Blog

The government has accepted the argument made in Philip Hunt's fine speech in the Lords this week, and agreed to change the wording of the Maternity Allowances Bill:

The government has agreed to change its bill allowing ministers to take maternity leave, so that it uses the term "mother" rather than "person".

The Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Bill would ensure up to six months' leave on full pay.

But the House of Lords rejected the use of the word "person" in its text.

The government initially argued this was in line with "drafting convention" but has changed its view, saying use of "mother" is legally "acceptable".

A small but significant victory.

Esther Phillips, introduced by John Lennon, from a 1964 TV show:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRpCd73hOrI&w=550&h=309]

She sings in colour here on The !!!! Beat show from Dallas in 1966.

A unique vocal stylist, as I noted before when I featured Just Say Goodbye:

Originally Little Esther, discovered by Johnny Otis in 1949 aged 14, she came back in the Seventies after years of drug abuse:

One of her biggest post-1950s triumphs was in 1972 with her first album for Kudu Records. The song penned by Gil Scott-Heron, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is," – an account of drug use — was lead track on From a Whisper to a Scream which went on to be nominated for a Grammy Award. When Phillips lost to Aretha Franklin, the latter presented the trophy to Phillips, saying she should have won it instead.

She's perhaps best-known for her version of Dinah Washington's What a Diff'rence a Day Makes - kind of appropriate given the extent to which she followed in Washington's footsteps, from the idiosyncratic vocal style to the early death.

l friendship and cooperation between Arabs and Israelis. It is as if the new administration is closing its eyes to the realities of the region and to American security interests to instead pursue a policy whose symbolism is in fact its purpose. By using “foreign policy” to convey an ideological worldview to a U.S. domestic audience, 80 million Iranians are being treated as props by U.S. policymakers who pose as “progressives” while openly displaying their lack of interest in our common human fate.

1200d img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mt_imported_image_1758336393.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”IMG_6933s” />

5 years of correctional labor for consumption or possession of pornographic videos or books, photos or drawings that “preach superstition.” Individuals who produce, import or distribute such materials may get life sentences of correctional labor or even the death penalty, depending on the quantity of the material. 

Well that's some sort of teenage nightmare. Your parents bursting in on a solitary hand session is one thing, but "caught during a surprise inspection by a task force created to monitor deviant behavior" takes it to a whole new level. I don't suppose family relations are too smooth now either, what with them all being exiled to the country.

Articles 34-38 of the law stipulate fines of KPW 100,000 to 200,000 if a reactionary thought crime occurs due to the irresponsible education of children and orders the entire family to move to the countryside as punishment for the parents. 

For someone who lives in one of the larger cities in North Korea, being deported to the provinces is considered quite a heavy sentence as these individuals will not only lose their economic base but also become politically stigmatized….

“The crackdown and punishments are likely to intensify for the time being given that the ‘anti-reactionary thought law’ is still in the early stage of implementation,” the source said.

“Moreover, Kim Jong Un stated that ‘non-socialism is a malignant tumor that hinders unity’ and declared a ‘more intensive struggle against the non-socialist phenomenon’ at the Second Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party on Feb. 8,” he added.  

Daily NK is aware that the principal of the school attended by the teenage boy also received the “revolutionary punishment” of unpaid labor. 

The principal was punished because articles 34-38 of the act stipulates “punishments of unpaid labor, demotion, dismissal, or forced resignation if a reactionary thought crime occurs due to the failure to control and educate students on how to abide by the law.” 

Pornography is clearly a non-socialist phenomenon. The only pictures you're allowed to get excited over are pictures of the Kim dynasty.

o.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mt_imported_image_1758336404.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”Gilden1″ />

[Photos: Palermo 2019, Bruce Gilden / Magnum Photos]

Gilden previously:

At the State Fair
Bogotanos
The Faces of Gucci
Lost and Found
Eighties New York

451ebab69e2027880179882200d img-responsive” src=”http://mickhartley.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mt_imported_image_1758336435.jpg” style=”width: 550px” title=”IMG_6920s” />

imed that being the only Jew in his class was “scary”. Miller faced no repercussions for his comments. The University of Bristol offered no support to Jewish students – not so much as an email.

Then, last week David Miller called for an “end of Zionism" in a video. Still the University of Bristol did nothing to support or protect Jewish students.

After that, Miller unashamedly doubled down on his comments. In a statement sent to reporters at The Tab Bristol, Miller declared Zionism a “racist, violent, imperialist ideology premised on ethnic cleansing". He suggested that Bristol JSoc had “manufactured hysteria” and the campaign against him had rendered Arab and Muslim students “unsafe”.

