The Dong Doesn't Stretch As Far As It Used To ...

Five Years Back ...

Or thereabouts ... the third post on this blog. It doesn't stand up too badly.


"... will survival be the biggest worry for most Iraqis ? The US and Brits are going to have to turn themselves into aid workers and/or policemen with some speed. When a strong police state collapses, anarchy often follows - and strangely people don't seem to enjoy it as much as young UK anarchists, many of whom will soon be on London's streets for the annual May Day riots, might think ...

Night is falling in Baghdad. Let's hope they don't wake up to a looted and burning city tomorrow. I'm very pleased - but it seems to me that for the Coalition the hard work has only just begun."

Fame At Last

This blog is #1 in Google for "how to kill badgers with paracetamol"

The End Times Are Upon Us

As the water level rises through the holed hull of HMS Great Britain :

Nearly a third of teachers have been punched, kicked, bitten or pinched by children or attacked with weapons or missiles. More than half of teachers say that their school’s policy on pupils’ poor behaviour is not tough enough and two thirds have considered leaving the profession because of physical aggression, verbal abuse and threats. The survey, published today by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, suggests that excluding the most violent youngsters does not help because they will repeat the pattern of violence at neighbouring schools.

Mary Bousted, the union’s general secretary, said that no teacher should have to put up with the behaviour seen in schools today. “Not only is poor behaviour driving teaching staff away at an alarming rate, it is also damaging the chances of other pupils during lessons by causing major disruptions,” she said.

So does the band on deck play ever faster :

Trouble makers as young as 10 years old are to be asked to sign a good behaviour contract to stop them going off the rails.

And the deckchairs are ever more frantically rearranged :

One of Britain's biggest education authorities is to put happiness at the heart of the curriculum for its 180,000 school pupils. Birmingham City Council is to tell its 440 schools that they must give as much priority to children's emotional well-being as they do to literacy and numeracy.

The authority is believed to be the first in Britain to rewrite its children's development plan – now required by law – to give priority to pupils' happiness.

Children will attend "emotional barometer" sessions to encourage them to express their feelings and their worries. Nursery pupils will also be given coaching in how to prepare for primary school. The aim is to make sure they can communicate properly with other children and behave in the classroom. Similar help will be offered when they transfer to secondary school. This could include appointing older children as mentors.

Les Lawrence, the Conservative cabinet member responsible for children's services in Birmingham, said: "It's not just about happiness for the sake of it. We all perform better when we're smiling. We support our young people in making a positive contribution to society and the economy and prepare them for the world of work, but that would count for nothing if almost half the population are stressed and anxious."

In a paralleldevelopment, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers is to debate a call to set up a Royal Commission to find out why so many children are unhappy at school. Union members will tell the association's conference in Torquay that they are worried that so many children – particularly those of primary school age – are displaying signs of anxiety because of the pressures of too much testing.

The idea of "happiness" lessons was introduced by Dr Anthony Seldon, headmaster of Wellington College, the leading independent school.

Note that this is not the product of some far-left Student Grant council leader in thrall to the theories of the late Ted Wragg - Brum is (I think) currently a Lib Dem/Conservative coalition. They are attempting to address a cultural deficit by paying people to make children happy. It doesn't work that way.

If this all seems too gloomy, here's the good (and totally unrelated) news :

The number of women head teachers in England has grown by 7% over the last five years, figures reveal. Flexible working has played a major role in helping women reach the top, according to research by the National College for School Leadership (NCSL). The NCSL's Women in Headship study found that 87% of primary school teachers are women but only 67% of heads are women and in secondary schools 57% of teachers are women, but only 36% of heads.

Translation Sensation

The other day I mentioned the Expressionist and Symbolist playwrights of the 20s.

The glorious magic of Google Translate is that pretty much anything in German sounds straight from Ernst Toller :


I wonder sometimes if I did, what I do, assess needs. I can worthless living standards. There is only a law and declares itself I should not terminate the life, otherwise there is no longer me. I have everything set up so that I can live.

