law

Petition for you to Sign: Tobacco giant is attempting to dictate health policies in Uruguay

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So here is the story (I’ve stolen the following text from the Wikipedia page all about this) … on 19 February 2010, when the multinational tobacco company Philip Morris International filed a complaint against Uruguay.[1] The company complains that Uruguay’s anti-smoking legislation devalues its cigarette trademarks and investments in the country and is suing Uruguay for compensation under the bilateral … Read more

Freedom of Speech vs Holocaust Denial

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Freedom of speech is a rather important right, and while it is quite easy to support the concept when it is manifesting itself as criticism of ideas we oppose (drawing Mohammed for example), what happens when we are faced with the promotion of things that we find to be highly offensive and utterly absurd – … Read more

Sex, Lies, and Blog Statistics – the top 5 from 2014

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Time for me to indulge myself in a little rant about the increasing pervasiveness of what can best be termed click-bait, but first, since it is January 1, I’ll start with a bit of crowd sourcing by taking a quick look at the statistics to see which of my posts got the most views in 2014. Here are the … Read more

Irish Politicians break promise to reform Blasphemy laws

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Ireland rather absurdly has a Blasphemy law, and this is not some archaic dictate inherited from the dark ages, but was introduced in July 2009 by the then Fianna Fáil-led government. Enacting something like this as recently as 2009 would appear to be truly bizarre, because nobody was demanding it should happen, and nobody was particularly bothered about the lack … Read more

Italian Scientists Jailed for not predicting earthquake – Verdict Overturned

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Back in 2012 there was an apparently utterly absurd decision by an Italian court to convict six scientists and a government official for failing to give an adequate warning of a 2009 Earthquake and sentenced them all to six years in prison. That 2012 judgement has now been overturned. As explained in Wired … An appeals court in … Read more

Ireland to Vote on Removing its Blasphemy Law … or perhaps not.

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Now here is a small snippet of potentially good news, it has been officially announced that Ireland will indeed now hold a vote on their rather silly Blasphemy law. The report on this reads … Junior Minister Aodhán Ó’Ríordáin told the Dáil: The Government accepts the main recommendation of the [Constitutional Convention], which is that a … Read more