Several politicians disclosed that they had been handed gifts including ties, jars of honey and trips abroad in an updated version of the Register of Members' Interests, but details of income from lucrative second jobs remained under wraps.
The new rules oblige all MPs to reveal the exact amount they are paid for second jobs, as well as the amount of time they spend doing them. But they are only obliged to reveal their earnings and workload once they have received payment for the roles. ( Read more... )
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The Politburo Standing Committee, led by President Hu Jintao, called on Communist Party members to mobilise to restore order. The committee promised punishment for rioters and leniency to those who took part after being misled by agitators.
In the parade, police were crammed into trucks and armoured personnel carriers and helicopters circled above. Vans with loudspeakers blared slogans like "Protect the people" and "Maintain stability".
With the city seemingly under control, the ( Read more... )
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Trooper Christopher Whiteside, 20, of the Light Dragoons, died in an explosion near Gereshk in Helmand province. He had hoped to compete as a fencer in the 2012 Olympics.
He became the seventh British soldier to die in as many days, bringing the total killed in Afghanistan to 176. His commanding officer, Lt-Colonel Gus Fair, said: "Trooper Whiteside had been tested in some of the most intense fighting ever experienced in Afghanistan and had never been found wanting."
Meanwhile, an ( Read more... )
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The unfinished novella, The Original of Laura, will be published this autumn in what has been widely described as the literary event of the year.
Hugh Hefner's title won the bidding war this week to carry a hefty, 5,000-word excerpt of the novella.
Nabokov had a long and mutually agreeable relationship with Playboy, which serialised his 1969 novel, Ada, and also conducted a number of important interviews with him, in which he discussed some of the controversy that surrounded his most ( Read more... )
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Despite having a steady job and knowing five languages, like thousands of seasonal labourers from eastern Europe who come to Britain every year, Mr Borisov believed the hours he would work on fruit farms this summer would make him enough money to justify spending six months away from his wife, Mira, and their newborn baby.
But earlier this week, the 27-year-old sat in a Tudor-style pub on the outskirts of the market town of Leominster, staring at the £7.62 that was supposed to last him ( Read more... )
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In fact, I just completed a Ye Olde Goldyn Appyl Presse radio show! It consists of a welcome, a fake ad, a breaking news bit, and the ending. The whole thing is almost 4 minutes long. I hope to upload it to YouTube. But if you want to hear it, I'm asking for $4! That's just $4! Once I've gotten $4, everyone will be able to hear it whether they contributed to it or not. Every dollar helps!
It was a lot of work, but I'm only asking $4 for it because I hope to post it on YouTube and use it in part as advertisement for the whole YOGAP project. Once released, embedding will be ENCOURAGED.
CLICK HERE TO GET TO THE DONATE BUTTON
You know, I like this idea so much I might do other features of YOGAP in a radio version, like "Celebrity Interview" with Vick Shunnel. :-)
A series of television ads was launched yesterday supporting a bill by Democratic assemblyman Tom Ammiano that would regulate and tax the sale of marijuana in the Golden State, where Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration is in a $26bn (£15.9bn) black hole.
The 30-second film features an "actual marijuana user". She is a retired, 58-year-old civil servant called Nadine Herndon, shown in front of her family portraits at home in Sacramento County, where she began using the drug after suffering ( Read more... )
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There is little doubt that the super-tanker that is the world economy is starting to pick up headway. The engines have been running flat out for some months but it has only been in the past couple of weeks that there has been real evidence of any forward movement. China and India have kept growing to be sure, with China becoming the world's largest car market in the first half of this year. But growth there has been more than offset by the collapse of output in pretty much the entire developed ( Read more... )
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The US President told G8 leaders at their meeting in Italy yesterday that between 20 and 30 nations would be invited to the non-proliferation summit in Washington next spring. He hopes to build on his successful disarmament talks held on Monday with the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev.
The US-led initiative could pave the way for the world to warn Iran and North Korea that they would be treated as "pariah states" unless they stop developing nuclear weapons. The burden of proof would be ( Read more... )
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Yesterday, in an attempt to shame the Cornish seaside town where the boy died into halting the drinking culture, his family released a picture of the drinking party where he had been celebrating the end of his GCSEs with friends.
Paddy, like thousands of young people, had been attracted to Newquay's reputation as a place to party.