Many changes have first to my disadvantage results. I have all the connections without prejudice investigated and researched for so long, until I was no longer any danger. I use the words very well, correct and true, ugly and wrong, untrue and bad, since I can remember. I express sentiments that. I feel that if something on my actions exerts an influence. My act is free. My thoughts are also free, as long as I feel nothing.

Boom ! Boom !

Rumbold at Pickled Politics on the latest PC lunacy, a police inquiry into a potentially racist episode of Basil Brush (one gets desensitised to these stories, stories that would have seemed pure fantasy only a decade or so back. Maybe that's the idea).

Northampton police sources revealed that they would have pursued Brush sooner had it not been for his powerful friends in the Labour party. Brush is believed to have been one of the key figures behind the Hunting Act, and as such has widespread support amongst the governing party. Police also want to hold the TV fox for twenty eight days, on the grounds that his catchphrase “boom boom!” is incitement to terrorism.

He said it, not me !

Employers don't want UK labour. They want migrant Labour because its on offer and cheap. Its a deliberate strategy by the capitalists and the government to bring jobs down to the lowest pay possible so that white workers who over the last 50 years have fought and won good working conditions will have eventually no choice but to take the crap. Meanwhile employers make and will continue to make huge profits.

Labour Party and TGWU activist Ian at IansRedBlog.

As an ex-TGWU man myself, I don't think it's a deliberate capitalist strategy. It's just capital, as it will, taking advantage. That's what capitalism's about - finding new ways to do things that can make more profit.

Usually, that's beneficial. Our capitalist builds a better mousetrap and people beat a path to his door. He makes lots of dosh, we get better mousetraps and everyone's happy except the mice (and maybe a few cats rendered redundant by technology).

But we don't make mousetraps in the UK any more - they're made in China, where, confounding the hi-tech/hi-wage example of the previous 200 years, industry is hi-tech, low wage (although that may be a high wage in Chinese terms). The hi-wage UK is left with a people-intensive "service sector" in which the costs of the people increase faster than the cost of goods, because human productivity, say in hairdressing or nursing, cannot by the nature of the work increase as fast as industrial productivity.

But cheap world transport - and change in British culture - changes all that. Eamonn Butler's Adam Smith Primer tells us :

The workers’ best friends, Smith surmises, are rising national income and capital growth, because they bid up wages. A landlord with surplus revenue will hire more servants. A weaver or a shoemaker with surplus capital will hire assistants. In other words, the demand for labour rises when – and only when – national wealth rises. The ‘liberal reward of labour’ depends entirely on economic growth.

That scenario supposes a fixed (in the short term, anyway) supply of labour. What if our landlord, weaver or shoemaker could import an almost unlimited number of low-paid servants and assistants ? What if, on top of that, their low pay was topped up by government through a tax credit system - a system originally designed to take low-paid Britons out of poverty ?

If the wages are low enough there's no reason why even in a system of economic stasis or recession our landlord shouldn't hire more servants. There's also nothing to stop him sacking the servants he has and replacing them more cheaply from the almost unlimited pool of new labour.

What was stopping it in Adam Smith's day was the cost of transport, the absence of a government pledged to abolish child poverty (aka "subsidise an employers low wages from tax receipts") and the fact that the locals just wouldn't wear it. A load of foreigners coming in and taking our jobs ? No way !

Now transport's cheap, there's that lovely subsidy, and above all the moral and political objections to undercutting "our own people" (a phrase which immediately brands the utterer with the indelible scar of racism) have been totally marginalised and discredited. The trades unions, which instinctively understood the objections to cheap 'scab' (non-unionised) labour, now welcome the undercutting of an entire working class.

A good capitalist will naturally take advantage of this situation. No conspiracy necessary.

Quote Of The Day

I don't know if it's original, but I'd not heard it before - James at WhatsThatSmell? on Rasputin :

"At the very least, he's so open-minded, his brain's fallen out"

Sell ! Sell ! Sell !

Samizdata on the death of Tony "Dr Doom" Dye.

What Tony Dye did not understand was politics. Every time he was certain that the crash must come, Alan Greenspan (and the mini me versions of him in charge of such institutions as the Bank of England) would just create more money to keep the credit boom going.

