ninme

The Times - ‘I felt no hatred and I did not fear death’ Last month, just before the Zimbabwean election, this farmer wrote a dramatic article in The Times describing President Mugabe’s intimidation campaign. Here he recalls what happened afterwards, by Ben Freeth

A lot of prayer features in there. Besides all the guns and fleeing women, [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

A bit of entertaining journalistic stock-phrasing over at Wheat & Weeds

Categories: People and Current Events

The Australian (from The Spectator) - Each rat his own cat, by Theodore Dalrymple

I have always found it worthwhile to talk to people whose work many intellectuals would dismiss as uninteresting. For example, I have found that insurance loss adjusters have the deepest insight into human nature this side of Shakespeare. One of [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

This sort of talk makes me nervous.

The Times - Telephone booths: the final call Age shall not wither phone boxes, nor mobiles condemn

BT has said it will listen kindly to communities that want to keep their boxes even if the phones inside don’t cover cleaning costs. This is good. The 1925 K2 model and [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Me last year: What’s “Um” in Prison Slang?

Then later in the year: If the French Can Figure It Out…

Now all of a sudden:

The Times - Prison works. So why won’t we admit it? If the crime rate really is falling, there’s a simple explanation. We are locking up more criminals, by David Green

By increasing [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Had a night full of wedding-related anxiety dreams. Nothing specific. Just a lot of running around and talking to people.

Telegraph - Angry brides confront bridal shop owner

Lisa Clarkson received threats last month and went into hiding after the sudden closure of her shop left about 170 brides out of pocket and without a [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

The Times - Bringing up Baby The law on maternity leave is trying to be modern, and failing

Yet the real world intrudes. As we reported on Monday and as Nicola Brewer, then chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), noted yesterday, it is an inconvenient truth that women are being turned [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

India Knight:

Speaking of children . . . A vicar in Staffordshire last week ordered a toddler out of his church for being too noisy. He was marrying the toddler’s parents at the time. Should children be banned from weddings? Couples have certainly got braver about putting “no [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

I love word stories.

The Times - Definitions coming to a dictionary near you As the English language nears its millionth coinage, here are some newcomers that might make it into the lexicon, by Giles Coren

According to the Global Language Monitor (whatever in the world that is) the English language is on the cusp of [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Hmmm.

The Times - Crips and Bloods: How Britain’s mobs are imitating US gangs

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has already warned that British gangs are copying the tactics of US ones. Earlier this year she said there was increasing evidence that they are wearing colours of allegiance, like the famous LA gangs, the Crips [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail:

People who scrawl on walls should be punished. Instead we indulge and flatter them, and so our streets are increasingly marred by this menacing, anarchic ugliness. But Japan – one of the last truly independent, self-respecting nations on earth – takes a different view. [...]

Categories: People and Current Events

Headline of the week, at least:

Times Online - No Nazism in our S&M romps: Mosley prostitute

Well, that’s okay then! (This is testimony in a lawsuit against News of the World, which apparently libelously labeled certain elements within the S&M orgies “Nazi”. I mean, wow.)

Categories: People and Current Events

The Times, headline: The Conservatives understand it’s society, not the economy, stupid

subheadline: Mending the “broken society” should be natural Labour territory, but it is the Tories who have grasped its importance

Err, really?

Categories: People and Current Events

CDR Salamander - Terrorists scared of China?

Categories: People and Current Events

The Times - Stabbings, not sex, are the real facts of life A message of Gandhi-like passivity turning hordes of docile potential victims into human cash machines, by Janice Turner

When I recall my own moderately rough school - the cries of “scrap on!” outside the gates, the mean girls who’d thump hard, being shoved [...]

Categories: People and Current Events