Reporting on a conference, here’s what to tell non-Europeans:

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The US on Wednesday praised the EU for its latest bid to choke funding of terrorism and crime but said more work was needed.

A day after EU finance ministers agreed that travellers entering or leaving the European Union with more than 10,000 euros ($13,040) would have to declare the cash in writing, a senior US official said cooperation on fighting terrorism was going well.

“The action is an excellent step,�? Stuart Levey, US Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told a news conference in Brussels. But the US wanted the 25-member bloc to do more by blacklisting some of the organisations operating in its borders.

Levey insisted there was no difference between the military and political wings of organisations that were willing to use violent means to achieve political ends.

“With the current situation in Israel and the territories, it is even more important to be firm on that issue,�? he said.

And here’s what to tell the locals:

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Nederland vormt een belangrijk knooppunt voor het vergaren van geld door terroristen, zo opent de Volkskrant zaterdag. De opsporing van terreurgeld ingezameld door internationale netwerken begint vrijwel altijd in Nederland. Uit andere Europese landen komen nauwelijks signalen van grensoverschrijdende netwerken die terreurgelden verzamelen.

Dat heeft de Amerikaanse onderminister Stuart Levey van Financiën deze week aan een hoge delegatie uit de Nederlandse financiële wereld laten weten, onder wie afgevaardigden van De Nederlandsche Bank en het ministerie van Financiën. Volgens Levey is Nederland scherper dan andere landen met het opsporen en daardoor bijna altijd degene die als eerste rekeningen detecteert.

Wereldwijd is tot nu toe 110 miljoen euro bedoeld voor terreuracties geblokkeerd. Het geld stond op rekeningen van ruim 350 personen en instellingen. In Nederland zijn zeker drie internationale netwerken blootgelegd: Al Aqsa, Benevolence en Al Haramain.

Why the selective reporting? Does anybody still trust journalism this way?

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Of all the reasons the underground service grinds to a halt, from signal failures to insufficient staff to derailments, none has as much impact as a suicide. Almost everyone gets involved. The police, ambulance and firemen all pitch up; the underground’s own emergency response unit, station staff, station managers and train managers all crowd around on the platform and try variously to save the person, move the person and clean up bits of the person.

How the tube got its reputation as a good spot for suicides is a mystery. It is a completely stupid choice. A large number of jumpers don’t die immediately and plenty don’t die at all. Those that are successful often manage because they get themselves crushed between the far wall and the train, instead of on the rails. It is very far from clinical. At the first “one-under” I attended, the woman was still alive underneath the train, screaming and trying to get up. The image stayed with me for years.

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After the initial burst, however, the supervisor has only one important job left – a job so vital that it was impressed on me several times when I was learning the procedure. When the body is brought off the track and the police are going through the pockets, the supervisor needs to pay close attention to what they find – not because of any magpie tendencies on the part of the police, but because they want to see if the person had a ticket. Perhaps, I said when I first heard this, they want to claim a penalty fare off the undertaker. But apparently many bereaved families try to sue the underground – on what grounds I can’t imagine – and if the person was travelling without a ticket the lawsuit is automatically null and void. So the lesson is clear: if you’re going to kill yourself on the tube, at least buy a ticket. In the circumstances, it only needs to be a platform ticket.

How not to pull a car out of the water

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Right now, 30 percent of all hermit crabs on our shorelines are living in shells that are too small for them. In the springtime, when the animal has its growth spurt, this shortage skyrockets to 60 percent. Hermit crabs, whose own bodies provide only thin exoskeletons, must scavenge and appropriate hard-walled shells abandoned by marine gastropods for shelter. The problem is that there currently are not enough shells left on our beaches for hermit crabs to use. This situation is not only uncomfortable but dire. Marine hermit crabs depend upon properly fitting shells for protection from predators (Hazlett, 1981), mating success (Hazlett, 1989) and reproduction (Childress, 1972). The present lack of housing is so severe that biologists now routinely find land hermit crabs attempting to shelter themselves in glass jars and whatever other ill-fitting forms of refuse they may find at their immediate disposal.

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Based on what we know about the new needs of these animals in their current environment, the Hand Up Project proposes to manufacture alternative forms of housing, specifically designed for use by land hermit crabs, out of plastic. This solution offers multiple benefits. Not only will the project afford the animal badly needed additional forms of shelter, but we also contend that, by utilizing current technology, we may now be better equipped to meet the needs of this life-form than nature ever has.

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I’ve been in Geneva all week, fighting the Broadcast Treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization. One of the least-supported provisions in the treaty is the “Webcaster’s provision” which would allow people who transmit information on the Internet to control how anyone who receives it uses it — even if it’s Creative Commons licensed, or in the public domain, or not copyrightable. Microsoft and Yahoo’s representatives have backed the US’s call for this (America is the only country that wants this), essentially saying that they represent the whole tech industry on this.

