In what will likely be the most startling news event this year, Wikileaks has obtained secret military files and given them to the New York Times, , and , who agreed to coordinate the release of their news stories. These thousands of United States military incident and intelligence reports detail a great many combat actions that have been hitherto unreported, telling a sorry tale of civilian deaths, armed conflict among allies, and mounting chaos in Afghanistan.

The Guardian calls it the biggest intelligence leak in military history.

From my initial examination of the news sites, it seems that each . . . [more]

As you’ll probably know, even if you’re imprisoned within your firm’s IT compound, the browser wars are back again, and the competition has been heating up. The latest major entrant into the lists is Google’s Chrome, which, now that it permits extensions, has moved from near zero to 7% of the market, pillaging mostly from IE’s share. Safari is holding its own, not gaining much of any ground outside the Mac OS world, while Firefox, once the white knight challenger, has begun to falter, weighed down perhaps by over use of extensions.

Now there comes what looks to be . . . [more]

I went to Niagara-on-the-Lake this weekend to catch a few plays at the Shaw. Friday night, after getting back to the B&B, I found myself sitting on a bed, using my netbook and an external mouse rather than the touchpad. The bed’s surface wasn’t quite suitable. The solution was immediately obvious. The convex back wasn’t a problem at all. More proof of Job’s genius.

. . . [more]

An article by Michael Moyer in this month’s Scientific American reinforces that crowd-sourcing approaches towards rating sites are inaccurate, and do pose a risk to lawyer’s reputations. We’ve discussed lawyer rating sites on Slaw before, here and here.

Moyer cites Eric K. Clemons of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who points out a couple of inherent biases in rating sites:

1. people using a service have already made a choice, and are pre-disposed to liking it
2. people do not tend to rate things they find satisfactory

What this means is that rating sites represent the extremes – . . . [more]

Given the Conservative government’s program of “getting tough on crime,” the Economist’s piece from Thursday, “Rough Justice in America: Too many laws, too many prisoners“, might be of special interest up here in Canada. It’s not a new story: we’ve known about the high incarceration rate in the United States for many years now. But in my view it’s a story worth repeating.

Herewith a few of the more telling portions:

. . . Between 2.3m and 2.4m Americans are behind bars, roughly one in every 100 adults. If those on parole or probation are included, one adult

This story by Erika Kinetz (AP) is on Google news with an AP logo, but I’m not sure what you’d say was the most authentic source for it. I found it serendipitously on Roger Ebert’s Journal (from which it appears since to have been removed.)

Christopher Dawson of ZDNet has also commented. . . . [more]

Okay, pop quiz:

Name the society that the following people all belonged to –
Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Karl Marx, Peter Ustinov, and Stephen Hawking . . . [more]

Librarians will know about the federal government’s Weekly Checklist of Canadian Government Publications, but I thought others might like to learn of its existence. A product of Government of Canada Publications, the checklist provides subscribing Depository Libraries with a list of those official publications from all organizations including Parliament that are catalogued and sent out to them — and incidentally informs the rest of us as well.

Most useful to this “rest” will be the sub-list of publications available online: see, for example, the electronic list for publications available as of last week.

The whole Government of Canada . . . [more]

For lawyers looking for clients and others considering additional financial consequences of the G20, the just released Vancouver (City) v Ward 2010 SCC 27 is perhaps a collection manual for those who were improperly arrested at the G20.

The facts of Ward. I’m quoting the headnote:

During a ceremony in Vancouver, the city police department received information that an unknown individual intended to throw a pie at the Prime Minister who was in attendance. Based on his appearance, police officers mistakenly identified W as the would‑be pie‑thrower, chased him down and handcuffed him. W, who loudly protested his detention

The US Senate has passed a bill against ‘libel tourism’, essentially barring the enforcement of defamation judgments from places that the US deems to protect free speech insufficiently. In what has become a widespread but still unfortunate practice, the bill’s name is an acronym: the Securing the Protection of our Enduring and Established Constitutional Heritage Act (viz the SPEECH Act).*

Out-law.com has this story and more official information is available on the Govtrack.us site. (It does not show the bill as passed as of July 14.)

Is such a bill necessary? Would not a rule like the Canadian . . . [more]

What to do with print now that so much is online, and discussions of what’s the point of print are taking place well beyond the posts on Slaw. Working in a Legal Deposit library means I have had to take a step back, look at the issues, and accept a much more conservative approach than I might have done otherwise.

Before I start on legal deposit, I know two good reasons why print is important, and they are both to do with personal experience. Firstly, when there is an electricity blackout you cannot access the internet. Mostly this is not . . . [more]

I was browsing Alberta case law posted to CanLII today using their funky RSS feeds and an interesting tidbit caught my eye. In Alberta (Justice and Attorney General) v. Yousif, 2010 ABQB 478, solicitor and client costs were awarded against the Minister.

[8] This matter was instigated by the Minister who was the principal architect of the legislation under which the action was taken. As I indicated in the last judgment, the objective of the legislation is that proceeds and instruments of crime may be used for the benefit of victims of crime. It gives the Minister broad