Chris Brooke (virtualstoa) on Twitter

Blair says on p.79 that the basis of socialism is the "community", on p.90 that the purpose of the Labour Party was "about the individual".

Vanity fair - Sarah Palin : The Sound and the Fury

h/t Daily Kos - AnnetteK

keep to the Fen Causeway

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures.  The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse.  Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen:  "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,"

A top Swedish prosecutor decided on Wednesday to reopen a probe into rape suspicions against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

• WikiLeaks' Assange interrogated by police (31 Aug 10)
• Julian Assange applies for Swedish residency (31 Aug 10)
• Lawyer appeals decision on Assange case (27 Aug 10)
• Assange: charges caused 'enormous' damage (26 Aug 10)

"There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed. Considering information available at present, my judgement is that the classification of the crime is rape," director of prosecutions Marianne Ny said in a statement.

"The basis for further considerations is not sufficient at the moment. More investigations are necessary before a final decision can be made (concerning possible charges)," she added.

A Swedish duty prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange on August 20th over rape allegations. But chief prosecutor Eva Finne abruptly withdrew it the next day, saying new information had come to light.

French police investigating a financial scandal swirling around Nicolas Sarkozy's government have raided the home of L'Oreal heiress Lillian Bettencourt.

France's richest woman has been accused of providing 'envelopes full of cash' to President Sarkozy and his ruling UMP Party.

The authorities are, in turn, accused of having turned a blind eye to Mrs Bettencourt avoiding paying tax on her vast fortune.

A wave of protest has overrun Germany. People everywhere are coming out against politicians' pet projects. Democracy seems alive and kicking, but oftentimes self-interest and the general welfare collide head-on. And this naysaying spree could stymie the country's modernisation.

 It's Wednesday afternoon in Stuttgart, the sun is shining, the lawn needs mowing again, but Sylvia Heimsch knows she's needed elsewhere. She glances at the webcam, which is beaming images of construction work on Stuttgart's main train station straight into her living room. Then she grabs her police whistle and trekking shoes and drives downtown with her son.

For months now Sylvia Heimsch (47) has been fighting the mega-project "Stuttgart 21". She is among the organisers of the "Park Protectors" bent on keeping nearly 300 old trees from being felled in the Stuttgart palace gardens. Last Wednesday Heimsch gathered with about a hundred other protesters for a sit-in on Highway 14 in Stuttgart. Heimsch bears little resemblance to past activists in West Germany. She's not against the establishment, she's part of it. She lives with her husband and three children in a revamped Jugendstil house. "Doctors, teachers, engineers and lawyers come out for our Monday rallies," she says: "these people are pillars of society, but they won't stand for this political insanity any more."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Two senior MEPs have indicated that the European Parliament will leverage its legal powers to make sure Catherine Ashton gets the "right balance" of top people in the diplomatic corps.

Ms Ashton, the EU foreign relations chief, is getting ready to unveil her nominations for 31 heads of mission and deputy heads of mission for EU embassies abroad, as well as a further 80 senior diplomatic postings and the top 20-or-so administrative jobs in the European External Action Service (EEAS).

Ms Ashton: the Georgia case shows the complexity of finding the right man or woman for each post

EUobserver understands she plans to reveal the first tranche of 31 names, which cover important missions such as Brazil, China, Georgia, Japan and South Africa, shortly after coming back from her trip to China on 5 September.

With so many of their media sources controlled by the state or government-friendly oligarchs, Russians have turned to their bloggers to keep informed and give voice to their grievances and concerns. But many of those in power are now seeking to impose rigid limits on online freedom.

One sunny June day in California, Rustem Adagamov was rushing without his glasses on when he literally ran into Russia's president. "I simply didn't see Dmitry Medvedev," Russia's most influential blogger says, "and I bumped right into him."

Adagamov, 48, uses his blog to report on a range of grievances, including the arrests of opposition members and "unparalleled police brutality." Each day, his blog gets around 600,000 page views, making it more widely read than many of Moscow's daily newspapers. Adagamov has even made fun of Medvedev on his blog by posting photographs of cups bearing the portraits of Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the caption "They all lie anyway" printed in bold.

Acts like these make it all the more astonishing that Medvedev agreed to submit to an interview with the Kremlin critic. And that's not all: The president also invited Adagamov to accompany him to California for a meeting with Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple.

A political ad rejected as hate speech by a Swedish TV station has sparked tension between Sweden and neighboring Denmark. Some Danish leaders have cried censorship, and even want to see election observers at Sweden's coming national poll.

Danish politicians are in an uproar over democratic freedoms across the water in Sweden, ever since a Swedish TV station rejected a political ad on Friday because of alleged hate speech.

The ad by the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD) party shows a retiree hobbling forward while Muslim women in burqas charge past to win money from the national budget. "On Sept. 19," their ad declares, referring to the date of upcoming national elections, "you can choose to cut money from immigration budgets, or from pensions."

