Archive for November, 2007


How the Taliban treated women

November 30th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

Having just read “The Kite Runner” – the first novel written by Khaled Hosseini [my review here] – I’m now reading “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, the second novel by this master storyteller. Even more than the first book, this work spells out what it has been like to live in Afghanistan in the last few […]

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Does the UK need a new flag?

November 28th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

To be honest, the thought had not occurred to me until I read this article today. I had not appreciated that apparently the Welsh are unhappy with the current flag because it does not include the the cross of St David or the Welsh dragon. Our flag was introduced in 1606 following the accession of […]

Posted in British current affairs | Comments (1)


Is One Laptop per Child stalling?

November 27th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

A month or so ago, I blogged about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project pioneered by Nicholas Negroponte. I pointed that, following support at a critical time from the then President of the Nigeria, Negroponte decided that the laptop would bear that country’s national colours of green and white. But that was then and […]

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“Mind the gap”

November 26th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

As a Londoner who doesn’t drive, I use the London Underground a lot and constantly hear the injunction “Mind the gap”. Today we have the news that the woman whose voice makes these and other announcement for LU has been told she can no longer do work for the organisation. It seems that Emma Clarke […]

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Would you like to be a secret agent?

November 26th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

It is reported that the Secret Intelligence Service (that’s MI6 to you and me) is mounting a recruitment drive this week to attract budding James Bonds, though without the licence to kill. Like its sister agency, the domestic Security Service (or MI5), it wants to “broaden its staff base” to “better reflect the ethnicity of […]

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Who says an individual can’t make a difference?

November 24th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

I live in a leafy part of north-west London where there are lots of trees. As I turn from my street into the main road, there’s a tree that has a black plastic bag fluttering from one of the branches. It’s been there years and years and years. It’s a constant reminder to me of […]

Posted in Environment | Comments (2)


More for Arabs to read

November 23rd, 2007 by Roger Darlington

In an earlier posting, I pointed out that Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years. I was aware at the time that there is a project designed to address this and this week that project announced the first works that it will […]

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How to Net a mate

November 22nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington

“Paul is in his late 30s and has recently come out of a painful divorce. The idea of dating again was, in many respects, an uncomfortable one. He recognised that he had a fair bit of emotional baggage and that meeting someone who understood him and shared his interests was not going to be easy. […]

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Slow justice in Cambodia

November 21st, 2007 by Roger Darlington

In the mid 1980s, I saw the film “The Killing Fields” which graphically depicted the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror in Cambodia in which 1.7 million people died, nearly a quarter of the population. A couple of years ago, in Siem Reap I visited one of the many killing fields and found it a moving […]

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What I love about my iPhone

November 20th, 2007 by Roger Darlington

It’s a week now since I bought my new iPhone. I still have a lot to learn about it, but already it is a sheer joy to own for the following reasons: It is a wonderfully elegant design and very small and light considering what it does. It powers up much quicker than my previous […]

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