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This interested me today:

Telegraph - Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes

By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor

Islamic sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in parts of Britain, a report claims.

Sharia, derived from several sources including the Koran, is applied to varying degrees in predominantly Muslim countries but it has no binding status in Britain.

However, the BBC Radio 4 programme Law in Action produced evidence yesterday that it was being used by some Muslims as an alternative to English criminal law. Aydarus Yusuf, 29, a youth worker from Somalia, recalled a stabbing case that was decided by an unofficial Somali "court" sitting in Woolwich, south-east London.

I expect we're supposed to be appalled. Yet I'm not. I don't see a problem with this idea. In fact it's a good deal more responsible a solution than meting out punishment beatings or kickings to the local scrotes on the say so of the local hard-man.

In fact, I quite like the idea that communities deal with many matters of justice on their own. As the report says, people submit to these courts because their families make them. Those families are shamed amongst their friends and the rest of their communities by their relatives' actions. The only stipulation I'd make is that no punishment should be imposed that would itself be a criminal offense under British law or that the "arrests" do not actually amount to kidnappings - if miscreants do not submit voluntarily to such local community justice.

It has always struck me, especially since the experience of accompanying a friend to a magistrates' court on a driving charge last year, that our good old British magistrate system is failing miserably in many places. They appear merely to be applying a regular slap on the wrist to a group of people, chief amongst them the hapless and hopeless, on behalf of an overburdened legal system. There's no sense, to me at least, that the magistrate system is reflecting the wishes and concerns of the communities they serve in any way that would assist in rehabilitation of relatively minor offenders or reconciliation with the communities they offend against.

But in terms of these Sharia courts, I don't see why we should get any more worked up about it than by, say, a Catholic Charismatic Renewal church that holds confessions in public, or the idea of church congregations "shunning" miscreants in some Christian sects. All our communities should be encouraged to find their own answers within the overall framework of the law to the sort of crimes against the community these courts are dealing with. Far better, say, than a broad brush "Anti-Social Behaviour Order" I'd say.

Oxford City Council is talking rubbish, again. Hard on the heels of the IPPR suggesting that the only way to radically improve recycling is to charge for rubbish collections by weight, it seems that, according to the Oxford Mail, Bin Brother is watching you - the new wheelie bins being, er, rolled out across Oxford from later this autumn will be "IPPR Ready".

Now, when I first saw it, I thought "what a terrible thing for a Lib Dem council to be doing, introducing spies on drives". I see Labour's John Tanner harping on about cost, which is apparently negligible per bin, to which the response of the Lib Dem administration seems to be that it would be better value to plan for this rubbish charging scheme now than have to replace or retrofit the bins in a couple of years time.

You don't need to fit the technology on your trucks of course, at £15k a pop according to the Oxford Mail article. You don't have to use the spyware technology until and unless it becomes compulsory to do so. And I don't think that the Institute for Pre-packaged Policy Rubbish is yet of the level of influence where one report of theirs turns quickly into law (thank goodness).

Of course the technology could be used to prove how regressive such a tax on rubbish could be. That must be it. There could be no better reason for a Lib Dem authority wanting to capture such information, could there?

But you know, maybe the IPPR isn't so far from the right direction after all. For if you charge for collections, surely you must also open them up to competition? It was something that we mulled on but did not resolve when we were trying to allocate functions to area committees here in Oxford, with waste collection ruled to be something that could not be achieved in the then market at smaller contract levels than city wide - so we could not allow area committees for example to decide to take a contract out with a different firm to do collection.

Why should waste collection and disposal be a public "service"? It was required once, just as public bath-houses and steamies were required, for public hygiene in an era when more or less untreatable epidemics were spread by (mostly organic) rubbish in the streets. Surely it is the very definition of a "nanny state" to be clearing up our mess after us? And whilst we have spent billions over the decades ensuring that we are free from the state in matters of personal hygiene and our laundry, we have done very little about technologies to deal with our own rubbish.

And it is our rubbish. There's isn't a lot of certainty in life but virtually every ounce we throw out we have at some stage voluntarily brought into our households. If we can get all that packaging back home from the shops when we buy the goods, surely it would be uncontentious to suggest that we take it back with us next time we go out?

It is easier to bill and reward a few bigger organizations - those competing businesses that will offer to collect our rubbish or pick it up from a mutually convenient place, like back at the supermarket or shopping centre. Land Value Tax might prize scarce landfill sites so that collection and disposal firms have incentives to be ever more inventive about how to reduce landfill. Similarly, Land Value Tax in the form of pollution taxes could control other disposal mechanisms like incineration versus "energy from waste".

The ability to take your empty tin cans back to a shop could be an added inducement to shop there maybe. People might be swayed by how much they have to take back into buying or demanding things with less packaging in the first place, or shopping in stores that use minimal packaging (like local traditional shops rather than out of town once a week supermarkets). Most supermarkets will already deliver your rubbish to your door, complete with its temporary contents of course, why not collect the empties at the same time?

Most people do not want to live in squalor. So if the nanny state is not handling their rubbish (at extremely dubious value for money) or other, competing, mechanisms offer a better value service, they will I am sure soon learn to use them. That leaves "the community" to police the system and enforce in the common good against those few people whose unwillingness to deal with their own rubbish impacts on others, or assist those who simply cannot deal with their own rubbish for some reason. Already we are free not to throw out anything. Already some people do, and for them we have environmental health officers who can step in to ensure their habits do not affect neighbours or the vulnerable.

And that community need not be a city, it could be a residents' association, an apartment block management company or committee, a parish council hiring the monthly village skip, or a neighbourhood action group setting policing priorities for the area. An apartment block - through its freeholder and the leaseholders, or the landlord and its tenants - can be responsible for their share, deciding either to take a contract out for someone to collect residual waste or to find ways of reducing or recycling it - making compost for the communal gardens or the local allotments. So this need not be "privatisation" so much as "mutualisation".

Red text is what's quoted in the Guardian, p2, 30/08/06

Secretary of Defense designate. Knows all about waging war in Iran-Iraq. He was implicated in the arms to Iran scandal. No doubt then he was probably privy to the actions of the CIA in assisting Saddam's troops to target chemical weapons on Iranian troops.

Nice. Now's the time for Saddam to spill.

I see that the energy review suggests outlawing "standby" buttons on consumer electricals. Good thing too. Because if they're there, as they are in nearly all cases in my little hovel, they are going to get used. I don't know if they really drain as much electricity as they say, but am prepared enough to believe so and feel guilty about having them, however convenient they are when watching "Science Shack" on the TV at 3am to help me sleep (I mean - there's no point really if you have to get out of bed again and wake yourself up to switch the whole thing off, not for the uberlazy like me anyway).

But my TV and Hi-Fi are only a few years old, so they're going to last long after "peak oil" by the looks of it. So I was thinking, what would make it easier for me to do my duty and turn the bloody things off properly.

With computers you can actually turn them right off and still have them turned on remotely if they are on a network using fantastic sounding little things called "magic packets". The network listens passively (yes, I believe it does take a tiny amount of charge, but from the onboard battery rather than the mains if I understand it correctly) and when a magic packet arrives addressed for that particular gizmo it knows to turn the machine on just as surely as if you were pressing the button yourself.

So, for those of us who will have TV and other gadgets with standby buttons on for a good while yet whether they are outlawed or not, could we not have some kind of power plug that works with something similar to these "magic packets". One remote control could do for the whole house with different numbered plugs. Power the thing off at the wall and still be able to roll over in the morning and turn it all back on again without getting out off bed?

Anyone any good with a soldering iron want to have a go at it? Or point me to one someone made earlier?