Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

[Governments] can employ people directly in the public sector. They can subsidise the private sector to take people on and keep them on. They can buy more goods and services from companies, resulting in more new hires. They can tweak the tax and benefits system to make work more attractive to the inactive. They can invest in "human capital" - economics-speak for making people more employable by training and educating them. And they can ensure that the cost of rules and regulations governing the hiring and firing of workers do as little as possible to discourage companies from creating jobs.

Five out of six of these broad areas of government action on jobs cost money. The Irish Government has almost none. And it is prohibited under the terms of its EU-IMF bailout from spending the very little money it has on anything the bailout supervisors say no to.

The troika told the Government that if it wanted to spend additional money on jobs it would have to find concrete sources of revenue to fund its initiatives. The Coalition chose the dubious, if expedient, option of taking from private pension pots. But before discussing the cons and pros of that issue, the more immediate question is whether yesterday's package will help the 300,000 people who are unemployed and the additional 140,000 who are entitled to claim the dole, mostly because they are underemployed.

Things are getting out of hand. Police attacked what was pretty much a relatively peaceful demonstration, with ferocity. Right now there is a demonstrator in the Nikaia General Hospital, fighting for his life after being severely hit (probably but not definitively by a police club) in the head. He has undergone surgery and the doctors say he will remain in critical condition for 48 hours. I hope and pray that he makes it OK, both for him and because if there is again someone murdered by the police, all hell will break loose.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

Den of the Hyena - First they came for the homosexuals

What has changed? The answer is, again, rather complicated, but it centres on an increasing shift toward the kind of contempt for human rights shown in the bill itself. If we look at the bill in more detail we can see that it was never intended simply as an instrument for criminalising lgbt people. Because it's very difficult to prove a person's sexual orientation - certainly if they haven't had anal sex (which supporters assume, incorrectly, isn't practised by straight people) - homosexuality is something that anybody can be accused of. This provides an easy way of framing and disposing of political opponents (or those who simply fall foul of corrupt officials). And there's more. Simply knowing that somebody else is lgbt and failing to report it can lead to a prison sentence. This would criminalise parents who fail to turn in their children, but it is also, again, an easy means whereby to frame people.

The Anti-Gay Bill was always an attractive political tool to corrupt factions within government. What has changed is that the Ugandan government has now reached a point where it has more need of such measures to control an unhappy populace, and where it also needs a distraction. Those opposing the bill around the world need to think carefully about what that means.Yes, it is important to challenge the bill, but how many other stories do you see about Uganda in the Western news? With the focus on this piece of legislation it is all the easier for Museveni's government to get away with the other human rights abuses it is perpetuating and to keep foreign eyes off the protests and riots. Because ultimately, the suffering of lgbt people is unlikely to lead to sanctions or other serious forms of intervention.

When you want to be free to deal with a population using violence, you start by dehumanising them. That was easy for the Ugandan government and its allies to do with gays. Once that happened, ordinary people became more comfortable with the idea of lynch mobs. Some will have joined in, perhaps thinking they had to do it to protect their children, and once one has been involved in something like that it is harder to convincingly express moral outrage when one sees the same tactics used against other groups. Dehumanisation spreads. Police officers, too, become more comfortable with using violence against the population they serve.

The Danish People's Party (DPP) and its leader Pia Kjaersgaard argued controls would counter illegal immigration and organised crime.

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The border controls were negotiated by the DPP in return for supporting the government's pension reform.

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The newspaper Politiken notes that the use of customs officers would be a way of getting around the Schengen rules, as checks would be random.

"Global warming is a hoax," [Bachmann] asserts, her Midwestern twang buffered by the winning smile and hip-mom hair.  "First, because every point in the atmosphere is right next to the point beside it, where the temperature is exactly the same.  And that extends from point to point, in every direction.  That's why every place on earth always has exactly the same weather as every other place.  So there is no quote-unquote `warming.'"

Pure gold.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

Bad News : It's on the other side of the country and there's no public transport.

So it'll cost me the best part of £50 to enjoy my free day out + camping cost. Did I ever mention I'm too old for camping ? And it's free to CAMRA members anyway !!!

But it's in cheddar, which is a lovely part of the country, so I'm tempted.

keep to the Fen Causeway