The sequence of events that produced the current deadlock in Zimbabwe began on 11 March last year when Morgan Tsvangirai and a number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the meeting, but found that the area had been cordoned off by riot police and the meeting closed down on presidential orders. Informed a little later that a large number of civic leaders and MDC activists had been arrested and were being held at Machipisa police station in Highfield, he drove there straightaway. As soon as he arrived, he was pulled from his car and his head repeatedly slammed against the wall by police. (...)

Few people in Myanmar were prepared for the approaching apocalypse. The government-owned news station reported last Friday evening an "80% chance of heavy rain". It appeared that no one knew that a major cyclone had been ferociously whirling towards Myanmar from the Bay of Bengal (aiming at Mon, Karen and Karenni states, and the Irrawaddy and Yangon divisions), despite days of prior knowledge by those outside Myanmar.

So-called "natural" disasters are particularly shunned and censored by the reclusive and highly superstitious Myanmar military regime, as disasters could be interpreted as astrological signs of illegitimate misrule. As a result, no one was prepared due to lack of government warning and planning. (...)

Saturday Afternoon May 10 2008 witnessed a pronounced easing of tension.

Based on a US Congressional source, the Siniora government is reportedly able, with US approval, to offer the following face-saving proposal to Hezbollah to end the current crisis:

1. Hezbollah can keep its landline optic telecommunication cables for use in its Resistance struggle against Israel. But they should be put under "State Control".

Translation: Hezbollah controls them exclusively same as now and no one else will touch them. But ’officially’ they will be under ’State’ control, i.e. not State control. (...)

The French Deputy’s ’kidnapping’ hoax was clearly meant to create an international incident out of something that was commonplace and could have been avoided if the Deputy had kept his cool and not become antagonistic when first approached by Neighborhood Watch. (...)

Every four years, during U.S. presidential elections, the same thing happens, except it’s always a little bit different.

Some clever political operative injects “oppo” into the campaign - some little “scandal” that supposedly speaks to the “character” of a candidate - and the press corps obsesses on this marginal issue nearly to the exclusion of all substantive matters. (...)

Officially, the new law is merely a reworking of previous labour lawi.e., a summary and simplification of numerous individual laws involving no real change of content. In reality, the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy has used this reworking to fundamentally change the relationship between employers and workers.
French labour laws and rules regulate the relations between employers and employees and determine all important aspects of work. The labour code goes back to the nineteenth (...)

I have now been uninvited to the Public Policy Forum (“PPF”) IP program entitled INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REFORM: INNOVATION AND THE ECONOMY on April 28, 2008, which will now proceed without me on the program.

It seems that strong pressure was brought to bear on PPF to have me removed from the program and that PPF capitulated.

The presentation that I would have made would have been based upon the presentation I gave at the 16h Annual Fordham conference in NYC on March 28, 2008 entitled:

WHY CANADIAN COPYRIGHT LAW IS ALREADY STRONGER AND BETTER THAN THAT OF THE USA - AND WHY THE USA SHOULD LOOK IN THE MIRROR RATHER THAN AT ITS “SPECIAL 301" WATCH LIST

Here is that paper, which documents several weaknesses in American copyright law and some 15 areas in which Canadian copyright law is already stronger and better than American law, many of which result in very substantial outflows of money to the USA. The paper also points out hypocrisy and inconsistencies in American positions on IP, including with respect to the US “301" mechanism. I was also asked to address a some points in patent and trade-marks law.