Reviews Category
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‘Our Nelson Mandelas’ – The IRA’s Balcombe Street Gang
Photo: The four Provisional IRA terrorists known as the Balcombe Street Terror Gang, from left: Hugh Doherty, Martin O’Connel, Edward Butler and Harry Duggan, in a line up in London.
ON May 10 1998, four men made a dramatic appearance on the platform at a special Sinn Fein conference in Dublin. There was ‘stamping of feet, wild applause and triumphant cheering’ during a 10 minute ovation while the men known as the Balcombe Street gang stood grinning with clenched fists in the air. At the same conference, and to great applause, Gerry Adams described the four men as ‘our Nelson Mandelas!’
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Posted: 10th, December 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Politicians | Comment
Nelson Mandela Memorial In Photos: Where Were You When The White Supremacists Ruled?
THE Nelson Mandela Memorial took place at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg.
Barack Obama hailed Mandela as “the last great liberator of the 20th century”.
That much is true. Were it not for him and his fellow fighters against the brutal horrors of white supremacists, would black South African be free? Would the white leaders, the BBC reporters and the happy white faces be singing for Madiba? Not everyone hated apartheid. The powerful didn’t. The South African economy boomed on cheap black labour. They had the money, the overseas investors, the guns and the power. To take that on you don’t just need an avuncular smile and an audience with the Spice Girls. You need courage and the ability to instil fear in the oppressor. You need to be angry and ready to kill.
We all love Mandela now. He was the man who forgave. But you know what he forgave? The whites and rich blacks who sing his name and wave the flag of the Rainbow Nation haven’t focused on that. It’s not so much forgive as forget. This is what South Africa looked like for blacks in the 1960s. The poor, enslaved blacks who kept the South African machine rich.
His became the most famous name who took that on.
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Madeleine McCann: Aktenzeichen XY…Ungelöst And The Christmas Lights
MADELEINE McCann: Not much news on the missing child. But what there is, is here:
Daily Express, December 1: “Germans give hope of clue in search for Madeleine McCann”
Germans?
Detectives hunting for Madeleine McCann have been given information about two German or Dutch-speaking men seen acting suspiciously before she was kidnapped in Portugal.
The paper tells of “potentially strong leads”, which are much better than potentially weak leads.
The potentially strong leads came after Kate and Gerry McCann made a direct appeal on a German crime show, called Case Files XY…Unsolved, in October.
Good. All information can only help. Plenty of Dutch and German holidaymakers must have been in Portugal at the time.
In German, the show is called Aktenzeichen XY…Ungelöst. The show was trailed thus (translation via Google):
Maddie – the name went once in 2007 around the world. Here is one of the most puzzling crimes of modern times. Madeleine McCann was just three years old when she suddenly disappeared during a vacation. Her fate is unknown to this day. The desperate parents turn today along with Scotland Yard to the XY audience and ask: Who can help in the search for our daughter?
So. Scotland Yard organised the show.
The hope that her little daughter Madeleine but is not alive somewhere. Six years ago, the little night disappeared from a holiday resort in Portugal. To date, she is swallowed by the earth. The tireless parents ask today the XY audience for help. They are accompanied by Scotland Yard, which has re-opened the case and actually came to a new approach. gets the case Madeleine McCann after all these years still a positive spin?
And after that, we get, as ever, to watch the parents:
The bitter emotions of a seventh Christmas without her beloved Madeleine were evident on Kate’s face as she forced herself into the yuletide spirit for the sake of twins, Sean and Amelie. She joined thousands for the annual switching on of the Christmas lights in her home village, of Rothley, Leicestershire, on Thursday evening.
She smiled as children played on a bouncy castle and went on rides, but there were other moments when the pain of not having Madeleine there to share the early Christmas joy was clear to see. With a protective arm around the eight-year-old twins, Kate was cheered by warm words from friends and acquaintances who quietly support her.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, has suggested British and Portuguese police should join together as a team, in order to establish exactly what happened to missing Madeleine McCann.
