I remember a good few years back that the tabloids ran a bunch of stories proclaiming that bananas and cucumbers would have to be straight, apples perfectly round etc. all due to EU laws. Of course they had blown the story out of proportion, the regulations were put in place to ensure low quality merchandise was not mixed in with class a produce. However, in some cases this lead to perfectly good fruit and veg not being sold, and often disposed of. According to a BBC report, some fruit and vegetables will now be permitted in all shapes and sizes, providing they are labelled clearly as ‘for cooking use only’. Twenty six items of produce will have the regulations removed or relaxed, leaving just tomatoes, apples, lettuces, peaches and nectarines, pears, strawberries, citrus fruit, kiwi fruit, endives, sweet peppers and table grapes with the original laws in place.
Nov 28 2007
UKIP – Ignorant Or Manipulative?
To get a bit of background information for this post, head on over to this BBC News article. For those unwilling, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) are broadly anti-EU, and favour Britain isolating itself from the European Union more. In the past they have never shied away from playing on people’s fears, and blowing things out of proportion.
In this particular case, they presented a question within a Europe-wide census as asking citizens about their sexual activities. The question was referring to what is sometimes called common-law husband/wife relationships. This is when people live together but do not actually get married.
The tone used by a UKIP representative is toned down in this article, compared to the previous one that was issued before the EU decided to drop the question altogether. The UKIP member now appears to concede that the meaning they attributed to ‘consensual union’ may have been incorrect.
Anyway, I don’t know for certain, but it is unlikely that an entire party could mis-understand a term…
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Jun 13 2007
Google Responds To Criticism
Following on from the damning report that Privacy International released, and similar concerns from Article 29 (an EU based advisory body), Google has now cut the length of time that they will save data pertaining to their user’s searches. Instead of the original two years, personally identifiable information will be erased after 18 months, although the unidentifiable sections of the data will be kept for analysis.
OK, I don’t know about you, but I’ll be sleeping more soundly in my bed tonight… 🙁
Check the original post here.
Yes, I may moan about Google (especially since their actions with my AdSense account), but they are still the search engine I use, but I have disabled the personal search history feature within my account there.