Archive for February, 2007
He’s off and running …
February 10th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Thanks to the Internet, I’ve just watched live the declaration of Barack Obama of his candidacy for President of the United States. You can see his eloquent and inspirational speech here. The senator of just two years declared: “I recognise that there is a certain presumptuousness in this, a certain audacity to this announcement. I […]
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The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library
February 10th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library has always been great fun for us movie lovers. There are now 31 pastiches of famous films and the latest is “Borat”. To come … the James Bond movies.
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The cultural spectrum
February 9th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
I spent the day in central London with my sister Silvia who was down from Leicester and, as always, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Some of our time was passed at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Here we started by viewing the Islamic Gallery which houses over 400 objects, including ceramics, textiles, carpets, metalwork, glass and […]
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Forgotten world (65): United Nations
February 9th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Following the failure of the League of Nations formed in 1919, the United Nations was founded in 1945. It had its first meeting in London but its permanent headquarters is in New York. When the UN was founded in 1945, it had 51 members. Today that number has almost quadrupled to 192. The current Secretary-General […]
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Top 20 web sites by time spent there
February 8th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Early this morning, I battled through the London snow to go into the city centre for a seminar at the international law firm Denton Wilde Sapte. The speaker was Professor Paul Maharg of the Glasgow Graduate School of Law. The title of his presentation was “Blogging, podcasting and beyond: from real life to second life”. […]
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Forgotten world (64): Singapore
February 8th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Singapore comprises the main island – linked by a causeway and a bridge to the southern tip of Malaysia – and around 50 smaller islands. Chinese make up more than 75% of the community of 4.4M; Malays and Indians make up much of the remainder; and there are many foreign workers. Once a colonial outpost […]
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Forgotten world (63): Liberia
February 7th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Liberia in west Africa was created in 1847 to settle freed American slaves. Today it is a a country of only 3.3M struggling to recover after a 14-year civil war from 1989-2003 which cost an estimated 200,000 lives and displaced half the country’s population. The UN currently has 15,000 peacekeepers deployed there. Liberia has the […]
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Keeping you posted
February 6th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
This morning, I spent two hours at London’s City Hall – a really impressibe building by Tower Bridge – attending a meeting of the London Assembly’s Health and Public Services Committee. I was there as the Chair of the Greater London Region of the consumer watchdog Postwatch to answer questions – together with four other […]
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (4)
Forgotten World (62): Slovakia
February 6th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
After the disintegration of the Great Moravian Empire in the early 10th century, the Magyars gradually occupied the territory of the present-day Slovakia and, for the next millennium, it was a part of what eventually between the Hungarian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Between 1918-1993, the territory was the eastern third of Czechoslovakia. Following the split from […]
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Should we bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities?
February 5th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
A few weeks ago, I blogged about the fear that Israel was planning an attack on the nuclear facilities of Iran because of a belief that Iran is in the process of constructing nuclear weapons (which, of course, Israel already has). Opposition to the idea of such an attack is growing. Yesterday three former US […]
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