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| US and Russia Close to an Arms Control Agreement Obama and Medvedev talk at UN climate conference in Copenhagen www1.voanews.com |
'Our turn now' Gorkha campaign for India state gathers pace news.bbc.co.uk |
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s YouTube. Facebook. The Kindle. Now a tablet. New technology is creating new generation gaps. feeds.nytimes.com |
Michael White's diary It's not the Tories' Etonians who are their biggest electoral liability, but Ukip's EtoniansWhile Ukip's Nigel Farage campaigns to ban the burka from Buckingham in his drive to unseat Commons Speaker John Bercow before Tory MPs do, his successor as party leader is far more ambitious. Ukip's task at the election is "to stop the Conservative party winning as many seats as possible", rackety Etonian Lord Pearson of Rannoch (pictured) boasts to fellow-peers and MPs. Up to 50, he predicts. Undermining mainstream votes less noisily is the BNP. Some MPs, Labour's Janet Anderson and Tory Nadine Dorries for instance, have belatedly realised that recent complaints about their expenses, made to standards commissioner John Lyon, were lodged by a retired BNP copper. Michael Barnbrook claims to have started the whole expenses saga and in 2005 stood against Derek Conway, getting 2,015 votes for Ukip. He quit the party over its abuses of (yes) expenses.Would Wogan have done it? During peripatetic pork pie banter between Radio 2's newly enthroned breakfast show chef Chris Evans and his colleague Ken Bruce, the ginger funster appeared to suggest that the missing pie had been scoffed by a guest, Rabbi Pete Tobias of the Liberal Synagogue in Elstree. "Well, he is a Liberal rabbi,'' quipped Bruce. Investigative reporters from the Jewish Chronicle have established that Rabbi Pete ate only home-made hummus. The recipe is still on the programme's website, Terry.A gap has opened in the lives of art lovers in downtown Los Angeles, where a gallery which rents out pictures has closed pending a move to new premises. It claims to be run by Phyllis Stein.The latest Police Review magazine again debates how best to identify over-zealous police officers (not Michael Barnbrook, obviously) who cover their number before misbehaving. It stirred faint memories for Review reader John Kenny, who first proposed they wear name badges in a letter published by the mag in July 1968. Apparently, officers with silly names fear they might be "ridiculed by the public", he reveals. Get over it, PC Constable.Can the Amanda Platell who mocked David Cameron's airbrushed campaign poster (he looked like "a Bible belt televangelist with his wig on back to front") in Saturday's Mail be the same A Platell who underwent the Derma Roller facial treatment (needle-sharp spikes pushed into the skin) in ÂFriday's paper? She can and was also William Hague's image masseur when Billy boy bombed his leadership ambitions by appearing in a baseball cap.One of many crimes levelled against Tony Blair and his acolytes was that they briefed against lovable Mo Mowlam and jealously ruined her career. Neil McKay's new Channel 4 film, tells a different story: how Mo deceived them all about the seriousness of her illness in order to become Northern Ireland secretary in 1997, forcing her doctor, Mark Glaser, into complicity. Blair was actually quite indulgent, but all sorts of people who should have known better went along with the Âcomplaints of an unwell woman that she was being persecuted. Glaser, who felt under great pressure (what if a Âmiscalculation in Belfast led to an Âatrocity?) was greatly relieved when she was moved in 1999. "The day she left I had a stiff drink."David Cameron, who wants to deny state funds to aspiring teachers who only get third class honours degrees, keeps a couple of volumes of Evelyn Waugh on the bookshelf by his desk in his Westminster office, perhaps to remind himself that high seriousness can be combined with style and wit. But Waugh left Oxford in 1924 without a degree when he was heading for a third. What did he do? Teach in Wales. Result: the brilliant Decline and Fall.Showbiz historian David Starkey has coined the OTT phrase "gangland bling" to describe the brilliant Anglo-Saxon gold find in Staffordshire for which West Midlands patriots are trying to raise £3.3m to keep in the region. A scary precedent is Mentmore. An impoverished Labour government was offered the great house for £2m and said no. The contents alone fetched £6m.Michael Whiteguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Hugh Muir's diary He was the very man to fix Broken Britain• The fight to fix Broken Britain goes on, but amid the skirmishes there are more headaches for the east London Tories as a one-time kingpin of the party in Redbridge and former parliamentary candidate goes to jail for seeking a £10,000 bribe to back a planning application. No one knew that, as Suresh Kumar walked among the people – proudly raising funds, he said, for the local party – he was also selling the benefit of his office. Just as he didn't realise that, as he discussed such a transaction with a fellow he had never met, he was in fact talking to the News of the World's "fake sheik" Mazher Mahmood. He was suspended from the local party in December 2004, officially replaced as chairman in March 2005 and quit altogether soon afterwards. So isn't it unlucky that it has all come to an Âembarrassing head now, so soon after the fall of Alby Tebbutt, until recently the chair of nearby Romford Conservatives. He was thrown out of the party having recorded his third criminal conviction. Still, the battle to fix Britain goes on without them. We shall fight and we shall win.• More turmoil predicted amongst the elite corps of our theatre critics as they digest the news that Libby Purves, star of Radio 4's Midweek and the Times comment pages, will soon replace the venerable Benedict Nightingale. Impossible job, many are saying. How do you replace a legend? And yet more evidence that the experienced specialists are losing out to the multi-taskers, goes the complaint. Quentin Letts variously writes sketches and Âcomment and theatre reviews for the Daily Mail. And as for Tim Walker, the Sunday Telegraph's reviewer and the man the veteran critics really love to hate, doesn't he also write the ÂTelegraph's Mandrake column during the week? It's an ill wind gusting through the stalls and exiting stage left, they say. An ill wind.• But not one to be compared with that which blew the ÂEnglish Defence League into Stoke-on-Trent at the weekend. The result for the Potteries, 17 arrests and six injured police officers. And didn't the same malign group of fellows recently turn their attention to Weston-Super-Mare hoping to orchestrate polite opposition to an Islamic educational centre, primarily for children. The result in that case, 157 complaints, the vast majority of which were disregarded by planners because they were "of a racial nature" or "from anonymous and fictitious names and addresses". Another day, another triumph.• With the release of the acclaimed biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, there is much re-evaluation of Ian Dury's contribution to life and music. There is much admiration of how he managed to thrive, indeed to innovate, troubled as he was by adversity. Broadcaster and comedian Phill Jupitus, tells the The Word magazine of his encounter with the singer. "It became more of a chat than a straight interview, but I knew I had to broach the subject of his disability," he says. "So I'm sitting there with my 'earnest' head on – 'Obviously, Ian, with your disability shaping your life, do you think that you missed anything through having polio?' He ruminated for a bit. 'I missed a couple of buses…'". There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards, was a Dury classic. Autobiographical, clearly.• And finally, he may be under fire here for giving his fatherly endorsement to a church school, but when foreign secretary David Miliband (pictured left) speaks, the world still listens. His writ, and consequently that of Britain, runs large, especially in the Balkans. For even now they speak in Serbia of his visit a couple of months ago when, well-briefed and flanked by the foreign minister Vuk Jeremic, he made nice with the locals in Belgrade. "I come to Serbia as a proud friend of Kosovo, sorry, of Serbia," is how they recall his opening remarks. He travels extensively, the foreign secretary. Perhaps too much. Sometimes it shows.Hugh Muirguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |