Eideard

In the UK, that is:

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The £4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.

The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the legislation reaching the statute book.

Abolishing the cards and associated register will be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards.

The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.

The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total £1bn…

A separate scheme under which identity cards are issued to all foreign nationals resident in Britain by 2015 run by the United Kingdom Border Agency is still to go ahead. Home Office ministers said yesterday this was a separate scheme for biometric residence permits for foreign nationals that was required by European Union legislation…

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said: “The wasteful, bureaucratic and intrusive ID card system represents everything that has been wrong with government in recent years.”

My personal politics – like many, especially those I hope who take the time to learn rather than listen – are a mixture of progressive goals, fiscal conservatism, a touch of libertarian individual protectivism and a thoroughgoing distrust of professional politicians.

But, then our nation’s history is a wee bit different from those on the other side of the pond.

If this is your goal…?

A milkshake containing 2,010 calories — equivalent to eating 68 strips of bacon or 30 chocolate chip cookies — has topped a list of the 20 worst drinks in America compiled by Men’s Health magazine.

The Cold Stone PB&C milkshake, made with peanut butter, chocolate icecream and milk, contains 68 grams of saturated fat and 153 grams of sugar, according to nutritional details on the company’s website.

“In terms of saturated fat, drinking this Cold Stone catastrophe is like slurping up 68 strips of bacon,” the magazine said.

The second worst drink in America was listed as the Peanut Power Plus Grape from Smoothie King with a large cup packing 1,498 calories and the same amount of sugar as 20 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups chocolate and peanut butter snacks.

McDonald’s large Triple Thick Chocolate Shake came in third with 1,160 calories or the equivalent of 13 of the fast food chain’s hot apple pies.

I can feel my arteries clogging up just reading about this.

No, I’m not quite sure why I’m blogging this. Hell, why do I blog every dead chess player I can find?

No.. wait.. I know why I blog the dead chess players.

Here’s a piece from the New York Times: Art Linkletter

The average Briton turns up to work with a hangover three times a month, according to a survey and the frequency is expected to increase during next month’s World Cup.

The charity Drinkaware found each day more than 520,000 people in Britain go to work hung over, with nearly one in five of those admitting that as a result they make mistakes and struggle to keep on top of their workload.

“An international sporting event like the World Cup will inevitably capture the attention of the nation and is a great time for people to come together, but hangovers at work are likely to increase,” said Drinkaware Chief Executive Chris Sorek…

While nine out of 10 people said they considered having a hangover at work unacceptable, two-thirds of the 1,085 adults questioned by pollsters ICM admitted they had joked with their colleagues or boss about having a hangover.

Of those who went to work hung over, seven percent have had to leave work early because they were too ill to carry on.

Then, you add in those too wasted to go to work.

Or, my style – call in sick to stay home and watch your favorite team.

For police chief Clayton Leão Chaves it was supposed to be another day at the office. At around 9.40am this morning, he was making his daily journey to the police HQ in Camacari, a small city in Bahia state, and giving an interview to local radio on his mobile phone about the police’s struggle against local drug traffickers.

Then something went badly wrong.

“I heard some bangs,” one of the shows two presenters announced, perplexed, as the police chief’s voice disappeared.

“Something serious has happened to our chief. It can’t be anything else,” said his co-presenter, adding: “The chief was just talking to us. We don’t know what has happened. There is a lady weeping.”

According to local media reports, Chaves had been killed as he spoke to journalists from Bahia’s Lider FM radio station and to thousands of local listeners about attempts to improve security…

According to reports, the police chief’s car was ambushed by gunmen, who then fled in a white VW car…

Stunned, the show’s presenters urged police to rush to the scene. “Attention military police, attention colleagues of the police chief. Get to the Cascalheira Highway urgently. Something serious has just happened.”

Local radio presenter Marco Antonio Ribeiro told the G1 news site: “I was finishing the interview when the crime happened. We were meant to do the interview in the studio but he couldn’t make it. The interview was about his work combating drug trafficking in the region.”

Too real. There are some jobs that require an armored car – and not just for those worrying about political assassination.

Am I late?

A Swedish appeals court convicted a man in absentia of assault in April. The man’s absence turned out to be due to his untimely death a month previously and the prosecutor has now called on the court to re-open the case.