After Portuguese authorities admitted last month there was enough new information to justify reopening the case, after shelving their own inquiry back in 2008, Commissioner Hogan-Howe said:
One thing we’d like to see in the future is a joint investigation team which comes under the European community. It is a possibility legally and we’re working together at a political level, at a police and judicial level, to see how we can construct that…
…So that’s what we’re trying to get; an agreement between the two governments and the two police services.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 10th, December 2013 | In: Madeleine McCann, Reviews | Comment
Nelson Mandela: The Best Anti-Guff Tributes
WHEN Nelson Mandela died, the tribute industry went into overdrive. Words were said. Acres of newsprint filled. Hours of television focused on one man. He is praised rightly for his strength of character in facing down a brutal, humiliating and dehumanising system underpinned by the fraud of white supremacy. And then John Simpson, the BBC reporter, said that Mandela’s death at 95 left him feeling orphaned. The white BBC man was orphaned by the death of the 95-year-old black South African? They had shared blood, as father to son?
We looked around. Was anyone else rolling their eyes? Yes.
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Posted: 10th, December 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, Reviews | Comment (1)
Before The War: Europe’s Royal Family In 1913
WHAT did the Royal Family look like 100 years ago? 1913 was the year before the war to end wars. Were those halcyon days? No.
Women wanted a better deal. In June 1913 Emily Wilding Davison dashed in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in the name of women’s suffrage. Four days later she died. One month later, 50,000 women massed in Hyde Park, London organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. They would shot Herbert Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister, how many women wanted the right to vote.
Sparks were flying in Europe.Lenin and Trotsky were talking of revolution as they toured Europe. At once point, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in one corner of Vienna.
Empires were on the wane. Nations were the future. Australia and India wanted to move away from Britain. There was turmoil in Ireland. Workers united to push back the drowning tide of grinding poverty in a strike that would become the Dublin Lockout.
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Posted: 10th, December 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, Royal Family | Comment
TSA Seize Monkey’s Gun
THE TSA has been molesting and groping Americans for fun. And now it wants to steal your monkey guns.
Phyllis May of Redmond, Washington, lost her monkey gun in St. Louis. Travelling with stuffed monkey cowboy Rooster Monkburn – the cowboy sock monkey – the pair came before the TSA agent of instant justice.
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BBC Defends Mandela Coverage Against 1,000 Loons Who Complained About It
IT is only when important figures die that you start to reflect and realise what you had before your eyes all this time. In Nelson Mandela, we had a Martin Luther King Jr. We had a Gandhi. We had a Malcolm X. Of course, these people were divisive, but everyone should applaud what they aimed to do – stop unfair, inhumane treatment of people who aren’t white.
To some Mandela was a terrorist. To most, he was a man who defied a racist regime, went to prison and stayed strong in his belief to do the right thing and, inexplicably, he managed it. Apartheid, initially a ghettoisation of people, dressed up all cuddly by White Supremacists as ‘helping us all to be better neighbours’ rather than ‘Hey! Black guy! Whitey will have where you’re stood, ’til the horizon, thanks! And we’ll kill you if you complain!’, was lead by Mandela and the whole world rejoiced because he never gave up in his quest to end segregation.
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews, TV & Radio | Comments (4)
In 1988 Angela Lansbury Took A Bath And Swam Standing Up In A Dress
IN 1988, Angela Landsbury took a bath and went for a swim on her patio furniture:
Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Celebrities, Flashback | Comment
Inequality Caused By Cronyism Kills Economic Growth
INEQUALITY. Is it harmful? It can be. When caused by cronyism.
In other words, is it a bad thing for a country to have some really rich people? Again, it depends on how they got rich.
Sutirtha Bagchi of the University of Michigan’s business school and Jan Svejnar of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs studied how inequality correlates with economic growth. In general, more inequality meant slower growth, and less inequality meant faster growth.
But in many countries, over various time periods, growing inequality had no effect on economic growth. The new study suggests that an increase in inequality hurt the economy when the rich were getting rich through political connections.
That is, inequality hurts the economy when “a large share of the national wealth is held by a small number of politically connected families,” as the authors put it. . . . When a country’s wealthiest people got their wealth as Pangestu and Fridman did, inequality places a drag on the economy. When a country’s wealthiest got wealthy through market means, the resulting inequality has no negative effect on economic growth.
This jibes with what we know about free markets. If people can get rich by providing valuable things at good prices, then society will get more valuable things at good prices—and people across the income spectrum benefit. But if people get rich by pocketing subsidies and using the state to crush competitors, then they gained their wealth at the expense of everyone else.
