"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" - W.B. Yeats. "We're doomed !" - Private Frazer. "Like scrolling through a decade's worth of Daily Mail editorials in 20 minutes" - TheLoonyFromCatford
"I was so disgusted at the NOTW's behaviour that I rang them to complain but couldn't get through- so I just left a message on my voicemail instead."
Police are examining claims that a News International executive may have expunged millions of emails from an archive believed to date back to 2005. The Guardian reported that ‘massive quantities’ of the archive appear to have been deleted on two separate occasions, the most recent in January of this year.
Bradford is to be home to a new high-profile club promoting positive pride among British Pakistanis.
Tonight sees the launch of the Pakistan Club, which already has the backing of big names including cricketing legend Imran Khan, politician Lord Nazir Ahmed, business tycoon Nighat Awan OBE and Bradford’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Naveeda Ikram.
This afternoon, international racing driver Adam Khan will be in Centenary Square signing autographs before the official launch event at City Hall which will be attended by about 130 people from across the UK.
Anyone from across the UK can join although it will be based in Bradford and be built in phases which include a restaurant, a private cinema, lounge, separate gyms for men and women – eventually there will also be a banqueting hall and library. The club’s founders are actively looking for a suitable site in the city to either build the club premises from scratch or to re-develop.
Membership is open to all Pakistanis or people of Pakistani origin, says Mr Ahmed - as long as they are aged over 18.
"I imagine you both are thoroughly ashamed of what you have done."
"In a blow to the government's plans for Britain to manufacture its way out of recession, Bombardier has placed its UK operations under review after the Department for Transport awarded a contract to make carriages on London's Thameslink rail route to Siemens of Germany, bypassing Britain's last remaining train factory. The company has called an 8am press briefing on Tuesday morning at its Derby headquarters. Senior shop stewards will be briefed on job losses in time for the end of the night shift at 6am."
"steve you may want to take a look at this insane rant, i mean, apology, that one of the asian vancouver rioters who got caught, has posted on her blog. this is the original post she made, before later going back and totally editing out everything because she realized she was a moron.In the first link, to quote the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers, 'there's enough material for a whole conference'.
http://tinyurl.com/4226z6r
and the edited one:
http://tinyurl.com/65jgaw6
we will never really grasp how bonkers her real, original "apology" was. there are so many lines in there that are classic. but note the overwhelming use of modern victimology speak. generic (criminals are the real victims, i'm the hero here), racial (i'm non-white, back off), and sexual (i'm a woman, BACK OFF). "
Now of course the Arabs were descendents of slave traders, while the black Africans were descendants of their victims. But isn't there a word for killing people on the grounds of their descent? They can't be blamed for the sins of their forebears.
The highly religious Okello was convinced he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful position of the Arabs and to found the revolutionary state on Zanzibar and Pemba. On the night before the “revolution”, Okello gave his men the order to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women, and not to rape virgins.
The coup led to the poorly-known massacre of between 5,000 and 20,000 Arabs, whose families had been living in Zanzibar for centuries, between January 18 and 20. Footage of the massacre can be seen in Gualtiero Jacopetti's film Africa Addio.
A six-foot Zanzibari with a handshake that crushed my fingers and a head of fine black fuzz wished to join for original reasons. Recce Platoon had more machine guns per man than the Companies. And Mubarreq Obeid - for that was the big negro's name - had been unable to have a machine gun in his Company. With such a weapon, he said, his thick lips compressed in a snarl, he could kill many Chinese shooyooen (communists) in Dhofar and that was his desire. I protested that there were no Chinese communists in Arabia let alone Dhofar, but he was adamant.
"You are wrong, Sahb. They are behind all the troubles everywhere. Soon there will be many like locusts in Dhofar. In Zanzibar they talked to the African how he must throw out the Arab. Then, seven years ago, they rose and murdered all they could catch; slitting their throats by night as they slept. Some of us escaped to the dhows but my parents were chased along the beach by a crowd - although my mother was African. They ran into the sea to swim to the boats but some of the crowd followed, caught them by the hair, and drowned them.
So I, Mubarreq, have no parents because of the Chinese rats."
When he had gone I looked at the others. All nodded their assent.
"Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures. "Three points here. One is that the counting immigration only in net terms is a neat way of ignoring the demographic transformation illustrated in the Blackburn link above. If all the native English were to emigrate and be replaced by incomers, net immigration would be zero and the BBC would doubtless headline that immigration WAS zero. To a large extent headline immigration figures have been reduced by the massive UK brain drain, as young natives with degrees leave to be replaced by young Afghans and Somalis.
26.5% of primary school pupils are now ethnic minority, up from 23% in 2008. The destruction of what was, with all its faults, one of the best places in the world to live continues.
A Department of Health spokesman said: "We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community."
"Crucially, both the public and health care professionals need to be aware that TB is back, and growing fast."
