Six Canadian provinces have legislative recognition of Remembrance Day, though only two mention Two Minutes Silence, Ontario and Alberta. Nova Scotia for example says:

Every employer carrying on or engaged in an industry to which Section 3 does not apply shall, subject to Section 8, relieve the employees in the industry from duty, and suspend the operations of the industry, for a period of three minutes, at one minute before eleven oclock in the forenoon.

This post is about silence, and the legal protection of silence.

You have the right to silence. And in Quebec, a judge cannot refuse . . . [more]

I gave a presentation this morning on social media issues at a TechAlliance breakfast club event. Thought I would share this one slide.

If someone posts something about you or your organization that you don’t like, it’s best to so some sober reflection to consider the best response. Sometimes attempts to suppress things on the internet can backfire and bring more attention to it. It’s called the Streisand effect.

For example, you might be better off ignoring it if the comment is on an obscure place few will see, or if the person who posted it is clearly a . . . [more]

Perverse as it may be in November to contemplate Spring, today’s postings on the law of time and Bills prompt me to dredge out the wonderfully quirky piece of parliamentary draftsmanship, A.P. Herbert’s Spring Arrangements Bill.

The statute is referred to in Drafting Cayman Islands trusts, by James Kessler, Tony Pursal at page 148.

A.P. Herbert was the MP for Oxford University and a passionate advocate for Newfoundland independence – which made him a bete noire of Joey Smallwood in the Book of Newfoundland – see Peter Neary’s Newfoundland in the North Atlantic World, 1929-1949. Herbert’s . . . [more]

Interpol has released its orange alert report for hidden explosives, which details the features and components of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) originating in San’a, Yemen. Interpol has released the information to assist law enforcement in identifying suspicious packages.

The entire 4-page report can be downloaded here (pdf).

Two packages containing printers with Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) secreted on the inside were separately identified in UAE and the UK heading for synagogues Chicago.

One of the synagogues reports high web traffic to their site from Cairo, Egypt immediately preceding the incident.

In an unfortunate twist of irony, Sana’a, Yemen was once . . . [more]

I visited the website of the new UK Supreme Court (UKSuC?) recently — it’s a good-looking site, better, in my estimation than the new US Supreme Court site and, alas, our own — but I have to confess I was shocked to see what amounts to a real estate ad front and nearly centre on the home page. Three images are featured in boxes leading to important content. The one on the right is an advert for the renting of the Supreme Court building as a venue for events:

click image to enlarge

The text at the other end of . . . [more]

Smart Matt Mullenweg. He’s the founder of Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and supports WordPress.org (whose publishing program makes Slaw possible). One of his recent ventures is FoodPress, an aggregator of the best foodie blogging on WordPress.com. It’s got great content—at no real cost. Smart, as I said.

The content is worth a look, if you’re at all involved with food beyond simply eating to live. As with a lot of food porn on the internet, much at FoodPress depends on the quality of the photographs (there’s even a Favorite Food Photo Archive). That strawberry has to glow; the roast . . . [more]

Hours and hours of reading fun:

The U.S. National Library of Medicine has launched a web site about Most Horrible and Shocking Murders:

Hundreds of years before television crime shows and Agatha Christie murder mysteries, people got their thrills from “true crime” tales told in murder pamphlets (…)

Michael Sappol, PhD, a historian in the NLM History of Medicine Division says the public has had an appetite for true crime ever since the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. Murder pamphlets have been hawked on street corners, town squares, taverns, coffee houses, newsstands and book shops for more

Click on image to enlarge it.

Roll your own at Bitstrips. . . . [more]

More to the point, maybe, can you?

If you had an iPhone — and Everyday Looper — you could at least try. Reggie Watts, comic and musician, wows Sirius Radio interviewer, Ron Bennington, with an improvised concert on the only equipment he managed to bring to the interview.

I’ve tried to think how lawyers might make business use of Everyday Looper on their iPhones, but it’s Friday, so I didn’t try very hard. But if you can come up with ROI ($5.99) ideas, by all means let us have them. . . . [more]

The great Code of Hammurabi, nearly 4,000 years old, was written in cuniform script in Akkadian, a lingua franca for much of the middle east and north Africa at the time.

Thanks to the efforts of scholars at Cambridge, you can now hear what it might have sounded like. (Obviously, there’s no way to know with any certainty how Akkadian sounded, but certain clues, comparisons, and good guesses can give us an idea.) Here is a link to an MP3 file on Slaw’s server; you can also access the recording on the Cambridge site.

The . . . [more]