Maybe it’s because of the Spring weather, but love was in the air this week. Even regulators were in sync.

The week started off with a study showing that married couples have more immunological diversity than random pairs, suggesting that opposites really do attract.

The Canadian government showed some love for tech companies this week too, with BDC committing $75 million to a new VC fund: the Tandem Expansion Fund, headed up by Charles Sirois and Brent Belzberg.

A love triangle with India’s Shantha Biotech at the centre turned to a more traditional M&A romance this week . . . [more]

Auto manufacturer General Motors has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York this morning. It is expected the U.S. government will take 60% ownership and the Canadian government will take 12.5%. 17.5% will be owned by the UAW and bond holders will hold 10%.

By filing for bankruptcy protection, GM automatically loses its spot on the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index. It is unclear yet whether Canadian plants will be closed.

According to Kent Kresa, GM Chairman:

Today marks a new beginning for General Motors. A court-supervised process and transfer of assets will enable a New

Liu Guijin, China’s special envoy to Darfur, is currently in Doha meeting with representatives from Britain, France, Russia, United States and the European Union in a 5-day conference on how to deal with the situation in western Sudan.

U.N. backed negotiations between the rebels and the government are also continuing in Doha, and the rebels have released government prisoners in a gesture of good faith. Meanwhile, the government is making advances in Darfur, capturing several towns.

But the key to these recent gains are that the main rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), indicated that they withdrew to . . . [more]

The Slaw Scavenger Hunt challenge Scavenger Hunt is complete – our prominent lawyer from Toronto has won, but a brand new contestant got the last 2 items.

The last two items were . . . [more]

The Slaw Scavenger Hunt challenge Scavenger Hunt is down to a handful of items – our prominent lawyer from Toronto has an insuperable lead, but let’s see whether the last 2 items can be guessed.

I’ve amplified the big fat hairy hints we gave last week. The works are not so obscure that we couldn’t find lots of references to them. By the way, you can get there by skillful use of the Google search tools, and the resources of Canlii and its kin across the world. No need to spend money on the commercial databases on this project.

The . . . [more]

The desire of publicly-listed corporations to use current communications in fulfilling their duty to disclose material information about their activities can run into the technical limits of (some of) the new media.

There’s an article [PDF] by an American law firm on the topic – 8 pages in all.

An amusing example from the article: a corporate blogger was tweeting from a corporate phone conference, and was recalled to order about the limits to discussions of corporate earnings etc. So the next time it happened, he sent out FOUR separate tweets with disclaimers applicable to the same message! (One asks . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington has put together a list of resources on Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.

The list is broken down into:

• articles/books by Sotomayor
• her U.S. Senate confirmation hearings at the lower levels of the U.S. federal bench (1992 and 1998)
• links to her jugdments
• profiles and analyses from other websites

When we were discussing the various ideas we had for topics for this week’s series from our firm, Pitblado LLP, I told my colleagues that I wanted to use my writing opportunity to give the readers of Slaw a glimpse into something that is unique to Manitoba from the standpoint of technology and the law.

I told the group that I wanted to report on Manitoba’s recent enactment of The Child and Family Services Amendment Act (Child Pornography Reporting) (Manitoba). With the enactment of these changes to The Child and Family Services Act (Manitoba), Manitoba became the first province . . . [more]

I’m fascinated watching the right wheel out its opposition to President Obama’s candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. The current designated target, online at least, seems to be her putative “experience” gained from having overcome various difficulties in her life, something President Obama made a point of praising. The worst argument raised against this aspect that I’ve seen so far has to be that by Thomas Sowell in the National Review Online:

Much is being made of the fact that Sonia Sotomayor had to struggle to rise in the world. But stop and think.

If you were

A former researcher at the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, Manitoba made the news in mid-May after allegedly trying to smuggle genetic material from the Ebola virus across the Manitoba-North Dakota border. CBCNews.ca reported that in his affidavit, the researcher told officers he was working on a vaccine for the Ebola virus and HIV and that on his last day at the lab, he stole 22 vials to use at his new job in the U.S. because he did not want to have to start from the beginning with respect to his research.

With job losses and employees leaving their . . . [more]

We have posted many times on the great efforts of colleagues within the library community who are working to digitize older Ontario legislation on the Internet archive and elsewhere.

The volume of content there is increasing.

Has someone, or will someone, create clickable Table of Contents to organize this content? I couldn’t find any such efforts or am I missing something obvious?

For example, it literally took me 3 minutes to generate the following partial (and simple) clickable Table of Contents for part of the 1980 annual Ontario statutes (warning: the PDFs are slow to load):

Statutes of Ontario (1981)

The British Information Commissioner sponsored a study by RAND Europe of the EU Privacy Directive [PDF]. The study found the Directive in need of an overhaul, possibly a rebuilding from the ground up.

Here are the main challenges identified in the study, along with strengths and weaknesses of the current regime. Are any of them applicable to the Canadian system, either to PIPEDA and the provincial statutes that provide the framework, or to the privacy commissions that operate under them? Are the concerns applicable to public sector privacy statutes and commissioners as well?

From the study: . . . [more]