Wettest April for a century
April 30th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
It’s the last day of April and the news is now confirmed that in Britain it has been the wettest April for over a century with some areas receiving three times the normal rainfall.
Now, on 1 April, I started a four-year contract with South East Water to chair the company’s Customer Challenge Group [further information here] and at the same time South East Water and six other companies issued drought orders.
I hesitate to claim credit for the heavy rainfall and the relief this has given to the water companies, but some of my friends say that there is no such thing as coincidence.
Posted in Environment, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
And the rich get even richer …
April 30th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
.. . while the poor get even poorer – and the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne insists that we’re all in this together.
As explained here, the lastest Sunday Times Rich List shows that the wealthiest 1,000 people in the UK are now worth £414 billion which is a 4.7% increase on last year.
Does it matter if our society experiences ever wider inequalities in income and wealth? “The Spirit Level” argues that all of us suffer the consequences. See my review here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
The hidden gulag of North Korea
April 29th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
“There may be as many as 200,000 North Koreans locked away on political grounds behind barbed wire and subject to extreme cruelty and brutality. Many are “not expected to survive,” according to the State Department’s 2010 human rights report, in particular those incarcerated in the kwan-li-so (political penal labor colonies). Others are held in long-term prison-labor penitentiaries or camps, shorter-term detention facilities, mobile labor brigades and interrogation detention facilities.
The vast majority are arbitrarily arrested with no reference to any judicial procedure and for “offenses” that are not punishable in most countries, namely listening to a foreign radio broadcast, holding a Protestant religious service, watching a South Korean DVD, leaving dust on Kim Il-sung’s picture, exiting the country without permission, expressing critical remarks about government policies, or having a father or grandfather who was a landowner or defected to South Korea or worked for the Japanese, thereby placing the family in a “hostile” category under North Korea’s social classification or songbun system.
Starvation food rations, forced labor, routine beatings, systematic torture and executions put the North Korean camps in the ranks of history’s worst prisons for political offenders. Originally modeled on the Soviet gulag, the North Korean camps have developed distinctive features of their own for which no terminology has yet been devised.
Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents, in order to isolate them from society and punish them because of their relationship to family members accused of political crimes. Rooting out “class enemies for three generations” was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps. An equally horrifying practice distinctive to North Korea
is forced abortion regularly carried out and in the most brutal manner on women prisoners who illegally crossed the border into China, became pregnant by Chinese men and were forcibly repatri- ated to North Korea. In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born. Still another point of departure in North Korea is that all the residents of the kwan-li-so are denied any correspondence, visits or life saving parcels from family and friends. They are totally incommunicado.
Estimates of the numbers who have died in the camps over the past 40 years have run well over one hundred thousand. The existence of the political prison camps, however, is soundly denied by North Korean officials.”
This an extract from the preface to a new, second edition of a study called “The Hidden Gulag” published by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
A review of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”
April 29th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
Thanks to the services of Lovefilm, I have just managed to catch up with the classic movie “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” which was made as long ago as 1961. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How many friends do you have?
April 27th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
It depends on what one means by friends, right? A recent article in the “New Scientist” magazine suggested that one could view our relationships as a series of concentric circles with our closest friends in the innermost circle and our loosest contacts in the outermost circle. Interestingly it is propsed that, as one moves from one circle outwards to the next, the scaling ratio is about three, each total containing members of the layers within.
The model in the article looks like this:
- Intimates 5
- Best friends 15
- Good friends 50
- Friends 150
- Acquaintances 500
- People I recognise 1500
The friends figure is a particuarly interesting one. It is sometimes called Dunbar’s number. This is the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship. The concept was proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
I must say that this analysis accords quite well with my own experience. My intimate friends are about half a dozen and, if I check the contact details on my iPhone, I find that the number today comes to 1,549.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (2)
Royal Society report on “People And The Planet”
April 26th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
This week, the Royal Society has published an important new report entitled “People And The Planet” The report argues that rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption, present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing and to the natural environment. It gives an overview of how global population and consumption are linked, and the implications for a finite planet.
The key recommendations include:
- The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
- The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
- Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
- Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.
You can access the full report here.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
The world of the Special Adviser
April 25th, 2012 by Roger Darlington
Special Advisers – or SpAds as they are known in Whitehall and Westminster – are in the news this week because of the publication of e-mails from the advisers to Cabinet ministers Jeremy Hunt and Vince Cable concerning the News Corporation bid for BSkyB and the resignation of Hunt’s adviser Adam Smith.
During the Wilson/Callaghan administrations of the 1970s, I was a Special Adviser in the Northern Ireland Office and the Home Office. In the Blair/Brown governments of the 1990s/2000s, my son was an adviser in the Department for Education & Skills and the Department for International Development and my daughter-in-law held the same role in the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills and the Treasury.
So I know a bit about the role of the SpAds and generally such advisers perform a useful role in providing political advice and support to Cabinet ministers to complement the advice offered by the neutral civil service. But Smith clearly abused the position and had to go. Knowing the work of SpAds as I do, it is hard to imagine that Hunt was totally unaware of his adviser’s activity and therefore Hunt’s own position is now very precarious.
There was an interesting book on Special Advisers called “People Who Live In The Dark” which referenced me and you can read my review here.
Posted in British current affairs, My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
With friends like these …
April 23rd, 2012 by Roger Darlington
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
Nicholas Winton and the Czech kindertransport
April 23rd, 2012 by Roger Darlington
If you don’t know the story of how a British stockbroker called Nicholas Winton saved the lives of 669 Czech Jewish children at the start of the Second World War through an operation known as the kindertransport, you will end it amazing. Check it out here.
The story was told in the film *Into The Arms Of Strangers” [my review here] and it is now the heart of novel called “Far To Go” [my review here].
Posted in Cultural issues, History | Comments (0)
Understanding the French political system
April 22nd, 2012 by Roger Darlington
Today sees the first stage in the French presidential election. If you would like to understand a little more about the French political system, you will find my short guide here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)