FOX HUNTING: The big question. Foxhunting isn't about country vs city or working class vs toffs. i think that these are just distractions introduced by the pro-hunting lobby because it is clear that they have lost the battle to keep foxhunting going
What sensible arguments for keeping the hunting going is there?
Fox is a pest - so are rats and other vermon but does anybody dress up in stupid clothes chasing them on horseback. is there not far more efficient and humane methods of controlling pests than hunting. if pest control was the real issue why do hunt masters create fox-friendly environmnets to ensure that there are enough foxes to hunt?
Its a tradition - so were witch burning and the plague, nobody's asking for them to be brought back. traditions die out, its called progress no?.
Its a source of employment - so were the mines, the shipyards and the steelworks but I don't remember this countryside alliance complaining about their closure. millions of people lose their job in this country every year and millions of people find new jobs every year. It may not always be pleasant but it happens
The hounds will have to be put down - more correctly the hounds will have be put down sooner. Hunts kill off hounds when they're only a few years old anyway.
what's yr views, some folk i know are in favour of it.12
Points of disagreement and the Irish famine Whats the point of having a politics thread where you arent allowed to disagree?:you_crazy
The famine thread has been shut, for no good reason.
What about a new name for this section, 'politics, but nothin too controversial'.
Very disappointing... anybody wanna defend it, Raj, Angel?:hopeless:12
Points of disagreement and the Irish famine Maybe not so much warned, as asked to try an keep it civil. i don't wanna take sides, but i know what i think, and i thought your posts were just about within bounds, considering the provocation.
But it is pointless trying to reason with some people, and given its an open forum...
I don't really buy the 'both sides are as bad as each other' viewpoint at all, but I guess it is the legacy of hundreds of years of British exploitation and racism.
I'm not postin again on this topic, cos we will only end up with the thread bein locked again. i've spent many hours lookin at the contemporary sources on this, and anyone who wants to know the truth should do the same.
Anybody wanna do a thread about the highland clearances/scottish history? ha ha12
what’s this all about Nice slap over the fingers...Must hurt really really bad :yakk::yakk::yakk:
The US has banned exports of iPods, fine wines and fast cars to North Korea as part of the punishment for the country's nuclear bomb test last year.
The sanctions are said to be targeted at North Korea's elite, who reportedly enjoy luxuries despite the country's desperate poverty.
Meanwhile the US set talks with North Korea on lifting financial penalties.
The moves come amid efforts to restart multilateral talks aimed at persuading North Korea to halt nuclear activities.
US envoy Christopher Hill said, after meeting his North Korean counterpart in Berlin, that he hoped the six-nation talks would resume by mid-February.
The talks ended inconclusively in December, having resumed after a break of more than a year.
The sanctions on luxury goods were "carefully considered and carefully targeted" to affect only the country's elite, said US commerce department spokesman Richard Mills.
"It does not prohibit exports of food and medicine and other humanitarian goods."
The banned list includes cognac - said to be the favourite tipple of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il - as well as jet skis, jewellery and designer clothes.
The United Nations banned the sale of luxury goods to North Korea in response to its nuclear test on 9 October, but left individual countries to define those items.
However, the US appeared to be moving towards compromise on another front, by announcing talks next week in Beijing on US financial restrictions, which the North has blamed for its reluctance to rejoin multi-party talks.
irish famine………… since there was a good debate about it, and a tread about brining it back i thought id start a topic on it,
The Famine was the single biggest social catastrophy of the nineteenth centry. and as a result of it, 1.5 million Irish men, women, and children emigrated , hence thats why you always hear folk sayingh when they hear an Irish accent, yeah i have irish in me, like 1.5 million Irish folk went all over the world, that with the death toll, didn't leavre many Irish at home.
a staggering 1 million died - this out of a population of around 8 million people. In the years following the Famine, emigration continued unabated until the island's population was roughly half of what it had been in the pre-Famine period.
Given the extraordinary role that the Famine has played in Irish history, it is suprising that there has been very little public memorialization of the disaster.
please carry on, and keep iit civil.
Drug Raid
Quote:
Four people were arrested after the raid at Northern Lights just before 0100 GMT on Sunday.
Officers said there were about 1,000 people were in the club and they also found discarded cocaine and ecstasy, Class A drugs, on the floor.
Three other clubs, Bar Fibre, Space and Mission have also been searched in recent weeks.
A spokeswoman for West Yorkshire Police said there had been 30 arrests in total since the raids began.
The four people arrested on Sunday were in custody awaiting interview, she added.
Supt Peter Nicholson said information which led to the raid came from concerned members of the public.
He said: "This has been an intense campaign which will have hit the night time economy hard.
"It does not make us popular but that is a risk we have to take in ensuring their safety.
Supt Nicholson warned drug dealers against returning to the venues.
"I would ask them to remember that this is in no way over." he said.
"Information about suspected drug dealers was passed on without those people knowing and successfully led to the arrest of four people. We can and will do this again."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/west_yorkshire/6329149.stm
Letter bomb in London
Quote:
A woman has been taken to hospital after police were called to deal with a suspect package at premises in central London.
BBC Home Affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford said what was thought to be a "letter bomb" was found at the Capita building in Victoria Street, Victoria.
Bomb disposal experts are at the scene. London Ambulance said the female employee had suffered minor injuries.
The main road outside the building was closed off with a cordon set up.
The scene is just 200 yards from Scotland Yard's headquarters.
A police spokesman said: "We were called at around 0940 this morning to reports of a suspect package at a business address in Victoria Street.
"A female employee has been taken to hospital with minor injuries."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6331427.stm
:hopeless::hopeless::hopeless::hopeless:
UK : What *are* "core British values?" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6294643.stm
I can see what they are getting at....
I've always been happy to consider myself as "British Asian" as it is a unique culture and community that has contributed a lot to this country...
but I do think a lot of white kids are now left unsure of their identities and insecure..
OTOH I think one problem is that British people are often too quick to moan and criticise one another without looking for a solution and they create negativity that destroys enthusiasm (particularly that of kids)
Plus a lot of successes of Britain were (and to an extent still are) in the fields of engineering (railways, telecommunications and computers) and these things are no longer seen as "cool".
And when we do have something good/fun in Britain we tend to flog it to death (like the rave culture) and it is then often suppressed by the hand of the authorities when it gets too "anarchic/hedonistic"
I still think there is a lot of tolerance in this country (lets face it, where else in the world would people still get away with unlicensed use of land and buildings without payment for 17 years? There are many places where the cops or property owners would have defended their resources with firearms!), and a lot of free speech, but ironically they are under threat from the constant moans and whinges of the very people who benefit from it...
And TBH if I really wanted to I could emigrate to SE Asia fairly quickly - but I still prefer to live in the UK...
There is obviously something good about this country, but its hard to defiine (and probably even harder to teach to kids).
what does everyone else think?
Also interested to hear what those of you who don't live in the UK think of Britain..
medialens i'm sure many of you are already aware of this site but just incase anyone is in the dark...
www.medialens.org - correcting the distorted image of a corporate media
possibly the best source for 'between-the-lines' news. It was like a breath of fresh air when i first joined. i could go into reasons why i think its so great but the reasons will become obvious when you've read a few of the 'media-alerts' or blogs. take my advice and sign up to the email service, it truly is an insight.
i could go on and on about this site but any of you interested enough will delve deep enough to learn anyway. buy the book also!
there - salesman bit over - just look and learn :crazy: :weee: :crazy:
You’ve Gotta Love Fascism errm, or not
i find it incredible that even after the rise of facism that led to the 2nd world war, which trashed this country and which thousands of british families are still recovering from (I for one would have probably inherited a nice house from granparents who died fighting and whose home was bombed), ignorant assholes like the BNP promote this ideology as good for this nation
history clearly shows that the opposite is true
how fucking thick can you be?
Tax Takers Send in the Spiders
Quote:
02:00 AM Jan, 25, 2007
Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.
The "Xenon" program -- a reference to the super-bright auto headlights that light up dark places -- was started in The Netherlands in 2004 by the Dutch equivalent of the IRS, Belastingdienst. It has since been expanded and enhanced by international group of tax authorities in Austria, Denmark, Britain and Canada, with the assistance of Amsterdam-based data mining firm Sentient Machine Research.
Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. In this manner spiders can create huge datasets of web material, while preserving the relationships between pages at the moment they were spidered -- something that can reveal a lot about the people that made the pages.
It's unclear how effective Xenon has been in generating investigative leads. Contacted by Wired News, the tax departments of Canada and the United Kingdom confirmed participation in the program, but declined further comment.
Dag Hardyson, the national project leader for e-commerce for Skatteverket, the Swedish tax authority, was more forthcoming. Skatteverket is scheduled to join the Xenon project this year, and Hardyson said web crawling is well suited to tax enforcement.
"The internet is wide open for tools," said Hardyson. "It's much easier to handle than the real world."
Xenon, explained Marten den Uyl of Sentient, is in some ways the opposite of something like Google's web crawler, which traverses a tree of links and grabs a copy of everything it sees. Xenon is smart about link selection and context, and uses a "slow search paradigm," he said.
Whereas a spider like the Googlebot might hit thousands of websites in a second, "With Xenon it may take minutes, hours or even days to do a slow search."
The slow search prevents the crawler from creating excessive traffic on a website, or drawing attention in the sites' server logs. Den Uyl declined to say what user-agent the Xenon software reports itself as, but it's likely to be variable or configurable on the tax investigator's part.
