Stuff reports:
Customs are seeking the power to require people to disclose passwords to their electronic devices when entering New Zealand.
Failing to do so without reasonable excuse should be an offence punishable with three months prison, it has suggested.
No, no and no.
The details of the Northland poll are at Curiablog.
They show Peters 5% ahead of Osborne with 19% undecided. Obviously a very good result for Peters. The key will be what do the undecided voters do.
The Guardian reports:
Dark Heart of Europe is a series of photographs taken by Giovanni Troilo which won the contemporary issues category at World Press Photo 2015. However, Troilo has been accused of misrepresenting the town of Charleroi in which the images were taken. The mayor of the industrial Belgian town has described the study as a serious distortion of reality. Troilo has since admitted that some of his images were staged in order to recreate issues or scenes which he says typify Charlerloi, but he argues this does not affect the journalistic integrity of his work
Taking a photo is journalism and reporting news. Staging a photo is creating news – not reporting it.
The World Press Photos will have damaged credibility if they allow the award to remain for what were staged photos.
News.com.au reports:
A RADICAL Islamic preacher has been arrested in Norway after praising last month’s deadly attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly in Paris.
The Iraqi Kurd preacher known as Mullah Krekar said in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday that “those who draw caricatures of Mohammed must die”.
Krekar, who was only freed from prison late last month, was arrested on Thursday night on accusations of inciting crime, police said.
“I am obviously happy with what happened in Paris,” the 58-year-old said in the interview with Norwegian channel NRK.
Krekar also responded “yes” when asked if he believed those who carried out the attack were heroes.
When a cartoonist “tramples on our dignity, our principles and our faith, he must die,” he said.
“Those who do not respect 30 per cent of the Earth’s population do not deserve to live.”
I’m a proponent of free speech, but there are limits. Advocating and inciting death to those who don’t subscribe to your religious beliefs is that limit.
While courts have upheld the ruling, Norwegian law bars him from being deported to Iraq, where he risks the death penalty.
A pity.
Most will be aware that over the last couple of years companies can apply to be the registry for new top level domains. The application fee is around US$250,000, which provides a minimum level that applicants will think they are worth.
A couple of dozen strings have competing applicants, and if they can’t agree between themselves on who gets the string, then ICANN auctions it off. We have the results of 10 auctions to date, which provides an interesting insight into how valuable different TLDs are seen to be. The winning auction bids were:
I can see .app doing very well. Not so sure about some of the others.
For those wondering .mls stands for multiple listing service, a common term in the US real estate industry.
Andrew Rawnsley writes in The Guardian:
Canvassing for Votes, one of a series of four wonderful paintings by William Hogarth about the corruption of parliamentary elections in the 18th century, depicts agents for the Tories and the Whigs flourishing banknotes at an innkeeper in an attempt to bribe him. Would never happen today, of course. Payment in cash or kind in exchange for a vote – the practice that used to be called “treating”– is strictly illegal. Anyone caught doing it will likely wind up in jail.
That’s an obstacle for vote-hunting politicians at election time. Fortunately for them, the law has a loophole. And that loophole is massive. There is nothing on the statute book that says a politician can’t offer a bribe so long as it is directed at lots of voters. Individual bribery is a crime; mass bribery is entirely legal. Which is a good thing for David Cameron and Ed Miliband. If mass bribery were not allowed, both would be facing prosecution for the promises they have been making in the past few days.
Bribe one person and you go to jail. Bribe 100,000 and you get to be in Parliament.
This is also the main reason why Ed Miliband is treating for votes at the other end of the age spectrum by promising to cut student tuition fees to £6,000. One way of thinking about the Labour leader’s pledge is to ask what problem this is supposed to fix. Since tuition fees were raised to £9,000, applications for university places have not gone down; they have gone up. Applications from students with less advantaged backgrounds have not gone down; they have also gone up. No one starts repaying the loan until they are earning more than £21,000 a year and any debt outstanding after 30 years is written off. Of course, when I talk to students I hear complaints about them being burdened with debt. But it is often a greater source of irritation to them that they don’t think the teaching they are getting is value for the money. Some of the sharpest complaints about that are from students at universities with the more prestigious names. That might have been a useful area for Labour’s attentions. The upshot of Mr Miliband’s policy is that the greatest beneficiaries will be the highest earning graduates. Who knew that the Labour leader came into politics to redistribute money to future bankers?
