Recent Articles

Could a Labour / Libdem coalition happen?

It could, according to Sunder in this week’s edition of New Statesman.

But there must be changes to the New Labour agenda…
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Top Stories and Blog Review – 29th Jan

Digital Economy Action Plan

Nationwide
Heathrow third runway vote passed
Parents to get advice on kids drinking at home
Secret papers face faster release
Britain opens door to 36,000 Gurkha veterans

International
Revealed: letter Obama team hope will heal Iran rift
US passes $819bn stimulus plan despite GOP opposition
Iraqi women vie for votes and taste of power
World gets its first gay head of state

DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Lee Griffin

Himmelgarten Cafe wonders where the evidence is for the advice to not allow kids under 15 to drink any alcohol…ever. I shall have more about the CMO’s comments later.

Mark Reckons in party politics outrage shocker!

CiF/Simon Jenkins claims that stupidity is the ruling order of the day with our government.

Stephen’s Linlithgow Journal applauds the freedom fighters within the BBC trying to get the DEC message out.

Chicken Yoghurt is rightfully disgusted at the government’s sidestepping of democracy to give private companies a free ride in nuclear decommissioning.

Sim – O is keeping score in the game of religion.

Political Betting provides some Sarah Palin based comedy. What? It’s not a joke?

Why is the BBC flexing media muscle in the travel market?

Last November I wrote a piece outlining the worrying implications of the BBC’s acquisition of Lonely Planet for the Corporation’s non-commercial UK neutrality. I’m not the only travel journalist with these sorts of doubts. The BBC Royal Charter and Agreement, remember, is very clear on how the Beeb can and cannot interact with the UK media market:

The Agreement requires all commercial activities undertaken by the BBC to comply with four criteria. …

4. comply with BBC fair trading guidelines and in particular avoid distorting the market.

Of course, that begs a whole series of questions, but this much is plain: BBC Worldwide activities that distort a domestic market in which the corporation is a player are forbidden. This, essentially, was the basis for the decision to disallow BBC investment in ultra-local video last year. It’s the reason that the BBC’s acquisition (through BBC Worldwide) of Lonely Planet should be reversed at the first opportunity. continue reading… »

Holocaust Memorial Day

How remiss of me to forget to post anything to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Well, it may be a day late but lets correct that particular omission with a video that says pretty much everything that needs to be said…

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Top Stories and Blog Review – 28th Jan 08

Christian Advert Banned

Nationwide
Minister for terror: Gaza will fuel extremism
Paul Stephenson to become new Met boss
Directors of Lloyds asked for a pay rise
Cameron urges new lords sanctions

International
Red Cross: Crisis unfolding in Sri Lanka
Bleeding banks prompt talk of new big U.S. bailout
Don’t call us dogs, say Slumdog protesters in rampage
Mexico’s appetite for climate change clunkers
GOP-Obama love affair fizzles
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Aaron

Just a quicky today…

Hagley Road To Ladywood – Making the case for scrapping the House of Lords.

Stephen Tall/LDV – Yeah some Lib Dem donors aren’t whiter-than-white, but hell this is political fund-raising…

The Sun Lies – septicisle delivers his verdict on Rebekah Wade’s Hugh Cudlipp lecture.

No right turn – As Israel attempts to prevent its “war-criminals” from international justice, a group of anonymous Israeli human rights activists have broken cover.

Attenborough gets mail

If I asked you to name the public figure who you thought was least likely to receive hate mail then I think its fair bet that Sir David Attenborough would be one of the first names to spring to mind…

…and it seems, sadly, that you (and I) would be wrong.

Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. In an interview with this week’s Radio Times about his latest documentary, on Charles Darwin and natural selection, the broadcaster said: “They tell me to burn in hell and good riddance.”

It’s worth reading the full article, if only for Attenborough’s delightfully articulate sideswipes at the creationist hatemongers:

Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”

There are many who consider Sir David to be the greatest living Briton; to my mind he’s certainly Britain’s greatest educator.
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Palestine and the media

The problem with the Gaza disaster appeal video is that it focused itself on the Palestinians as victims rather than being a call for peace. This is not new. The media’s focus on the Palestinians as victims has been a considerable part of the problem over the last 20 years. During the First Intifada, when children threw stones at Israeli soldiers, pictures were beamed around the world and it became the biggest media story of the day, but the effect on both Israel and the Palestinians was disastrous.

The need of western-world television viewers and magazine readers was to share the suffering of a small people, but children in the West Bank and Gaza found themselves with a choice of going to school or going to where the western press scrum were gathered and be a hero before cameras that told their story to the whole world. Perhaps a billion dollars worth of media was made out of that story, by Reuters, AP and the BBC, but I doubt if the Palestinians received a single penny of that money.
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The wrong kind of nationalisation

What does a charity do? It used to be the case that charitable organisations, along a rather old but not dishonourable model, subsisted from donations and did “good works” independent of the state and public services. Increasingly, especially in services dealing with vulnerable people, that is no longer the case. Let us take a classic example – the funding of organisations which in one way or another house and support vulnerable homeless or ex-homeless people. 

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A broadband tax for the UK?

Further to a recent post (on my blog) suggesting that the UK isn’t going to institute a “3 strikes” law, there is speculation that the government might instead introduce a broadband tax, where ISPs’ customers will pay and the money going to the music industry to compensate for the loses they’ve suffered through P2P filesharing. According to The Times:

Lord Carter [...] may suggest additional charges on customers’ broadband bills to compensate the music industry.

There are a number of issues with any such proposal:

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Obama allows scientists to do their work shocker!

It might just be a coincidence – coincidences happen, after all. But they don’t happen in science nearly as often as you’d think. And it’s even rarer they happen in politics – and really, science funding is just politics without a dress code.

Still, it might just be a coincidence that three days after a certain transition of power within a certain world superpower, the Food and Drug Administration of that same superpower has given a stem-cell research group the green light to conduct human trials.

This is pretty damn exciting for this little science geek, and despite being separate from the federal government and any direct control by the USA’s brand new Lord High Superman, is right up there with the Guantanamo closure and abolition of the Global Gag Rule in my list of Things That Have Made Me Happy this week.
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