"But if he does that it will just make the crash worse when it does finally come" seemed to be Tony Dye's position, and he was right.

The Way We Live Now

Remember the Charlene Downes murder trial ? The 14 year old alleged to have been chopped up and kebabbed ? The jury couldn't come to any verdict against Iyad Albattikhi, accused of murder, or Mohammed Reveshi, accused of the disposal of her body, so the last I heard was a retrial.

At the time of the first trial the kebab shop in question, the Funny Boyz takaway, had its license revoked. The current owner has successfully apppealed against that decision.

Shortly after, there was a visit on the 3rd December 2005 by Mr Shaw and PC Ross who did not give evidence today. Mr Shaw noted two baseball bats behind the service counter. I am convinced what the bats were there for. The baseball bats were in the premises for one reason only – protection. While it may be understandable, it is nevertheless wrong. Such weapons should not be there.

A visit by Mr Shaw on the 10th December 2005 with PC Berry led to the confiscation of a bent claw hammer. Evidence had been given that the claw hammer had been used by the electrician – a legitimate purpose. I don’t accept the explanation; it was behind the counter for the same reason as the baseball bats.

The next visit was in the early hours of New Years Day. Sgt Hurt and PC Ross visited the premises that were open and trading even though the licence only permitted sales until 03.30. The Police had advised takeaways not to admit persons for 15 minutes prior to closing to enable the sales to be completed before the end of the permitted hours. A summons was issued and a trial is pending. The premises were open after they should have been and the appellant does not dispute that. On this occasion, Sgt Hurt, with a view to obtaining evidence, sought to confiscate the till roll. I am satisfied that Tariq Albattikih was uncooperative to the point of being hostile. It may be that he didn’t understand the power the Police had and it took some time for the Police to obtain the roll.

Two points - one being the little vignette of what are doubtless the issues faced when running a late-night takeaway in this gentler, more caring society. Everyone agrees it's "understandable" - but apparently it's also "wrong" to be able to defend yourself and your premises unless yiou can do it bare-handed.

The other is the alleged rape which apparently Iyad Albattikhi was also charged with. Is that anything to do with the Charlene Downes murder case, or is it a seperate issue ?

"It’s the perception of the victims ..."

It's the (reported) police response to these two stories that's illuminating :

Luton, like other enclaves, has experienced a spate of incidents that look all too like attempts to make Bury Park a no-go area to non-Muslims. Between November of last year and last month there were 18 attacks – all registered by the police – on five non-Muslim homes in the area. One couple, Mr and Mrs Harrop, white residents in their eighties, have had bricks hurled through their windows. The home of Mrs Palmer, a widow of West Indian origin, aged 70, has been attacked four times; on one occasion a metal beer keg crashed through her bay window while she was watching TV ...

DCI Ian Middleton of Bedfordshire police says: “It’s the perception of the victims that their Muslim neighbours are to blame, and we have to respect that. But we have our doubts.”

Nick Tolson, a former police officer who set up the National Churchwatch safety scheme, said that there had been an increase in faith hate attacks on clergy.

“The harassment is usually coming from young Asian men – often, but not exclusively, Muslim,” he said. “The police and prosecutors will classify an attack on a mosque or Muslim as a hate crime but not if it is a church or a vicar. These aren’t targeted attacks, they are spontaneous, but [the victims] are being singled out because of their faith and should be dealt with in the same way as other members of the community.”

There seems to be a common theme in these stories - one from Luton and one about the attack on a priest in Whitechapel/Tower Hamlets area.

Would that it weren't so, but the default police position seems to be :

Attack on a mosque or attack by white on brown/black - hate crime.

Attack on a church or attack by brown/black on white - crime.

The most obvious proof of this is in checking the initial reporting of racist attacks - which usually takes its cue from the police. The attacks on Anthony Walker, Stephen Lawrence, Kalan Karim, Christopher Alaneme were all declared as racist long before anyone was arrested or brought to trial (and in court only the first two were actually found to be racially motivated).

