Thousands of protesters are expected to arrive today at a controversial "climate change camp" near Heathrow Airport.
Daily Telegraph 13/08/2007
The day of direct action began at noon with a peaceful march to the centre of Harmondsworth, a village which will be affected by the proposed third runway...Speakers, including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot and John McDonnell MP, addressed about 300 locals and protesters from the camp.The Guardian19/08/2007
What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable.
It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind... hardly an approach calculated to bring success.
When you think of South London you probably don't think of rolling cornfields and verdant hedgerows. But that's exactly what the southernmost tip of London is like, 15 miles due south of Charing Cross, down on the border between Croydon and Surrey.See the tree marked in my photograph with a green circle? That's as far south as Ken Livingstone's influence extends. It's the spot in London closest to the equator, where the sun rises highest in the sky during the summer, and where daylight is longest in midwinter. Of all the locations south of the river, it's the ultimate place that black cab drivers will never take you.Ah, Happy Valley and Farthing Downs...sweet memories.
There are too many career politicians and career columnists these days. Deedes took something from journalism when he was an MP and he took something back to journalism from being a minister. He knew more than one life. He was something of a rounded person. That’s a thing worth aspiring to.A nice appreciation of the great Bill Deedes from Dave.
Andrew Keen is that classic sort of British reactionary: the sort that would bemoan the loss of the word "gay" to the English language, and regret the damage caused by industrial vacuum cleaners on the chimney sweeping industry. His book is impassioned, but simple-minded, harkening to those simpler times which concludes that our networked economy has pointlessly exalted the amateur, ruined the livelihood of experts, destroyed incentives for creating intellectual property, delivered to every man-jack amongst us the ability - never before possessed - to create and distribute our own intellectual property and monkeyed around mischievously with the title to property wrought from the very sweat of its author's brow.And this comment made me smile:
I also find it mildly amusing, that while prepping for his appearance on the Colbert Report, Keen thought it would be a wise idea to reach out for suggestions on how to effectively debate Stephen Colbert (read above) on the very same "internet" he was going on the show to speak out against... on the very same web page which is (promoting) his book that purports the very same ideology... which is being sold over the FRIGGIN INTERNET...Game, set and match!
Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched.
As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the "battle space" remains the same, with changes only at the margins.
...it isn't simply the antics of a clutch of lenders seeking risky profit that has been driving this crisis, and it will take more than a reining in of investors to solve the problem.
Short of a generalised labour insurgency, the likely means to accomplish this will be an attack on wages and conditions. Gordon Brown's attempted pay cuts for public sector workers is certainly part of the means of handling this without making any curtailments on the privileges of investors or their profits, which is one reason why the fightback by posties is so important. It's also probable that New Labour will ratchet up attacks on immigrants and asylum seekers as a way out of its inevitable difficulties.
The US government's way out, which Brown is very likely to support, will presumably be to aggressively push to broaden its global hegemony so as to ensure greater market access, either militarily or through subversion. And if there is to be any kind of germinal radicalism or militancy, the US is busily expanding its forms of domestic repression...
One of my servers is down, so some content (mostly images) will not display at present :( In a significant victory for the Bush administration, a federal jury found Jose Padilla guilty of terrorism conspiracy charges on Thursday after little more than a day of deliberation.The Padilla Conviction - New York TimesMr. Padilla, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who became one of the first Americans designated an “enemy combatant” in the anxious months after Sept. 11, 2001, now faces life in prison. He was released last year from a long and highly unusual military confinement to face criminal charges in Federal District Court here. The government’s chief evidence was a faded application form that prosecutors said Mr. Padilla, 36, filled out to attend a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 2000. Mr. Padilla’s extraordinary legal journey began in May 2002, when he was arrested at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, where he grew up. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Mr. Padilla’s capture a month later, interrupting a trip to Moscow to say that an “unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb” — one that could have caused “mass death and injury” — had been foiled.
It would be a mistake to see the guilty verdict against Jose Padilla as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system.
It is hard to disagree with the jury’s guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration’s serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of — conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas — bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases.
When Mr. Padilla was arrested in 2002, the government said he was an Al Qaeda operative who had plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb inside the United States. Mr. Padilla, who is an American citizen, should have been charged as a criminal and put on trial in a civilian court. Instead, President Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and kept him in a Navy brig for more than three years. The administration’s insistence that it had the right to hold Mr. Padilla indefinitely — simply on the president’s word — was its first outrageous act in the case, but hardly its last. Mr. Padilla was kept in a small isolation cell, and when he left that cell he was blindfolded and his ears were covered. He was denied access to a lawyer even when he was being questioned. The administration also insisted that the courts had no right to second-guess its actions. It was only after the Supreme Court appeared poised last year to use Mr. Padilla’s case to decide whether indefinite detention of an American citizen violates the Constitution, that the White House suddenly decided to give him a civilian trial.
Animoto takes your images and music, and applies editing technology that professionals in the film industry use for creating things like movie trailers. The service overall could be likened to a slide show creator, but uses AI technology to offer a little something extra Mimicking tools that are used by professional directors and editors, Animoto will consider the images and music that you’ve submitted for the creation of a video mashup. The end result will be more like a movie trailer than a regular slideshow. Founded by former MTV, Comedy Central and ABC studio producers, the traditional media approach to consumer applications is how the music revolution changed in recent years, and reflects how the video industry has been following suit. The main drawbacks so far include the omission of videos for its mashup service, and the lack of other editing tools, for adding captions, etc. (via Mashable)I simply uploaded a folder of images and selected a music track and this is the 30 second result. There was no editing input from me at all. You can produce unlimited shorts (30 seconds) for free but full length videos are charged at $3 each or $30 a year for unlimited productions. These are not final prices and I doubt whether the $3 per video is a realistic proposition. I'm sure we'll see further editing options and caption facilities added in due course. I still think it's cool and it's much quicker and easier than messing about with all those transitions and timelines. Check it out yourself.