His parents, John and Maria, were too distraught yesterday to speak publicly but his stepmother, Shireen Higgins, spoke out to urge other families to boycott ( Read more... )
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There is a remarkably low rate of violent crime against strangers in most of the big cities, and it is safe to walk the streets of Mumbai or Bangalore late at night. But every six hours, a young married woman is burnt to death, beaten to death, or driven to suicide by emotional abuse from her husband, figures show.
More than two-thirds of married women in India aged between 15 and 49 have been beaten, raped or forced to provide sex, according to the UN Population Fund.
One of the ( Read more... )
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President Hamid Karzai ordered a review of the legislation after The Independent revealed that it negated the need for consent within marriage.
President Barack Obama described it as "abhorrent", Gordon Brown said Britain would "not tolerate" it, and other Nato countries threatened to withdraw their troops unless the legislation was drastically re-written.
The amendments were passed to the cabinet this week and signed by Mr Karzai on Wednesday, Human Rights Watch said last night.
The ( Read more... )
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Yesterday, a four-minute video surfaced featuring 37-year-old British diplomat James Hudson, entitled "Adventures of Mr Hudson in Russia". It shows the deputy consul general in Ekaterinburg cavorting with two prostitutes. He has since resigned.
A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: "The FCO expects all its staff to demonstrate high levels of personal and professional integrity and takes all allegations of inappropriate behaviour seriously.
"That said, we ( Read more... )
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The Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates came to the
conclusion after reviewing the case yesterday. That followed claims that the
former deputy prime minister John Prescott was among the victims of a
hacking operation which resulted in the jailing of Clive Goodman, former
royal editor of the News of the World, and private investigator Glenn
Mulcaire in 2007, for unlawfully intercepting communications in an effort to
find out information about Prince William. ( Read more... )
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An in-depth analysis of the records relating to the deaths of 163 children killed at the hands of a parent or carer in the last five years has shown that thousands of children from babies to 16 are "slipping through the net" of protection measures despite the knowledge that they live in households with a history of domestic abuse, drug problems or where there has been a recent separation ? all factors which dramatically increase the risk of murder.
The study shows for the first time the ( Read more... )
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S&A Produce, which supplies both Tesco and Sainsbury's, employs thousands of eastern Europeans who are given a specific work visa allowing them to work for the company. They are attracted by the prospect of earning up to £200 a week by picking fruit on its farms in Herefordshire and Kent.
The workers are officially paid the minimum wage of £5.74, a comparatively high sum for foreign nationals who often have an average annual income of less than £3,000 in their own countries. But employee ( Read more... )
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Ferdinand Ambach, a Hungarian tourist, was drinking with Ronald James Brown on December 7, 2007 in a suburban Auckland bar before they went to Mr Brown's flat.
A violent argument erupted and Mr Brown, 69, was bashed repeatedly with a banjo before the neck of the instrument was rammed down his throat.
He died in hospital three days later after his life support system was switched off.
The defence case was that the 31-year-old accused was provoked by two unwanted ( Read more... )
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Figures published yesterday by the School Food Trust (SFT) show that a majority of pupils are still turning up their noses at the healthy options espoused by Oliver and the Government, preferring to bring their own packed lunches or buy junk food outside the school grounds.
Only 43 per cent of primary school children are eating school dinners, a rise
of just 0.1 per cent on last year. Among secondary pupils the figures are
even worse, with just ( Read more... )
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[REVIEW] Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen
Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914. Stanford, California: Stanford University, 1976. 615 pp.
People tend to forget how heterogeneous--ethnically, culturally, and otherwise--modern states used to be. Canadians are probably less likely to forget than citizens of other Western states, simply because their country is prone to innumerable fissures--Québec versus English Canada, West versus East, South versus North, even downtown versus suburbs, heartland versus periphery--but other countries evidence much the same fissures. Sweden, for instance, is traditionally thought of as the epitome of homogeneity; yet, throughout its history Sweden has received so many immigrants (Walloons, Germans, Finns, Balts, Dutch) as to become a melting pot even as successive Swedish sovereigns have fought to establish uncontested boundaries. (Sweden's modern boundaries were only defined in 1815, with the cession of Finland to the Russian Empire.) This convenient memory lapse might have been produced by the Western traditions of sovereignty established with the Peace of Westphalia: Thongchai Winichakul's excellent article “Siam Mapped: Making of Thai Nationhood,” (The Ecologist, September-October 1996), explores how Thailand and the Thai national identity have been molded by successive Thai governments the better to establish Thailand's maximum sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity.