Just as interest free student loans transfer wealth from those who didn’t go to university to those who do.
The Herald reports:
Apple has been ordered to pay nearly $US533 million by a federal jury that found the company’s iTunes music store uses software that infringes on patents held by a Texas company.
An attorney for plaintiff Smartflash LLC praised the verdict. Apple immediately announced plans to appeal and said the case shows the need for Congress to reform the US patent system.
The case involves three patents that Smartflash holds for software used in storing data files and managing access through an online payment system. The outcome will likely add fuel to a broader debate over the federal patent system and complaints that it’s easily abused by companies that make most of their revenue through patent lawsuits.
“Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no US presence and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented,” Apple said in a printed statement.
The statement added: “We rely on the patent system to protect real innovation and this case is one more example of why we feel so strongly Congress should enact meaningful patent reform.”
I agree with Apple.The US should follow NZ and not allow patents for software. You have scores of companies that file patents on as much software as possible, just so they can then sue someone who comes along with a similar idea. As in this case, they never produce anything with their patents – they just use them for lawsuits.
It is likely the decision will be overturned on appeal, but it is a shame so much money is wasted on endless patent lawsuits between IT companies.
One News reports:
Fifth-ranked Green MP Gareth Hughes has confirmed he’s standing to become the Green’s male co-leader.
The 33-year-old who’s in his third term as an MP says his candidacy is for a generational shift in New Zealand politics .
West Coast based list MP Kevin Hague has already put his hat in the ring and is considered by some to be the front runner.
The party will decide on who the male co-leader is at its conference in late May.
It’s good Green members will get a choice.
I don’t agree with Gareth on most environmental issues, but he has done a lot of good work in the Comms/ICT sector and has built up a lot of respect for his approach to issues in this sector – even by those who disagree with him. If there had been a change of Government, many said he would be a good Comms/ICT Minister.
It is hard to see him beating Hague, but the fact that Hague is seven years older than the retiring Norman may be a factor – hence why Hughes is talking generational shift.
Not sure if James Shaw has totally ruled out standing, but it seems unlikely. Kennedy Graham is talking about it, but I think the real contest is likely to be between Hague and Hughes.
The Herald reports:
Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has clipped the wings of a fledgling regional airline before it can get off the ground, rejecting plans to operate domestic flights from Whenuapai airbase, northwest of Auckland, to Wellington.
Kiwi Regional Airlines (KRA) chief executive Ewan Wilson has responded by accusing the Government of bias, questioning its role in who uses the military airbase given the government’s major shareholding in competitor Air New Zealand.
Selling our remaining shares in Air NZ would solve that problem.
The airline, backed by Sir George Seymour National College director Nicole Domett and used car dealer Eugene Williams of 2 Cheap Cars, was in the process of buying three aircraft for the new services with plans to launch at the end of the year at the earliest.
An airline backed by a used car company called “2 Cheap Cars”. Hmmmn. Not sure I’ll be rushing to book a flight.
Two SAAB 34-seat planes would begin flights with a third to be added, but the Civil Aviation Authority must authorise an air operating certificate before KRA can launch.
The SAABs would take around two hour to fly to Wellington. So overall transit time from the North Shore may not vary a lot.
Stuff reports:
Documents released today with NZHerald.co.nz refer to the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga, Vanuatu, Nauru and Samoa as targets of the Government Communications Security Bureau.
What a stunning revelation. An agency whose mandate is primarily to collection foreign intelligence, collects foreign intelligence.
Stuff has details of the success rate for passing the restricted licence test by region. In order they are:
Interesting that there is such a large variation.
