Scrapping private education would place a huge additional burden on the state – leaving it with larger class sizes, or leaving taxpayers with higher taxes – all to fund the education of wealthier kids who the rest of us aren't paying for right now.
I honestly don't know how many girls are trafficked into Britain
Joan Smith: Make no mistake: sex trafficking is real
She is currently romantically involved with Denis MacShane, a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom
Perhaps it is time to ask middle-aged male grandees from the Guardian and Newsnight to step aside and allow a different journalism (?) to examine the problem.
It's a clash between people clinging to antiquated ideas from the 1960s – that men are entitled to sex whenever they want it – and those of us with a modern view of the rights of women and children.
Also, interesting creative choice by Snickers and their agency ABV BBDO, considering the invasiveness of the UK’s actual surveillance network.
In a shockingly egregious use of surveillance, even for nostril-inspecting authorities in England, the government plans on expanding a social experiment that places families with behavioral problems under 24-hour watch—in their own homes! Referred to as “sin bins,” the households are monitored with CCTV cameras to “ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.” About 2,000 families have been subjected to the program so far, but there’s plans to enroll 10x that amount in the next two years. Of course the U.S. has a similar concept whereby dysfunctional families are given the chance to share their indignity with strangers, they’re called “reality shows.”
Big Brother is not only watching you - now he's barking orders too. Britain's first 'talking' CCTV cameras have arrived, publicly berating bad behaviour and shaming offenders into acting more responsibly.
The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: 'We are watching you'.
Frontman Matt revealed there might be a scheduling problem for the band, which could determine whether they take part or not:
"There's an issue. We've got a gig that same day in Ireland, so we need to work out if we can make it or not, that's basically what it depends on."
The band laughed off suggestions of 'doing a Phil Collins' and chartering a jet or helicopter to ensure they can take part:
"Private jets for climate change?! Not sure about that! That seems a bit on the edge to me. That's actually the issue to be honest, so we need to think about it."
Muse And Pulp Unite For Climate Change Campaign
Muse and Pulp are among a number of bands who have come together to help build a visionary new centre to tackle the issue of climate change.
The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.
Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits
"If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said.
"A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don't worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact ... is comparable."
Smoking rate soars up to one third despite ban
A THIRD of the Irish population now smokes, a new survey reveals.
A survey of 4,082 people this summer revealed that 33pc of the Irish population had taken up or continued to smoke.
It is the highest smoking rate recorded here in the past 11 years, according to the EU's 'HELP -- For A Life Without Tobacco' campaign.
The survey, which was conducted between March and September, revealed the largest group of smokers -- 45pc -- is aged between 16 and 30.
Property brokers now estimate prices for pubs have sunk as much as 40pc with Ireland suffering the worst collapse in its modern history.
In Ireland, sales are tumbling as unemployment edges beyond 12pc and taxes rise. That's amplifying a trend toward drinking at home, started by the 2004 ban on smoking in public places.
At least 4,800 pub jobs were cut in the past year, the Vintners Federation of Ireland said in an August report.
PALERMO, Sicily - A Sicilian builder transferred from prison to house arrest tried to get himself locked up again to escape arguments with his wife at home, Italian media reported Thursday.
Gambino went to the police station and asked to be put away again to avoid arguing with his wife ...
Police charged him with violating the conditions of his sentence and made him go home and patch things up with his wife.
Andrew Marr ponders Churchill's modern view. What would have been Winnie's message to the healthists? (link)FRONT PAGE CAMPAIGN
Roy, Lindsay
That this House believes that politicians, retailers, publishers and distributors have a collective responsibility to protect children and young people from displays of sexually graphic material that they are not emotionally equipped to deal with; calls for an urgent review of existing guidelines drawn up between the Home Office and the National Federation of Retail Newsagents; further believes that such a review must consider the availability of sexually graphic publications to children and young people, the positioning of these publications on the shelves of retailers, the potential for concealing these publications in bags and consider the question of age-rating such publications; and further believes that failure to follow the revised guidelines could lead to calls for legislation covering all aspects of the availability and display of sexually graphic material to children and young people throughout the retail and publishing industries.
Banning smoking in your own home was always on the agenda - but the assault begins this year. Official. (link)
UK population 'to rise to 71.6m'
Just over two-thirds of the increase is likely to be related directly or indirectly to migration to the UK.
If the projected increase materialises, the population will have grown at its fastest rate in a century.
But Mr Hain said the BBC had "made one of the biggest mistakes in its proud history".
Mr Hain will also send a message of support to the UAF rally, which is being held in central London.
Hundreds of council workers filled out a health and safety questionnaire about biscuit-related injuries, only to discover it was a hoax.
Four councils were so taken in by the spoof survey they reported having specific policy rules on safe biscuit consumption.
One council even claimed to have supervised tea breaks for safety reasons.
A total of 813 over- cautious council employees clicked through to the online survey and 437 risk-averse workers actually took the time to complete it.
The fictitious 'British Biscuit Advisory Board' was created as part of a £3million marketing drive by Fox's biscuits for its Rocky bar.
Independent brewer Brewdog is using the internet to sell 10,000 shares in the business.
The Scottish brewer has called the online scheme “Equity for Punks” and is offering the shares at £230 each.
It said the £2.3 million raised by selling the shares via equityforpunks.com will provide the funding for “the world’s first carbon neutral eco-brewery” in Aberdeen.
Investors will own part of the brewery and will also receive a lifetime 20% discount on Brewdog beer.
POLICE have delivered a major blow to an Island charity that recycles bicycles to Africa.
Hampshire Constabulary has cut off the supply of unclaimed stolen bikes from its lost property store — saying it feared being sued if someone was hurt using one.
Now, instead of being recycled and used, the bikes are scrapped.
On the Island, Re-cycle has sent a total of 600 bikes to be used as Third World transport lifelines. More than half came from the police lost property department.
The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.
Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic
They spoke to specialists, studied news reports and surveyed police, who reported that 71 women had been "trafficked", whether willingly or not, during 1998.
At the very least, they guessed, there could be another 71 trafficked women who had been missed by police, which would double the total, to 142. At the most, they suggested, the true total might be 20 times higher, at 1,420.
"It can be estimated that the true scale of trafficking may be between two and 20 times that which has been confirmed."
Chaste took the work of Kelly and Regan, brought the estimate forward by two years, stripped out all the caution, headed for the maximum end of the range and declared : "An estimated 1,420 women were trafficked into the UK in 2000 for the purposes of constrained prostitution."
Three years after the Kelly/Regan work was published, in 2003, a second team of researchers was commissioned by the Home Office to tackle the same area. They, too, were forced to make a set of highly speculative assumptions: that every single foreign woman in the "walk-up" flats in Soho had been smuggled into the country and forced to work as a prostitute; that the same was true of 75% of foreign women in other flats around the UK and of 10% of foreign women working for escort agencies. Crunching these percentages into estimates of the number of foreign women in the various forms of sex work, they came up with an estimate of 3,812 women working against their will in the UK sex trade.
The researchers ringed this figure with warnings. The data, they said, was "very poor" ... [and] "should be regarded as an upper bound".
No chance. In June 2006, before the research had even been published, the then Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ... [declared] to an inquiry into sex trafficking by the Commons joint committee on human rights: "There are an estimated 4,000 women victims."
The Salvation Army went further: "The Home Office estimated that in 2003 ... there were at least 4,000 trafficked women residing in the UK. This figure is believed to be a massive underestimation of the problem."
In a debate in the Commons in November 2007, [Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister Denis] MacShane announced that "according to Home Office estimates, 25,000 sex slaves currently work in the massage parlours and brothels of Britain."
There is simply no Home Office source for that figure, although it has been reproduced repeatedly in media stories.
Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution
Repeatedly, prostitutes groups have argued that [Labour anti-trafficking legislation] is as wrong as the trafficking estimates on which it is based, and that it will aggravate every form of jeopardy which they face in their work, whether by encouraging them to work alone in an attempt to show that they are free of control or by pressurising them to have sex without condoms to hold on to worried customers.
How many people will spend their lives worse off because of your grandstanding?
I hope you all rot, painfully, to death. And that your children burn you in effigy every day thereafter.
A revaluation of business rates from next April is set to hit the sites of car boot sales, including pub car parks, ministers confirmed.
Barbara Follett, the Communities Minister, confirmed the plans in a written answer to shadow communities secretary Caroline Spelman, saying: ''Where a property is used entirely, or on occasion, as a car boot sale site, its rateable value for the 2010 revaluation should reflect any rental enhancement attributable to that use.''
Mrs Spelman accused Gordon Brown of a ''tax assault'' on those who wanted to use car boot sales to kit out their homes during the recession.
Homebuyers could be forced to provide detailed information about the amount of money they spend on alcohol each month to qualify for a new mortgage under a new clampdown on reckless lending.
In a sweeping review of the mortgage market published today, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said lenders needed to be far more rigorous about their financial checks of potential borrowers.
It said lenders should delve deeper into homebuyers' personal spending including the amount they spend on alcohol and tobacco.
