Chavez in London

by michaelc Posted on 15 May 2006

Just seen on Channel Four News: a snippet from Chavez’s news conference in London today. A senior journalist asks him why he isn’t seeing Blair, and he replies, you appear to be an experienced journalist, and yet you ask such a stupid question! There was also Tariq Ali saying that the trouble is we haven’t got any politicians like him in Europe. Quite so. Here it’s the politicians’ answers that are stupid.

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Iran surrounded

by michaelc Posted on 7 May 2006

Needlenose says “if you’re wondering why the Ayatollahs are acting a touch, um… cagey about their military plans, then perhaps this handy pictogram of the region with countries where the U.S. has military bases (or has been granted overflight rights by a friendly regime) might help clear things up.

iransurrounded.jpg

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Acting up

by michaelc Posted on 29 April 2006

Back in February, actors starring in Michael Winterbottom’s politically-charged The Road To Guantanamo were held by British police under anti-terrorism legislation on their return from Berlin where the film premiered. One of the actors, Rizwan Ahmed, said he was verbally abused, had his mobile phone was taken away, told he could be kept in police custody for up to 48 hours without access to a lawyer. He also claims a police officer asked him if he planned to star in any more “political films”.   Continue reading →

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News junkie

by michaelc Posted on 28 April 2006

If you’re a news junkie and you’re working at home and so you listen to the news at intervals during the day, you can sometimes see it evolving, from the moment a fresh item first arrives until it’s been properly incorporated into the ideological agenda. This happened last Monday with a press conference by Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, except that they couldn’t quite cope… Continue reading →

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Detroit sold for scrap

by michaelc Posted on 5 April 2006

From The Onion: Detroit Sold For Scrap :

‘Detroit, a former industrial metropolis in southeastern Michigan with a population of just under 1 million, was sold at auction Tuesday to bulk scrap dealers and smelting foundries across the United States. Continue reading →

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An event that didn’t quite happen

by michaelc Posted on 5 April 2006

Been to see ‘Greenwich Degree Zero’, the installation by Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy at the Beaconsfield Gallery in London (and later, Rod tells me, in various other venues), which reconstructs an event in 1894 when a French anarchist was killed when the bomb he was carrying detonated outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Except that in this version, he also succeeds in blowing up the Observatory, which he didn’t achieve in 1894 (assuming that’s what he was aiming to do). Continue reading →

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Memories of an Opinion Poll

by michaelc Posted on 26 March 2006

A bunch of recent television programmes about Harold Wilson brings back to mind an experience I had in 1965, when I had a job between school and university with National Opinion Polls. In the 1964 General Election which brought Wilson to power, his preferred foreign minister, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat. Wilson named him foreign minister nonetheless (unusual, but apparently not unconstitutional) and waited for the first by-election in a safe labour constituency, where he then put Gordon Walker in as the candidate. This turned out to be Leyton in East London in January 1965. NOP sent a whole bunch of us down there for a weekend’s interviewing. Continue reading →

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Not civil war?

by michaelc Posted on 20 March 2006

Iraq: maybe it isn’t civil war, but then it’s anarchy. Absence of law and order. That’s what Bush and Blair have achieved.

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