I’m not sure if they record this, but it would be interesting to also see the data broken down by age, gender and ethnicity. I suspect females have a higher pass rate, but could be wrong.
The Herald reports:
Sexually transmitted infections should be reclassified to enable better tracking and treatment as social media influences sexual behaviour and more drug-resistant strains emerge, a health authority says.
Regional Public Health, in the greater Wellington region, has supported legislation that will place HIV, gonorrhea and syphilis on the list of notifiable diseases, meaning more information about cases would be collected by authorities.
But it also wants chlamydia – the country’s most common STI – to be notified, as well as specified antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.
But would that work in Hamilton, the STI capital of NZ? Wouldn’t it be easier for authorities to just notify when someone in Hamilton doesn’t have chlamydia? 🙂
Radio NZ reports:
Lecretia Seales is dying of a brain tumour, and is lobbying the government to reform the laws on assisted dying.
The 41-year-old Wellington senior public lawyer was diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and is having palliative chemotherapy.
She believes it is a fundamental human right that she should be able to say goodbye to her husband and family at a time of her choosing and while she remains fully conscious.
If I had this right, I wouldn’t be going out tomorrow and exercising it, but it would be comforting to know I had that right.
The story also has audio from an extensive interview with Lecretia on Nine to Noon. If you are interested in this issue, I’d encourage you to listen to it.
The Herald reports:
His campaign began 14 years ago, with the establishment of the Andre Agassi Preparatory Academy in a run-down part of Las Vegas, and is still expanding.
By the end of this year, Agassi hopes to have extended his tally of charter schools (which are similar in spirit to our own free schools) to more than 100, spread from Nevada to Tennessee.”
The USA has dropped to 29th in the world when it comes to educating our children,” Agassi told The Daily Telegraph. “The demand for good schooling is huge, but the infrastructure is not there.
“Rather than wait for the government to do the job, I wanted to create a model that would be scalable and sustainable.
The idea is to find partners on each job, investors who aren’t looking to give their money away, but neither do they insist on having an annual return of 20 per cent.
I’m in an exciting place where I can raise $175 million of funding in 15 minutes of phone calls, and the total we have gathered so far is well north of $1 billion.”
Superb. And from Wikipedia:
In 2001, Agassi opened the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy[151] in Las Vegas, a tuition-free charter school for at-risk children in the area. He personally donated $35 million to the school.[152] In 2009, the graduating class had 100 percent graduation rate and expected a 100 percent college acceptance rate.
Also:
In 1997, Agassi donated funding to Child Haven for a six-room classroom building now named the Agassi Center for Education. His foundation also provided $720,000 to assist in the building of the Andre Agassi Cottage for Medically Fragile Children. This 20-bed facility opened in December 2001, and accommodates developmentally delayed or handicapped children and children quarantined for infectious diseases.
Those charter school funders are really evil aren’t they.
The Herald reports:
The Privy Council in London has quashed Teina Pora’s convictions for the rape and murder of Susan Burdett in south Auckland in 1992.
The decision means Mr Pora is a free man. His parole conditions immediately fall away. The former star schoolboy rugby league player was released on parole last April after spending 20 years in prison.
This is no great surprise.
The decision was reached by a panel of the judicial committee of the Privy Council made up of the New Zealand Chief Justice, Dame Sian Elias, and four Law Lords, including Lord Kerr.
Lord Kerr said written submissions on whether a retrial should be held would need to be filed within four weeks. “Those convictions had to be quashed and that Mr Pora’s appeal be allowed,” he said.
I can’t see much merit in a retrial.
Labour’s justice Spokesperson Jacinda Ardern said the case should have been closed years ago.
“Teina Pora has spent more than 20 years in prison, despite overwhelming public evidence that a miscarriage of justice occurred.
“The decision of the Privy Council to uphold his appeal has come with a hefty price tag not only for all the families involved in this case, but also the justice system.
“It didn’t have to be this way.”
