The funeral of theIn Britain there have, thus far, only been rallies against the other side of the conflict so we are behind the Egyptians on that one.killedassassinateddead egyptian border officer was attended by 30,000 of his countrymen, who according to al masry alyoum, turned the event into an anti-Hamas rally, shouting anti-Hamas slogans, and rightly stating that his blood is on Hamas' hands.
Three Israelis killed as Hamas launches revenge attacksWhich isn't really true seeing as it was Hamas's rocket attacks that precipitated the current situation. Perhaps Hamas were taking preemptive revenge.
How should the government stop loonies putting decapitation videos on the internet?Update: By a margin of 17 to 1 (thanks Andy), my readers are more intelligent than Andy Burnham.
- Clamp down on beheadings.
- Clamp down on the internet.
"If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn't reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now."Culture Secretary Andy Burnham. The man's intense Stalinism is only mitigated by the fact he's a fuckwit:
Other safeguards mooted by Burnham include compelling websites such as YouTube and Facebook to remove offensive material within a specified time after they have been alerted to it, and changing Britain's libel laws to make it cheaper for people to sue publishers if they have been defamed online. Internet providers will be urged to adopt the proposals in the new year, but if that failed to work, Burnham said the proposals might have to be enshrined in law.And when I throw a large rock at Andy Burnham's smug face it isn't intended to inflict physical injury it will simply happen to be the inevitable effect. If you still haven't been convinced of his sheer fucking stupidity:
Burnham, a father of three, insisted his proposals were not intended as an attack on freedom of speech
He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websitesThe cretin hasn't heard of the 1st amendment.
Sometimes you look back into recent history and you ask: did all that really happen? Were half a million "communists" massacred in Indonesia in 1965 (the rivers clogged with corpses)?
No
Were 200,000 people killed in East Timor in 1975 by the Indonesian invaders?No, around 18000 civilians were killed. This is horrible but vastly less than those killed in places like Bosnia where he supported the genocide.
Have 300,000 people died in Central America since 1960?No. Given the population of central America that would be an absurdly low figure even it the region were like Switzerland.
Has the persecution of the Kurdish people in Turkey reached levels which approach genocide?No.
Are countless lraqi children dying every month for lack of food and medicine brought about by UN sanctions?
No they were dying because Saddam's regime whim he was an apologist for sold all the food and medicine to build palaces.
Did the military coups in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chile result in levels of repression and depth of suffering comparable to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and the Khmer Rouge?No. Millions of people died in Germany, Cambodia and Russia compared to a few thousand in the Latin American dictatorships. Disgusting as they were the Juntas were less murderous than a certain other Latin American regime that Pinter also supports. It is a form of genocide denial to place the crimes of Nazi Germany on a level with those of Pinochet's Chile.
Whilst the regimes that Pinter condemned were frequently murderous and despicable that was not why he condemned them as can be shown by his wholehearted enthusiasm for far more murderous regimes who happen to be anti-American. His only motivation was an intense xenophobic hatred of the United States.
No doubt he was a great playwright and those who knew him as a person have my sincere sympathies but he should not be portrayed as some kind of moral inspiration which he clearly was not.
Report clears Obama, Transition Team
As President-elect Obama vacationed in Hawaii, his lawyers released a report detailing contacts between the Transition Team and embattled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The conclusion? There was no wrong doing.He must be breathing a sigh of relief after his own lawyers cleared him.
Of 214 kids who had attacked children of the other religion, 158 said they recognised them from cross-community schemes.'
The idea of giving private citizens to pin down other citizens who aren't posing a threat to anyone would be extraordinary even without the credit crunch. Often the reason for an outstanding debt is an innocent misunderstanding, such as a householder mistaking utility company's letters for junk mail or assuming that their direct debit was taking care of it. Even when the debt has been incurred through the debtors own mistakes it is often the case that the government, the banks and credit card companies were egging them on. That shouldn't be sufficient to grant some thug the right to manhandle you to the ground and take your property out of your newly kicked in front door.The government has been accused of trampling on individual liberties by proposing wide-ranging new powers for bailiffs to break into homes and to use “reasonable force” against householders who try to protect their valuables.
Under the regulations, bailiffs for private firms would for the first time be given permission to restrain or pin down householders. They would also be able to force their way into homes to seize property to pay off debts, such as unpaid credit card bills and loans.
Paul Britton purported to have an insight into how killers think. He was at best deluded. Psychologists haven't merely enabled killers to remain uncaught but, through their 'expert' advice to parole boards, have also enabled known murderers to be released. Killers are relatively rare and in depth stides of them even more so. This means that there isn't a great deal of actual evidence for psychologists to test theories against and therefore conclusions drawn from them should only be accepted provisionally and never be applied to real life situations as though they were scientifically proven laws.Detectives discounted his denial, which was convincing when you consider he had an incentive to say anything that might please his strange girlfriend. The point of the undercover exercise was not to extract a confession from Stagg, as no judge would have allowed a jury to hear evidence from a honey trap. Britton's pseudo-science aimed at securing more than a mere admission. He believed that his academic insights had given him the psychological profile of the killer.
