When you stay up late at night, you get to see a lot of interesting television. Last night it was the BBC documentary Blair’s War. The BBC, in its liberated “hey, you paid for this already” attitude, helpfully makes the script of the episode available on the web.

Synopsis: Tony Blair is pretty well ignoring public opinion in the United Kingdom to go to war.

Today in History: The U.N. Security Council met for the first time in New York, 1946.

The Geneva Convention is much in the news these days, mostly because Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks are accusing Iraq of contravening some aspect of it.

The Convention is actually a set of the following related treaties:

• Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field
• Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea
• Treatment of Prisoners of War
• Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War

My previous experience with The Geneva Convention was limited entirely to its application to Colonel Hogan and his wacky bunch of heros on Hogan’s Heros (warning: website plays theme song automatically; may be annoying).

Some more site renovations:

• Search the site
• Site archives (1999-present)
• Recent searches (right-hand side)
• Recent incoming Google searches (right-hand side)

The site archive goes out to my father, and to the departed Alan McLeod, who has gone on to the place where history and innovation thrive, who where the most frequent requesters of this feature.

My friend Stephen Good has returned to his long-dormant weblog. I introduced Stephen’s weblog when it went online last August.

About the closest thing you will find to unvarnished anti-war opinion on the CBC is on Global Village [warning: insane multi-media website]. It’s a good antidote to Aaron Brown et al.

From my American friend Maggie comes a pointer to this story about an American eBay vendor refusing to sell to a Canadian, giving the reason as “we do not ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us.”

While I’ve never subscribed to the “big blue marble” theory of happy world togetherness, images like this do force me to think twice.