In contrast, the killings of Ross Parker, Kriss Donald, Isiah Young-Sam - and the serious assault on John Payne - were only declared racist at trial and verdict time. In none of these case did the police declare the attack racist.

It would be interesting if anyone has time, to analyse the 73 BBC news pages for "racist attack" and get a more scientific handle on the initial police responses. I can find only one case where the police declared an attack on a native to be racist "early doors" - and that's when an Englishman was attacked by a Scot.

Too much corruption ...

Baroness Symons, a former Labour minister and a director of British Airways, has been giving the airline access to the House of Lords’ private dining facilities so it can entertain its most profitable customers.

She is one of more than a dozen peers who have been booking the dining rooms to entertain companies for whom they work, leading to complaints that firms are paying peers for access to the Lords’ facilities in the Palace of Westminster. According to documents seen by The Sunday Times, Symons, who was last year paid £39,000 by BA, booked one of the Lords’ private dining rooms seven times in 2007 so the airline could wine and dine its most loyal business customers.

The meals provide BA with the chance to impress customers who hold gold and silver frequent flier cards with a lunch in one of Britain’s most exclusive institutions. This weekend the practice provoked accusations that peers are abusing their position to use the Lords as a corporate dining club. “Parliament should not be used as an exotic restaurant for hire and peers should not be facilitating this,” said Norman Baker, a Liberal Democrat MP.

Anything else ? No wonder Gordon Brown announces "green" taxes then approves a third Heathrow runway.

The airport operator BAA has used an elaborate network of lobbying and PR groups, headed by senior Labour figures with access to the government, to promote its controversial plans for a third Heathrow runway. Among the Labour insiders recruited to front pro-aviation lobby groups are Brian Wilson, a former industry and energy minister, and Lord Soley, a former chairman of the parliamentary Labour party.

Jo Irvin, now a member of Brown’s inner circle in Downing Street, not only headed BAA’s public affairs department but also fronted one of the prime lobby groups backing Heathrow expansion. Another Labour apparatchik, Stephen Hardwick, was closely involved in the same lobby group, as well as being employed as director of public affairs for BAA.

Opponents of the third runway claim the links between BAA and the government have given it an undue influence over aviation policy. John McDonnell, a Labour MP, said: “BAA dominates the government’s aviation policy. There have been a number of front organisations over the years that have promoted aviation. They are all funded by the industry and are largely paid lobbyists.”

Bunch of dirty dogs, aren't they ? Haven't a lot of time for Mr McDonnell, but he's right on this one. The suborning of New Labour began when Andersens gave Neil Kinnock a job after 2002 and they've become more and more compromised ever since. I would however be loth to suggest that Mr Cameron's born with a silver spoon up the nose Tories would necessarily be any better.

As their support sinks to 27%, so they're panicking about the core vote. Here's Liam Byrne :

"In the past, people didn't think Labour took immigration seriously. My job is to say, 'the Government has got the message'. Big changes are needed."

A former management consultant ....

He's exactly right. His job is to say things - any things - as long as they can get a few of those votes back.

A fleet of mobile detention vans is being sent out. "They're big trucks with cages in," Mr Byrne explains. "Once upon a time an illegal immigrant who was picked up would be given a map to Croydon and told to turn themselves in. That was nonsense. Now we detain people immediately. Last year we deported 60,000 people, this year we aim for a significant increase."

Big trucks with cages in, eh ? That should claw back a few of those BNP votes. No fierce dogs or guards with whips ? We'll get those if the polls go much lower. And telling people to get to Croydon and turn themselves in is a thing of the past, is it ? Used to be like this ?

Nine suspected illegal migrants arrested at a lorry depot are on the run after police trusted them to make their own way to an immigration office more than 80 miles away. Cambridgeshire police seized the Afghan men as they were hiding in a lorry at a depot in the village of Fordham near Ely. They were believed to have entered on the lorry via a port on the south coast.