Detectives set "Lizzie James" on Stagg to see if he matched Britton's description of a murderer, who was excited by his victim's fear and had a "deviant interest in buggery". When Britton ruled that the local loner did, the police believed him. Police say that Britton also told them that the murders of Rachel Nickell and Samantha and Jazmine Bissett were not the work of the same man, although Britton disputes this.
The specifics of Britton's folly are gruesome enough. As professor David Canter of Liverpool University said at the time, he barely mentioned the most striking and revolting aspect of the case: that the killer murdered Rachel Nickell in front of her child. As William Clegg, Stagg's QC, added at the trial, the transcripts of the conversations between his client and "Lizzie James" showed only that Stagg was a friendless man going along with a domineering but beautiful woman.
But dwelling in the detail misses the wider point. Just as dissenting economists are asking by what right their conventional colleagues demand to be taken seriously when no more than a handful warned of a coming banking crisis, so Parliament and the public should be wondering by what right psychologists demand a hearing.
It is not a reputable profession. The British Psychological Society dismissed all charges of misconduct against Britton in 2002, and no-one else has held him to account for what he did to Stagg and, indeed, to "Lizzie James", who went on to suffer a nervous breakdown.
What we must do, I suggest, is introduce a new concept of universal compulsory volunteering.Melanie Reid in the Times putting the moron in oxymoron.
At a time when it's fashionable to decry our politics as being unrepresentative, out of touch or even corrupt, let's stop for a moment to praise the fact that sometimes the system works.So what has Jacqui Smith done to demonstrate that she isn't unrepresentative and out of touch?:
I'm referring to the decision, announced to the Guardian by the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to drop plans for directly elected police authorities.Yes that's right, abandoning plans to make the police accountable to elected representatives just shows how representative the government are!
It was only when those who really understand the implications – the police themselves, and local authorities – became involved that opposition to the idea started to build.So the opposition was led by bodies with a vested interest in the status quo. Next week after consulting with turkeys the government will decide to ban Christmas.
The Local Government Association pointed out that turnout in these elections was likely to be low, with the result that minority and extremist parties could flourish. Sir Jeremy Beecham, vice-chairman of the LGA warned that far-right groups could end up controlling police authorities, after exploiting the fear of crime.They could in theory, but they are no more likely to win elections to policing boards than to local councils, where turnout is also very low but the BNP have only scant representation. In fact this isn't an argument against allowing the public to elect police boards, this is an argument against allowing the public to elect anyone. The threat of the minuscule and pathetic BNP is being hyped up to justify the centralisation of power and maintaining the current top down mode of government.
In January 1993 Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, a satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman "courageous." After Abdel-Rahman's arrest on charges of masterminding the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in July that year, Mr Bunglawala guessed that it was only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere". Five months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he called a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.[7]Whilst his praise for Bin Laden was before the World Trade Center attack it was after Al Qaeda had carried out many other attacks including the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left hundreds of people dead. This doesn't seem like the sort of stuff that a moderate would say.
The Pyramint was a brand of Terry's chocolate popular in the 1980s. It was designed to resemble an Egyptian pyramid made, not out of large stones using forced labour, but of chocolate by a specially designed machine.
On 15 November, Colour Sergeant Krishnabahadur Dura of the 2nd Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles was killed in action in Afghanistan.{Via James Higham}
.....
this Government thinks so little of C. Sgt Dura's sacrifice that their first instinct is to weild the full weight of the immigration system against his wife and children.
one bright spark at the Sun decided to savage me for the heinous crime of being educated at Godolphin and Latymer school. Of course, the journalist, Lynsey Haywood – who sounds pretty well-heeled to me – forgot to mention that I went there on a full scholarship, and that my dad drives trucks for a living.Isn't a bit rich for an climate change protester to boast about her father driving trucks for a living? Perhaps some concerned eco warrior should do something about that.
In his public apology, Russell Brand said that all he's ever wanted to do was make people laugh. Okay, Russell, any time you're ready.
R. Tanner,
Hove
The call for a new primary curriculum has met predictable opposition. But it is in a fine tradition of progressive thinking
Karen Matthews, who received welfare payments of $40,000 a year, had borne seven children to five different men. She called two of her children with the same father “the twins,” thus transferring the meaning of “twin” from the relatively unusual biological occurrence of double birth to what she clearly thought the equally unusual social circumstance of full siblinghood.
..........