She said Labour had been calling for a Criminal Cases Review Commission – an independent body to deal with claims of wrongful conviction and miscarriage of justice – for several years.
I agree that NZ should have such a Commission. Many US states have them, and they have corrected some significant wrongful convictions.
Stuff reports:
A Heart Foundation billboard depicting ‘NZ’s biggest killer’ has been defaced with a sketch of Prime Minister John Key.
The billboard aimed at raising awareness of heart disease as “New Zealand’s biggest killer” will now have to be taken down because the foundation can’t afford to replace it.
It was put up on Commerce St, in the Hamilton suburb of Frankton early last month, and yesterday a member of the public told the foundation the image of a man representing the disease as a “serial killer” had been blackened out and replaced with a sketch of Key’s face.
Heart Foundation head of marketing Vanessa Winning said employees and volunteers were upset the billboard has been used for political protest.
“It’s really disappointing that a charity is being targeted to score political points,” she said.
“I find it unthinkable that someone would vandalise our billboard, and consequently mock a seriously crippling disease, just to make a political statement.”
“This is an incredibly immature and callous act.
“People are diagnosed with heart disease every day and have to live with the consequences. To think that such a personal and destructive topic is being used to score points is very sad.”
Whoever defaced the billboard went to ” a lot of trouble” to measure and produce the image of Key, she said.
Winning said heart disease in New Zealand claimed more than one life every 90 minutes and many of those deaths were premature and preventable.
“We work hard to stop the prevalence of heart disease in New Zealand and an act of vandalism like this is very discouraging,” she said.
“We don’t have the money to waste on fixing vandalism of this nature. To rectify it saps precious money needed for our vital health programmes and research.
“Instead, we will have to take it down, as we can’t afford to replace it.”
I hope the douche-bags responsible are proud of themselves.
Today at 11am EST Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his third speech to the US Congress joining Winston Churchill as the only other foreign leader in history to have addressed a Joint Session of Congress three times. On the eve of final negotiations between the US (and other powers) and Iran over a proposed nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu came to lay out the case for rejecting the deal proposed.
Unlike his two previous addresses, this one was shrouded in controversy in that the invitation by Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner was not sanctioned by the Obama Administration. Various administration proxies have used time in the run up to the speech to criticize Netanyahu (who faces a Knesset election in Israel in 2 weeks’ time) of politicizing the negotiations with Iran. The intense opposition from the Obama administration has seen 37 Democrat Representatives and Senators boycott the speech – an action itself unprecedented.
Netanyahu acknowledged the controversy and paid as much tribute to Obama as he could muster given how fraught their relationship has become but he wasted no time laying out why the proposed deal with Iran is bad. A good percentage of his speech was a lesson in recent Iranian history and of the many acts of terrorism perpetrated by Iran on Middle Eastern states, US interests and Israel. Netanyahu has stated many times that the greatest threat to world peace is militant jihadist Islam married to nuclear weapons. As Prime Minister of the state of Israel, job One is the protection of the Jewish state. Whilst many world leaders saw the replacement of the belligerent Ahmadinejad with the more demur and softly spoken Rouhani as President of Iran as a sign of the softening of the Iranian regime, Netanyahu lays out the actions and statements of Rouhani since assuming power as evidence that the jihadist and terrorist mindset of the Islamic republic has not changed.
Netanyahu made six key points:
Netanyahu is a bold and uncompromising figure. It was an open and direct challenge to Obama’s attempt at a legacy-making historic deal with Iran. Such a defiant challenge to a sitting US President has left some Israelis and many US Jews nervous of the damage to US relations. Whilst it is easy to dismiss this speech as a re-election ploy, it is important to note that Obama has shifted the stance of the US on a nuclear Iran from a “no options are off the table” to prevent Iran obtaining the bomb to a wishy washy regime that has enough holes that a duplicitous state anxious to get its own way can easy thwart. There is a sense amongst progressive elites that a nuclear Iran is inevitable and to cut the best deal possible.