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Money, Politicians, Reviews | Comment (1)
NSA Are Spying On Gamers Too
THE National Security Agency have sent their grotty little tentacles into every corner of the globe, spying on us all in a bid to reassure us all that they’re fighting off terrorists. Even though most of us aren’t terrorists. And by a huge margin too.
Anyway, the tech world have teamed up and said ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! THE ONLY PEOPLE ALLOWED TO INVADE THE PRIVACY OF THE GENERAL PUBLIC IS US!’
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
3 Highly Disturbing Vintage Ads From The 70s And 80s
EVER been scared by an advert?
Have Her In Stitches (literally)
THIS advertisement comes from a 1982 Canadian newspaper. Notice anything particularly troubling about it?
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Flashback, Key Posts, The Consumer | Comment
Candy Crush Saga: The Game That’s Too Successful To Float (See Zynga)
THIS is a fun little story. Candy Crush Saga is the all conquering barnstorming game of the moment and it’s made its maker, King, worth something like $5 billion. But it’s exactly that mega-success of the game that means that the maker cannot cash out by floating it on the stock market. Imagine that, being to successful to be able to sell yourself.
King, the mobile games maker behind Candy Crush Saga, has delayed its initial public offering until next year amid fears that the flagship game has been “too successful”.
The British company, which is gearing up for a potential $5bn (£3bn) flotation on the Nasdaq stock exchange, had considered listing by the end of this year. However, it has decided to wait to give it time to demonstrate that it has other hits in the pipeline and is not a “one hit wonder”.
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Posted: 9th, December 2013 | In: Money, Reviews, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Sergeant Alexander Blackman: A Life Sentence For Murdering A Not-Quite-Human Taliban
MOST of us will never know the horrors of war: we leave the front-line butchery and barbarism to others, content to judge the effectiveness of military strategy from our armchairs and calmly pontificate on the relative morality of battles lost and won. We have no understanding of the dreads or traumas of armed conflict, and little apprehension of the kind of mind which can rationally entertain killing another human being on the orders of another, writes Cranmer.
But those who sit in courts martial do: they are officers and warrant officers qualified by experience to judge fellow members of the armed forces. They are better equipped to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, and mete out just punishments to those who breach military discipline or violate the rules of engagement.
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Heroic School Officials Suspend 10-Year Old For Firing An Imaginary Bow And Arrow
TO Georgia, USA, where quick-acting school officials have suspended a 10-year old with an imaginary bow and arrow, saving his classmates from imaginary massacre. Previously, we spotted the schoolboy busted for aiming an Hello Kitty gun at a classmate and shouting “BANG!”.
Now Megyn Kelly reports on South Eastern Middle School fifth grader busted for pretending he was in the Hunger Games:
The Rutherford Institute, which is defending Johnny Jones, says he was told he violated the school’s zero tolerance policy on weapons. They’re working to get the suspension reversed and lifted from his permanent record.
On Friday night’s The Kelly File, defense attorney Jonna Spilbor reacted to the ordeal. “Here’s how ridiculous it is. If we’re going to punish this poor kid for pretending to shoot a bow and arrow, let’s ticket his parents for parking their unicorn in a fire zone.
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Clever British People Get Off Their Faces More
ALICE Robb has seen research showing that children of higher intelligence are more likely to booze and take drugs:
Drawing on the results of the National Child Development Study, which tracked for 50 years all British babies born during one week in March 1958, [evolutionary psychologist Satoshi] Kanazawa found that kids who scored higher on IQ tests grew up to drink larger quantities of alcohol on a more regular basis than their less intelligent peers. He evaluated other factors, including religion, frequency of church attendance, social class, parents’ education and self-reported satisfaction with life, and found that intelligence before age 16 was second only to gender in predicting alcohol consumption at age 23.
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Posted: 8th, December 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (6)
Mandela Balls: John Simpson Says Nelson Mandela’s Death Makes Him Feel Like ‘An Orphan’
NELSON Mandela is dead. The world salutes a lost leader. And we ask that only South Africans call him Madiba. And then John Simpson types his tribute to the man:
The BBC reporter softens readers up before the pic last line:
I listed him as a hero in my examination for Cambridge, and when I got there in 1963 I found someone had painted “FREE NELSON MANDELA” in huge white letters on a wall that I had to pass every morning on my way to lectures. It caused a scandal at the time: graffiti was still frowned on in the early 1960s.
