Thanks to The Daily Edge.
I have spent the day enjoying the Welland Valley Beer Festival - nine pubs, stretching from Great Bowden on the edge of Market Harborough to Lyddington in Rutland, served by a relay of vintage buses. How can you not enjoy that? The buses also call at Market Harborough station, so it is easy to reach it from further afield. I visited the Talbot Inn at Gretton, the Wheel & Compass at Weston by Welland and the Queen's Head at Sutton Bassett. In between I found some things to photograph and even had a walk between those last two villages, though ...
In April Thanet Council issued a statement with this opening line "The article published in the Isle of Thanet Gazette today (5 April 2013) regarding the council's Economic and Regeneration Manager Mr. Rob Hetherington includes several inaccuracies which the council would like to correct." Rather oddly if you ask me it goes on to say "It is incorrect that Mr. Hetherington has been informed of any decision in relation to his leaving employment with the council or that the council is in talks with him over any severance package." Surprisingly this weeks Gazette announces the departure of a Rob Hetherington, ...
This morning, along with local residents, members of Community Spirit Action Group that represents much of the 'north' of the West End Ward, local community police, City Council Rapid Response Team, community safety wardens, our West End Communities Officer, volunteers from Tesco and my ward colleague Cllr Richard McCready, I took part in a graffiti clean up in the Blackness industrial area, cleaning up numerous buildings in streets like Ash Street, Douglas Street, Milne's East Wynd and Park Street. We made excellent progress over two hours and it was very kind of a local business owner who brought the team ...
If you aren't much of a gamer, you could be forgiven for missing the announcement of the new Xbox - the Xbox One. It has been heavily (and deservedly) lambasted by almost everyone for a raft of features that nobody wants - it needs to be connected to the internet at least once every 24 hours, or it blocks you from playing games. If you buy a second hand game, you have to pay a charge directly to Microsoft to install it (likely the label price of the game in the first place). This also means that you won't be ...
Scottish Liberal Democrats held a dinner last night to celebrate Malcolm Bruce's thirty years of service as MP. In light of his recent comments on the need to eat less meat, did the distinguished member for Gordon take the vegetarian option? I think we should be told.
One of the interesting aspects of privilege is how it lays bare our unconscious assumptions about the world. A male software developer may never consider that a user would want or need to change their name. Thus they would design a product which ignored the millions of women changing their names after marriage. It's very temping to see software as racist when, in reality, it's more likely to have a root cause of unconscious assumptions. Take, for example, GitHub. You can host all of your software projects on there - as long as you speak English. Wait? What? Try adding ...
By Mathew Hulbert The current Labour frontbench is the worst Official Opposition since the days of the Tory Leaders William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith.It is the worst Labour Opposition since the days of Michael Foot back in the early 1980's.Why do I say this?Because, given the circumstances, Labour should be doing much, much better.Given the cuts to Welfare, the changes to the NHS, and so on Labour should be steaming ahead in the polls.But they are not.Yes, they lead in the polls; but it is a weak lead.People just don't believe Labour has changed enough to be trusted again ...
Note from district council Further to my email below, First Capital Connect have confirmed their acceptance to the amended form of tree work in the station car park whereby the majority of the trees are to be retained. Please see details below. The tree removals will be limited to a dead Pine, a suppressed Ash with a trunk defect and clearance of Sycamore saplings either side of a Holly to allow it more space to grow. I have shown the location of these on the attached map and I have visited the car park to mark their trunks with a ...
(As you may have guessed I have been playing with adding graphics to the Blog. Blogger doesn't like .pdf files, but I have installed a (free) conversion program to one of my computers )
Although this care home is in Cramlington, I'm posting the link to their open day as they offer support of the Stroke Club that I go to.
More comedy genius from Australia's Clarke and Dawe: Also on YouTube.
Today we bring you the 1956 Annual Report of Southport Women's Liberal Association. It is notable for several features. Firstly the context; the faltering Liberal revival had begun. Deep in the wretched winter of 1954 a by election was held in Inverness-shire on December 21st. In fact so poor was the weather the result did not reach the London Press till Christmas Eve. The Liberal candidate, John Bannerman, was a 'popular Gaelic speaking Highlander, sportsman, potato developer and broadcaster; he had played Rugby for Scotland on thirty seven occasions between 1921 and 1929'. He reduced the Tory Majority from 10,000 ...
