As of June 1st, all Canadians will need passports to enter the U.S. by land or water. This is in addition to air travel which has required a passport since January 23, 2007. This initiative is required by the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI), a U.S. law requiring all citizens of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda to have a passport or other accepted document that establishes the bearer’s identity and nationality to enter or depart the United States from within the Western Hemisphere. Document requirements for children do vary somewhat from adult requirements.

Additional details are available . . . [more]

There weren’t exactly an Ark’s worth of devleopments this week, but what did develop came two-by-two.

This week saw two very public regulatory developments in the U.S.:

• The FDA took two heavy steps against highly visible advertising: they said that General Mills’ claims on Cheerios boxes that the cereal can help lower cholesterol means that Cheerios are a drug and should be tested and regulated accordingly; and they chastised a number of pharma companies for ads placed with Google because the ads (limited to 95 characters) do not contain the required risk information. 
• Also in the U.S., Rep. Pallone

I’ve mentioned the controversy surrounding the safe injection sites before. But I went in for a closer look recently in Vancouver, when I attended the appeal by the Crown of the decision of Pitfield J. last year in PHS Community Services Society v. Canada, [2008] B.C.J. No. 951; 293 D.L.R. (4th) 392 (B.C. S.C.) that allowed the facility to stay open.

The Respondents in this case were seeking the extension of an exemption for the Insite facility under the Controlled Drugs and Substance Act (CDSA).

The opposition to the exception by the Federal Crown, appealing the decision made by . . . [more]

After a week, we seem to have stumped the research skills of Slaw’s readers – or at least the time and patience of our competitors to date – in the global Scavenger Hunt, the contributions just keep on coming.

In terms of the contest list of 50 dates, set by the two Simons, the table below lists the dates remaining to be identified. The lead is still with our reader (a pioneer blogger) in Oxford, who is well familiar with the Bodleian Law Library. He has 148 points. Close behind is a prominent lawyer from Toronto is close behind . . . [more]

I have seen the future of search – and this demo of Wolfram|Alpha is so mindboggling in conception and ambition that when the site launches I want to experiment at length, when it launches on Monday. It’s essentially about fusing an analytical engine on top of search, drawing data from the web and then crunching it in a myriad of different ways. “Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine.” “Wolfram Alpha can generate and compute vast amounts of data and present it using visual charts, spreadsheets and . . . [more]

The Florence Agreement of 1950 attempts to stem restrictions on the circulation of knowledge via books. In the Philippines, the government has recently given to the world a new understanding of the scope of the agreement, based on a more critical reading of the text. According to the Customs Undersecretary, the Agreement only applies to educational books, and, no surprise here, Customs is the body best able to make that determination. Perhaps they are well versed in the field. There seems to have been some interesting work done ((Such as HARSKAMP, E. and SUHRE, C. (1992). ‘Psychometrische kwaliteiten van meetinstrumenten . . . [more]

Me, I always wanted to be the bass player. Not the bouncy Macca sort, mind you, but the guy who slouches around at the back of the band almost too cool to breathe. But lots of other folks would have preferred to be the drummer: even further back, maybe, but… well, louder. And having a whole lot more gear. So this fillip is for them. It’s about drumming and the beat.

Go to Audio Playground’s Virtual Drum Machines‘ site. You’ll find an incredible cornucopia of drum machines from the past all lovingly recreated by Joseph Rivers thanks to the . . . [more]

We don’t realize how much we rely on a service until it’s unavailable.

Did any Slaw readers get affected by the Google outage?

The headline in Information Week read:

Gmail, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Analytics, YouTube, AdSense, and Blogger experienced outages Thursday morning, according to discontented Twitter users.

Here is the statement:

“Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users, from approximately 3:30 AM until around 7:00 AM, Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved. We know how important Google News hit is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

“The . . . [more]

Thanks to a Law Times Tweet, I learned that the entertaining peek into the lives of summer students at Cassels Brock & Blackwell is back in business. You may remember this blog from Connie’s post last summer.

Having summer students spend time blogging about their experiences probably seems like a crazy thing many. I think this is a great marketing initiative, both for attracting potential students, and also to the wider community. How many of you saw the tweet from Law Times – a main stream publication? How likely is it that this news will show up in . . . [more]

If you’ve not yet had your fill of Richard Susskind, the much-mentioned-on-Slaw author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, you can hear him in conversation with Berkman Center’s Brock Rutter in a discussion recorded yesterday on how IT can make practice “better and more efficient through the use of software and applications to streamline repetitive legal tasks.”

The interview is found on Radio Berkman. . . . [more]

That was the title of a presentation I attended this morning at the London TechAlliance breakfast club series.

David Ciccarelli of Voices.com was the presenter. He is well qualified to present, as he has built his business using these methods. Voices.com is interesting in itself. It is essentially a job mart for voice actors that puts together voice actors with those needing their services. As you will see from their web site, they have an impressive client list. . . . [more]

Legal researchers, what has your bar association done for you lately? What should it be doing? Are you content to join the substantive sections dealing with legal issues you research, or would you prefer to have a special section dedicated to legal research generally? I know that legal research sections have been established in British Columbia, Alberta (North and South), Manitoba and Quebec. Are there any others? In provinces where there is no separate legal research section, why is that? Is there any movement to create legal research sections in those jurisdictions? What about a national . . . [more]