The London Legal Support Trust has been running the Great Legal Bake this week – unfortunately I am a bit late in on this.
See Legal Cheek: Law-themed cakes sweep the country as the Great Legal Bake proves a hit.
Photos from that site of a legal brief cake and a Supreme Court cake:
From David Gray Solicitors:
I don’t think there is a winner or judges.
David Cameron announced today that the Holocaust Memorial will be built next to the Houses of Parliament.
I don’t suppose it will be as big as this one:
Here are the regulations for visitors:
Here are some Stolpersteine in Berlin:
LATER NOTE: More about Stolpersteine (‘stumbling blocks’) and how you can support one here.
I’m not sure who took this photo of a beached whale with the Mercedes logo on it, but it was tweeted by Arial Bold.
Or has it been photoshopped?
Mercedes (one version):
Three prongs representing land, water and air
CND (one version):
By Gerald Holtom, 1958
Possibly ncorporating the semaphore letters N(uclear) and D(isarmament).
The first public corpus of alcoholized German speech appears to be a product of the Institut für Phonetik und Sprachverarbeitung/ Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing at Munich University.
There’s more information here: Speech of Intoxicated Speakers.
Professor Jonathan Harrington has published widely, including the following:
Harrington, J. (2006). An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts,
Journal of Phonetics. 34 439–457.
Harrington, J., Palethorpe, S., and Watson, C. (2000). Does the Queen speak the Queen’s English?
Nature, 408, 927-928.
Thanks as usual to the organ grinder.
The Votes for Life Bill is to allow UK citizens living outside the UK to vote in parliamentary and EU elections, even if they have lived abroad for more than 15 years. The government currently intends that even if this bill is passed before the EU referendum, it should not apply to that referendum.
There is a petition for UK citizens to sign if they want to be able to vote in the referendum. Here is the link:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/111271
The petition must have been started in October as it ends in April. Apparently there are about 2 million UK citizens living abroad, but some of them have been abroad for less than 15 years so they are entitled to vote here.
Some sources: Votes for Expat Brits blog
a BBC Radio 4 podcast: Carolyn Quinn explores the practical process by which Britain would exit the EU if UK voters opt to leave, and looks at the experience of Greenland, which quit the EEC in 1985.
It seems that Matthias Müller was speaking in acoustically confusing surroundings at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit:
Frankly spoken, it was a technical problem. We made a default, we had a … not the right interpretation of the American law. And we had some targets for our technical engineers, and they solved this problem and reached targets with some software solutions which haven’t been compatible to the American law. That is the thing. And the other question you mentioned — it was an ethical problem? I cannot understand why you say that.
(I have the impression that the word ‘default’ is popular with Germans speaking bad English). Colleagues wonder why he was not accompanied by an interpreter. The interview can be heard here. Müller was allowed a ‘do-over’ later:
Mueller: I have to apologize for yesterday evening because the situation was a little bit difficult for me to handle in front of all these colleagues of yours and everybody shouting. OK. Thank you very much for coming again and giving me the opportunity to say some words.
NPR: When we talked yesterday, the key line seemed to be that this was a technical error. Which sounds to us in English, like, “Oops.” When it wasn’t an oops. It was more than a technical error. It seemed to be intentional.
Mueller: Yeah, the situation is, first of all we fully accept the violation. There is no doubt about it. Second, we have to apologize on behalf of Volkswagen for that situation we have created in front of customers, in front of dealers and, of course, to the authorities. …
I don’t quite understand what Müller means by ‘I cannot understand whether you say that'(corrected in this second transcript to ‘why you say that’).
Details of the lawsuit against Volkswagen here.
LATER NOTE: Richard Schneider reports that Müller intends always to use an interpreter in future appearances in the USA. He apparently understood ‘ethical’ as ‘technical’ in the above story.