The then 26-year-old man was tried on charges assault in Stockholm district court on May 27th 2009. While the court found him not guilty the prosecutor elected to appeal the case.

When the date for the hearing arrived, on April 19th 2010, the court concluded after a delay that the defendant would not be attending, but it was decided that the matter could be dealt with in absentia.

The Svea Court of Appeal overturned the district court ruling and found the man guilty of assault, issuing a fine of $1,886 and setting a deadline date for an appeal of May 24th.

Information submitted to the court after the hearing indicates that an appeal is not to be expected as the convicted man died on March 25th 2010, details which were brought to the attention of the court first on April 26th, court documents show.

“Now the appeals court has in the meantime convicted a deceased person, without any prior convictions, which existing rules do not allow,” Malmö chief prosecutor Jörgen Lindberg writes in a letter appealing the court’s ruling.

There has to be some sort of moral to this tale, right?

Bottled water contains more bacteria than tapwater, with some brands found to harbour levels 100 times above permitted limits, according to new research.

A team of scientists found that 70 per cent of popular bottled water brands available in shops had high levels of bacteria.
The researchers from Ccrest Laboratories in Canada found that tap water had less bacteria than bottled water.

Microbiologist Dr Sonish Azam, of Ccrest Laboratories, said bottled water did not live up to its claims or purity.

She said: “Heterotrophic bacteria counts in some of the bottles were found to be in revolting figures of one hundred times more than the permitted limit…”

“Bottled water is not expected to be free from microorganisms but the [level] observed in this study is surprisingly very high,” she said.

Dr Azam said there was no need to drink bottled water if tap water was of a good quality.

Dr Azam said that the bacteria in bottled water is unlikely to cause disease. “But the high levels of bacteria in bottled water could pose a risk for vulnerable populations such as pregnant women, infants, immunocompromised patients and the elderly,” she said.

Local studies in my neck of the prairie have found pretty much the same results. But, hey – maybe the global beverage bottlers need your subsidy, eh?

How long can you hold your breath – and why?

Four teenagers were injured after a driver fainted while holding his breath as part of a game being played in a moving car, Wheatland, N.Y., police said.

The teenagers were treated for minor injuries after the car hit a tree and a boulder, the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle reported Wednesday.

The driver of the car, Bryan Parslow, 19, a paraplegic, and a passenger, Sean Parslow, 16, had to be freed from the vehicle Monday night by firefighters, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said. The other passengers were David Fox, 19, and Brian Sinclair, 19.

The driver and passengers allegedly told police they were holding their breath through the town of Garbutt when Bryan Parslow blacked out and lost control of the car.

Alcohol was not a factor in the accident, authorities said.

They didn’t say anything [publicly] about stupidity.

Yup – that’s the ATM intact – sitting in the debris

Suspected robbers in Germany appear to have miscalculated the quantity of explosives needed to blow their way into a rural bank.

The building housing the bank in the northern village of Malliss was largely destroyed by an overnight explosion.

The bank’s cash machine survived intact and the suspected thieves are not thought to have made away with any money, Germany’s Welt Online reported…

The presence of a delivery van near the site of the explosion indicated that the suspected thieves may have intended to drive off with the cash dispenser, local media reported.

The explosion also set the stolen van on fire – so, they escaped on foot.

In all, not a stunning or successful exploit.

A British scientist claims to be the first human to have been infected with a computer virus after he contaminated an electronic chip which was inserted into his hand. Dr Mark Gasson, of the University of Reading, said the device was programmed with a virus which could transfer itself to other electronic systems it came in contact with.

Any other chips that interacted with the infected systems would also contract the virus, he said, raising the possibility that in the future, advanced medical devices such as pacemakers could become vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Dr Gasson’s chip, a refined version of the ID chips used to track animals, has been programmed to open security doors for him and to unlock his mobile phone automatically.

The results allegedly prove the principle that in future, human implants like this could contaminate increasingly complex medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants.

Dr Gasson told BBC News: “With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses.”

“From an ethical point of view, the surveillance of implants can be both positive and negative. Surveillance can be part of medical care, but if someone wants to do harm to you, it could be a problem.”

Not that anyone expects an “ethical point of view” from the sort of hackers who develop computer viruses. Rationales, excuses, high-sounding crap arguments to justify their infantile and scatological behavior.

Meanwhile, Mark Gasson continues to be an interesting walking experiment.