Shocking News

In news that will doubtless come as a huge shock to anyone who knows Bangor at all, O’Sheas, that utterly salubrious Irish-themed drinking establishment on the High Street, has been caught selling drinks to kids and was shut down (for six weeks) by the county council on Thursday.

The BBC have helpfully provided a photograph of the place, apparently in order to confirm any stereotypes readers might have:

Obviously not the sort of place you'd expect to sell drinks to kids

Shocking. This news is so, so shocking.

Laugh or Cry?

Collapsed firm’s gemstone found

“Wrekin Construction, based in Shifnal, Shropshire, went into administration last week with the loss of 420 jobs.

Afterwards it emerged the company had a ruby listed as an £11m asset.

Adminstrators Ernst and Young said it had “taken possession of the gemstone reported to be the Gem of Tanzania” which would be kept in secure storage.”

Words fail.

Genius

http://xkcd.com/556/

Meanwhile, in Madagascar…

…some fairly serious things are going on that the Western media is only reporting as an afterthought, if that. Just thought I ought to mention it. It’s been going on for months as well…

List of Shame

I’m a little late with this, mainly because if I’d posted anything on it earlier than today it’d have degenerated into an angry rant (and quite right too). Anyway. The following companies are run by utter bastards:

Amec Building, Amec Construction, Amec Facilities, Amec Ind Div, Amec Process & Energy, Amey Construction, B Sunley & Sons, Balfour Beatty, Balfour Kilpatrick, Ballast (Wiltshire), Bam [now HBC] Construction, Bam [now Edmund] Nuttall,  C B & I, Cleveland Bridge UK, Costain UK, Crown House Technologies [now Carillion/Tarmac Const], Diamond M & E Services, Dudley Bower & Co., Emcor [now Drake & Scull], G Wimpey, Haden Young, Kier, John Mowlem, Laing O’Rourke [now Laing], Lovell Construction UK, Miller Construction, Morgan Ashurst, Morgan Est, Morrison Construction Group, N G Bailey, Shepherd Engineering Services, Sias Building Services, Sir Robert McAlpine, Skanska [now Kvaerner/Trafalgar House], SPIE [now Matthew Hall], Taylor Woodrow Construction, Turriff Construction, Tysons Contractors, Walter Llewellyn & Sons, Whessoe Oil & Gas, Willmott Dixon, Vinci PLC [now Norwest Holst Group].

If you like, you can call this a blacklist. Haha.

Disaster

Mere words alone cannot express quite how awful this is.

Horrific.

A threat to national security

After all, 91 year old historians are very, very dangerous people!

This part is darkly comical though:

Hobsbawm applied to the Security Service in June 2007 for access to his personal files under part II, section 7 of the Data Protection Act. He eventually received a reply from MI5 which said: “We have conducted a search of Security Service records and have determined that the service does not possess any personal data to which you are entitled to have access under section 7 of the act. You should not take this response to imply that the Security Service does or does not hold any personal data about you.”

Good.

Quoth the BBC:

“The government has rejected a request from train companies to make sure fares keep rising, the BBC has learned.”

Prices are way too high as it is (an obvious statement, but then I’m still bitter about a delightful journey on Sunday…). This is only good news in a small way, I guess, but that’s better than…

Insert Stockhausen Joke Here

Tuesday’s Sinfest: http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3087

I do so hope that the helicopter in the third panel is a direct reference… probably not, actually, but the possibility amuses me anyway…

This is not localism

“Tories propose more council power” says the BBC headline. Surprised, I read the article and it quickly became clear that they aren’t proposing anything of the sort.

The main idea seems to be to scrap rate-capping (good) and replace it with local referendums that would allow residents to “veto” council tax increases (beyond awful. If you want to see why this is such a boneheaded idea, have a look at California…). As much as I loathe rate-capping, this Californianisation of local taxation would be infinately worse and could, potentially, cripple local government even further.

Another thing seems to be directly elected Mayors in twelve local authorities (none of which, incidently, are even slightly likely to be run by Tories by the mid-term of a Tory government if the present system is kept). The article doesn’t mention whether or not local people will get a vote on whether they actually want a directly-elected Mayor* which is mildly disturbing, as a switch to a Mayoral system always results in major change (even if it’s only within groups) to the patterns of local politics. If a future Tory government just imposed directly elected Mayors on these cities (and only on these cities) then it would amount to, at best, a series of coups against existing local administrations.

There’s more there, though I’m tired and canna be bothered to look further. But one thing that I did not notice in the article was anything that would actually increase (for real) the powers of local authorities or do something about the poor state of local democracy in this country. Nothing. Nowt. Zilch.

Quite a few things that would make the Daily Mail reading classes happy though.

*My view is that you either have elected Mayors (or elected Leaders or whatever you want to call them) everywhere or only in places where it’s clear that the people actually want an elected Mayor…