Here's today's hand-picked selection that caught my interest... lordashcroftpolls.com Interesting (and under-reported) finding from Ashcroft poll: 31% want to see LibDems in Coalition again post-2015 http://bit.ly/196Kmcd Cameron has already picked his message for the next election - and "cleaning up politics" isn't it Tories/LDs "thought Cam's complacent country-house manner concealed reforming radicalism. Now accept it doesn't" http://bit.ly/14lv1ki EBuzzing Top Lib Dem Blogs, June 2013 | Mark Pack .@MarkPack coins term "the Stephen Tall hokey cokey mantle" *puzzled face* [IMG: :)] http://bit.ly/1bcVBwk Send to Kindle
Two weeks ago we published an open letter to Tim Farron on the subject of unpaid internships. Here is his reply. Dear Friends, Firstly thank you for your letter and thank you for bearing with me while I was away for a few days with Rosie and the children. I wanted to make sure I gave you a proper reply rather than a few rushed lines. In my meetings with Liberal Youth and the campaign group InternAware I was asked about the party and internships. I promised at the time that I would personally not employ people as unpaid interns. ...
Below is the text of a letter that has been written to Councils by Eric Pickles. This is a big issue in the middle part of Sefton and the part of West Lancashire that wraps around Sefton Borough because of the proposal to build a large number of turbines of a similar height to Blackpool Tower! I have posted on this subject before and met campaigners opposing the Lower Alt Wind Farm proposal last Thursday at the Central Sefton Area Committee. I thought It would be useful to reproduce the whole of the letter on this site. ************* I am ...
Last night Kelly-Marie Facebooked & Tweeted (and probably in other places where I don't follow her) announced that she had been selected by the Guildford Liberal Democrats to be their candidate for the 2015 General Election. It wasn't exactly a surprise as most people that knew the situation thought that it was going to go that way but it wasn't a fait accompli. With lots of talk within the party at the moment focused on women and the fact only seven of the 56 MPs (Mike Hancock currently is an Independent MP following his 'resignation' of the party whip earlier ...
For as long as anyone can remember Sefton Council and its contractors have never really got to grips with cutting the Borough's grass verges. Each growing season councillors have to complain about the lack of cutting but this year we were wrong footed and given a false sense of hope as the first couple of cuts actually happened! But sadly things have gone downhill since then and some verges are about as bad as they can get or ever have been at present. What's more the Highways Agency seem to be in competition with Sefton Contractors as to who can ...
Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft — who spends more on polling than all three main political parties combined — published the latest of his surveys yesterday. It contained little good news for his party: 'Perceptions of the Conservatives have been eroded further ... This is the price we have paid for spending half a year talking amongst ourselves.' And none of the party leaders would've been much chuffed by public perceptions of them, though Nick Clegg comes off worst, '[combining] the weaknesses of the other two, being "weak", "out of his depth", and "out of touch" all at the same time.' ...
The Guardian has revealed that the American National Security Agency is collecting data from internet providers and other companies. Yet Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple have all denied being party to such an arrangement. Writing on The Daily Beast, Megan McArdle says their are five possible explanations: The companies are lying;Only a few people in the company know about this, and they aren't issuing the statements;The Post and the Guardian are wrong and have been duped;PRISM was operating without the knowledge of the companies;The companies know, and those statements are very carefully worded.Which does she favour? All of these ...
It really is extraordinary that more homes, families and villages are being blighted by yet another plan for a third runway from Heathrow's stubborn bosses, to boost their shopping centre with airport attached. No doubt it will be accompanied by another of those dubious economic studies which add up all the potential benefits of more flights to China, but don't subtract the costs of all he disbenefits of the extra flights, from noise and carbon emissions, and to health. The future of Heathrow currently divides the Conservative Party, but there is at heart a more fundamental argument about whether we ...
posted The Blood is The Life 07-06-2013 http://t.co/AA6JDDcsQM on #dreamwidth (tags: (from twitter) dreamwidth ) Was the Communications Data Bill just a cover for Prism Data? « Complicity Zoe remains the go-to blog for IT/civil liberties stuff. (tags: ) Lib Dems are the hardest-working British party in Brussels - and UKIP the worst | Mark Pack And when they do turn up they fall asleep: (tags: ) Do women not want to be friends with sluts? A review of a study. | Another angry woman Excellent deconstruction of a flawed survey. (tags: ) Checking your privilege | The ...