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast country, the size of western Europe and home to sixty million people. For decades it was known for its rich geology, which includes large reserves of cobalt, copper, and diamonds, and for the extravagance of its dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but not for violence or depravity.
"I don’t know any extended family not supporting a distressed, disillusioned, despairing young person - often with a degree or good qualifications. And maybe sympathising with an older person, desperately jobseeking after redundancy.”Our children, bar a fortunate few, will not be able to own the roof over their heads, something my and my parents generation could take for granted. We're going back to the days of my grandmother, who lived in rented accommodation all her life.
"Wrapped inside this little word is the quintessence of Britain's great social fracture. Over the last 30 years the public monstering of a huge slice of the population by luckier, better-paid people has become commonplace. This is language from the Edwardian era of unbridled snobbery. When safely reproduced in Downton Abbey, as the lady sneering at the scullery maid or the landowner bullying his workers, we are encouraged to look back smugly as if these shocking class differences were long gone. The form and style may have changed – but the reality of extreme inequality and self-confident class contempt is back...
Chav is used to mix together anyone of low status the speaker wishes to despise - and that includes the entire working class - on matters of taste as well as morals. Just go to the dreadful ChavTowns site and see how the two are elided."
But there is no disguising the very considerable impoverishment of the town, an impoverishment that is actually characteristic of a high proportion of the country. This impoverishment is as much of the spirit as economic: nowhere in the world (at least nowhere known to me, including very many poorer places) do you see such a concentration of people who have given up on themselves, or rather, who never had any self-respect to give up on.
What one sees is a purely materialist society that is not even very good materialism, for it does not promote even those mental and moral disciplines that promote material success. A large proportion of the population has been left to the mercies of a popular culture whose main characteristic is the willing suspension of intelligence, and which does not merely fail to inculcate refinement, grace, elegance and the desire for improvement, but actively prevents them and causes them to be feared and despised.
Councillors in Walsall have leapt to the town's defence after a critic writing in an American magazine described it as like "Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets". Walsall council leader Mike Bird dismissed as nonsense claims published on the internet that the Black Country was one of the "most depressing areas of urban devastation" in the world.
"A great article from Dalrymple. No one with any self-respect or decency would live in Scarborough. The inhabitants are dirty, dishonest, gap-toothed swine.
My family left Scarborough when I was five, to seek a better life in the Gaza Strip. My parents were aid workers, and I spent my childhood in Palestine, Somalia, Yorkshire and the Congo. I met some rough diamonds in Mogadishu, let me tell you, but I never truly saw a society in collapse, where savages have the upper hand, until I returned to Scarborough. I was beaten and robbed by the villainous local peasants within an hour of getting off the train, then they tied me to a mule and I was dragged through a turnip field.
You simply can't treat people like that and expect to have a thriving tourist trade. Not for nothing did King John describe the town as "a weeping pustule'' on his realm."
“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”
Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures.
: The number of foreign workers increased by 1.7 million in the last decade and accounted for all the increase in employment levels over the period.
: Work visas increased by six per cent in the year to March 2011
: Asylum claims increased by 11 per cent
: Migrants granted settlement in the UK increased by four per cent
The average wage taken home by 11 million British workers will remain 'roughly the same' until at least 2015, experts have warned. Think-tank Resolution Foundation said low and middle-income earners were not likely to benefit from the expected economic recovery. It predicted workers' pay in four years time would be the same as in 2001.
"The likely indictment of John Edwards for misuse of campaign funds is the final blow for a rare champion of economic justice"
What an inspiring story. I presume Clarissa's parents, only semi-literate, raised her in dire poverty - but the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School brought out her full potential.
A London schoolgirl praised by Michelle Obama during her visit to Oxford told today of the First Lady's "unbelievable presence". Clarissa Pabi, 20, who grew up in Islington and is now president of the Oxford Poetry Society, was hailed by Mrs Obama for succeeding against the odds.
During her speech at Oxford University, the US President's wife told pupils from Miss Pabi's old school: "If you start to doubt yourselves, I want you to remember Clarissa. Remember her story if mine does not resonate. Success is not about our background - Clarissa knows that."
Miss Pabi, educated at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington and now studying English at Oxford, said: "It was unbelievable being in her presence and hearing her talk."
Miss Pabi was inspired to go to university by her mother, who has a doctorate in chemistry. Her father and grandparents were educated at university and her younger brother is at the University of East London.
Ross's dog is gravely ill.
As so often he's spot-on. I remember in my teens a girlfriend walking through the door one Saturday morning and bursting into floods of tears - and it wasn't the state of my room.
"What's the matter ?"
"They've taken her to the vet to be put down !" - 'her' being the companion of her childhood, a thousand walks and a hundred days out in the country with parents. But I didn't think like that at the time - I was properly sympathetic and held her till my shoulders were soaked in tears - but it was only a dog, a nice enough dog, but still a dog. At this distance memory fails, but I probably assumed it was just a girl thing, what with being more emotionally open and all that.
