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Cuttings and links to other online information.
John La Rose
John La Rose, who has died aged 78, was the elder statesman of Britain's
black communities. Like Marcus Garvey, CLR James, George Padmore, Fidel
Castro and Frantz Fanon, John belongs to a Caribbean tradition of
radical and revolutionary activism whose input has reverberated across
continents. (Guardian, 28 Feb 2006)
China activists 'vanish' amid protests
At least eight prominent Chinese human rights activists have vanished after they joined one of the first overt attempts to coordinate a nationwide protest against the authorities since the 1989 democracy demonstrations.
Among those still missing [are] Hu Jia ... Qi Zhiyong, [and] Yu Zhijian. (Guardian, 25 Feb 2006)
Forget the rising bills, we've never had it so good
If you choose to believe the official statistics, we have never had it so good: incomes are rising, inflation is low and the British economy is enjoying its ninth year of Labour-induced stability and prosperity. (Telegraph, 25 Feb 2006)
Why pensioners are feeling the pain
The official rate of inflation, according to Bank of England figures, has fallen to just 1.9%. But try telling that to pensioners on fixed incomes, clobbered by soaring energy bills and, it was announced this week, a fresh round of increases in council tax and water rates. (Guardian, 25 Feb 2006)
'Naming and shaming' guidance condemned
Professor Rod Morgan, chairman of the Youth Justice Board, has criticised the "naming and shaming" of youngsters subjected to antisocial behaviour orders as "not the sort of thing that would be tolerated in most countries". (Guardian, 25 Feb 2006)
Sowing to reap a greener world
Kew Gardens is mentioned prominently in our history books in chapters relating to the growth of the rubber industry in the country during the 1800's.
In the second half of the 19th century the establishment dedicated itself to moving plant and seeds from one colony to the other, where the crops had a potential to be grown and harvested commercially.
Director of the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, Sir Peter Crane, concedes that today the British may be accused of bio-piracy for carrying that out. (Sun2surf, 25 Feb 2006)
Why we must stop shopping in Tesco
It's heartening to see the wave of antipathy billowing out towards Tesco. And it's producing results too. Near where my parents live in Norwich, a persistent local campaign has stopped Tesco getting permission for a store that would wipe out a street of local shops, including two terrific butchers, a greengrocer, a fishmonger, an old-fashioned pharmacist who delivers, and two fine bakeries. Money spent with local people goes back into the community, to the plumbers, hairdressers, solicitors and dentists, whereas money given to Tesco winds up hundreds of miles away in Tescoland, wherever that is. (Guardian, 25 Feb 2006)
Shell told to pay Nigeria's Ijaw
A Nigerian court has ordered oil giant Shell and its partners to pay $1.5bn to the Ijaw people of the Delta region. (Guardian, 24 Feb 2006)
£26m city academy 'inadequate'
OFSTED has called for urgent improvements in the £26 million Peckham Academy after the education watchdog said that its sixth form was “inadequate”. (Times, 23 Feb 2006)
ID cards have cost £32m so far
A total of £32 million has been spent preparing for identity cards even though Parliament has yet to approve the Government’s plans, according to figures released yesterday. (Times, 23 Feb 2006)
Call to rebuild inhumane immigration centre
Inspectors of Haslar Immigration Removal Centre have found living areas to be 'filthy', with ingrained dirt and paint peeling off the walls. Campaigners have asked for investment in the centre but the Home Office has refused. (Gosport News, 22 Feb 2006)
Attention seeker
Move over central government. The new head of the Local Government Association has ambitious plans for councils to be at the heart of the communities agenda - and on Question Time. Peter Hetherington meets Paul Coen. (Guardian, 22 Feb 2006)
Every little protest helps: campaigners unite in bid to cut Tesco down to size
...Last week, as the Small Shops parliamentary group called for the creation of a retail regulator, more than 200 local anti-supermarket campaigns came together in an online alliance under the slogan "Every Little Hurts". (Guardian, 22 Feb 2006)
Miliband's threatening letters undermine his localism spin
Under Labour, power has drifted to the centre; and despite the buzzwords there is no intention to hand any of it back. (Guardian, 22 Feb 2006)
Iraqi blast damages Shia shrine
A bomb attack in Iraq has badly damaged one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, sparking furious protests.
