Gurkha vote success

Alix Mortimer has the story here. The success of Nick Clegg's motion does not in itself guarantee a U-turn by the government, but there are signs of a relaxation of their hard line, albeit on a case-by-case basis. It seems that Gurkhas and their supporters will succeed if they keep the pressure up, but only if they do so.

There was one sickening note: David Cameron posing with Joanna Lumley for the evening television news as if it had been the Conservatives who had driven the campaign for Gurkha justice in the House of Commons. Nor (so far) has there been an acknowledgment by the Tories that they did nothing while they were in office.

Let us also remember that, before Nick Clegg, Paddy Ashdown did much to raise awareness in this area.

Craig Murray's evidence to Human Rights Committee

Jonathan Calder has a link to the session which came about largely as a result of public pressure.

It surely is a coincidence, but you will see from the official clip that proceedings took place in The Thatcher Room.

Opening up family courts

There is a podcast of today's Woman's Hour (available for seven days) which includes a lively discussion of the benefits or otherwise of allowing reporters (under restrictions) into England & Wales family courts from this week on, as well as of the wisdom of removing some of those restrictions. Camilla Cavendish, who has been mentioned here before, is on the side of more reporting. Caroline Little (no relation) of the Association of Lawyers for Children takes the opposite view.

The world's most popular Flickr images

A quartet from Cornell University has analysed
the Flickr database. Among their findings:

• New York City is the world's most photographed city with more than 12 million of the photos taken there.
• The top seven most photographed landmarks are the Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, the Tate Modern Gallery, Big Ben, Notre Dame, the London Eye, and the Empire State Building.
• The top 10 most photographed cities are New York, London, San Francisco, Paris, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Seattle, Rome and Amsterdam.

Thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald for the reference. The SMH also draws attention to the prominent place (28th) occupied by the Apple Store in New York City, higher than St Paul's.

For all their iconic status, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House do not figure in the top twenty-five images.

The Bible: an appeal to internet geeks

It has been pointed out in the Linux conference on Cix that the Bible has been rewritten in many different languages (including Klingon and the language of the London streets).

But has anyone rewritten it as a set of RFCs?

Asthma in the limelight

I try to avoid duplicating posts in the various blogs I contribute to, but I make no apologies for repeating here what I have already published on my Cadoxton councillor site:

Asthma UK starts nine days of green-themed fundraising on Friday. I’m delighted to see that the brilliant Cerys Matthews is adding her support to the campaign with the words: “It’s not hard to imagine how very frightening it is to be unable to breathe. For younger children the feeling must be even more scary as it’s hard to understand why you can’t breathe and panic can exacerbate the situation so it’s a vicious circle. I am supporting Asthma UK’s Putting Asthma in the Limelight campaign to encourage children who suffer from asthma to get to know how best to deal with their illness and hopefully to help them avoid having attacks in the future.”

Stop me if you've heard this cricket story

Tidying up old CIX messages, I came across this quote from the 1990s:

During a Nat West final at Lord's, a large Home Counties matron bore down on the Compton Bar in search of her errant husband long after the lunch interval was over.

"Is this the Boycott Bar?" she demanded

"There is no Boycott Bar", replied the waitress. "There's the Compton Bar, the Cricketers..."

"I tell you he's in here somewhere. And, believe me young lady, you may call it what you choose, but it's the Boycott Bar. Because once the bugger's in, no-one can get him out."

The Vince Cable fan club extends to the Telegraph

Mary Riddell of the Daily Telegraph is the latest journalist to be bowled over by Vince Cable. No doubt this will further infuriate Guido Fawkes who is (a) dismissive of Vince; (b) frequently rails against the Telegraph for departing from its historic Toryism.

Gordon Brown is not a member of the fan club, either. In his speech to the Labour faithful in Swansea today, he again denied that there was any warning that there was an economic crisis to come. Yet if he cares to look in Hansard for 13th November 2003, Column 398, he will find one of many warnings by Vince Cable:

"On the housing market, is not the brutal truth that with investment, exports and manufacturing output stagnating or falling, the growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt, which is secured, if at all, against house prices that the Bank of England describes as well above equilibrium level? If the Bank of England is correct in its expectations of a market correction and rising interest rates, what action will the Chancellor take on the problem of consumer debt, which is rapidly rising, with 8 million annual visits from the bailiff?"

Three years later, economist and campaigner Ann Pettifor issued a warning about the crash to come in "The Coming First World Debt Crisis".

And if he did not listen to opposition politicians or lobbyists, he and his staff at HM Treasury should have been reading the Financial Times, where both Gillian Tett, its capital markets editor, and the paper's influential Lex column, "warned long in advance about the serious imbalances in the financial system" (James Robinson, The Guardian) and their implications for world economics.