Clarissa’s time at the Bar overlapped with that of several prominent New Labourites, and she discusses their escapades with equal gusto: ‘Cherie Blair was clever but desperately needy and always jumping on Derry Irvine.’ I wince. ‘Actually, Derry Irvine was quite a sexy guy back then,’ says Clarissa. ‘He radiated intelligence.’ And then there’s Tony Blair. ‘He was a few years younger than me but I remember him well. He was very glib, a chancer and, you know, he wasn’t really respected by anyone of my generation. Everybody used to say, it’s just as well he’s going into politics because he’ll never succeed at the Bar. We used to call him Miranda.’ Because he was wet? ‘No, no, he wasn’t called Miranda because he was wet, ducky!’ Clarissa guffaws impatiently. ‘Remember that scene in The Tempest when Miranda sees the sailors? Well then. He got on conspicuously well with all the male junior clerks. Everybody knew it.’ But he’s married now, I say. ‘So are a lot of people.’
Every 16-year-old will be expected to devote their summer to "patriotic" national service, under radical proposals being launched by David Cameron today. He said: "This will make people feel proud about themselves and about their country."Jeeeeeeeeeeeeez! Please just fuck off you dopey twat and take that Khan with you.
Virtually no effort has been made to find the man who raped the girl, Christine Jackson, and dumped her body in a creek in Noxubee County, one of the most rural in the state.Having built the original case on the premise that Brewer, acting alone, raped and murdered the girl the prosecutor, some 15 years later PERCEIVES that there was someone else involved. I bet Allgood played to the jury in his final speech, graphically describing how this big, ignorant, nigga forced his big, black cock into this sweet, innocent little child ( I can hear the drawl as I type). Now, apparently due to Mr Allgood's newly acquired clairvoyant powers, he sees a completely different scenario but one where Mississippi will still get to strap Brewer to a gurney and execute him.
This is the first time prosecutors have sought a new capital murder trial after a conviction was overturned by DNA evidence...prosecutors are not convinced of the innocence of Mr. Brewer, a black laborer who is mildly retarded. Forrest Allgood, the district attorney who first tried the case, said his theory then was that Mr. Brewer, who was the boyfriend of the victim’s mother, acted alone. At the trial, Mr. Allgood argued that the couple’s bedroom was “the killing field,” although traces of human blood found there were so small that they could not be tested.
His view has changed.
“I perceive (sic) that Kennedy Brewer assisted someone else in the killing of the child,” Mr. Allgood said. “Whether he actually penetrated that child or not functionally doesn’t make any difference if he was aiding, assisting and encouraging in her death.” Mr. Allgood declined to offer a new theory of what occurred the night Christine disappeared, saying only that Mr. Brewer was the baby sitter that evening and that there was no sign of forced entry at the house.
THIRTY years ago today, the Voyager 1 space probe — a one-ton robotic craft whose long antennas make it look rather like a spider the size of a school bus — was launched from Cape Canaveral...If all continues to go well, Voyager should pierce the heliosphere’s outer skin by around 2015. It will then depart into the void of interstellar space, where it is destined to wander among the stars forever.
Mindful of this mind-boggling fact, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake persuaded NASA to attach a gold-plated phonograph record to each of the Voyager spacecraft. Containing photographs, natural sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from all over our world, the record was intended to preserve something of human culture beyond what an intelligent extraterrestrial, encountering the craft at some far-distant time and place, might infer from the spacecraft itself.Via Coudal
The information etched into the grooves of the Voyager record is expected to last at least one billion years. That’s a long time: A billion years ago, life on Earth was first venturing forth from the seas.
The never-ending shame of September 11th is that the souls of the dead have not been allowed to rest in peace but have been conscripted again and again into the garish rationales of fools and knaves for unending war and conquest. For the neocons, those original 9/11 deaths have compounded nicely, provided an impressive rate of return. With each anniversary, 9/11 becomes harder to disaggregate, analyze; the smoke-pouring towers have optical landmarks purged of historical-cultural-psychological-political-human context.
In the effort to retaliate against terrorists who hijacked planes six years ago with an arsenal of $3 knives, this year’s overall (US) defense budget has been pushed to $657 billion. We (the US) are now spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone, occupying a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy that sparked this orgy of militarism.
The waste is so enormous and irrelevant to our national security that a rational person might embrace the libertarian creed if only for the sake of sanity. Clearly, the federal government no longer cares much about providing for health, education, hurricane reconstruction or even bridge safety, as the military budget now dwarfs all other discretionary spending, despite the lack of a sophisticated enemy in sight.
Why do I take issue with those who argue that, in refusing to turn a blind eye to "minor" infringements, the authorities are simply being petty and heavyhanded? Quite simply, because refusing to accept any form of anti-social behaviour is the cornerstone of zero tolerance - a term that is much talked about, often suggested as a way of curbing our wave of lawlessness, but widely misunderstood. Having witnessed the effects of zero tolerance at first hand, I know that it works - but only if you treat all minor infringements with due seriousness and don't just pick on easy targets while ignoring the more hardened thugs.
My experiences date back to the late-Eighties, when my family and I lived for two years in frenetic New York. When we arrived, with three children under the age of ten, the city was so dangerous that there were times that we felt like prisoners in our 18th floor apartment on the Upper East Side. Supposedly one of the more affluent neighbourhoods, the nearby playground was a haven for crack-smokers. Drunken pan-handlers made walking to the shops down Third Avenue a daily ordeal. Kathleen Jennings wearing flip-flops Menacing squeegee merchants besieged our car at traffic lights.
One Sunday, playing baseball in Central Park, we were set upon by teenagers who stole the bat and threatened to attack us with it. A few days later, in that same spot, a jogger was gang-raped and beaten almost to death by more than a dozen masked youths who sprang, whooping, from the trees. This rampant lawlessness and the insidious fear it instilled was as constant as the wailing police sirens, tarnishing an otherwise enjoyable stay.
By the mid-Nineties, however, when I returned to visit, the city was barely recognisable. The aggressive beggars and street gangs had vanished, as had the sickly fug of crack pipe smoke.
Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Saunders tells the paper: "I could have stayed there for another six months, we would have been able to defend ourselves, and killed a lot of people in the process, but what would have been achieved?"A comment which applies just as well to the entire Iraq adventure, no?
Andrew Murray: [The Stop the War Coalition] has organised more than a dozen national demonstrations since [February 2003]. None has been attended by fewer than 50,000 people.I posted a link on this in the sideblog but the more I think about it the more I wonder whether the Prof is losing his grip. Had anyone else posted such a fatuous observation Geras would have been all over them PDQ, and I don't expect any of his students would have got away with it either.
Geras: Population of the UK: 60,587,300.
