Quotulatiousness

July 10, 2009

The headline really does say it all

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:21

Hard to come up with a better title than this one:

Once an empire, Britain faces big military cuts:
Afghanistan operations in the future could be affected.

[. . .] at a time of overwhelming public support for its service men and women, the global recession is causing Britain to face hard choices about its future military role in the world — putting at risk plans to build new aircraft carriers and heralding consequences for everything from operations alongside the US in Afghanistan to whether the UK remains nuclear-armed.

The start of the first full-scale official review of Britain’s defense forces in more than 10 years was announced on Tuesday. It came within days of three of Britain’s most influential independent research institutes forecasting that the £34 billion (about $54 billion) defense budget will be seriously cut.

The question of whether to support a £76 billion ($124 billion) program to replace Britain’s aging Trident nuclear weapons system also looms large.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), warned that the UK cannot afford much of the defense equipment it plans to buy, questioned the value of renewing the submarine-launched Trident nuclear deterrent, and said it was “delusional” to think the UK could act alone without closer European defense cooperation.

Actually, the “delusion” is that there is any will in Western Europe for any kind of military action, under any circumstances.

(Cross-posted to the old blog: http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005571.html.)

Sunken 1812 vessel may be HMS Wolfe

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:13

An interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen about a recently discovered wreck near Kingston, which may be the remains of HMS Wolfe:

A team of divers is set to plunge into Lake Ontario near Kingston, Ont., next week in a bid to confirm the discovery of a legendary Canadian-built ship from the War of 1812, the HMS Wolfe.

In collaboration with marine archeologists from Parks Canada, the divers plan to take detailed measurements, drawings and photographs of a sunken wooden sailing vessel that appears to match the size and last known location of the famous 32-metre sloop: the flagship of British naval commander James Yeo and star of a dramatic 1813 battle west of Toronto that helped thwart the U.S. invasion of Canada.

The suspected discovery comes just three years before the 200th anniversary of the war, adding urgency to the efforts to identify a possible new showcase relic for bi-national commemoration activities.

(Cross-posted to the old blog: http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005570.html.)

Maybe photographers in the UK actually do have rights

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Clive sent me this update from The Register:

The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.

There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.

The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like, including police officers.

The over-used Terrorism Act of 2000 does not ban photography either, although it does allow police to look at images on phones or cameras during a search to see if they could be useful to a terrorist.

This is a belated follow-up to incidents like this one (oh, and this one, too). It’s refreshing to see that at least one government recognizes that recent police enforcement of a non-existant law must be curtailed. It’s also sad that this sort of thing is still so rare as to be noteworthy.

Oh, and Canadians shouldn’t try to be smug about this . . . we have over-enthusiastic police enforcement of mythical laws as well.

(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005569.html.)

Testing (of course)

Filed under: Administrivia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:33

This is the first attempt to switch from MovableType to WordPress. Let’s see how this all works.

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