Month: November 2005

Losing your human rights was never so boring

The headline message from this post is that the US Senate just passed an amendment denying habeas corpus – a fundamental human right – to anyone detained at Guantanamo Bay. And that’s very bad.

Obsidian Wings has a description of the amendment and its potential effect, written before it passed yesterday. It also has a second post, with more description, written after the vote passed 49-42 on the floor of the Senate.

All is not over yet, but SCOTUSblog and Opinio Juris discusses the consequences for some major human rights cases currently before the Supreme Court.

Update: More in the New York Times.

Gomorrah and Sod ’em

Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate and evangelical wingnut, has told the people of Dover (PA):

If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God — you just rejected Him from your city.

Why? Well, at the elections last week Dover’s citizens booted out their school board for promoting the teaching of ‘intelligent’ design instead of evolution, and incidentally making the town a global laughing stock.

But God’s cross now. Honest, Pat says so. Brrrrr!

(via The Washington Post)

9/XI

The Virtual Stoa – the site whose masthead date is still in the French Revolutionary calendar – notes that November 9th is a recurrent theme in German history, being the date on which the Kaiser abdicated, the Beer Hall Putsch failed, and the Berlin Wall fell. It is also the date of Kristallnacht.

New competition law baffles retired majors

In the final act of the hilarious school fee fixing scandal, the OFT has ruled that 50 independent schools may have broken competition law by telling each other what they were going to charge parents.

This sort of information exchange, as you might imagine, is just slightly illegal. If the bursar at my school, the amiable but non-whizz-kid Major Dixon (retd) is anything to go by, it was just good chaps keeping each other informed (in flagrant breach of the law).

Back to the Future in Kaliningrad

BBC news reports that Kaliningrad (Królowiec, Koenigsberg) – the capital of that small sliver of Russia that used to be a bit of German East Prussia – is going to erect a statue, and name a square in honour of, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

Given that the city’s existence in its present form is a direct consequence of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s something of a nostalgia for the old days in what is now a vast Russian military base.