Though Miller attempted to pit two minority groups, two student groups (JSoc and the university Islamic society) against one and other, the University has only said they "do not endorse the comments made by Professor Miller about our Jewish students", saying "any action which we might take as an employer is a private matter".

However this malicious attempt to sow seeds of diversion between two minorities was not enough for Miller. On Saturday in The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian website, Miller claimed that UJS and Bristol JSoc has been manufacturing a “charade of false anti-Semitism allegations”. Still a deafening silence from the university….

David Miller’s position as a lecturer has allowed his hateful conspiracy theories to spread. This is why Miller is so dangerous to Jewish students and why the University of Bristol needs to take action fast. 

And in the Times today, Daniel Finkelstein puts his finger on the real issue, when Miller crossed the line from poor scholarship and the spreading of antisemitic conspiracy theories to actual attacks on Bristol's Jewish students:

Professor Miller’s work has long been deeply offensive to me and to many Jews but that’s not a good enough argument for his dismissal. However, the same cannot be said for his recent response to controversies about his work.

Miller has chosen to attack the Bristol University Jewish Society — proper, actual students at his own university — as being part of a co-ordinated campaign of censorship directed by the state of Israel. He further told the Jewish Chronicle that: “There is a real question of abuse here — of Jewish students on British campuses being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing”.

Bristol University may regard Professor Miller’s amazing theories about power elites as part of the rich tapestry of political sociology and merely as a home for views on Israel I don’t happen to share.

It cannot, however, allow some 18-year-old student who comes up from Radlett to study, say, botany and joins the Jewish society to be characterised by one of its own professors as having signed up to a foreign-backed conspiracy to subvert the country’s politics.

If Bristol cannot tell the difference between such an assault and the normal cut and thrust of academic and political discourse then it doesn’t have any business even teaching political sociology.

long list of brutal African strongmen. The latest scandal surrounds the abduction and trail of Paul Rusesabagina, the hero of the film Hotel Rwanda.

Ian Birrell has the details:

Paul Rusesabagina was a humble hotel manager when he became a hero amid the horrors of genocide, saving 1,268 people from machete-wielding mobs. His story, immortalised in Hotel Rwanda, was remarkable: fearful days spent pleading with gangs of killers, fraught nights spent firing off faxes begging for help to stop the hideous butchery taking place outside his gates.

His actions brought fame and a United States presidential medal of freedom. But he was dismayed to see his nation become snared in fresh horrors under the one-time rebel turned president Paul Kagame; there was the invasion and looting of next-door Democratic Republic of Congo that left millions dead, as well as the routine killings, detentions and disappearances of Rwandans who questioned their leader’s rule.

Why, he asked me ten years ago, was Britain propping up this despot with big dollops of aid when his democracy was such an obvious sham? “We know what happened in the past. But that does not mean we close our eyes to what is happening now,” he said. “I did not keep silent in 1994 and I cannot keep silent now. We need justice, not aid.”

Today, Rusesabagina stands in a Kigali court clad in prison pink, the latest victim of Kagame’s paranoid misrule. He was seemingly set up by an agent posing as a Burundian priest, lured six months ago from his Texan home to Dubai and then flown on a privately-hired jet to the Rwandan capital. Three days later he was paraded in handcuffs, facing charges on nine offences including murder, armed robbery and membership of a terror group. The president crowed about a “flawless” operation.

And still the money flows in.

Yet there is disturbing irony underlying this latest show trial as Rusesabagina’s presence in that Kigali court reminds us again of the validity of his words when we spoke a decade ago: why is Britain backing this barbarous figure? Even now, even today.

Britain pumps huge sums into this tiny central African nation — £111m over the past two years alone — while its president spends a reported £30m sponsoring Arsenal FC, his favourite football club. Our officials churn out pathetic reports talking about “building effective government institutions” and “development of an open and inclusive society” while Kagame kills his critics, overturns term limits, jails political foes, squashes free expression and shuts down the slightest space for civil society….

The flow of funds from British taxpayers did not even stop when Scotland Yard warned two human rights activists in this country that a Rwandan hit squad had been sent to kill them, or when MI6 gave the government tape recordings of senior regime officials plotting to kill opposition leaders. The author Anjan Sundaram has also written that anti-terror experts provided him with armed protection in the UK when he promoted his superb exposé of Kagame’s dictatorship, based on several years trying to teach journalism in Rwanda on an aid-funded project. Rwandans living here have told me of regular events organised by intelligence operatives based in the London embassy, at which they must pledge loyalty to the RPF on pain of death for them or their families.

If we're supporting Kagame in his attempts to silence all opposition, then we're clearly supporting the wrong man.

On a sunny spring-like morning: