Over on Comment is Free I’ve got a piece about commuting inspired by a iPod advert showing a person “spirited away” by their music – their clothes sitting empty on a crowded train. It reminded me of the childhood incantation “don’t go wishing your life away”…
And yes I do really recommend the Ghanaian peanut chicken, should you have a chance to sample it!
At home with the flu, feeling blah, but reading some interesting stuff so I don’t sleep the day away and then wake the night away…
The report also says that strong economic growth in China and India means they are often wrongly labelled as the main culprits. While India has 16.8% of the world’s population it emits just 4.1% of the world’s carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, China is the world’s leader in solar power.
A poll of 2,000 adults and 350 children published today found that 80 per cent of 10 to 15-year-olds were “quite happy†or “very happy†with their family life. The same proportion said that things were “just as good†or “better†since the separation.
Less than a third of the children (28 per cent) longed for their parents to get back together. An “end to the arguments†was cited as the greatest benefit of divorce by far.
These include the 306-metre-high “Shard of Glass” tower planned for London Bridge, which will be Britain’s tallest building. Although plans for a second tower, the 200-metre Minerva building, have been scaled down, two other proposed buildings, a 324-metre high Bishopsgate tower and a 209-metre building at 20 Fenchurch Street, have also raised alarm at Unesco.
Prof Schulze-Makuch says that, given the cold dry conditions of Mars, life could have evolved with the internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide.
The Viking experiments of the 1970s would not have noticed alien hydrogen peroxide-based life and would have killed it by drowning and overheating the microbes, he claimed.
A small, traditionally poor area, the Cinque Terre is being transformed, apparently against the odds.
…so successful is it becoming, that in recent years the residents of Riomaggiore and the other hamlets strung out along the Ligurian coast have been enjoying a lifestyle their predecessors could only have dreamed of.
Courtesy of the National Park, they now receive free natural medicine, massage treatments and health screenings.
There is a free shopping service for elderly residents and subsidised child care for working parents. Cars are banned – replaced by electric buses.
It has become a farming utopia; a place where tourists and others from outside are in the front line of conservation.
… but also on wildlife:
The Preservation of Grain Act, passed in 1532 by Henry VIII and strengthened by Elizabeth I in 1566, made it compulsory for every man, woman and child to kill as many creatures as possible that appeared on an official list of ‘vermin’. ‘Paradoxically, many of these creatures are today highly valued and given the full protection of the law,’ said Lovegrove.
The act was drawn up to counter food shortages and spread of disease caused by a series of bad harvests and a sharp rise in population. Henry VIII put a bounty on each creature, ranging from a penny for the head of a kite or a raven to 12 pence for a badger or a fox. These were considerable sums when the average agricultural wage was around four pence a day.
Still no guarantees, but at least Azanin Fatehi, the 19-year-old Iranian sentenced to hang for defending herself against a would-be rapist, has a new trial, after an international outcry. But what this exposes about Iranian law is horrific.
…232,492 signatures have been delivered to the Iranian government, and a trust fund set up which has enabled Ms Fatehi to have access to one of the best lawyers in the country. The young woman’s sentence was stayed in June last year and a retrial ordered. The first stage of this was held last August, and the case continues on Wednesday. If it upholds the first verdict, it will need to be approved formally by Iran’s Supreme Court.
Under Iranian law, self-defence is a valid defence in a murder trial, but its application depends largely on the circumstances. Negar Azmudeh, a Canadian lawyer who has previously spoken out on Ms Fatehi’s case, said that the fact that she and her niece were in a park in the evening may have some bearing on whether the defence is considered valid.
Ms Azmudeh cited a case where a woman was prosecuted for injuring her boss as he tried to rape her at work: “Because she had showed up at work on a Friday [a weekend day in Iran] they could not claim ‘self-defence’ because her presence at the office on a Friday when she knew the boss was there constituted her ‘invitation’ to be raped.
Just been reading a history of Bridewell, the original “house of correction” in London. Arguably the first such attempt to “correct” prisoners, and also perhaps the only long-time such institution to be housed in an honest-to-goodness palace. (Royalty having found the site at the meeting of the Fleet and the Thames rather too smelly.)
The first surviving record of an inmate is that of “a certain woman named Morton” who was charged on December 16 1556 with having abandoned her child in the streets of Southwark. She was whipped at Bridewell, then pilloried at Cheapside, with a paper on her head explaining her “crime”.
1610 George and Agnes Sturton were living in a single room in the parish of St Martin, Ludgate Hill when a man called and asked to be taken in as a lodger. Plague sores had already broken out on his body, and he offered them 30 shillings if they would hide him, and save him from the pest house. They agreed, but he died, and they locked his body in their room and fled. Neighbours, however, broke down their door and sent for the constable. Punishment: whipping.
1639 – Elizabeth Pynfould, alias Squire … petitioned the council. She had been a prisoners for seven years in Bridewell, having been committed by a Council warrant, she knew not why, unless it was for petitioning the Lords to cause her husband to allow her means of livelihood. She prayed for liberty, and to be supplied with means.
W.G. Hinkle, A History of Bridewell Prison, 1553-1700, Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. (Not unfortunately very well organised, and heavily reliant on secondary sources.)
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