Tuesday, 13 September 2011

*OOPS*

The advertisement sought a “regional anaesthetist fellow” to fill a one-year post at the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University NHS Trust, Merseyside.
But under the job description section of the advert, posted on the local NHS job website, a hospital employee had inserted the phrase “the usual rubbish about equal opportunities etc…”.
The gaffe, which was in reference to the NHS' equal opportunities policy, was “swiftly” deleted after hospital chiefs were made aware of the damaging comment. An investigation was under way on Monday.
It is understood it was first spotted by a doctor, who has not been named, after they clicked on the advert with a view to applying for the position.
It was later replaced with the new web page that contained phrase “we are committed to promoting equality and diversity”.
The hospital confirmed on Monday night that an internal inquiry had been launched after the advert was published last Thursday, the date applications closed.
Officials would not say if anyone had yet be identified but added the advert had been uploaded internally.
The advert did not disclose a salary, but the hospital it would have be “negotiable” to candidate awarded the “senior post”.
According to the advert, applicants would be required to work with 37 consultants, 21 registrars and almost a dozen “senior house officers”.
The successful candidate to the post, which had “education approval” from the Royal College of Anaesthetists, would also be expected to help establish a teaching programme and workshops for junior doctors.
Cllr Paula Keaveney, from Liverpool Council, said: “They need to look at the process because if something like this gets through without being checked properly, what else could get through?”
A hospital spokeswoman admitted the advert was unacceptable and “in no way reflects” the wider equal opportunities views of the trust.
“The Trust is conscious of its duty to promote equality and is a Stonewall Diversity Champion employer,” she said in reference to Britain's “good practice employers' forum”.
"The Trust will be conducting an investigation into this incident to ensure that this cannot happen again.” She said the trust was “fully committed” to equal opportunities.
She declined to say if anyone had been identified as the investigation was “still ongoing”. She said that a "small number of applicants" had applied for the position.
Andrew Hough @'The Telegraph'

David Cronenberg's 5 Most Intriguing Films

Policing London: Law and not Orde

It is hard to know if Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was appointed yesterday as the new Metropolitan police commissioner, deserves more congratulations or commiserations. The true answer must be a bit of both. Mr Hogan-Howe is a proven police leader who has risen to the most important job in British policing. But he has done it at a time when the force, in London as elsewhere, faces funding and staffing cuts, is struggling to recover from the phone hacking furore and the riots, and has become a plaything in a constitutional spat between a Conservative home secretary and London mayor, both of whom think the new man must also be their man. As the third Met commissioner to hold the office in less than three years, Mr Hogan-Howe will be uncomfortably aware that what goes up can come down too.
It certainly does not help that, between them, Theresa May and Boris Johnson contrived to overlook the claims of the best qualified candidate for the commissioner's job. Sir Hugh Orde, former Northern Ireland police chief and head of the chiefs' association Acpo, had the strongest CV in the field, as well as the strongest policing profile. He also got the backing of two official panels, one comprising civil servants and police experts and the other members of the Metropolitan police authority, both of which decided he was the best candidate for the job. But the home secretary and the mayor each decided they knew better.
The reason for this is not hard to find, since Sir Hugh had been outspokenly clear that he would have been an independent chief, abiding by the traditional principle that the police and not the politicians take the operational decisions. If nothing else, it is a historic irony that the Conservatives – who spent decades denouncing Labour for seeking to politicise the police – have now taken a succession of Met management decisions whose political character far exceeds anything that Labour home secretaries or mayors have ever attempted. This places Mr Hogan-Howe in an unenviable position. Through no fault of his own, he will be labelled the Tories' placeman. No Met commissioner in modern times has come to the job with less authority or legitimacy.
All this makes the new commissioner's job even more difficult than it would have been anyway — and with the Olympics less than 11 months away. The Conservatives have blundered into the delicate and antiquated architecture of British police governance in a deplorably foolish way. The shambles they have created in London policing is a grim precedent for the politicised system they want to introduce elsewhere. Mr Hogan-Howe has our best wishes, but he has been handed a poisoned chalice.
@'The Guardian'

The Journalist and the Spies

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.
It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.
Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function...
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Dexter Filkins @'The New Yorker'

Northcote Graffiti (5PM 13/09/11)

(Click to enlarge)
Worth enlarging to check what book pages are used!