This attitude was reminiscent of the prevailing elite opinion in Britain in the 1930’s as Hitler rose to, and gained in, power. Churchill’s warnings were dismissed as the ranting of an out of touch political has-been past his prime….until he was proven right. In the midst of an Israeli media firestorm of opposition, the taunts of his political opponents in Israel and the best efforts of Obama’s water carriers to denigrate the speech and Netanyahu’s “unhelpful” world view, he went over all their heads straight to the only people who can stop Obama doing a bad deal – the US Congress. Judging by the rapturous reception he got, he stands a good chance of succeeding hence why Obama was so implacably opposed to the speech. Netanyahu came across as confident, factual and determined whereas Obama as cerebral, inconsistent (shifting red lines) and the appeaser he has become.
Finally Netanyahu announced what I had long believed to be his bottom line – that if the US won’t lead the charge to prevent Iran getting nukes, that Israel would act alone militarily to at least blunt and delay what is rightly seen as an existential threat to the very existence of Israel.
Stuff reports:
Old copies of the offending tome are kept in a secure “poison cabinet,” a literary danger zone in the dark recesses of the vast Bavarian State Library. A team of experts vets every request to see one, keeping the toxic text away from the prying eyes of the idly curious or those who might seek to exalt it.
“This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp warned as he carefully laid a first edition of Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto of hate – on a table in a restricted reading room.
I presume people in Bavaria have the Internet. It is on Project Gutenberg.
I know the parliamentary library has a copy also, as once when I worked there I was sent to check out which MPs had borrowed it!
The prohibition on reissue for years was upheld by the state of Bavaria, which owns the German copyright and legally blocked attempts to duplicate it. But those rights expire in December, and the first new print run here since Hitler’s death is due out early next year.
I didn’t realise it was still under copyright. Hitler died in 1945 so I would have thought copyright expired in 1995.
The book’s reissue, to the chagrin of critics, is effectively being financed by German taxpayers, who fund the historical society that is producing and publishing the new edition. Rather than a how-to guidebook for the aspiring fascist, the new reprint, the group said this month, will instead be a vital academic tool, a 2000-page volume packed with more criticisms and analysis than the original text.
Sounds like a good way to do it.
Regardless of the academic context provided by the new volume, critics say the new German edition will ultimately allow Hitler’s voice to rise from beyond the grave.
“I am absolutely against the publication of Mein Kampf, even with annotations. Can you annotate the devil? Can you annotate a person like Hitler?” said Levi Salomon, spokesman for the Berlin-based Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Anti-Semitism. “This book is outside of human logic.”
Yes it is an awful book, that represents great evil. But it was the Nazis who banned and burnt books. Trying to ban Mein Kamph would just make it more desirable – and never succeed.
The Telegraph reports:
The last surviving Dambusters pilot is to sell his gallantry medals awarded for the famous raid and donate the proceeds to the Bomber Command Memorial fund.
Squadron Leader Les Munro hopes to raise £50,000 from the sale, which will go towards the upkeep of the newly-built memorial dedicated to the 55,573 airmen killed during the Second World War.
Among them will be the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery, which brought a tragic twist of fate for Sq Ldr Munro.
When his mother opened the door to an official delivering an unopened telegram with news of his award, she feared the worst and collapsed with an aneurism and died within a week.
After being given the devastating news, Sq Ldr Munro was offered the chance to be taken off bombing operations, but declined.
The 95-year-old visited the monument in London’s Green Park in 2013 and said he was inspired to make the sacrifice “out of comradeship” to his fellow servicemen who did not made it back.
Sq Ldr Munro said it was important for the memorial to maintain its condition for the relatives of the thousands of men listed on it and future generations.
This brave and generous man is a Kiwi.
Sq Ldr Munro, from New Zealand, said: “The memorial is a magnificent tribute to Bomber Command’s fallen. It was a travesty it took 67 years before the loss of 55,573 lives was finally recognised.
