Ken Loach’s new film, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, has had the British press up in arms, with one paper declaring that it is “designed to drag the reputation of our nation through the mud.”
In fact the critics had their condemnation in print before any of them had seen it! George Monbiot has a good article on this.
Our emerald isle is not so green, according to a report by the European Environment Agency, which gives the republic bad marks on such things as greenhouse gasses, ozone and municipal waste.
Guy Goma, an economics and business studies graduate from Congo,was waiting in the reception area of the BBC news building for a job interview. Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, was also waiting for an interview, but his interview was in front of the cameras to discuss the Apple vs Apple court case. One massive cock-up later and…
In 1996 the British Labour party announced in it’s election manifesto that it would hold a “Royal Commission of Inquiry” into Vivisection. As a result many animal rights groups backed Labour in the 1997 election.
Labour never initiated the Royal Commission, which outraged many, and today Tony Blair has come out and said that he is in
favour of testing on animals.
Many will say that this is fair enough (at least the man finally has an opinion), and that you’re either “with them or against them”, but surely you don’t need to be in favour of digging up scientists’ grannies to feel it might be worth at least investigating whether in this day and age experimenting on creatures barely related to humans is really worth the effort. Artificially giving bunnies a disease and then “curing” it doesn’t always tell us much, as six men in London recently discovered.
Don’t get me wrong, if I’m sick I’ll take whatever drugs the doctor tells me to and all my sympathy for animals, rightly or wrongly, takes a back seat to the well being of myself and my loved ones. However I just can’t help wondering, has science not progressed far enough so that we can have a better idea what a particular drug will do to a human being without first testing it out on a bunch of other creatures?
Everything you ever wanted to know about crypto: www.cypherpunks.to
We’re in the home stretch now – the mortgage is arranged, the searches are nearly finished, everything else is in place.
Househunting has been transformed by the internet, gone are the days of pounding the pavement in order to jump through the right hoops in order to buy your home. Our mortgage broker, solicitor and estate agent are all people we haven’t met, but whose services we have engaged over the net. We won’t even have to trudge to the solicitor’s office to sign the contract, it’s being posted to us. Even the searches undertaken by the solicitor seem to have been undertaken through another online agency.
That doesn’t mean to say it has not been exhausting for the two of us. A large part of the house hunt was finding the right area, sites like upmystreet are great for this, and you can even get a copy of the land registry data (for a small fee) courtesy of ourproperty.co.uk. If you don’t know where you want to live there’s not much point in househunting at all.
Fluxblog has got a link to an inspired cover of the Radiohead song “Just” by Mark Ronson, this has been featured heavily on XFM and BBC 6 Music. If you haven’t heard it, go listen to it now!
Apparently, back in 1989, Alexei Sayle won an emmy for his television show “The Alexei Sayle Show”. Nothing unusual about that, since he is a very funny man. However it transpires that no one told him and he didn’t find out until he saw none other than Benny Hill on the news collecting the award on his behalf! You couldn’t make it up if you tried.
Slugger O’Toole is reporting on the Irish Government’s plans to remove 2,300 archaic laws from the Statue Book. So, no more dropping suspected theives in deep water attached to millstones, or charging Frenchmen discriminatory taxes.