*cough*

William Gibson: The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)

Genis Carreras: Isms

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Question - Did this guy do the covers for The xx or is he just their biggest fan?

Neko Case 'filled with sperm'

Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit

The use and abuse of excessive media power

Owen Jones
 Miliband asked if it's fair UK workers have worse collective rights than almost anywhere in W Europe. Existential question for Labour

The Meaning of Michael Arrington

Contemplation Drawn From Magnetic Tape Flaking Away

Developing Your Creative Practice: Tips from Brian Eno

(Thanx Stan!)

Tape Generations


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Bank Of America To Cut 30,000 Jobs

Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State

As the Obama Administration continues its efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, this report looks beyond the issues of the day and focuses on what an international peacekeeping force to defend a two-state solution might look like.  Though no individual case study can replicate the challenges of the Middle East, the authors extract lessons learned from other peacekeeping operations - including military and political lessons - that could be applicable.

Editor and contributing author Andrew Exum writes, “There should be no doubt that peacekeeping in a future Palestinian state would be fraught with difficulties, not simply because of the unique history and circumstances of the region but also because the international record of such operations is mixed.  As this project makes clear, policymakers should tread cautiously when considering such an option. Any initiative to broker peace in the Middle East carries risk, but the more risks policymakers and leaders understand beforehand, the better prepared they will be to mitigate and manage them.”

Security for Peace takes an “end-around” approach to the problems of the Levant, imagining the goal – the establishment of a future Palestinian state – and asking what kind of security arrangement would be necessary to serve as a facilitator for such a state.  Chapters in the edited volume include:

• Case studies on Southern Lebanon by CNAS Fellow Andrew Exum and Research Assistant Kyle Flynn, East Timor by Scott Brady, and Kosovo by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weitz;
Military Lessons, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), who draws on experience planning peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Haiti, to illuminate key lessons learned in the field of peace operations since 1945;
Political Lessons, by Ambassador James Dobbins, who draws on personal experience overseeing U.S. post conflict reconstruction operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and research on peacekeeping since the Second World War; and
• An examination of four scenarios, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Marc Lynch, that could precede a possible peacekeeping force.

Authors: Dr. Andrew M. Exum, Scott Brady, Dr. Richard Weitz, Kyle Flynn, Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), James Dobbins, Dr. Marc Lynch
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Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words

Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit. He has been rather famously an aggressive critic of God and his followers, after cutting his sacrilegious teeth on Mother Teresa. He wrote a deadpan argument for trying Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, then was branded an apostate by former friends on the left for vigorously supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He memorably — a lot of what Hitchens has written merits the adverb — shot back that his antiwar critics were “the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”) And he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb.
This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.
Let’s begin with the obvious. He is unfathomably prolific. “Arguably” is a great ingot of a book, more than 780 pages containing 107 essays. Some of them entailed extensive travel in inconvenient places like Afghanistan and Uganda and Iran; those that are more in the way of armchair punditry come from an armchair within reach of a very well-used library. They appeared in various publications during a period in which he also published his best-selling exegesis against religion, “God Is Not Great”; a short and well-­reviewed biography of Thomas Jefferson; a memoir, “Hitch-22”; as well as various debates, reading guides, letters and rebuttals — all done while consuming daily quantities of alcoholic drink that would cripple most people. As Ian Parker noted in his definitive 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens, the man writes as fast as some people read.
The second notable thing about Hitchens is his erudition. He doesn’t always wear it lightly — more than once he remarks, upon pulling out a classic for reconsideration, that he first read the work in question when he was 12 — but it is not just a parlor trick. In the book reviews that make up much of this collection, the most ambitious of them written for The Atlantic, he takes the assigned volume — a new literary biography of Stephen Spender or Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, or a new collection of letters by Philip Larkin or Jessica Mitford — and uses it as pretext to review, with opinionated insights, the entire life and work of the writer in question, often supplementing his prodigious memory by rereading several books. He is a master of the essay that not only spares you the trouble of reading the book under review, but leaves you feeling you have just completed an invigorating graduate seminar...
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Bill Keller @'NY Times'