At least people seem to forget this less often than before. We can probably thank Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into Frenchmen for this. France was Europe's first modern republic, and well into the 19th century France arguably ranked as the single most powerful state in the West. Most people believe the stereotype that France is a homogeneous society, yet well into 19th century as many French citizens regularly spoke languages other than French--Breton, Occitan dialects, Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Alsatian, Corsican--instead of French, and even in French-speaking areas provincial loyalties often transcended the putative bond of the nation. The introduction of immigrant languages only complicated this picture. Renan, in his famous attempt to define the French nation, said that any nation was defined by the consent of its component communities; Weber argues that if consent was involved, it was manufactured, engineered.
We know, thanks to the research that Weber inspired, the French case is prototypical for most other nation-states. The post-Revolutionary French state was concerned with eliminating troublesome political identities, but by and large for the first half of the 19th century this was limited to the centralization of national affairs in Paris and the pursuit of national glory. Under the Second Empire and--still more--the Third Republic, active steps were made to encourage the elimination of provincial loyalties. Urbanization and industrialization helped immensely, of course, dislocating traditionally agricultural rural communities and allowing a specifically Francophone modernity to penetrate. The growth of mass media--book and magazine publishing, popular music, and the like--also played an important role in making French trendy for the non-Francophone young and diminishing the intergenerational transmission of language. Weber brought a new perspective on the school as vehicle for francophonization; though it was less than successful in homogenous non-Francophone peasant societies (Brittany is the most spectacular example), in areas even minimally open to the French language it removed the children from the traditional norms of peasant society. In one interesting passage, Weber recounts how it took generations to convince the French masses to use the metric system, with measurement in the public sphere (distances, say, and commerce) succumbing more quickly than measurements relating to one's person. I myself, living in a country that converted to metric just before me birth, use kilometres but not kilograms. And now, almost all of France's minority languages are nearing extinction, and the Fifth Republic is far more universally Francophone than any of the previous republics or monarchies of France. Where France has gone, any number of other countries have followed or are trying to follow in their different ways--Thailand, for instance. The French nationalizing project mostly worked.
If this book has a fault, it is that it does not consider the substantial foreign immigration to France. Over the lifetime of the Third Republic, perhaps five million Europeans (at first Belgians, then Spaniards and Italians, then Poles, White Russians, and Armenians, among many others) immigrated to France, making their homes in town or country, assimilating with remarkable speed. This immigration has continued to the present, of course: The Frenchman of the early 21st century is now likely to have at least one grandparent of foreign birth, just like his/her American contemporary. It seems certain that the same methods used to acculturate Limousins to French norms were used to acculturate Ligurians; yet, there was little mention of foreign immigration apart from a mention of Flemish immigrants in Nord and other passing statements. One passage, in which he describes how the folkloric traditions of certain Parisian neighbourhoods disappeared as old generations died off and new residents came in, strikes me as useful. It would have been nice if there had been a sufficiently updated version to cover this, or an updated version to cover all of the scholarly innovations, for a fuller perspective on the integration and assimilation of all the unofficial non-Francophone cultures of France in English. We can, however, look forward for followup works--Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, for instance--to carry the torch.
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ti_news :: the_independent : MPs' second incomes kept under wraps [+1] ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif)
cathy_comic : Friday, July 10, 2009 [+0] - ti_news :: the_independent : China calls on members of Party to quell violence [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Soldier killed in blast 'had Olympic ambitions' [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : 'Playboy' wins rights to serialise lost Nabokov novella [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Fruit pickers: 'The money we earn is not worth getting out of bed for' [+1]
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discord_society :: fayanora : YOGAP RADIO!!! [+1] - ti_news :: the_independent : Smoke dope and save the state of California, dude [+3]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Hamish McRae: We need an exit strategy from the Bank of England's costly policies [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Obama plans nuclear talks to lift threat of proliferation [+2]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Boycott Newquay, says dead boy's stepmum [+2]
- ti_news :: the_independent : India abolishes husbands' 'right' to rape wife [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Law will let Afghan husbands starve wives who withhold sex [+3]
- ti_news :: ksengupta : Was British diplomat set up by the Russian secret service? [+3]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Yard rules out inquiry as hacking row simmers on [+2]
- ti_news :: the_independent : One child in Britain 'is killed like Baby Peter every week' [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Revealed: Scandal of Britain's fruit-farm workers [+3]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Jury finds banjo killer guilty of manslaughter [+1]
- ti_news :: the_independent : Battle for healthy school food is struggling [+4]
- rfmcdpei : [REVIEW] Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen [+1]