Next time we drive past Maastricht, we are going to take a look at Selexyz Dominicanen. There’s an article in the Guardian architecture section about this book shop in a converted church, and it looks spectacular. The architects were Merkx + Girod, and the photo above is from their website..
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.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.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…
Slovakia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic all join the Schengen Zone tonight.
That is the part of the EU where the member countries trust each other enough to abolish the visa- and border controls (But beware! At airports, the new members won’t benefit from the abolition of controls until the end of March in 2008). In the member countries of the Schengen Agreement, when crossing the border to another member country you don’t need to show your passport or ID, and don’t need a visa to enter the country. It speeds up arrival at sea- and airports and means there are no border controls on road links. The member countries also share data on criminals via the Schengen Information System and their police forces cooperate with each other to fight crime.
The new members bring nearly all of the European countries into the zone – even some non-EU countries such as Norway and Iceland are members, and Switzerland joined in 2004, but will actually implement the changes in 2008.
You can probably guess that the only major European country which will then not belong is the same country where a leading national paper is alleged to have run the headline “Fog In Channel: Continent Cut Off“. Well, that’s not quite true – as well as the UK, the Republic of Ireland has not implemented the reduction of border controls either.
Picture from Arborsmith Studios website (click picture to visit)Axel Erlandson an American arborsculptor opened an exhibition in 1947 featuring trees which he had shaped by pruning, bending and grafting. The original exhibition, called The Tree Circus had a chequered history, only bringing in a little over $300 in a good year (1955). Eventually 12 of the original trees were bought by Michael Bonfante for his amusement park, Bonfante Gardens, in Gilroy, California. We’ve been to California a number of times, but didn’t know about these trees, unfortunately.
Russia and the USA have the world’s highest populations of prisoners [PDF from the British Government, 116 KB size]. Russia has 685 per 100,000 people of the national population locked away, followed by the USA, which has 645 prisoners per 100,000. Those figures are around 6 times the rates for most countries in Europe, by the way (Germany, France, Switzerland: 90, UK 125, Italy 85 for example. Even Zimbabwe only has 155 per 100,000 in prison).
The USA under George W Bush has moved much closer to a soviet-style regime in another way: the Transport Security Administration (TSA) has just published a proposal that all air passengers will have to apply for permission to fly to/from or over the USA 72 hours in advance of their flight for “security screening”. Only if you get a clean bill of health will you be issued with a boarding card. Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance. (If you don’t fancy ploughing though a 1MB PDF, the Register has summarized the main points here).
Apart from sounding very like the thin edge of requirements similar to those in Russia to have internal passports for movements within Russia – a requirement which is about to be lifted, by the way, I can’t imagine that it will help tourism, which despite the cheap dollar has been suffering from the increasing bureaucracy associated with trying to arrange travel to the USA.
If you have any plans to visit the spectacular Grand Canyon Skywalk, you will probably be interested to read this article first – here’s the salient point:
We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:On top of the $75 you need to add tax, making $83 per person. For that price, by the way, you are not allowed to take your camera onto the Skywalk.“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”
Richard Branson started thinking about saving fuel for Virgin Atlantic by having their jets towed to the take-off point at Heathrow and Gatwick without using their own engines.
Now, from April onwards, Quantas and Air New Zealand are going to try gliding Boeing 747 jumbo jets into Auckland airport to save fuel on landing.
Starting in mid-2007, the USA is going to scan in all ten fingerprints of people visiting the USA (at the moment they scan in 2 fingerprints). This allows the prints to be stored in a format compatible with that used by the FBI’s database. The fingerprints will made available to the FBI and international intelligence agencies with no restrictions on their use. Countries subject to the new scheme include America’s staunchest allies as well as other less cooperative states: Britain, other European Union nations, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, for example.
Additionally, according to today’s Observer:
...[travellers] already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security. Now passengers face having all their credit card transactions traced when using one to book a flight. And travellers giving an email address to an airline will be open to having all messages they send and receive from that address scrutinised.
The demands were disclosed in ‘undertakings’ given by the Department of Homeland Security to the EU and published by the Department for Transport after a request under the freedom of information legislation…
How much information about someone can you find out, starting with a discarded boarding card stub and just surfing the internet for 15 minutes using only data available in publicly available databases?
Well, all of those and while you’re about it, why not log into his frequent flyer account and change a few details and book a flight somewhere hot and sunny? Also no problem. In this particular case, you can thank British Airways and the American Government for their help, and the Guardian for highlighting the case.
So remember, think about what you throw away, and shred sensitive paperwork, such as bank statements, credit card slips etc. before you put them in the dustbin.
Problems that travelers have with the Transportation Security Administration (the agency that is responsible for checking passengers before they board flights to and from US airports) have been well documented (in case you need reminding, here’s a summary of some cases). I wasn’t aware that Canada poses similar problems until Ruth noticed this entry in James Bach’s blog:
...A few weeks ago, as I was clearing customs in Ottawa, on my way into Canada, the customs guys decided that they needed to search my stuff. No problem.
Then they decided to search my computer… the inside of it… the part with all the files. I was shocked. I had never heard of this before. But not only do they have the right to do it, they apparently have the interest.
They told me that they were looking for prohibited material, which include “hate materials” and “child pornography”. If I refused to provide them with the necessary passwords, they told me they would simply sieze all my equipment. So, I complied. (Not before some grumpy sputtering on my part, which they interpreted not as surprise and dismay at an unexpected personal invasion, but a non-verbal admission that I was a child pornographer)
The thing is, I travel with 300 gigabytes of disk space, which includes 7 or 8 complete virtual computers that comprise a travelling test lab, plus backups. I must have millions of files. Furthermore, it quickly became apparent that the frowny customs guys didn’t know very much about computers. They seemed to think that any file with an extension not mapped to an application is “inaccessible” and therefore suspicious. After two hours of plinking away at my system, speaking in hushed French, they announced that they were turning my equipment over to a forensic team for examination…