The same blindness afflicted me with regard to the effect of children, although I think I wasn't alone in this. Our single lives were so endlessly fascinating, what friends were doing, who was with whom, the places to go, the people, the parties, that we looked on people who'd got children slightly pityingly, as if they'd been afflicted with a crippling disease (and it IS crippling to a wild social life, although I know a few exceptional people and couples who have just carried on - I'm just not exceptional) which not only curtailed their social life but made them talk about children an awful lot - as if that topic was of any interest at all compared to the important things.You live and learn. Hopefully. Now I feel more that becoming a parent is gaining access to the secret heart of life and the long chain of familial links down the generations. Not that it doesn't have its many, many drawbacks. Susan and I looked at each other one day after #2 had arrived and said 'whatever did we do with all that time we had?".
I digress. So I finally learned about why parents are interested in kids, but still didn't get the dog thing. Our neighbours were childless but treated their dogs like their children - they slept upstairs and their doings were part of our everyday chats. Most odd, we thought.
Dog lovers ...
I'd taken my firstborn up to visit his grandpa, and grandpa and I were out walking with grandpa's dog and the pushchair plus baby. I loved that new dad bit, with bonny boy getting cooed over by all and sundry ... the checkout queue turning into a little love fest ... and he WAS a beautiful baby - he's 21 now and six foot.
Lady approaching on the pavement, breaks into happy smile :
"Oh, what a beautiful ..."
(Dad smiles modestly... he's getting used to this ...)
"Dog!"
(Smile vanishes instantly)
Then our youngest went off to Big School, and it left a bit of a gap in Susan's life. Suddenly there were no babies to care for - and she likes caring for things. One day she went off and returned with this chap (and promptly had him snipped, to my horror). Apparently Labradors were very even tempered, good with children and an all round ideal first dog for a family with no dog-owning history on either side, at least since our great-grandparents were on the farm. What's impressive is that AFAIK, apparently all dogs are descended from domesticated wolves. Just shows what breeding will do.
The kids were thrilled, promised to walk him etc etc - didn't last and soon Mum and Dad were doing most of the walks. But the exercise is great - he and we usually get about three miles a day in - it's good for an ageing chap with a desk job. I've learned most of the footpaths and circular routes round the house.
Labradors seem to eat anything - three week old bird carcases, stones, deer poo, sheep poo, horse poo - and they roll in fox poo, which is not a nice smell and means an hour shampooing him in the garden (then a shower and complete change of clothes). On the good side they love apples, blackberries, plums, the farmer's turnips - healthy eaters.
He once found a rotting, rank dead rabbit inside a plastic bag, scoffed it, then sat in his crate in the kitchen and disgorged the lot some hours later. Not a nice clean-up job - the smell at close quarters was truly evil.
They're meant to have more acid in their stomachs than humans to enable digestion of bad food - but ours pushes that way beyond the limits. The Muslims are right enough when they consider dogs unclean. They're filthy dirty creatures.
But they have a way of wrapping themselves round the heart. Always pleased to have human company, playful, cheery. All the family quickly grew to love him - even grandma, very much a non-dog person, has a soft spot.
October last year, grandma is round for Sunday tea/dinner, I'm just out in the garden using the last of the light at ten to six.
"Can he stay out here with you ? "
"OK"
The call for tea. I call him - he's not anywhere in the garden. Round the house - no sign.
"Has he come in ?"
"No"
"He's not in the garden"
Poor grandma. She was left alone in the house while everyone emptied into the darkening garden, calling, then after a quick conference and grabbing of mobiles, two cars head slowly in opposite directions, and the boys are in the local wood with torches. Daughter and I take the car across rough farm tracks, along the routes of his favourite walks, stopping, scanning the gloomy fields, calling him, on again, repeat.
Forty minutes later it's pitch black and the cars are back. The boys have been right through the woods to the fields on the other side, which we've also scanned from the cars as best we could, then back again. Up and down the village - again - half expecting to see a limp form in the headlights. Not a sight or sound.
Tea at seven in almost total silence. The only thing I can compare it with was the first family Christmas without my grandmother.
Eight o'clock. He's been gone two hours. We've been out in the garden and around the house again. Nothing. The feeling that he's gone for good starts to solidify.
Nine o'clock. My daughter's standing at the back door, calling his name. Nothing. I feel she's wasting her time, but in solidarity I go to the side door to call. Open it - he's standing on the step.
God knows where he'd been. One moment of tremendous pleasure - calling my daughter into the kitchen, without telling her who was there, then watching the ecstatic reunion - the boys hearing the noise and tumbling in, happy uproar. "For he was lost, and is found".
Once again Mr Kipling has the words :