saltwatermatt

Researchers in Sydney, Australia, are suggesting injury data since introduction of mandatory use of helmets by cyclists, do not support this intervention.

La Via Campesina - food and farming for the earth. Representatives of this organisation visited Adelaide in South Australia and Adelaide in New South Wales.

From the page: "Being human and ordinary, we will often fail

to love the whole, the dark, and the difficult parts.

We will always try to avoid something.

We will tremble. We will be blind.

We will be uncertain. We will continue to hurt

one another and miss the essential.

We will always need mercy and compassion.

Gunilla Norris"

Simple css/HTML code to keep footers attached to the bottom of webpages, without scroll bars appearing. Doesn't apply to IE6 apparently, but even YouTube have given up on IE6, they observe!

Broadband speed test.

My 512 comes in at 477 download and 93 up.

Telstra will not change my speed to 1500, even thought the line was tested as capable of supporting this speed when the broadband ADSL service was established.

Rational? Existing service in an area that the will not provision new services into.

I live in a very small area of Geelong that has high speed internet service connections all around it, by my street's residents are refused any neew broadband services, except (expensive and moderately low speed) wireless that is - surprise, surprise, not idea for VOIP telephone services.

Thank goodness for good journalism. I thought it was the judge who directed the jurors that it was acceptable to move with the times!

No! It was one of the defendants, a protestor trying to defend planet earth from the billions of tonnes of excessive CO2 we are presently spilling out into our atmosphere...

" On the third and final day of evidence, Gannon who boarded the train dressed as a coalminer's warning canary, reinforced points made by a university lecturer, a film-maker, a charity worker and others about why they had felt compelled to act. She concluded: "burning coal means carbon pollution which means death."

The final statement was given by charity worker Jonathan Stevenson, 26, from London, who cited Lord Denning's admiration of a jury in 1670 which refused to convict William Penn and other Quakers for "disorderly preaching" even though they were themselves imprisoned by a judge, "without so much as a chamber pot". Stevenson told the jury that Judge Spencer was not going to do that and also referred to a law lords decision in 2005 that no judge could direct a jury to return a guilty verdict.

He said: "The freedom that you have, that the legal system allows juries, is what enables the law, where necessary, to move forward. Times change, and what was acceptable in one era may not be acceptable in another.

"The law will eventually have to change and acknowledge the harm that carbon emissions do to all of us, by making them illegal."

From the page: The chief crown prosecutor for North Yorkshire, Rob Turnbull, said: "While the CPS [crown prosecution service] respects the rights of individuals to lawfully protest, it takes a serious view of criminal activity which targets those carrying out lawful activities." He defended Judge Spencer's pre-trial ruling on the grounds that no one was in such immediate danger from global warning that hijacking a coal train was "proportionate".

"The judge said that if the power station contributed to global warming, and all that entailed, it was for the government to attend to and not the protesters. He also said that no reasonable jury could conclude that the crime these defendants allegedly committed was either reasonable or proportionate when there were democratic processes available in this country for political change."

The 22 were acquitted of actually stopping the train, after evidence that no one knew which of them had donned fake railwaymen's uniforms and used red flags to bring it to a halt. The ambush stopped the train right on a bridge over the river Aire, whose girders gave protesters the means to clamber up and use 15 shovels to start unloading coal.

Passenger and freight services in the area were disrupted for two days, but Drax generated power normally throughout."

I would be a less conservative judge or prosecution!

Conclusion of a four day trial of UK climate change protesters who peacefully stopped a train carring coal to a power station. Judge disallowed the defence of necessity, was accommodating regarding need for a contemporary interpretation by the jurors of the law (based on 1860s statutes), but firm regarding his decision that his court should not either be hijacked by the protesters.

Reminds me of an Australian Magistrates Court case in Geelong where a similar number of anti-war protesters were denied the Necessity Defence in the Lascelles Wharf Case at the time of Australia's involvement in the first Iraq war.