The spider can also be configured and trained to look at particular economic niches -- a useful feature for compiling lists of business in industries that traditionally have high rates of non-filing. "For instance, weight control (yields) 85,000 hits, some for products ... also services," says Sweden's Hardyson.
Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon's Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.
As illuminating as Xenon is for the tax man, the data-mining effort poses dangers to citizen privacy, said Par Strom, a noted privacy advocate in the world of Swedish IT.
"Of course it's not illegal," said Strom. "I don't feel quite comfortable having a tax office sending out those kind of spiders."
One issue has to do with how the information Xenon captures is protected.
Sentient has created access controls for its law-enforcement data-mining tool, called Data Detective, but its Xenon software lacks many of those protections, said dan Uyl, commenting on the theory that investigators will quickly delete the compiled data.
"Data Detective (handles) long-term data warehousing," he said, "(Xenon is) short-term project data warehousing. Different type of data, different type of analysis."
But Hardyson said the Swedish government -- which already has its own internally developed tax crawlers -- is currently keeping a copy of everything it spiders. That means that someone's long-expired actions have the potential to come back and haunt them. "We can scan and store all actions for every e-marketplace in Sweden, it's about 55,000 per day," said Hardyson. He said his agency hasn't decided if it will change its policies with the new, more sophisticated Xenon software. "Is this what we should do? Our lawyers must look at it."
Canada's tax authorities declined to state what its Xenon data retention policies are, as did Simon Bird, head of the "Web Robot Team" at the British HM Revenue and Customs office.
In the United States, the IRS is not a part of the Xenon project, but would neither confirm nor deny that it uses spidering software in its investigations.
Strom said now that the cat is out of the bag, there's no way to get governments or corporations to forgo technologies like spiders and data mining.
"The information is public of course, because it's posted on the internet," Strom says. "It wasn't meant to be used this way ... (this is) using the naivete of people. It's on the limit of what is ethical."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/1,72564-0.html
CN : China destroys old satellite with space missile… http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Missile-knocks-satellite-China-quizzed/2007/01/19/1169095958347.html
China quizzed over satellite destruction
January 19, 2007 - 2:04PM
Australia and other countries have demanded that China explain why it launched a missile last week to knock out an ageing weather satellite.
US spy agencies say China conducted a successful test of a satellite-killing weapon on January 11, knocking out the Chinese satellite with a "kinetic kill vehicle" launched from on board a ballistic missile.
The impact following the first known satellite-killing test in space in more than 20 years occurred more than 800 kilometres above the Earth.
Australia, the US, Japan and Canada are concerned about the possible militarisation of space and the hazards posed by debris from such tests.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who is in New York, said Australia was opposed to the militarisation of space.
"We had some concerns if China had been firing missiles into space to destroy satellites that this would cut cross the long standing commitment of many countries to ensure that space is not militarised," he told reporters.
"We've asked the Chinese for an explanation.
"So far the answer from the foreign affairs people in China including the ambassador in Canberra is that they're not aware of the incident."
On the instruction of Mr Downer, China's ambassador to Australia, Madame Fu Ying, was called to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) on Tuesday for a meeting with deputy secretary Peter Grey.
"Australia sought an explanation from the Chinese government about the nature of the incident and China's assessment of the danger posed by the debris created by that incident," a DFAT spokeswoman said.
"The government also sought an explanation about the Chinese government's future plans for developing and deploying weapons systems with the capability of destroying space assets."
Madame Fu undertook to get further information from Beijing.
"We are waiting on the outcome of her inquiries," the DFAT spokeswoman said.
The United States, Canada and Japan have also voiced their disapproval with China over the space test.
The US has indicated the test is against the general cooperative nature of dealings in space.
"The US believes China's development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area," US National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
There are indications that the successful missile test against the weather satellite could have implications for US defence systems.
"(What the test would) demonstrate, if that's correct, is that they have a capacity to destroy satellites in space and of course the danger there is that you get into a situation where other countries including the US I suppose would have to start to look for ways of protecting satellites in space," Mr Downer said.
"The Chinese position and a common position around the world is that we are opposed to the militarisation of outer space."
Analysts said China's weather satellites would travel at about the same altitude as US spy satellites, so the test represented an indirect threat to US defence systems.
Japan has multiple concerns, including safety implications and what it means for the future use of space.
"We are concerned about it firstly from the point of view of peaceful use of space and secondly from the safety perspective," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said.
The Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, which first reported the missile test, said a Chinese Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite, launched in 1999, was destroyed by an anti-satellite system launched from or near China's Xichang Space Center in Sichuan Province.
The last US anti-satellite test took place in 1985 before Washington halted such Cold War-era testing, concerned that debris might harm vital civilian and military satellite operations.
According to David Wright of the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists, the satellite pulverised by China could have broken into nearly 40,000 fragments from 1cm to 10cm in size, roughly half of which would stay in orbit for more than a decade.
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