August 2009
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun
« Jul   Sep »
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Month August 2009

Climate Camp’s open letter to the Met

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Service. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

The three parts of news stories you usually don’t get

Mark Thompson, writ­ing on his web­log News­less  —  Time to stop break­ing the news, and start fix­ing it: I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that there are four key parts to news stor­ies, and we typ­ic­ally only get one of them, even though journ­al­ists pos­sess all four, and the other three are argu­ably more important.

A gender experiment in policing

Could be interesting. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian: The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp  –  put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests? Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see…

Animal Farm: which character is Douglas Hogg?

Douglas Hogg  —  the Brit­ish Tory MP who included the cost of clean­ing his moat on his expenses — reck­ons: A par­lia­ment­ary salary does not sup­port the life­style to which most pro­fes­sional and busi­ness classes aspire. Which got me won­der­ing as to which char­ac­ter Hogg most resembles in Animal Farm. My money’s on Pin­keye. He car­ries on to suggest:…

Cheney: an evil person for evil times

The Guard­ian: ‘Mem­oirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on ter­ror.’ Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.

Want to be bemused?

Then try fol­low­ing the debate pro­pa­ganda war on health care reform in the U.S. Dar­ing Fire­ball has a couple of pearlers: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part One You Can’t Make This Stuff Up, Part Two Update: Stephen Hawk­ing: I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS,” he told us. “I have…

The worst terrorist attack in history

This week marks the 64th anniversary of one of the largest and most hein­ous acts of ter­ror­ism ever per­pet­rated: the nuc­lear bomb­ing of Hiroshima and Naga­saki by the United States of Amer­ica, the only coun­try to have ever used nuc­lear bombs to mas­sacre civilians. The largest attack, also per­pet­rated by the U.S., was the fire­bomb­ing of…

What happens when the hang ‘em high brigade call the shots

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing story this week illus­trat­ing how sex offender laws in the U.S. have run amok and are not only mak­ing mat­ters worse but are des­troy­ing the lives of many inno­cent people in the pro­cess. Plonkers with bal­lots + self-serving polticians = per­ver­sion of justice.

On Rupert Murdoch’s plan to charge for news websites

Andrew Clark writ­ing for The Guard­ian: “Rupert Mur­doch said qual­ity journ­al­ism is not cheap and so he intends to charge for all his web­sites,” includ­ing the Times, The Sun and the News of the World. Two com­ments. The Sun and News of the World are not qual­ity journ­al­ism. They’re tabloids. A pre­dic­tion: Murdoch’s plan to charge…

They’ve made us scared to talk’

Fam­ily of Ian Tom­lin­son  —  who died after being hit by police­man at G20 protests — speak out.

  • Recent comments