Ummm:
In a Sunday newspaper interview, Sufiah said she did not see her work as a prostitute as sordid. She said that she turned to escorting after reading Belle de Jour\’s Diary of a London Call Girl, which was made into a television drama starring Billie Piper.
So this blogging thing does work then? People do take note, do copy our actions?
Excellent news, eh? This blog must have created any number of grumpy middle aged gits then.
Seems he had all the necessary attributes to be Mayor of London then:
She gave birth to Mr Livingstone\’s son, who is now 15, at the Royal Free Hospital in north west London, in November 1992.
Another of Mr Livingstone\’s lovers had given birth to his daughter at the same hospital two months earlier, just over two years after she gave birth to his first daughter.
All this time the maverick politician was in a long-term relationship with Kate Allen, the UK director of Amnesty International, with whom he lived for nearly 20 years, between 1982 and 2001. Mr Livingstone subsequently took up with his office manager Emma Beal.
Ken\’s quite right that his is all personal stuff. I\’m just wondering whether he had the same view when it was his electoral opponent who was having all the tabloid trouble? No, I don\’t know, but it would be interesting to, wouldn\’ it?
Those stories over how Tesco\’s was going to save a billion in tax….we all found out they were nonsense pretty quickly, didn\’t we? It appears that The Guardian might have a few problems over it:
Tesco is to take legal action against the Guardian newspaper and its editor Alan Rusbridger after a series of articles that claimed it avoided paying £1bn in tax by using an offshore structure for property joint ventures.
In a High Court writ the retailer seeks special damages for "libel and malicious falsehood", citing complaints from customers.
Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco\’s executive director of corporate and legal affairs, said: "It is very regrettable that we have had to take this step. We had hoped that the Guardian would be able to accept it had made a mistake and apologise for what it had written, but this has not happened.
"We support free and open debate about the role and conduct of business so long as that debate is based on fact," she added.
In a stock exchange announcement, Tesco said it expects to achieve savings of £23m in stamp duty related taxes on the transactions completed to date.
"The maximum additional savings in stamp duty related taxes that might be achieved from using these structures could be another £30m-£40m, depending on market conditions," claimed Tesco.
The retailer added that it was not uncommon to use offshore companies for joint ventures with third parties, claiming that the Guardian Media Group used a similar structure when it acquired Emap alongside private equity company Apax.
The legal action may put Carolyn McCall, chief executive of Guardian Media Group, in a difficult position. Ms McCall joined the Tesco board as a non-executive director in 2005.
How gorgeously, wondrously, amusing.
I wonder what the reaction is going to be? Given the incredible quality of the original reporting The G doesn\’t have a factual leg to stand on. But libel and malicious falsehood against a company might be a difficult thing to prove.
So, what indeed are they going to do? Apologise or fight the case?
Here\’s The G\’s version.
However, the Guardian said last night that Tesco\’s actions amounted to bullying and were clearly designed to silence public debate on the important issue of taxation.
"This looks like a deliberate tactic by Britain\’s largest retailer to shut down perfectly legitimate inquiries into their methods of tax avoidance. At the same time that two Tesco directors are reported to have lobbied the government in private on matters of taxation, the company is now seeking to chill public debate on the same issues," it said in a statement.
"The articles were in the context of a series of articles on taxation issues in a globalised world. They clearly raised serious matters of public interest in relation to tax avoidance and tax management. We have never claimed Tesco behaved illegally. These are matters of considerable political importance at present, debated by all parties.
"Guardian journalists put a series of questions to Tesco over a period of nearly four months. At no point during the pre-publication correspondence would Tesco even admit the offshore structures, still less give the explanation they advanced post-publication. We offered meetings to discuss the allegations; this offer was rejected. We included Tesco\’s explanation in the articles and have subsequently offered the company the opportunity of a full and prominent right of reply.
"Instead of frankly explaining their position and/or engaging in a public dialogue Tesco has taken the extraordinary step of suing for libel in a clear attempt to close down the debate and discourage others from looking too closely.
"It\’s hard to think of another large public company which would resort to such bullying tactics."
"Bullying"? Methinks the value of the damages (assuming Tesco\’s win of course) have just ticked up.
The root cause of the crisis is in a sense Europe\’s monetary union. The euro effect halved Spain\’s interest rates almost overnight. Rates then fell below Spain\’s inflation rate for several years, fuelling an explosive credit boom. The country\’s current account deficit has reached 10pc of GDP, the highest of any major economy.
This is the bit that all those federasts panting for the euro rather forgot to mention. A single currency is indeed lovely for the transaction costs side of things. It also, inevitably, means a single interest rate though. And with different inflation rates, widely disparate economies, this might not be a good idea.
The rate was clearly and obviously too low for Spain: as it is now too high for Spain.
"We have a very worrying situation. The developers simply cannot refinance their debts. We need to cut interest rates by 2pc, which is obviously not going to happen,"
There is no solution to this….other than leaving the euro.
So, is this the smoking gun, the reason that the Speaker didn\’t want to release these expense claims?
Gordon Brown claimed more than £18,000 in 2005-06 for a mortgage-free London flat, including £4,981 for cleaning, £2,385 for food and provisions, £815 for utilities and £900 for council tax.
This would be this flat:
Gordon Brown gave his £700,000 flat in central London to his wife Sarah weeks before he moved into 10 Downing Street, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
But the thing is, wasn\’t he actually living in the flat over 10 Downing Street (the Blairs living in the larger one over 11)?
