odds and ends - three

strike?
it seems there is going to be a 24 hour token strike by public sector workers starting midnight today unless last minute negotiations bear fruit. no doubt buffalo will do his best to get his pals in trade unions to be flexible but there is a chance they may go ahead anyway. not that it matters much to economy, it is questionable anybody will even notice.
given the options we will have to live with this sort of thing for sometime to come until somebody reintroduce something like the voluntary retirement scheme that unp proposed in 2003 which would have got rid of most of the public servants.

peace talks
ltte is threatening not to participate in second round of peace talks unless 'sri lanka government refuses to disarm tamil paramilitary organisations and continues allowing them to launch offensive military operations against our military positions' according to balasingham. this was expected and they will eventually drive the country to inevitable war. buffalo must not to feed them and even better wrongfoot them by reversing his position and proposing a federal solution, perhaps even before the second round.

local elections
they are a mess and the result will be a mess. they are turning out to be the most violent elections since 2001, if you do not count pussies enforcing the tamil boycott in 2005 presidential election as violence. i will probably write a full post soon.

british cowardice
british monitors of a palestinian jail withdrew after tipping the israel, so that israel army can attack and arrest unarmed unconvicted prisoners (including probably some terrorists) with heavy armor. israel's action is understandable, british one was spineless and cowardly. they certainly deserve whatever anger they are receiving for such a betrayal. this could lead to escalation of violence with suicide bombings in the near future, breaking the relative calm that prevailed in the recent past in spite or because of hamas victory at the elections.
inexplicable nature of the british action has already given rise to a host of conspiracy theories, to the effect that u.k. and u.s. are deliberately trying to destabilize the situation and hamas government. i am skeptical about conspiracy theories in general, i hope i can remain so in the future.

google and privacy
google is likely to be told by an u.s. court to handover some of the search data requested by u.s. the government in connection with a statistical study about child pornography, after the government reduced it's demands drastically from billions of web addresses to just fifty thousand. tellingly only google stood on principle and challenged the original demand. others yahoo, msn, aol, have reportedly handed over whatever was was requested in full. so next time you use any other search engine remember big brother has easy access to whatever you type.

127th royal thomian
royal won. was going to write a post but since it seems almost all sri lankan bloggers were there and have written about it, i refrained. here is a nice roundup of other posts.