If it carries on, athletes are gonna start arriving for the Olympics and wonder if we've decided to hold them underwater

keep to the Fen Causeway

The issue here is not that Democrats offer no alternative to capitalism. Somebody should but they've never claimed to. But they offer no challenge to it in its most rapacious, exploitative and ultimately self-defeating incarnation of recent times. It is difficult to accept lectures on outsourcing from the party that introduced the North American Free Trade Agreement - an outsourcers' charter liberalising trade between the US, Mexico and Canada. The party that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, loosening regulations that would have mitigated the worst effects of the most recent crisis, has no credibility to preach about business ethics.

The Democrats have done a great deal to make things easier for firms like Bain to do the very things they are criticising and precious little to protect the livelihood of people like Cobb and his former colleagues in the steel mill.

Given the opportunity to reform a banking system where venality, corruption and ineptitude were rife Obama decided instead to prop it up. As such he has proved himself more keen to save capitalism from itself than protect workers from its excesses. He told the bankers at the 2009 meeting: "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." Next time he should get out of the way.

If there's any news that gives the lie to the idea that the state can be rolled out of existence, it's the coalition's announcement that between 2014 and 2019 £9.4 billion will be invested in our railway infrastructure. This comes only a couple of weeks after Labour endorsed a report recommending a return to state ownership of the railways. It's as though an electric bulb has been switched on - or, at least, will be switched on in a couple of years - in forgotten, diesel-run spokes of the country.

Having lived in Lancashire and currently living on Merseyside, where I'm a regular user of Northern Rail, this news would have me bouncing out of my seat were it not for the belief that the electrification of lines between Manchester and Liverpool, and between Cardiff and the valleys, is so long overdue as almost to be insulting.
[....]
Most of the projects on Monday's impressive-looking list aren't new: electrification of the north-west commuter routes, and the western mainline as far as Cardiff, has been announced twice before: in 2009 by Labour, and in March last year by the then transport secretary, Philip Hammond. It represents a bundling together of all the modernisation projects needed to bring the railways halfway up to the standard of those in continental Europe.

Occasionally, reality has an aggressive way of bringing government rhetoric down to earth, like a malicious Tour de France spectator with a handful of tacks, watching Cameron approach on his Barclays bike.

For most of last week, talk has been of Olympic Security and the failings of G4S. The Government are making tough noises about penalties for failure to perform on the contract. G4S, in reply, not-so-subtly hints at the sudden rise last December in the number of security personnel required by LOCOG, from 2,000 to 10,000. The notion being, presumably, that thorough bag searches are a close substitute for non-incendiary social and foreign policies.

Jon Lord, the former keyboard player with the rock band Deep Purple, has died aged 71.

He had been receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer since last August.

Lord, who co-wrote many of Deep Purple's legendary songs, including Smoke On The Water, played with many bands and musicians throughout his career.

A statement issued by his publicist said he died at the London Clinic on Monday, surrounded by his family.

If you were involved in Icelandic high finance in the runup to the recession, you might want to start watching your back.

That's because the government has appointed a white collar crime bounty hunter who wants to haul your behind in (alive, to be sure).

LeMonde reporter Charlotte Chabas has a profile of Ólafur Þór Hauksson, a former local police lieutenant whom the Iceland government appointed to track down individuals likely to have helped sink the country's banking sector during the credit crunch.

will the mountie get his man?

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

The process of mitosis is extremely precise; when it comes to manipulating DNA, cells verge on being obsessive and with good reason. Gaining or losing a chromosome during cell division can lead to cell death, developmental disorders, or cancer.

As Kiyomitsu watched mitosis unfold in symmetrically dividing human cells, he noticed that when the spindle oscillates toward the cell's center, a partial halo of the protein dynein lines the cell cortex on the side farther away from the spindle. As the spindle swings to the left, dynein appears on the right, but when the spindle swing to the right, dynein vanishes and reappears on the left side.

Hope it has wifi.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

This remastered edition of 'Ulysses' introduces modern user-friendly formatting by applying additional punctuation where necessary and separating the 'internal monologue' from the narrative.

Private Eye | Official Site

It's at this point, you might have thought, that Mensch - the high-profile scourge of those who abuse people's privacy on the Commons select committee on phone hacking - might have slapped her hand to her forehead and exclaimed: "The ICO! Yes, I remember them!"

As an MP, after all, she's long been obliged to register with the ICO as a processor of personal information. As a social network, Menshn of course needs to do the same - and yet unaccountably it failed to get round to it before launch, as the rules require. Nor, at that point, did it comply with the ICO's rules on cookies or privacy policies.

Not a peep from the company
Menshn has since managed to slap a half-hearted privacy policy and the required warning about cookies on to its site, but it still fails to show up on the ICO registration list. Indeed, an ICO spokesman told the Eye late last week that, ten days after launch, it had not heard a peep from the company.