Or is this all a storm in a tea cup?
At The Register.
Making fun of Al Gore, J. Porritt and A, Darling and their willy waving.
…but the equally foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone. …
How about this as an idea? Health care is expensive because health care is expensive: it requires huge amounts of labour (in the US, 13.5 million people) and vast amounts of capital ($800 million to bring a new drug to market).
How about the idea that there is *no way* to produce cheap health care for everyone? We can dance around the minor issues, choice, quality, access, these sorts of things, but we\’ll never invent a method of health care that provides high quality care to everyone that is cheap.
This is the problem you have when party lists determine who has a chance of being elected and who doesn\’t in a multi-member constituency.
It\’s entirely stitched up by the party insiders.
Add in, say, the tax funding of political parties and you\’ve a recipie for a self-selecting elite governing the country for evermore.
How lovely, eh?
The home secretary will today outline plans to increase protection for children surfing the web, including new jail terms for convicted paedophiles who use social networking websites.
The measures, which mirror systems operating in the US, include a requirement for convicted sex offenders to give their email address to the police. If they use that address to sign up to a website such as MySpace, Bebo or Facebook, they could be imprisoned for up to five years.
Five years for joining Facebook?
Isn\’t it, ermm, sort of necessary to show that they actually did something wrong? You know, like groomed a child or something? Logging on to leave "kthnxbai" on a friend\’s wall gets you five years now?
Take inspiration from our gallery of interesting edibles – you could be munching on your own mung beans before you know it.
It would appear that this is what we have come to.
Sigh.
Our eldest son, Will, once a highly academic, sporty, handsome, smiling young boy, began smoking cannabis at school with friends. He was fourteen. He soon began to change into someone we scarcely recognised, who stole to fund the habit that began to consume him. Pleas from us to stop were met with a shrug and the comments ‘the government wouldn’t have downgraded it if it wasn’t safe to smoke’. With predictions of nine excellent passes at GCSE, we could never have foreseen that our son would follow a route of drug abuse and destructive behaviour that would bring our family to breaking point.
Yes, sad. But no, not the basis upon which to threaten 10 million man years of prison (2million smokers, 5 years jail time each).
Not that such a threat would in fact reduce consumption. One of the oddities has been that consumption has fallen since the downgrading.
Ahhh,
Since 2003, the Prime Minister also claimed money for his utility bills and extensive renovations at his Westminster flat, including the building of a nursery.
So that is what people have been rumouring about. While living in Downing Street that flat that he gifted to Sarah was spruced up on his expenses.
Hmm.
Now, is that flat out on the rental market?
OK, so these guys are alleged to have been plotting to blow up airliners. Here\’s how the bombs were supposed to work.
Is that the same bomb making method that was so compehensively shown to not work those couple of years ago? Or a different one?
Doesn\’t matter all that much to the court case of course: that their bombs might not have worked is no bar to their conspiring to make them so.
But anyone know?
I have to admit to a certain dubiety about this:
In Sclavounos view, the economics of the power industry are already approaching a tipping point that will drive rapid adoption of floating turbines. "The technology is essentially proven," he says. "We know we can design [platforms] and spars that are not going to move in big storms. What is going to lead to this industry taking off will be the economics. When carbon-emissions trading markets start maturing, you\’re going to see this industry take off, even without state subsidies. We\’re not far from it."
Not the statement about economics, that\’s obvious. As and when some form of renewables is indeed viable against conventional then it will indeed take off.
He estimates that Blue H\’s wind farms will deliver wind energy for seven to eight cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly matching the current cost of natural gas-fired generation and conventional onshore wind energy.
That\’s the bit I\’m dubious about, that they have in fact reached that point.
Anyone know more about it?
At the Business.
Why financial market regulation doesn\’t work very well and buses and cars.
Yes, we have an outbreak of willy waving!
Who in the British political blogosphere has the biggest!
Yes, I do says Guido!
But mine is better says Iain!
And mine more sweary says the DK!
And mine more perfectly formed says Tim Ireland!
(As boring technical background you need to understand the difference between pageviews, unique visitors and absolute unique visitors. The first is someone viewing a page. Someone might view many, or refresh to see the comments, or come back later in the day to see who has responded wittily to the "Lol, pwnd!" they left as a critique of the Schleswig Holstein Question\’s exegesis which was so painfully put together by the blogger. The second is one person or computer coming by in a day, no matter how may times they do so in a day. The third is that same one person one computer in a month, no matter how many times they do so. OK?)
From the general discussion it seems that absolute uniques is preferred as a measure of reach: how many people are you getting the message to, rather than how many people do you have as the regular reading crowd?
Iain\’s got something a little north of 50k absolute uniques.
My Google Analytics numbers for the month of March:
214,315 people visited this site 219,306 Visits 214,315 Absolute Unique Visitors 246,655 Pageviews 1.12 Average Pageviews 00:00:15 Time on Site 90.80% Bounce Rate 96.33% New Visits
Over 200,000 absolute uniques! Yes, it\’s true! Timmy has the biggest willy!
That this is on a site dedicated to celebrity fluff, that almost none of the visitors ever come back again, nor stay long enough to even read a post means nothing, nothing at all. (ie, it ain\’t this site, it\’s the old one.)
Middle Aged Priapism Rocks!