No notice to Quirinale from Prime Minister's Office or Foreign Ministry

Why was Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, kept totally in the dark about President Gheddafi's visit by the Prime Minister's Office and Foreign Ministry until the Libyan leader flew out of Ciampino airport? We hope it was just another of the many glitches that accompanied President Gheddafi's stay in Italy. But the snub to President Napolitano, and his Libyan counterpart's many uncontested extravagances, provide a cue for discussing a wider, and increasingly difficult to avoid, issue. When Silvio Berlusconi said that to criticise the Italy-Libya agreements was to be "prisoners of the past", he was quite right. Yet his apposite reference to Italy's history and interests fails to obscure the main weakness of Italy's international profile in recent years: the pursuit of legitimate strategies while flouting protocol and proportion.

A CHINESE lingerie company provoked outrage yesterday after cynically exploiting Princess Diana's image on the anniversary of her death.

Adverts featuring a lookalike in "Diana underwear" were displayed on giant billboards in shops and airports across China.

The tiara-wearing model is dressed in only a pale blue bra and knickers as she plays a cello to a child.

The same model is also pictured in a blue chemise to promote the range, which carries the slogan: "Feel the romance of British royalty, Diana underwear". Sam Chambers, a British expatriate, saw one of the adverts at Shenzhen airport in southern China. He said: "I saw it flash up on a rolling advertising screen and couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

I managed to back everything up a couple of days ago onto a seagate 1.5TB external HD.  Then when it was doing the automatic back ups the next day I started getting roor messages.  Then I realised the drive was broken - clicking loudly- and replaced it.

The new drive seems ok but it won't even do the initial back up even though the drive has been formatted.  It keeps telling me it has failed. Has this happened to anyone else?

Ad astra per aspera

Havana, Cuba (CNN) -- Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said he acknowledges the persecution of gays and lesbians during the Revolution in his country, according to a newspaper interview published Tuesday.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Cuba sent openly gay men to labor camps without charge or trial.

"They were moments of great injustice, great injustice!" Castro told journalist Carmen Lira Saade from the Mexican daily La Jornada. "If someone is responsible, it's me."

REIMS, France -- Deep below a lush landscape of ripening Champagne grapes, Thierry Gasco, the master vintner for Pommery, ran his finger over the shoulders of a dark green bottle that looked just like the thousands of others reposing in his chilly subterranean cellars.

But to the practiced hand and eye, there is a subtle, if potentially significant, difference.

"This is how we're remaking the future of Champagne," he said, pointing to the area just below the neck. "We're slimming the shoulders to make the bottle lighter, so our carbon footprint will be reduced to help keep Champagne here for future generations."

* Politics in place of the market: The Bundeswehr Transformation Center expects that a supply crisis would roll back the liberalization of the energy market. "The proportion of oil traded on the global, freely accessible oil market will diminish as more oil is traded through bi-national contracts," the study states. In the long run, the study goes on, the global oil market, will only be able to follow the laws of the free market in a restricted way. "Bilateral, conditioned supply agreements and privileged partnerships, such as those seen prior to the oil crises of the seventies, will once again come to the fore."

• Market failures: The authors paint a bleak picture of the consequences resulting from a shortage of petroleum. As the transportation of goods depends on crude oil, international trade could be subject to colossal tax hikes. "Shortages in the supply of vital goods could arise" as a result, for example in food supplies. Oil is used directly or indirectly in the production of 95% of all industrial goods. Price shocks could therefore be seen in almost any industry and throughout all stages of the industrial supply chain. "In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse."

• Relapse into planned economy: Since virtually all economic sectors rely heavily on oil, peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets," says the study. "A conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis."

So remember.  Peak oil=socialism.  

Mostly because the current prophets of profit are to autistic to plan for crisis, so governments have to do it for them.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg

keep to the Fen Causeway

keep to the Fen Causeway

Not my best work obviously, but the songs I wrote and produced for them then were an attempt to document the subjects of conversations we had in caffs on the way to gigs. The main road greasy spoons are now long gone - replaced by brightly lit emporia straddling the motorways.  There's very little inspiration to be drawn from them. And most of them are owned by a giant cooperative!

You can't be me, I'm taken

In today's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland's column on the Miliband brothers ends by outlining the weaknesses that could undermine their campaigns to become leader of the Labour Party. David, he writes, has not sufficiently distanced himself from his support of the invasion of Iraq and from concerns about the treatment of British residents by foreign intelligence agencies.

Freedland claims that Ed's problem is that he has not given sufficient thought to why the deficit ballooned on Labour's watch. The answer is so glaringly obvious, yet Ed hasn't articulated it, for the simple reason that it breaks the greatest political taboo of the past 30 years.

In the low tax, low pay, deregulated market environment that New Labour sought to create, it is simply not possible for the majority of people to maintain the standard of living to which they have become accustomed for the whole of their working life without some support from the state.