Thousands of Iraqis have gathered at the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, where two men blew up the famous golden dome in a dawn raid. (BBC, 22 Feb 2006)
Sorry? I doubt that, says brother
The sincerity of David Irving’s claim that he now believes millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis and that gas chambers did exist was challenged by his twin brother yesterday. (Times, 21 Feb 2006)
High price of unpaid hours
Public sector employees work an average of half a day more a week unpaid overtime than their private sector colleagues. (Times, 21 Feb 2006)
BME groups fear the police
New research by the Independent Police Complaints' Commission has found that Asian and Black people in England and Wales fear police harassment if they make a complaint. (BBC, 20 Feb 2006)
Turn back to your taps - we all pay the price for bottled water
The next time you reach for bottled water stacked on the supermarket shelf, spare a thought for the planet. You may think that it is better for you to buy such water, but better for the environment it certainly is not. (Times, 18 Feb 2006) The cost of bottled water
Housing stock trebles in value to £3.4 trillion over a decade
The house price boom of the last decade has seen the total value of all private housing in Britain treble to £3.4 trillion - three times the UK's annual economic output, research from the Halifax shows today.
(Guardian, 18 Feb 2006)
Gas and electric bills soar to £1,000 a year
An energy bill of £1,000 a year could soon be the norm for the average family, after British Gas announced yesterday that it is to raise its prices for gas and electricity by 22 per cent. (Telegraph, 18 Feb 2006)
Women MPs vow to change face of Hamas
Ask Huda Naeem how she intends to use her influence as a newly elected MP for Hamas and she ticks off a list of wrongs done to women in the name of religion. (Guardian, 18 Feb 2006)
£2.8m housing fraud claims second scalp
The political head of housing in a borough has resigned in the wake of a multi-million pound fraud scandal.
'; Liberal Democrat councillor Keith Fitchett announced yesterday that he had resigned as Lambeth's executive member for housing after a £2.8million fraud in the borough's housing department. (South London Press, 17 Feb 2006)
Locked in the past
The common sense view is that prisons work. But the evidence suggests they are failed, outdated and costly. Is it time to abolish them? (Guardian, 15 Feb 2006)
UN inquiry demands immediate closure of Guantanamo
A United Nations inquiry has called for the immediate closure of America's Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the prosecution of officers and politicians "up to the highest level" who are accused of torturing detainees. (Telegraph, 13 Feb 2006)
'Too many' unelected London bodies, report says
The "clutter" of unelected bodies running the capital's services is confusing Londoners and undermining local accountability, according to a report published today aiming to improve the way London is run. (Guardian, 13 Feb 2006)
Survival comes first for the last Stone Age tribe world
Describing the Sentinelese tribe of India's remote Andaman islands in his travel journals, the notoriously trite 13th-century explorer Marco Polo wrote: 'They are a most violent and cruel generation who seem to eat everybody they catch.' (Guardian, 12 Feb 2006)
Self-cleaning bathroom on the way
Nanotechnology may yet rescue us from the drudgery of the weekly ritual of blitzing the bathroom. (BBC, 10 Feb 2006)
Our primitive fascination
The story of the demise of Sunder Raj and Pandit Tawiri sounds like something plundered from the pages of a 19th-century adventure novel, except that it really happened, late last month, and reached the attention of the world's media only yesterday. The two fishermen were killed (we learned) by "one of the most primitive tribes in the world" after their boat drifted to the shore of North Sentinel Island, a tiny outcrop in the Indian Ocean, whereupon they were attacked by axe-wielding, near-naked warriors.
(Guardian, 10 Feb 2006)
Web encyclopedia articles 'vandalised'
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is investigating the possibility of "article vandalism" by staff at the Houses of Parliament after it uncovered attempts to manipulate information by workers in Washington. (Telegraph, 10 Feb 2006)
Climate 'makes oil profit vanish'
The huge profits reported by oil and gas companies would turn into losses if the social costs of their greenhouse gas emissions were taken into account. (BBC, 9 Feb 2006)
Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy
Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations. (Guardian, 8 Feb 2006)
Church apologises for slave trade
The Church of England has voted to apologise to the descendants of victims of the slave trade.
...During an emotional meeting of the Church's governing body in London, Rev Blessant explained the involvement of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in the slave trade.
