggerated. Someone promptly transferred £500 from his account to British Diabetic Association. Because of the Data Protection Act, Clarkson has no idea who was responsible for the transfer.

Clarkson’s revised opinion about the lost CDs:

“Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

The BBC reports:

The UK has built up a stockpile of 100 tonnes of plutonium –
enough to make 17,000 nuclear bombs, according to a Royal Society report.

Well, that should be enough for any conceivable (or inconceivable) purpose, when you consider that just over 6kg of plutonium was used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. I hope it’s well guarded , because the plutonium is stored in powder form, which is ideal for use in a “dirty” nuclear bomb. The Royal Society has made several suggestions for making it harder to use the plutonium in terrorist attacks, but the British Government’s position is:

It would not be appropriate to take any decisions until the public consultation on new nuclear* has been completed and the outcome is known,

(* See the Government website here for more information on the “new nuclear” consultation.)

The front page in today’s Observer:
‘Housing boom over’ as UK bank chaos grows

Britain’s house price growth will be halved next year as the global financial crisis exacerbates the impact of rising mortgage rates, according to Nationwide, the biggest mortgage lender.

After the dramatic bail-out of high street bank Northern Rock underlined the impact of the American ‘sub-prime’ mortgage crisis on Britain’s financial sector, Fionnuala Earley, Nationwide’s group economist, said she expected house price inflation to slow to around 3 per cent next year.

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From the Manchester Evening News a couple of days ago:

A VIOLENT thug attacking a shopkeeper never expected to come face-to-face with a superhero.

But as Gerard Smith went `berserk’ in a Manchester newsagents, passer-by Kevin Godin-Prior lifted his jumper to reveal a Spiderman costume and told him: “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”...

His latest installation at Glastonbury.

Perfect hindsight is a wonderful thing – we really shouldn’t have sold our UK house when we moved to Germany in 1980! Thanks to the The Economist for pointing it out.

Update: At least we are considerably better off, than this family in Morocco, who don’t have anything to laugh about.

We got back yesterday from visiting my mother in Devon. We had decided that since we’ve neither of us ever been to Cornwall (at least not that we remember!), that we should go that extra mile and visit the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project while we were in the UK. Both were the brainchild of Tim Smit, who must have had an inexhaustible supply of energy to get both locations up and running in a space of about ten years. Both are well worth a visit.

The photo above is of an old petrol pump in St Mawes, on the Cornish coast not far from St. Austell, which is where we stayed. The price in “new pence” was 2.4 pence/liter – we paid between 93p and 97p per litre when we drove down from Stansted Airport to Cornwall. If you click on the photo, it links to some more photos we took in Cornwall.

Sounds impossible, but at Airkix they have a vertical wind-tunnel, and offer an hour of indoor skydiving training which includes 2 “flights” for £40, or once you’ve got some experience you can skydive for £10 per minute. Sounds like it would be fun to try! (You generally have to weigh less than 114 Kg or you won’t get off the ground, however).

The BBC plans to launch an on-demand TV service which uses software that will only be available to Windows users. If you’re a British resident or a British citizen, you might consider adding your name to the online petition to Tony Blair.