Recently The Times reported that the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) had created a team called Road Safety Support, to help the Police deal with the increasing number of drivers seeking to contest speeding tickets by citing “legal technicalities”. The legal technicalities included challenging whether a speed camera was properly calibrated, that speed signs were obscured or cameras had given false readings.  In many cases the Police have failed to secure convictions because they failed to comply with certain aspects of the law when enforcing speed limits.

It is curious that the Police find it exceptional that they must comply with the law when seeking to secure a conviction.  In this country, for centuries it has been incumbent upon prosecuting authorities to prove their case by presenting to the Court sufficient evidence of a defendant’s guilt.  Should radar equipment not be calibrated properly so that it records a speed of 33 mph for a vehicle travelling at 29 mph in a 30 mph limit, the driver is clearly not guilty of speeding.  Where a speed sign is obscured, natural justice requires that a driver unfamiliar with the area should not be prosecuted.

The setting up of this new unit is tantamount to the Police admitting that they were not exercising due diligence when presenting some of these cases to the Court and were failing to ensure that they possessed solid, reliable evidence.  It is nothing to do with “loopholes” and everything to do with competent evidence gathering and prosecution.

The Times - Speeding drivers with loophole lawyers

Tough on Liberty, tough on the causes of Liberty

According to Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Web 2.0 is “killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct” with amateurs creating an “endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.”  It is, “undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent.”  Wikipedia is identified as a particular villain, being riddled with “mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings” but yet being more popular than Britannica.com, thereby threatening the latter’s financial viability. What Wikipedia has done to reference books, bloggers will do to traditional news media, believes Mr Keen.

I believe Mr Keen is being alarmist, because ultimately, quality matters.  The laws of natural selection apply in the virtual, as well as the real world.  The very best survives and the rest fade away.  Britannica.com will live on because it is acknowledged as being authoritative whilst Wikipedia is not. The mainstream media cannot be seriously challenged by citizen bloggery and will remain ascendant because of its inherent professionalism and quality in depth.  Web logs are a passing fad and the current intense activity will pass leaving only a small number of the most committed.

Part of Mr Keen’s hypothesis relies also upon a premise that the average punter cannot differentiate between different sources of information with the result that the good will fall and the bad will prevail.  Yet we know that anything free is unlikely to be as good as something paid for.  Free, net-based sources of information are just a convenient, useful point of first reference before turning to, for example, the trusted newspaper, news magazine, or reference book.

Much on the net is trashy and ephemeral but the important point is that we all know it and when we don’t want monkeys, we avoid paying peanuts.

John-Paul Flintoff - The Sunday Times

David Smith - The Observer

Malaysia is a forward-looking, democratic country that abides by the rule of law.  It happens also to be a Muslim country.

According to the New Straits Times, at the High Court Registry in Shah Alam, the state capital of Selangor, on 14^th May 2007 a Hindu man, Mr V. Suresh, applied for a writ of habeas corpus seeking the release of his wife Siti Fatimah Abdul Karim (who I shall refer to, wrongly, as Mrs Suresh) from detention at the Baitul Aman Faith Rehabilitation Centre, where she had been sent by the Malacca Syariah High Court on 8^th January 2007.

Mr Suresh had married his wife according to Hindu rites on 10^th March 2004 at a Hindu temple in Malacca.  They lived together in Malacca and together had a daughter Diviya Dharshini, born on 19^th December 2005. The daughter was raised according to the Hindu religion.  By all accounts (and unsurprisingly) Mrs Suresh had professed the Hindu faith and had changed her name.  Following the marriage, she had attempted to formally change her name and religious status from Islam to Hindu and was advised by the Melaka Islamic Religious Department to make a formal application in this respect to the Malacca Syariah High Court.  The application was filed in late 2006 and the first hearing took place on 8^th January 2007.  Upon attending the hearing, Syariah Court officials detained Mrs Suresh and placed her in the Baitul Aman Faith Rehabilitation Centre.

You might think that my righteous indignation arises from the knowledge that this poor woman could be incarcerated simply for choosing to convert and practise the "wrong" religion. Whilst it is another example of how religious courts established to protect and advance the interests of their own faith cannot be trusted to apply justice without fear or favour, affection or ill will, in fact my ire is raised because in Malaysia, unlike the United Kingdom, its citizens still have an unrestricted right to apply for a writ of habeas corpus.