The organisation owned the Codrington Plantation in Barbados, where slaves had the word "society" branded on their backs with a red-hot iron, he said. (BBC, 8 Feb 2006
Lost horizons
The election of a far-right British National party councillor in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 still stands as the most graphic justification of what the liberal urban elite has come to hold as an article of faith: that many of the white working-class inhabitants of "cockney" east London are socially regressive and profoundly, irredeemably xenophobic. (Guardian, 8 Feb 2006)
Vital statistics
For the past 15 years, Danny Dorling has been "rummaging around" in numbers, crunching his way through reams of raw data, building up an extraordinary picture of poverty and wealth in contemporary Britain. In study after study, he has uncovered evidence that the government would perhaps prefer stays buried: that Labour has presided over an era of unprecedented inequality widening and declining social mobility. (Guardian, 8 Feb 2006)
Black flags block US sign in Cuba
Cuban President Fidel Castro has unveiled a large new monument outside the US mission in Havana.
...Havana says it symbolises the people who have died as the result of violent acts against Cuba since its 1959 revolution - more than 3,400 of them. (BBC, 7 Feb 2006)
Clampdown on the clampers
...A borough infamous for its overzealous parking enforcement has unleashed under-cover inspectors on its own staff to rid the streets of wayward wardens.
The "mystery parkers" will test the services of Lambeth's parking enforcement contractor, Control Plus. (South London Press, 7 Feb 2006)
Gas rise takes home energy bills over £1,000
The energy regulator was facing demands for a full scale investigation into gas prices last night as it emerged that British consumers are to be hit with a record-breaking rise in gas bills. (Guardian, 6 Feb 2006)
Amnesty urges UK to act on Guantánamo Britons
The UK government must intervene on behalf of nine British residents being held without trial at the US Guantánamo Bay detention centre, Amnesty International urges today in a report on the impact on inmates' families. (Guardian, 6 Feb 2006)
Hopes fade for hundreds missing in ferry disaster
Hopes are fading for at least 800 people still missing after an Egyptian ferry sank in the Red Sea in the early hours of yesterday morning.
The Al Salam Boccaccio 98 capsized in bad weather about 40 miles off the Egyptian coast during an overnight trip from Duba, Saudi Arabia. It was carrying more than 1,400 passengers. (Telegraph, 4 Feb 2006)
Entire Darfur village of 55,000 flees after raids by Janjaweed gunmen
Exhausted refugees were building ramshackle shelters in a dry river bed yesterday after 55,000 people fled a raid mounted by the Janjaweed militia in the Sudanese province of Darfur. (Telegraph, 4 Feb 2006)
Strategic rethink as US digs in for the Long War
The United States military announced yesterday that it would convert some of its largest ballistic nuclear missiles to carry conventional warheads for use in precision attacks against terrorist targets or rogue states. (Telegraph, 4 Feb 2006)
Fraud squad cops set up in town halls Feb 3 2006
Cops from the fraud squad are setting up shop in three of our town halls.
The announcement comes after we exclusively revealed last week that Lambeth council would soon have a dedicated detective in place. (South London Press, 3 Feb 2006)
Bankruptcies show sharp increase
Nearly 70,000 people became insolvent in 2005, the highest since records began, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has said. (BBC, 3 Feb 2006)
Community Rallies to Shut Down Coca-Cola in India
Over 500 hundred community members and their supporter marched to the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Mehdiganj, near the holy city of Varanasi, in northern India today.
The protesters are demanding that the Coca-Cola bottling plant be shut down immediately because it is causing severe water shortages - by extracting too much water and polluting the groundwater in the area. (India Resource Center, 3 Feb 2006)
Man police shot 'lawfully killed'
Officers who shot dead a man brandishing a gun-shaped lighter acted lawfully, the High Court has ruled. (BBC, 3 Feb 2006)
It's capitalism or a habitable planet - you can't have both
There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change. A cap on this and a quota on the other won't do it. Tinker at the edges as we may, we cannot sustain earth's life-support systems within the present economic system. (Guardian, 2 Feb 2006)
Police tampered with log on dead Brazilian 'suspect'
Undercover detectives altered a surveillance log to avoid blame for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes in a bungled counter-terrorist operation, according to police watchdogs. (Times, 2 Feb 2006)
Shell posts $23bn record profit
The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell today announced record profits for a British company of $22.9bn ( £12.9bn) on the back of soaring oil prices. (Guardian, 2 Feb 2006)
Mugabe moves against city whites
President Robert Mugabe has begun confiscating and vandalising white-owned property in Zimbabwe's cities, after taking over most farms in the countryside. (Telegraph, 2 Feb 2006)
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