But as the bill draws nearer to becoming law, there are growing concerns about the new powers it will devolve to Jobcentre staff. The legislation would allow them to ask benefit claimants searching questions about their drug or alcohol use. Those suspected of having a dependency or of misusing drugs will then be asked to undergo an assessment and, if they refuse, face having their benefits withdrawn for a maximum of 26 weeks.
And this is democracy? When the establishment can bankrupt political parties because they're losing the political arguments?
BNP debate 'illegal', warns Hain
Mr Hain wrote: "If you do not review the decision you may run the very serious risk of legal challenge in addition to the moral objections that I make.
In my view, your approach is unreasonable, irrational and unlawful."
The Financial Services Authority will make banks liable for loans if they do not check customers can afford them.
It is expected to ban self-certified mortgages, in which customers do not have to prove their income.
A farmer has been fined £150 for failing to 'meet the psychological needs' of a cow because his barn was too dark.
A study proving Jewish and Islamic methods of slaughtering animals are painful has led to renewed calls for a ban in Britain
UK law requires that all livestock be stunned prior to slaughter – with the exception of those animals intended for consumption by members of certain religions. Islamic halal and Jewish kashrut law require that animals are slaughtered by having their throat cut – a relatively slow means of death.
Practitioners of ritual slaughter say the animal must be alive to facilitate the draining of blood – and that throat slitting is humane.
But the new research suggests otherwise.
Adam Rutherford, an editor of Nature, wrote on the Guardian website: "It suggests that the anachronism of slaughter without stunning has no place in the modern world and should be outlawed. This special indulgence to religious practices should be replaced with the evidence-based approaches to which the rest of us are subject."
Some European countries, such as Sweden, require all animals to be stunned before slaughter with no exception for religions. But such a ban in Britain would be hugely controversial – and would draw inevitable comparisons with the ban on kashrut enacted by Nazi Germany in 1933**.
Sometime soon, we'll see a report showing that the social costs of skiing are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It wouldn't be hard to produce a number that large. First, show frequent skiers are more likely to have accidents than recreational skiers.
Then, make the critical assumption that nobody could ever rationally decide to take risks - health is all that matters. Frequent skiers then are by definition irrational, and irrational people enjoy no benefits from their ski outings, no matter how happy they appear.
We've seen a lot of cost measures of this sort. Tobacco, fatty foods, gambling - just about anything fun seems to cost "society" more than a billion dollars.
But, like my hypothetical report on the costs of skiing, these reports rely heavily on what I'll call a "healthist" assumption about how we should live our lives.
Any time we make a decision that lets us enjoy a bit of fun but with some risk to our health, that decision is considered irrational and cannot generate any real enjoyment.
Consequently, benefits are either assumed equal to zero or set to an arbitrarily low level.
If health and safety were our only goal, the world would look very different. We would all buy cars made of padded foam rubber and drive very slowly. That we don't is strong evidence that we have pluralistic sets of values - we are not monomaniacal healthists in our daily lives.
For every skier who dies in an avalanche, tens of thousands of others took no fewer risks but enjoyed a great time out on the slopes. Their enjoyment ought to count for something.
And, for every drinker who dies in an accident that could have been avoided were he sober, there are countless others who simply enjoyed a good night out.
Where a healthist report tallies the social costs for the unlucky few, rational policy requires putting weight on the benefits as well.
Whatever all those [national newspaper] correspondents do all day, it clearly doesn't involve basic factchecking.
Bans on smoking in restaurants and bars reduces the risk of heart attacks among non smokers, according to hard hitting report. The research, by the U.S. Institute of Medicine reviewed 11 key studies of smoking bans in Scotland, Italy, the U.S and Canada.
In Helena, Montana, for example, they recorded 16 per cent fewer heart attack hospitalisations in the six months after its ban went into effect. Nearby areas that had no smoking ban saw heart attacks rise over the same period.
More dramatically, heart attack hospitalisations dropped 41 per cent in the three years after Pueblo, Colorado, banned workplace smoking.
According to some experts, third-hand smoke, as it is known, is as dangerous to health as the fumes billowing directly from a pipe or cigarette, particularly for babies and children.
A recent report in America has warned that even if you don't smoke in front of your family, you might be putting them at risk of cancer or delaying the development of their brain, thanks to polluting their environment with a lingering chemical cloud.
The research behind this story did not actually assess the dangers of “third-hand” smoke, but instead surveyed people’s beliefs about these dangers, and whether this was related to the likelihood of banning smoking in their own homes.