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Posted: 8th, December 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Everything Victoria Ayling Knows About Immigration She Learnt From These Daily Mail Front Pages
THE Mail leads with the news that a Ukip member thinks all immigrants should “go home“. She says she was referring to “illegal immigrants”. What is unclear is whether or not the paper agrees with her. How long will it be before Victoria Ayling is being talked about in positive tones by the Mail’s columnists?
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Posted: 8th, December 2013 | In: Key Posts, Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Ukip’s Victoria Ayling And Her Little Problem With Lord Rob Neasden
“SEND them all back home,” says Victoria Ayling, according to the Mail. The paper says Ayling says all immigrants in Britain should be sent back home. Did she take the Ukip psychometric test designed to assess the candidates’ character and judgment? The fruitcakes and the deranged were weeded out. Or were they weeded in? Hard to tell. Problem is, if we can’t rely on Ukip to corral all the bigots and nutjobs into one place and give them a club rosette, they’ll scatter and in isolation be less entertaining.
As for Ayling, The Mail calls her a “high-profile UKIP politician”. But we’ve never heard of her before now. A quick spot of online tells us that in March, Ayling moved from the Tories to the Ukippers in March 2013. The BBC reported:
A former Conservative general election candidate claims many Tories are preparing to follow her lead and defect to the UK Independence Party. Victoria Ayling said she had lost confidence in David Cameron and believed the government was not doing enough to tackle immigration.
Mrs Ayling is councillor with East Lindsey District Council in Lincolnshire. ..
In 2010 she came close to causing a general election upset when she reduced Labour MP Austin Mitchell’s majority in Great Grimsby to just 714 votes.
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Posted: 8th, December 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews | Comment
Mandela Marketing: Nikki Finke Plugs The Film Of The Dead Man
NIKKI Finke says the man how inspired the film Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom has died. Yeah, that film based on an actual true story. He was 95. That’s older than the film. Who knew?
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Posted: 7th, December 2013 | In: Film, Politicians, Reviews | Comments (4)
A.A. Milne Reads Winnie The Pooh In 1929 (With Photos Of The Writer Playing With ‘Christopher Robin’)
IN 1929 A.A. Milne (above) was recorded reading aloud a passage from his book, Winnie-the-Pooh.
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When World Cup Draws Go Bad – In 1982 Football Was A Tatty Affair
THE World Cup is a glamorous, slick affair these days… but that wasn’t always the case. Back in 1982, the World Cup draw was an absolute shambles.
The draw for the 1982 World Cup in Spain suffered from a numerous cock-ups and technical problems while small boys in capes waddled around nonplussed.
And overseeing it all? A young Sepp Blatter, now president of FIFA, but at the time, merely the general secretary. It’s not like Blatter to make a hash of something surrounding football, is it?
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Movember Is Gingerist, Teenist And Racist But Makes Everyone Laugh At The New Statesman
IT took two people – Arianne Shahvisi and Neil Singh – to crete The New Statesman’s beyond parody troll-baiting article:
Why Movember isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
One of the Movember mantras is: “Real men, growing real moustaches, talking about real issues”. The slogan is as misguided as its campaign: Movember is divisive, gender normative, racist and ineffective against some very real health issues.
I’ve always though so what for the grandstanding if it helps. But it turn out it’s all massive cone. This from the apparently serious political magazine that asked Russell Brand to edit it.
Here are a few of the best lines about Movember:
…virtually none recognise the pernicious gendered and racial connotations carried by the practice.
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Posted: 6th, December 2013 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Smoking Marijuana Gives You Fantastic Breasts
DOES smoking marijuana give you man boobs?
“In humans, the effects of marijuana on testosterone and estrogen levels aren’t as clear. Lower testosterone levels have been reported in chronic marijuana users compared to nonusers, but not all studies support this.”
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Journalism Under Apartheid: ‘You do realise you will be working for a kaffir paper?’
I WORKED in pre-Mandela ZA as a young sub and chief sub and briefly, in charge of Drum the anti-apartheid magazine. I never met Nelson (in jail during the entire time I was there) but knew Winnie. She allegedly had a relationship with one of our photographers at the time, writes an Anorak reader.
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Posted: 6th, December 2013 | In: Flashback, Reviews | Comment (1)
