Author: Mick Hartley

  • Dark fleets

    represent an alarming and potentially growing human rights concern.”

    According to the study, the dark fleet is having a dramatic effect on stocks of Pacific flying squid, with catches in neighbouring South Korean and Japanese waters down by four-fifths.

    The full report – Illuminating dark fishing fleets in North Korea – can be found here.

  • Lea boats 4

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    Previously, Lea boats 1, 2, 3, plus bonus Boats on the Upper Lea.

  • Remarkably stupid

    Panorama journalist John Ware, fresh from his court victory against the Labour Party, takes apart the lies and distortions that the Corbynites and their supporters – Momentum, journalists like Owen Jones – promulgated in their determination to discredit him and his fellow reporters when they blew the whistle on Labour's problems with antisemitism:

    A year ago, the Labour Party declared all-out war on the BBC. Why? 

    I was the reporter on a Panorama programme in which seven former Labour staffers blew the whistle about antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party. They explained how they felt a growing factionalism had created a safe space for antisemitic views inside the party.

    Labour responded by accusing me of having flouted journalistic ethics. I had, Labour alleged, knowingly promoted falsehoods and invented quotes. I had misrepresented and fabricated facts. 

    It was, the party claimed, all part of my “deliberate and malicious” attempt “to mislead the public.”  

    It didn’t stop there. The party accused the whistle-blowers of being motivated by “disaffection” with Corbyn and the Labour Left; they had “personal and political axes to grind” as opposed to actually believing what they told me about the toxic climate they said had enveloped the party under the Leader’s office.

    These were remarkably stupid things for the official opposition to say in public. It is the BBC’s job to subject any political party to careful scrutiny – but it is particularly important for the BBC to examine the actions of the party that aspires to be the next government.

    Most politicians recognise that such criticism is an essential part of a democratic society. How did Labour react? By imputing a malign, dishonest, conspiratorial motive to BBC programme makers….

    A devastating indictment of the whole sorry bunch.

  • Little Italy, 1905

    "Italian neighborhood with street market — Mulberry Street, New York." Ca. 1905:

    image from www.shorpy.com
    [Photo: Shorpy/DPC]

    Mulberry Street previously, ca. 1900.

  • Blue tube

    A new Anish Kapoor sculpture, perhaps? – hidden away by Abbey Creek. It's not far from his ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park, after all:

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    Well, no. Given it's location by the Abbey Mills Pumping Station, it's almost certainly something to do with sewage.

    A work of art, nevertheless.

  • Labour “profoundly sorry for the distress caused”

    leblowers featured in the BBC's Panorama last July….

    Allies describe the three as "livid" that there has been a settlement….

    The JC understands that this last minute legal action is being funded by Unite.

  • Children “minimally involved” in coronavirus epidemiology

    From the Times:

    There has been no recorded case of a teacher catching the coronavirus from a pupil anywhere in the world, according to one of the government’s leading scientific advisers.

    Mark Woolhouse, a leading epidemiologist and member of the government’s Sage committee, told The Times that it may have been a mistake to close schools in March given the limited role children play in spreading the virus….

    “One thing we have learnt is that children are certainly, in the 5 to 15 brackets from school to early years, minimally involved in the epidemiology of this virus,” Professor Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Edinburgh University, said. “They are probably less susceptible and vanishingly unlikely to end up in hospital or to die from it.

    “There is increasing evidence that they rarely transmit. For example, it is extremely difficult to find any instance anywhere in the world as a single example of a child transmitting to a teacher in school. There may have been one in Australia but it is incredibly rare."

    I have noted this before.

  • Stone roses

    The pergola at The Hill, Hampstead:

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    Yes, it's a title I've used before.

  • Opposing hate

    g.”

    Opposing anti-Semitism ain’t a lot of people’s thing these days. According to the progressive catechism known as intersectionality, the hatred espoused by Farrakhan and others of his ilk is of negligible concern because he and his followers lack “power.” Jews, classified as “white” bearers of “privilege”—despite being gassed alive and starved and beaten to death by the millions within the living memory of the community—are therefore inherently “powerful” rather than “oppressed.”

    Such abstruse theorizing must come as cold comfort to the more than 200 Jewish New Yorkers violently targeted in hate crimes last year—a figure comprising over half of all hate crimes in the city—the vast majority of them perpetrated by Black and Hispanic men. As it must to the families of the four people murdered in the shooting at a Jersey City kosher market by followers of the Black Hebrew Israelites—a religious sect whose members believe much of the same nonsense spouted by Farrakhan and his celebrity acolytes and ass-kissers, who include Jay Z, Kanye West, Jay Electronica, and other members of hip-hop royalty.

    Opposing anti-Semitism, however, was John Lewis’ thing. Just as opposing homophobia and every other form of bigotry was his thing, even if it occasionally set him apart from his putative ideological and racial allies. “I follow my conscience, not my complexion,” he said….

  • The Canadian Prairies

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    [Photos from the series Crown Ditch and the Prairie Castle © Kyler Zeleny]