Police informed the immigration authorities at St Ives and were said to have waited for immigration officers to arrive, but with all their cells full and without the "capability to look after them", later that day Cambridgeshire police bought the nine men single tickets, gave them verbal travel directions and then escorted them onto a train bound for London. The men were supposed to make their way to the 20-storey Lunar House in Croydon, south London, which houses the headquarters of the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA). They were never seen again.

March 11 - 5 days ago.

A Trip To The Theatre

A.G. MacDonnell's first novel 'England, Their England" is now mostly remembered for his chapter on the village cricket match, but there's a lot more to it.

Our hero, Donald, a young Scot making his way in journalism in the 20s, is asked at short notice to produce some theatre reviews for a literary magazine. There was no state subsidy of theatre back in those happy days :

Another thing which made it difficult for him to get his perspective right was the universally acknow­ledged fact that the English Drama, as acted in London, is the lowest form of theatrical art in the world, because the Public will only go to visit trash and would religiously boycott any of the really first‑class plays which are growing dustier and dustier in the cupboards of disillusioned playwrights, even if any manager was so insane as to produce them on the commercial stage. It is left, Donald soon dis­covered, to Societies, Clubs, Groups of Intelligent Theatre-Lovers, and Private Associations of Patrons of the Drama to produce these first-class plays on Sunday evenings for one performance only. Hardly a Sunday in the year goes by without the appear­ance of a masterpiece by Pirandello, Kaiser, Toller, Tchechov, Savoir, Lenormand, Martinez Sierra, or Jean Jacques Bernard, dazzling the eyes for a single day and then dying like the may-fly. Sundays have been on which no fewer than three separate Clubs or Societies have been performing Kaiser's From Morn to Midnight, while on five Sundays out of eight in February and March of one year it was possible to see Toller's Hoppla. Donald, who was conscientious and painstaking, spent a lot of time in the Chelsea Free Library going through the files of The Times and the Manchester Guardian in order to learn the technique of dramatic criticism from the two heads of the craft, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Brown, and he was surprised to discover that in the first seven years of the Peace, twenty-eight of these Sunday Producing Societies had been formed, and that of these twenty-eight, no fewer than twenty-three had started their career with Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

It was to these Sunday performances of dramatic masterpieces that Donald was looking forward with especial eagerness. He was quite ready to put up with any number of adulteries and murders and high-kicks during the week for the sake of the works of genius, and it was with a real thrill that he presented himself one Sunday evening, thirty-three minutes before the scheduled hour, at the theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue where he was to see, for the first time, a dramatic masterpiece.

There was no orchestra, and the audience came filtering into the stalls in a queer silence, broken only by the gay greetings of celebrities. For each member of the Club seemed determined to recognize, and be recognized by, as many fellow-members as possible. It was almost like a competition, so fiercely did the necks twist, the eyes wander, and the lorgnettes focus. Sixteen people, all total strangers, bowed to Donald, and one man, an elderly, baldish bird with an eye­glass, went so far as to rise in his seat in order to bow more impressively. Donald blinked nervously and tried to nod in such a way that, if he really had met the other party somewhere, the movement would pass for a greeting and, if not, for a twinge of rheu­matism in the neck. But the strain became too great, and after a bit Donald concentrated passionately upon his programme.

The piece to be given was the translation of a German masterpiece by Herr Rumpel-Stilzchen, the great exponent of the new Illusionist Symbolism, and it appeared from the programme that the scene was laid throughout in a gallery of a salt-mine in Upper Silesia. It was called, simply, The Perpetuation of Eternity. The producer was Herr von Pumpernikkel, described on the back of the programme as "the Rheinhardt of Mecklenburg-Schwerin," and the incidental choreography was by Dripp. Donald was just wondering what part choreography played in life in Upper Silesian salt-mines when a gong was struck somewhere in the theatre and the lights went out. A pause of seven or eight minutes followed, and then the curtain rose, revealing the eagerly awaited gallery and the exquisite lighting effects of von Pumpernikkel, although actually the latter were not easily detectable at first, as the play opened in com­plete darkness, and for twenty minutes continued in complete darkness. This period of twenty minutes was occupied by a soliloquy by the Spirit of Polish Maternity which, in Rumpel-Stilzchen's original, was written in Polish. The translators, in order to pre­serve the sense of strangeness, of exoticism, had, rather cleverly, translated this part into Italian, and the delivery of the soliloquy was punctuated by frequent bursts of applause from those of the audience, apparently about one hundred per cent, who under­stood Italian. This applause grew more and more marked in emphasis and volume as von Pumper­nikkel's lighting gradually illumined the stage and it became possible to distinguish, even as far as the back rows of the stalls, between those who did, and those who did not, pick up the finer points of the Italian language. It appeared that Donald alone did not, until a big, burly man with a sardonic look on his face, who was sitting by himself a few seats away, observed loudly, "Beastly peasant dialect," where­upon everyone within ear-shot of him stopped ap­plauding and sneered vigorously. At the end of the soliloquy the lights, now flooding the stage with alternate purple and green, lit up the backs of a row of salt-workers who dug and chanted dismally as they worked. The foreman of the gallery then came for­ward and shot two of the workers, whether for bad chanting or for bad digging was not made clear, and immediately all the lights went out except for an illuminated screen of salt background upon which was thrown a cinematograph-picture of New York skyscrapers as observed from a Zeppelin. Then the Chrysler Building and the Woolworth Building and the rest of them vanished suddenly and were followed by a ten-minute reel from the Oberammergau Passion play, during which a negro with a megaphone, stationed in the wings, sang with great gusto a song that was popular during the War and was called, "When that Midnight Choo-choo leaves for Alabam." The curtain came down on the end of the second verse and the middle of The Last Supper. Subdued but sincere clapping greeted the end of the act, and the more senior of the critics went moodily out for drinks.

The second, third, fourth, and fifth and last acts were packed as full as the first with Illusionist Symbolism of the same brilliance and irony. It need only be said that among the "effects" was the murder by the salt-workers of a preference-shareholder of Cerebos Salt, Ltd., by throwing him into a quartz-crushing machine; the tragedy of his final screams, as his top-hat and mother-of-pearl-knobbed cane were sucked into the instrument like the last petals of a rose down a drain, was intensified by a most dramatic “throw-back” to the shareholder’s early boyhood with his dear old father, a town councilor of Hesse-Darmstadt, and his dear old mother, the town councillor's wife, who both drank a good deal of light lager and crooned some folk-songs. There was also a long scene of great poignancy between the Spirit of Irony and the Soul of Upper Silesia, during which the League of Nations came in for some nasty knocks, and there was a powerful bit of the most modern sort of Symbolism in which a salt-digger's mistress was confronted with a lot of the Thoughts which she would have thought if she had been, instead, a champion tricyclist. And Dripp's choreo­graphy turned out to be the Dance of Mourners at the Funeral of a Demented House-Agent, said to be symbolical of the housing shortage during 1925 and 1926 in the Silesian towns of Kattowitz and Breslau.

In short, The Perpetuation of Eternity was, as one of the penny dailies said next morning, the most arrest­ing piece of thought-provoking symbolism that had been produced since Ernst Toller's Hoppla had been staged on the previous Sunday, or since Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author on the last Sunday but two. The Times gave it three-quarters of a column, but Mr. Brown, to Donald's amazement, called it "a turgid Dripp from the village Pumpernikkel," and enquired "If this is Upper Silesia, what can Lower be like?"

Tower Hamlets - Priest Attacked

A priest has been attacked in the grounds of his church, in what police described as a "faith-hate" crime. Canon Michael Ainsworth, 57, was injured by two Asian youths at the church, in Tower Hamlets, east London. Canon Ainsworth said a third youth watched as he suffered cuts, bruises and black eyes in the assault at the church of St George-in-the-East.

Asian youths, eh ? They were at it in Whitechapel earlier this year. I'll bet it's those pesky Jains again.

Poverty Causes Crime Part 5984

Allegations that four boys from Eton College attacked a 13-year-old girl on the school’s playing fields are to be investigated by police.

Carty IV

The last Carty story I featured was this, the everyday story of a 20 year old construction worker being shot at hs own wedding reception. A Martin Carty was one of the accused.