The reasons for Shannon’s abduction have not yet emerged, but again the Guardian managed to distract the reader’s attention from less than optimal family arrangements. Instead, it ran an upbeat story on the housing project where the Matthews family lived; that way, the obvious could be ignored rather than denied. The Sun, a tabloid newspaper whose readership is virtually entirely working-class, had described the project as “like Beirut—only worse.” But the Guardian, whose readership is largely middle-class and employed in the public sector, drew attention to the improvements that had taken place in the project, thanks to the local council’s having spent $8 million on it over the last three years—supplying traffic bollards shaped like penguins, for example. Before the improvements, one resident said, “We’d houses burgled, sheds burned, caravans blown up.” Now, only one house in 90 is robbed per year; and, thanks to the penguins, joy-riding by youths in stolen cars is presumably much reduced. The implication is clear: with more public spending of this kind everywhere in the country, administered by Guardian readers and their peers, everything will be all right. It won’t matter in the slightest if children either have no fathers, or different fathers every few years.
In fairness I should probably admit that I voted for Iceland 3 times. Those Vikings haven't fooled me or our illustrious Prime Minister.Which one of these poses the greatest terrorist threat?
Damian Green: 0
Iceland: 4
People who don't recycle: 4
Radical Islamists: 14
Walter Wolfgang: 3
Karen Matthews has acted appropriately throughout: she was waiting for Shannon at home; she contacted the police as soon as she had exhausted all the obvious locations.Apart from with the bloke she gave her to.
And yet, our eye is drawn to her poverty, numbers of partners, cans of lager going into her household. Everything about Ms Matthews' life has been up for scrutiny.This appears to have been quite astute.
Karen Matthews has been subjected to a Today programme interrogation that appeared to position the mother as the perpetrator: Sarah Montague asked her seven times about her lifestyle. Her patronising preoccupation was how many men there have been in her life, not her judgment about them. Has any other, apparently blameless mother been so sweetly assailed?Sarah Montague 1, Bea Campbell 0.
{the McCann's} resources - money, looks, religion, organisation, focus (all a function of class) - were all mobilised to protect them and to obscure the question of culpability. It was the McCann's photo-opportunity with the Pope that eventually exposed the campaign to criticism as inappropriate, not to say unseemly.Unseemly!?
No one thought Karen Matthews had abducted or killed her daughter - and yet she has been judged. Some commentators think they can say anything they like about this woman and even to her. She has spoken with reticent dignity, yet her class makes her available for blame.Nope her obvious unsuitability as a parent appalled most people, who kept their silence because of the awful situation they believed that she was in.
few, if any, Pakistani militants have been known until now specifically to target Israelis. I say, Israelis rather than Jews because the single surviving terrorist noted that they chose Chabad House to avenge the suffering of the Palestinians. Therefore, the attack was anti-Israeli, though not necessarily antisemitic.Richard Silverstein at Comment is Free doesn't think that targeting a Jewish Community Centre for a massacre is antisemitic.
About 1 in 10 children in the developed world is abused each year but official statistics indicate less than a tenth of those abused are investigatedThis is a based on a study by the Lancet who as we all know never publish sensational inflated statistics. If there are over one and a half million abused children in Britain today then it would be horrifying. However as the article explains:
The definition of abuse was wide-ranging and included punching, hitting, beating, burning, rape, exposure to pornography as well as neglect and emotional abuse such as making a child feel worthless or unwanted.
Clearly punching, burning, raping and severe neglect are examples of child abuse (although I suspect 'hitting' means corporal punishment) but when you get into 'making a child feel worthless' then that could mean almost anything. A parent who snaps at a child to shut up might make the child feel worthless, but unless it is constant it is hardly abuse.
Is the reason they are defining child abuse so widely to make it appear as though we are all guilty and that real abusers are no worse than millions of normal people.
Update: More Lancet fun here.
Shipping has become an almost invisible industry, the silent motor of global trade, but its consequences are not all benign. Big ships burn dirty fuel and are not subject to any form of carbon emissions regulation, and pump out polluted ballast water, soiling seas. Now the industry needs assistance. But its behaviour should change too.How did they get from pirates to global warming? I have no idea.
The Rudd Government's plans to censor the internet in an attempt to protect children from inappropriate content and extreme and violent pornography has come in for some criticism.
The plan to impose mandatory filtering on Internet Service Providers has invoked the ire of a new generation of civil libertarians who regard any such move as a threat to their freedom and even some children's welfare groups say that mandatory filters, pointedly aimed at protecting children, are ineffective and a waste of money.
How can civil libertarians possible criticise this, after all they're only depriving people of their freedoms for the children.
Pittsburgh Mayor Calls for Pirates BailoutI don't think we should be encouraging these Somali sea bandits. In fact I didn't realise they ha been hit that hard by the credit crunch.