Counting down towards the fiftieth birthday of Doctor Who with Fifty great scenes... The Doctor's finished on the telly again, and who most wants him finished? With Doctor Who - The Mind of Evil released this week to complete a rival Time Lord's adventures on DVD, it's about time to follow Number 40's "I'm the Doctor" with a hostile takeover: "I am the Master."And while sometimes I add a second Bonus Quotation here, something's got into my head (a sort of drumming) and now there are rather more. More spoilers, as well. So, peoples of the Blogosphere: please attend carefully... ...
Very interesting slice of the future here - extending the existing software which produces automatic write-ups of sports matches for US news outlets into other fields: [IMG: Moody keyboard. Photo courtesy of Andregc. Some rights reserved. http://www.sxc.hu/photo/754170] Narrative Science is somewhat known in journalism circles for its automated sports and finance articles, but in a fascinating profile last year, Steven Levy wrote about how the company "realized that it could produce much more than journalism": Indeed, anyone who needed to translate and explain large sets of data could benefit from its services. Requests poured in from people who were buried ...
Normally, Liberator would not perpetuate health scares published in the Mail. But this one is credible and backed by evidence: The ice served in six out of ten of Britain's most popular high street restaurants contains more bacteria than the water found in their toilets, an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has found.Scientific tests have shown that ice from branches of McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Starbucks, Cafe Rouge and Nando's all had higher levels of bacteria than samples of water taken from their lavatory bowls. Experts say it could be due to them being cleaned more often than the ...
I am aware of two meetings at Blyth Town Council next week. Both are at Arms Evertyne House, starting at 6:30 pm Tuesday 11th June, Assets Committee Thursday 13th June, Planning & Development Committee
Don't forget that WestFest 2013 starts tomorrow with Big Sunday on Magdalen Green! Magdalen Artists are having an exhibition at the Vine throughout WestFest - details below: You can download a high quality PDF of this poster here.
Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the Dundee City Council Annual Staff Awards 2013, the inaugural year of such awards. The awards ceremony took place in the West Park Centre. Having a staff awards initiative has proved itself to be extremely worthwhile. All of the participants last night - not just the winners - are excellent examples of providing high-quality and innovative services and highlighted the commitment and professionalism of the City Council's staff. It was a thoroughly inspiring evening and I have no doubt that the success of the 2013 Awards will ensure the initiative is repeated ...
You can download a high quality version of this poster here.
Education Minister, Leighton Andrews, must confirm that the Pupil Deprivation Grant will continue to be a regular feature of school funding in the future. My research is telling me that schools in my region agree that the PDG has been an enormous help, and that without the PDG they couldn't afford to provide the additional support which is visibly closing attainment gaps. Where we have clear examples of improvement it is vital that we use those as best practice for other schools to follow. What is worrying me is that 60% of respondents are unsure how much longer they will ...
Nick Clegg may have killed off the Snooper's Charter but that does not mean that it is not business as usual for the spooks at GCHQ and their American allies in the routine monitoring of communications traffic. The Independent reports on claims that thousands of Britons could have been spied on by GCHQ under what they describe as a "chilling" link to a secret American operation covertly collecting data from the world's largest internet companies. They say that under a progranme called Prism, American agents were able to glean data, including the contents of emails and web-chats, direct from the ...
Saturday: Short form: weird, poignant, brilliant, mind-expanding, read it. Long form: Faction Paradox are, supposedly, all about rejecting the "stuffy" linear constraints imposed on History by their former kin the Great Houses. The enemy is usually described as "an alternate form of history". But what would that look like? "Doctor Who" is often described as the most flexible story-telling format in history. Of course, it isn't. But the irony is that, to really express how far you can flex this universe, you have to edit the Doctor out of history from the very beginning. That's where Faction Paradox comes in. ...
