Last Straw

Labour (UK) have had twelve years to do this: A fierce debate within the gov­ern­ment on how to tackle entrenched wealth inequal­ity … is to be ignited by a report ordered by Har­riet Har­man, the Labour deputy leader and the min­is­ter respons­ible for equalities.

As part of nego­ti­ations with Iran over nuc­lear fuel Mohamed ElBaradei of the Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy Agency recently pro­posed that Iran trans­fer about 70 per­cent of its low-enriched uranium to Rus­sia for fur­ther enrich­ment by the end of this year, then to France for con­ver­sion into fuel plates for med­ical use, effect­ively neg­at­ing its use in alleged […]

Chan­nel 4’s Dis­patches last night: Do You Know What’s in Your Break­fast? A reminder that, in capitalism, it’s not the job of the food industry to provide good healthy food. Their job is to make as much money by whatever means neces­sary, even if that means sneak­ing copi­ous amounts of sat­ur­ated fat, sugar and salt into […]

Guard­ian gagged from report­ing UK par­lia­ment: The Guard­ian has been pre­ven­ted from report­ing par­lia­ment­ary pro­ceed­ings on legal grounds which appear to call into ques­tion priv­ileges guar­an­tee­ing free speech estab­lished under the 1688 Bill of Rights. Update: Trafigura drops bid to gag Guard­ian over MP’s question.

‘No cred­ible evid­ence’ of Ira­nian nuc­lear weapons, says UN inspector: The UN’s chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he had seen “no cred­ible evid­ence” that Iran is devel­op­ing nuc­lear weapons, reject­ing Brit­ish intel­li­gence alleg­a­tions that a weapons pro­gramme has been going on for at least four years. Any­one sur­prised by this is just a fucking […]

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.

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 […]

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: […]

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.

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