A glance at the week that was
We know now
Facebook has become the primary source of evidence in divorce proceedings in the US.
Randomly selected politicians can improve legislative efficiency, according to Italian researchers.
Men with beards can be harder to understand, as the hair hides movements that aid intelligibility.
Guinness tastes best in Ireland – as we always knew.
The numbers
1 million- The approximate number of sardines that died in a California marina
£150 million- Profit to be made by Nama on a property on Grosvenor Square, London
5- The number of Irish citizens on the new Forbes magazine list of the world's billionaires
0 -The amount Tony Curtis left his children in his will
2- The number of women in Enda Kenny's new Cabinet
238, 539, 663- The total number of kilometres travelled by space shuttle Discovery
Dame Edna in the Dáil
The New York Times’s reputation for accuracy took a blow this week when it got a salient fact wrong. “The Irish Republic on Wednesday swore in its new prime minister, Enda Kenny, after an election that wiped out the long-time ruling party, Fianna Fáil,” the piece went.
“Ms Kenny’s center-right Fine Gael party will now govern in a coalition with the center-left Labour Party.” The Grey Lady soon corrected its peculiar-foreign-name mistake, affirming that “Enda Kenny is a male”.
Web of intrigue
The ill-fated Spider-Man Broadway musical, Turn Off the Dark, has already seen the departure of numerous actors and stuntmen, occasionally with broken bones, but this week saw director Julie Taymor leave the production, and her arch-nemesis is reported to be Bono. The New York Daily News reported that Taymor had “brought aboard a veteran director to tune up the music”, leaving Bono and the Edge less than pleased.
Give me a crash course in . . . Guantánamo prison
What is Guantánamo and how long has it existed? The prison, built in January 2002 on a US military base in Cuba, is the most potent symbol of the abuses spawned by George W Bush’s “war on terror”. The first prisoners, who were captured by US forces in Afghanistan, arrived on January 11th, 2002. The orange jumpsuits worn by shackled prisoners and the chain-link cells in which prisoners are held have become familiar images around the world.
What does Obama think of it? In January 2009, the day after he took office, president Barack Obama signed an order to close Guantánamo within a year, review military trials and ban torture. Obama denounced Guantánamo as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda. In two years the Obama administration has transferred 67 prisoners to 24 destinations. But it does not know what to do with the remaining 172 detainees.
After the US supreme court ruled Guantánamo detainees could challenge their detention in US courts, the Bush administration established secret military panels to determine whether they were “enemy combatants”. The supreme court then ruled that the military tribunals set up at Guantánamo violated US and international law. Bush still signed a law providing for trials by military commissions and preventing detainees from challenging their detention in US courts. The latter provision has since been overturned by the court.
What did Obama announce this week? He issued an executive order allowing for indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo, and for the resumption of military tribunals there.
Why is it remaining open when he promised to close it? Obama has been stymied at every turn in his efforts to shut down Guantánamo. In December 2009 the White House announced that 100 of the 215 remaining Guantánamo prisoners would be transferred to a largely disused state penitentiary in northwest Illinois. But the plan raised an outcry from residents and Republican lawmakers, who feared the presence of suspected terrorists would endanger Americans.
Under Obama the state department has persuaded friendly countries to receive 40 detainees, including two Uzbeks who were sent to Ireland. But US allies are no more eager than US citizens to have former Guantánamo detainees among them. In December 2010 Congress passed a law that effectively banned the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the US.
What does the future hold for those imprisoned there? The future is murkiest for 48 detainees who are deemed too dangerous to be freed but who cannot be tried because there is insufficient evidence against them, or because evidence was obtained under torture. They face indefinite detention in Guantánamo. The Obama administration has broadened Bush’s military/ intelligence review panels to include civilians from the departments of state, justice and homeland security, but even if a panel recommends release the US may have no place to send detainees from countries such as Yemen, where it is feared they would join al-Qaeda.
In theory the other 124 prisoners can now be tried by military commissions. It is uncertain where these will be sent if cleared. Nor is it known whether Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Guantánamo’s most notorious prisoner, will be tried soon.
Has the president lost credibility? Yes. Obama has adopted virtually the same policy established by the Bush administration, and institutionalised indefinite detention without trial. He says he is committed to closing Guantánamo and to trying some detainees in civilian courts, but it is difficult to see how he can achieve this. LARA MARLOWE
Next week you'll need to know all about . . . Internet Explorer 9
On Monday Microsoft will release the latest version of its venerable Internet Explorer (IE) at the SXSW festival in Texas. Expect to hear a lot about how impressive this update is, as Microsoft does its best to convince the web users of the world that this browser is the best. For a long time, though, IE was effectively the only browser out there.
After the notorious browser wars of the 1990s, when Microsoft crushed Netscape’s Navigator, and got into a lot of anti-trust hot water for doing so, IE had an amazing 95 per cent of the world’s users. It was so ubiquitous that an awful lot of people effectively thought IE was the internet, the de facto window on the web.
But, like a lot of monopolies, Microsoft let IE grow stale. It didn’t release a major update to IE6, which came out in 2001, for five years. Fresh competition came from new browsers, such as Firefox and Google Chrome, which were faster and more compliant with developing web standards. IE’s user base has shrunk dramatically as a result, though it still boasts the largest market share.
The latest version promises to be more standards-compliant and support HTML5, the new web architecture that allows for rich multimedia and interactivity in websites. How fast people upgrade will depend partly on how much noise Microsoft makes next week.