Illicit Drug Use among Older Adults

Chunky Mark on George Osborne

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Inside Shakespeare and Company


Inside Shakespeare and Co.

♪♫ Aissa 'AJ' Lee - Hickory Wind


http://www.TheTuttlesWithAJLee.com

Could This Kid Be the Next Alison Krauss?

13 years old!!! 

Monday, 12 September 2011

September 11th 1973


Ken Loach
(Thanks tefidancer!)

Ken Loach: ‘Watching young people riot, I felt sad for their alienation’

We refuse to live in fear!

Teach our kids to code

Shortwave Pirate Radio


Shortwave pirate radio broadcasts are some of the most original & entertaining programming one can hear. These stations bring the reality that radio can be spontaneous, creative & unrestrained along with a direct connection to the listener, even if they're across the ocean!
The recordings from the 90's were made with a Grundig Satellit 500/random longwire (94'-96') & a Drake R8A/50ft. sloper (96'-00') on both reel to reel & cassette. Unless noted, the rest of these (2000 & up) were recorded using a Ten Tec RX-340 receiver and various antenna configurations along the way (T2FD/phased Wellbrook loops/EWE & finally a DX Engineering 4 Sq.) by minidisc & currently hardrive media using Audacity recording software through an M-Audio Delta 66 interface via the Ten Tec's DC-Coupled audio tap for SSB or Sherwood Engineering's SE-3 for AM. Also, the majority of these stations were recorded from North East Florida. Some of these I do not have exact dates/times/frequencies, but will add the info later if found.
I record pirates often, and have a large collection which I will continue to add here. Keep in mind the nature of shortwave as conditions can change to varying degrees and some of the recordings are better than others, but always entertaining!
Enjoy! : )
Sealord
sealord40m at gmail dot com
VBR ZIP (11.5GB)
Or individual trax
@'The Archive'
WikiLeaks 
Fench nuclear waste explosion today. The MOX plutonium cables:

Breaking:

Neal Mann 
RT : AFP: Emergency services say risk of leak after French nuclear plant blast

♪♫ John Foxx & The Maths – Interplay (Analogue Video Mix)

Egypt security forces raid unit of Al Jazeera

The Chancellor & The Cocaine

So there was definitely, there was cocaine on that night on the table. George Osborne did take cocaine on that night. And not just on that night. He took it on a regular basis with me, with his friends. There were more witnesses, not just me, that witnessed George Osborne taking cocaine. So it's you know, there are other people out there that know the truth. On that particular night he had taken a line. And I said to George jokingly that when you're prime minister one day I'll have all the dirty goods on you. And he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine.
Transcript/Audio
@'ABC'
Evgeny Morozov
Facial recognition cameras to be installed on Rotterdam trams (this must be Dutch Tolerance 2.0)

The guns of The EDL

EDL leader agrees with Breivik’s opinions, threatens Britain’s entire Muslim population

Kate Bush New LP!

Following the release of her update album Director's Cut earlier this year, we're excited to hear that Kate Bush is to put out a new LP of entirely new material in the autumn. 50 Words For Snow is released on November 21st, and was recorded at the same time as the Director's Cuts sessions. We are told that the seven tracks (listed below) are "set against a background of falling snow." Intriguing.
'Snowflake'
'Lake Tahoe'
'Misty'
'Wildman'
'Snowed In At Wheeler Street'
'50 Words For Snow'
'Among Angels'
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Obama Team Feared Coup If He ProsecutedWar Crimes

Ah humanity! don't you just love it?