Llanarthne doing its bit for water conservation

 The National Botanic Garden of Wales looked a picture yesterday. Apart from most of the spectacular plants in the great greenhouse having passed their peak flowering, and the lake levels being slightly lower than normal, there was little to show for the heatwave and near-drought conditions (which thankfully look like coming to an end just before an emergency is declared in Wales.) For once, there was no need to close the "airlock" doors to the glasshouse in order to keep the Mediterranean heat in.

All was achieved without troubling Welsh Water. There is a borehole which supplies the estate:

- and water is reused:

We recycle waste water in our Living Machine

Sewage, and stuff that’s gone down the sink in our restaurant, is pumped into a big underground tank in the Living Machine. Whilst the solid sewage drops to the bottom of the septic tank, the watery top is pumped down to a big pond in our Conserving Our Future Zone. How does this work? Here, tiny creatures eat the nasty bits. These bacteria need lots of oxygen – so we pump air across the gravelly floor. This fairly new technology is called ‘forced bed aeration’.

Tall reeds help control water flow. Bacteria also attach themselves to reed roots – so increasing bacteria numbers.

Where does all the water end up?

It waters trees in a nearby field which we intend to use to fuel our biomass boiler.

There is more at the official site, botanicgardens.wales.

Britain's electric car battery future hanging by a thread

 The Guardian has reported: 

Construction of a huge electric car battery factory that has attracted tens of millions of pounds of taxpayer cash and been hailed as a flagship project of Boris Johnson’s levelling up policy has been put on “life support” to cut spending, leaked internal documents suggest.

This would not be the first time that Tory hype has run far ahead of reality. Remember the promise?

the Prime Minister said the new battery factory will “boost the production of electric vehicles in the UK, whilst levelling up opportunity and bringing thousands of new highly-skilled jobs to communities in our industrial heartlands.”

Johnson & Johnson follows North American talc ban with international stop

Johnson & Johnson will no longer sell its talc-based baby powder globally in 2023, the drugmaker said on Thursday, more than two years after it stopped selling the product in the United States and Canada.

Others will surely follow, as they cannot be 100% sure that their product, sourced largely in Asia Minor, does not contain impurities with a risk of causing cancer.

I shall continue using my Imperial Leather, but with caution and will look for a reasonably-priced alternative when this tin runs out.

Extra-territoriality

 News came through yesterday morning of Israel military forces killing two Palestine militants in a raid on Nablus. There was no attempt, unlike previous similar operations, to minimise civilian casualties by attacking during nocturnal quiet hours. A 16-year-old boy also died in the raid. Nablus has had a chequered history, but the last international resolution of its status sees it as part of Palestine. Israel's actions are therefore legally questionable as well as morally so.

There is less doubt about the illegality of USA's extraterritorial killing in Kabul recently and, during the Obama presidency, of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  Russia sends agents into England to liquidate fellow-citizens benefitting from asylum in the UK, and the UK may not be the only nation which allows this to happen. In all these cases, there has been collateral damage, often including the loss of innocent lives. 

It seems nothing can be done to hold the agents to account. The ultimate judge in these matters is the United Nations Supreme Council, but both Russia and America are permanent members thereof - and Israel disregards UN Resolutions anyway.

Digitising the phone networks

 Ofcom has just issued some advice to calm people like me who were worried that our plug-in telephones would cease to work once BT and Virgin turned their networks over from traditional transmission to digital - or from PSTN to VoIP in the jargon. (I see that the always-independent Kingston-Upon-Hull has already made the switch.)

Some excerpts:

BT has taken the decision to retire its [public switched telephone network (PSTN)] by December 2025 and this means other providers that use BT’s network must follow the same timescale. Other companies with their own networks such as Virgin Media plan to follow a similar timescale.

[...]  in the future, landline calls will be delivered over digital technology, called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). You might also see this referred to as ‘digital phone’ or ‘digital voice’.

These changes have already started, but you don’t need to do anything until your provider contacts you to tell you your service is changing. Alternatively, if you want to move to a VoIP service now, you can do so by upgrading to a new phone and broadband package.

Once you have moved to a VoIP service, your landline phone will work in much the same way as it always has.

The full advice, including details of how other devices connected to the telephone network are affected, is here.

Funding public broadcasting

 France has scrapped her TV licence fee. As Screen Daily reports: 

The licence fee removal was a campaign promise from re-elected candidate Emmanuel Macron. The government instead plans to fund public broadcasting by allocating “a fraction” of VAT revenues, worth approximately €3.7bn.

Probably the main objection to a fixed licence fee is that it is regressive. It bears more heavily on those with lower incomes as it is a larger proportion of these than on those more well-off. Taking broadcast funding from VAT revenues is progressive to the extent that those who spend more on VAT-able goods contribute more. But "the French Senate adopted an amendment saying that this could only be a temporary measure lasting until December 31, 2024". This throws the structure of funding - possibly even the future - of French national broadcasting into doubt again.

Neither the licence fee nor the new French system put pressure on the national broadcaster to operate efficiently. There is over-staffing at the BBC and in my view too many resources devoted to the games politicians play.  Surely there must be a mechanism for funding the corporation fairly while eliminating needless job creation, without micro-management from outside which most agree would be dangerous.

The Shipping News from Norway . . . and Kenya

 A news brief about a cruise ship grounding in Sognefjord in Norway caused a wry smile, as I had heard that these modern leviathans, uncomfortable guests at traditional ports, had been causing trouble not only in Venice but also in former city of culture, Stavanger. However, the full story in the Maritime Executive revealed a more hopeful side. Since February, the Richard With

had been at the Myklebust Verft yard undergoing a conversion to hybrid-powered propulsion including the addition of battery power and a connection to attach shore power in ports. She departed the shipyard earlier in the week and was heading to Bergen to resume service on August 8.

That edition of the Maritime Executive contained another surprise, worthy of inclusion on Pointless. Kenya has joined the ranks of shipbuilding nations alongside South Africa and Egypt.

Beneficial ownership register at last

 Six years after it was promised by David Cameron, the Register of Overseas Entities is now in force. It seems that the introduction of this instrument, long demanded by groups concerned about the anonymity of the ultimate ownership of so much property in Britain, has been hastened by Putin's war on Ukraine and the need to identify oligarchs and their hot money.

The i newspaper reports the anti-corruption group, Spotlight on Corruption, welcoming the register as "a crucial first step" towards clamping down on criminals. 

This blog has followed Private Eye in calling for transparency in this area. There is a worry that there may be some loopholes in the legislation and regulations. One that leaps out is that property acquired before January 1999 is exempt. An even bigger worry is the threat by the current government to cut the number of civil servants. To be effective and command respect, the register must be kept fully up-to-date and penalties for non-compliance applied swiftly and enforced. For that, staffing in Newport has to be increased and at the right level of competence. The attitude of the Tory government to policing the existing Register of Companies does not inspire confidence.