This week we presented a letter from 20 technology companies and organizations that opposed the inclusion of Webcasting in the treaty — among the signers were Mark Cuban (who founded Broadcast.com, and owns $500,000,000 in content), O’Reilly and Associates, and Salon.com. I made 300 copies of the letter and set out copies at one-hour intervals (setting out all my copies would have been a mistake, since someone was stealing all of the public-interest groups’ papers and throwing them away in the bathroom garbage-cans).

It made a huge difference. After the letter got into the delegates’ hands, the tenor of the debate really changed. Click the link to read the letter:

Briefly, we reject the Webcasting Provision for the following reasons:

1. The Internet depends on permission-free access. This is reflected in the exemptions in many countries’ copyright laws for online and internet service providers. When authors or rights-holders’ permission has been required for fixation, copying, retransmission or decoding in other situations, the negotiation of licenses from creators and copyright rights-holders have provided ample protection for all parties. Adding a new layer of intermediaries, over and above copyright holders, for the re-use of information on the Internet benefits no one — save those intermediaries. If an Internet company has the rights to a work, or need not secure the rights to a work due to a limitation in copyright, or because the work is in the public domain, there is no rational reason to require that the company also seek the permission of a further intermediary whose sole creative contribution to the work is in making it available.

2. There is no demonstrable problem. Internet businesses are famously, legendarily well-capitalized from angels, venture capitalists, public markets, private investors, governments and every other source of capital imaginable. Proponents of webcasting rights have offered no credible evidence that the lack of legal protection for webcasting rights has precluded the establishment of any new Internet businesses. Indeed, the businesses most volubly calling for Webcasting protection are among the best-capitalized in the history of the world. There is no certainty of benefit here, but it *is* certain that the creation of a new psuedo-copyright will slow down adoption and innovation in Internet markets by requiring all content-related businesses to negotiate yet another layer of license agreements before they can offer new products or services to the public. The most likely result of introducing these new rights will be to skew the market; in practice it will provide financial assistance to incumbents who will be able to assure investors of their right to exclude their competitors and new entrants from the market. At the same time, it is likely to constrain, not increase, the creation of more information products for the public.

We do not desire the “protection” you offer us, nor do we believe it will benefit us.

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The conference “Open Standards and Libre Software in Government” held in coordination with the Dutch Presidency of the European Union in The Hague concluded successfully today. Keynote speakers on behalf of the Dutch prime minister and the office of the Irish prime minister urged governments to consider open source software in spirit of inter-agency collaboration. The European Commission launched its definition of Open Standards, and several representatives of EU ministries announced major national open source and free software efforts.

Open standards and Free/Libre/Open Source software is of critical importance to governments across Europe, which was reflected by the keynote speakers. Frans Nauta, Secretary of the Innovation Platform chaired by the Dutch Prime Minister, emphasised the need for collaboration between governments and citizens and lauded the open source movement as a model for open cooperation. Colm Butler, director of information society policy for the department of the Irish Prime Minister urged the open source community to make technical matters easier to understand for decision-makers. 

In the session on interoperability and open standards, Barbara Held from the European Commission’s IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Unit announced their definition of Open Standards, which require the “intellectual property – i.e. patents possibly present – of (parts of) the standard to be made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis�?. It also calls for “no constraints on the re-use of the standard�? to be imposed. The definition is part of the European Interoperability Framework just published.

Among other speakers, Christian Hardy from the French ministry of finance presented the large migration of over 100 000 desktops to OpenOffice, the free software alternative to Microsoft Office, across the national French Administration. Rolf Theodor Schuster, CIO at the German Foreign Ministry presented a live demonstration of the fully open source desktop and server system that secures the global German embassy network.

Additionally, the vice-mayor of The Hague, and representatives from government authorities in Vienna, London, Haarlem and the Union of Italian Provinces described their open source experiences and future plans.

The event was organised by MERIT, University of Maastricht under the FLOSSPOLS project supported by the 6th Framework IST / e-government Programme European Commission, the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and of the Interior, and the Dutch Government’s OSOSS Programme.

This undated picture released by CARE International shows their Iraq country director Margaret Hassan. Hassan, a British-Irish aid worker kidnapped in Iraq last month, was feared to have been killed by her captors after a video was issued apparently showing her murder.(AFP/HO/File)

A Sri Lankan police officer looks at the body of the guard who was killed together with Colombo High Court judge Sarath Ambepitiya (not in picture) at Colombo’s fashionable residential area of Cinnamon gardens. Judge Ambepitiya was known for his tough stance against child molestors and had also handed down a 200-year jail term forn the island’s main Tamil Tiger guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran after a trail in absentia.(AFP/Sena Vidangama)

Falluja