“My reasons for donating my medals and flying log books to the fund were prompted by my visit. I could not help but think of the cost of its ongoing maintenance and with the feelings of the descendants of those 55,573 in mind believe that every effort be made to maintain the memorial in the best possible condition.
Rather than have Sq Ldr Munro feel forced to sell off his medals, maybe the NZ Government could contribute something?
Sq Ldr Munro learned to fly Lancaster bombers at below tree-top height at 200mph in preparation for the raid.
On one such flight over Lincolnshire, he was nearly killed when a seagull hit his cockpit windscreen “like a cannonball” and landed between him and his co-pilot.
He went on to practice for the mission over Derwent Water in the Lake District and the Fleet at Chesil Beach.
Two days after the Allied invasion of Europe, Sq Ldr Munro dropped the first “Tallboy” 12,000lbs bomb on a tunnel in southern France that enemy Panzer tanks were using to reinforce Germany army in Normandy.
He then led successful raids to wipe out E-boat and U-boat pens in Le Havre and Boulogne, successful missions that helped the Allied take control of Normandy and France.
After the war he returned to New Zealand, studied agriculture and worked for the State Advances Corporation which managed state-owned farms.
He got into local politics and served as mayor of Waitomo, a town on the northern island of New Zealand. He was appointed to the Queen’s Service Order (Q.S.O.) in 1991.
A great NZer.
Just watched Season 3 of House of Cards. While it was still good viewing, I have to say I found it far less satisfying than the first two seasons, which were brilliant.
Why did I find it not as good as previously? A few reasons.
The Guardian reports:
The UK justice system should receive a radical overhaul for the digital age with the creation of an online court to expand access to justice and resolve claims of up to £25,000, the official body that oversees civil courts has recommended.
In a transformative proposal for largely lawyer-free, virtual courtrooms, the civil justice council is calling for an internet-based dispute resolution system to be available within two years.
Backed by Lord Dyson, the master of the rolls, who is head of the civil judiciary in England and Wales, the report says existing services – such as eBay’s disagreement negotiation procedure and Cybersettle’s blind-bidding operations – provide prototypes worth studying.
The online dispute resolution (ODR) model proposed in the report envisages a three-tier process: evaluation through interactive services and information, negotiation with online “facilitators” and finally, if agreement has not been reached, resolution by a trained judge relying on electronic submissions.
Only the judge need be legally qualified. If necessary, telephone hearings could be built into the last stage. Rulings by the online judge would be as enforceable as any courtroom judgment.
I think this is a very worthy idea.
There are already some smaller scale precedents such as the .nz dispute resolution service which has a mediation stage, and then an arbitration/decision stage – all done without a face to face hearing.
An IMF paper looks at expenditure rules:
Our findings suggest that expenditure rules are associated with spending control, counter-cyclical fiscal policy, and improved fiscal discipline. We find that fiscal performance is better in countries where an expenditure rule exists. This appears to be related to the properties of expenditure rules as compliance rates are generally higher than with other types of rules (on the budget balance or debt, for example). In particular, we find that compliance with expenditure rules is higher if the expenditure target is directly under the control of the government and if the rule is not a mere political commitment, but enshrined in law or in a coalition agreement.
So the most effective type of fiscal rule is a binding expenditure rule.
Evidence of adverse side effects is mixed. The introduction of expenditure rules is associated with a decrease in public investment only in emerging economies. A possible explanation is that any adverse effects on public investment could be mitigated in advanced economies by welldesigned budgetary frameworks and procedures. Instead, the empirical analysis points to two positive side effects. First, expenditure rules reduce the volatility of expenditure, thus imparting a degree of predictability to fiscal policy and making it less destabilizing. Second, expenditure rules are associated with higher public investment efficiency.
I’d love NZ to have an expenditure rule, such as restricting core crown expenditure to 25% of GDP over say a three year cycle or restricting the growth in expenditure to say 1% after taking account of population growth and inflation.
Expenditure rules are currently in place in 23 countries (11 in advanced and 12 in emerging economies)
So we would not be alone if we did this.