From 'flamey' Amy Winehouse to Russell Brand the banker, documentary team's fake celebrity stories fooled editors
But - with observers beginning to fear the worst - Falcon was eventually found hiding in a box in his parents' attic, unaware of the extraordinary state-wide chase he had caused. He may, perhaps, be in a little trouble with his parents.
{phone rings}
Kid {whispering}: Hello
Caller: Hi young man, can I talk to your father please?
Kid {whispering}: No, he's busy
Caller: OK, your mother, then?
Kid {whispering}: No, she's busy
Caller: Is there anyone else there I can talk to?
Kid {whispering}: A policeman.
Caller: Great, can you let me talk to him?
Kid {whispering}: No, he's busy.
Caller: OK. Anyone else there?
Kid {whispering}: The fire brigade
Caller: There are a lot of people in your house. What on earth are they all busy doing?
Kid {whispering}: Looking for me.
I wandered up to a pub in the shadow of the motherfucker of all parliaments last night.Everyone has heard of the nanny state. Many object to its pervasive influence in our daily lives, some reluctantly conclude that nanny really has our best interests at heart, while others work feverishly to extend nanny's influence.
That was then, this is now. Nanny has been dismissed, sent packing. Nanny has been replaced by the bully.
Unlike nanny, the bully state is not content to allow people to enjoy their hard-fought liberties while pointing out the choices it would prefer us to make. Today, the state goes to increasing lengths to enter into our private domain. Our homes are no longer our castles as the state seeks to dictate our behaviour with intimidation and threats, backed up by severe penalties, the threat of a criminal record, or the loss of one's livelihood.
Brian Monteith, a former member of the Scottish parliament, reveals how the nanny state came to be and why, dissatisfied with our stubborn resistance to her pleas to change our behaviour, the bully state has been brought in to enforce a stricter code of conduct.
Despite this, Monteith remains optimistic, explaining how we can beat the bullies and remain free to enjoy our liberties.
WHO launches worldwide war on booze
HUMANITY's relationship with alcohol has never been easy. Now it is about to undergo as great a change as our attitude to tobacco, which has seen smoking plummet from the height of cool to the lowest of unpleasant habits.
That at least is the hope of the World Health Organization, which, between now and January, will be honing its draft of the first global strategy on reducing health damage from alcohol abuse, the fifth leading cause of premature death and disability worldwide.
Unveiled last week in Geneva, Switzerland, the document is the culmination of talks between representatives from the WHO's 193 member states. "It is a landmark document," says Peter Anderson, a health consultant and adviser on alcohol to the WHO and the European Union.
Sally Casswell of Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand, who helped produce the WHO document says a focus on passive drinking is key to winning public acceptance for more stringent alcohol legislation. "It challenges the neoliberal ideology which promotes the drinker's freedom to choose his or her own behaviour," she says.
Others are sceptical of the [drinks] industry's contribution to the debate. Robin Room of the University of Melbourne, Australia, who studies the legislation on recreational drugs, fears that some parts of the WHO document may already have been watered down to appease the industry, especially those seeking to restrict marketing.
There are so many nails in Labour's coffin now, there's barely room for the corpse.
The removal of cigarettes from public display is a step closer after MPs said vending machines should be banned and shops should keep stocks out of sight.
"If the vote on Monday goes against newsagents - our 18,000 members - then they will vote with their feet. This will be very bad news for Gordon Brown."
ACS Chief Executive James Lowman said: “The Minister has proposed regulations that are the most inflexible of their type anywhere in the world. It makes a mockery of the repeated reassurances that Ministers have made to Parliament and businesses that they will take a light touch approach to compliance.”
The removal of cigarettes from public display is a step closer after MPs said vending machines should be banned and shops should keep stocks out of sight.
The vending machine amendment to the government's Health Bill was passed by the Commons without going to a vote.
"Making a mistake is not a defence. If you are deemed to be guilty of benefit fraud, you may be prosecuted"
"Although insurers and DVLA send out reminders, these may of course be delayed in the post and it remains your responsibility to check your existing tax disc and insurance certificate to ensure that you renew them in good time. A postal strike will not be accepted as an excuse for failing to renew either."
PRAGUE -- The Czech government said Monday it is ready to discuss President Vaclav Klaus's demand for a special clause in the Lisbon treaty with other European Union governments and officials, but asked him to guarantee he won't raise any new conditions for his approval of the document.
Last week, Mr. Klaus, the last hold-out among European leaders and an outspoken critic of the Lisbon Treaty, said he would only sign the treaty if the Czech Republic gets a permanent opt-out from the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
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