At the time I wondered if it was a travellers tale. While no paper said so, the story just had that air about it.

Seems so. Note however that travellers are not stupid people. This was planned and organised - a lot better planned than the first hit.


A man facing an attempted murder charge broke out of the dock, bit a policeman on the nose and fled from a court yesterday. Jason McInerney - who is accused of shooting a bridegroom at a wedding reception - was on the run last night after the breakout.Prosecutor Ian Hope threw off his wig and gown and set off in pursuit of McInerney, but was tripped up in a corridor by a man thought to be among a gang of accomplices who had arrived to help with the pre-planned breakout.

Although McInerney escaped, his brother Kurt and Martin Carty, the two other defendants on attempted murder charges, were caught by police and security guards before they could reach the exit at Reading Crown Court. The trial had only recently been moved from a courtroom with a higher level of security. Last night police warned the public not to approach McInerney as they continued to search for him.McInerney, of Romford, Essex, is from Britain's travelling community, with contacts across the country.

His parents' home, in Blaxston, near Doncaster, was alleged to be where McInerney, his brother and Carty, 18, set off from before the shooting at the Skyways hotel in Slough in November 2006. They were accused of attempting to murder Joseph Mitchell by shooting him in the groin during his wedding reception. They also deny robbery, relating to the beating of a man whose high-powered VWGolfR32 they allegedly stole to use as a getaway car.

Mr Mitchell gave evidence against them at the start of the trial, which had been moved from the high-security Court Six, where it had been held for the past three weeks to the lower security Court Two, to make way for a murder trial. A witness said it was no coincidence that the breakout took place on a day when armed police, normally stationed outside the courthouse in connection with the murder trial, were not present because that trial was not sitting.



Jason McInerney.

Shannon Matthews - The Plot Thickens

The Shannon Matthews story takes another twist, as she's not returned to her parents and a relative of her stepfather is arrested. Somehow I don't get the impression of a classic 'held-against-will' scenario. All very odd. But it was this that got me :

It emerged in the course of the inquiry that an astonishing 1,387 registered sex offenders live within a 20-mile radius of the nine-year-old's family home in Dewsbury Moor, West Yorkshire.

Pi * R2 - thats about 1300 square miles - so about one sex offender per square mile in West Yorkshire.

Any Simplish Freeware Video Editors Out There ?

I want to make a Youtube video of 'mockney', feauturing the late Sandy Denny introducing two of her songs, first in a 1967 folk club (shy but beautifully modulated Home Counties) and then in 1971 (mockney with occasional lapses into RP). I have the audio and some images and titling, I just want to put them together and create a 2 or 3-minute .avi or .mpg file from them.

What's out there that someone with no video editing experience could use ? any ideas ?

Tasteless ...

Commenter JuliaM on the recent unfortunate events in Snowdonia :

I wonder what the 'disturbing texts' he was supposed to have sent said ?:

gdby crl wrld :(

Shannon Matthews Found Alive And Well

I think a couple of "Huzzah"s ! are in order. I am so pleased. I keep reading how no-one cares for a poor lost girl, but the news went flying round the office this afternoon.







"The Return of the Children"


Neither the harps nor the crowns amused, nor the cherubs' dove-winged races -
Holding hands forlornly the Children wandered beneath the Dome,
Plucking the splendid robes of the passers-by, and with pitiful faces
Begging what Princes and Powers refused: - "Ah, please will you let us go home?"

Over the jewelled floor, nigh weeping, ran to them Mary the Mother,
Kneeled and caressed and made promise with kisses, and drew them along to the gateway
Yea, the all-iron unbribeable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway.

Then, to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled, She said: "On the night that I bore Thee,
What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my arm?
Didst Thou push from the nipple, 0 Child, to hear the angels adore Thee
When we two lay in the breath of the kine?" And He said - "Thou hast done no harm."

So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
Looking neither to left nor right where the breathless Heavens stood still.
And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the Command:
"Shall I that have suffered the Children to come to Me hold them against their will?"




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