Don’t say sayonara to the Simpsons just yet: Sources say several top-level producers will take pay cuts in order to keep the show on the air. Not all of the producers are on board, and cast members have not yet agreed to any terms. Variety notes that any money saved…
Continue reading …Palestine’s bid for statehood took one step forward yesterday as it gained initial approval for full membership in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Membership in UNESCO would allow Palestine to apply to protect its monuments and historical sites as World Heritage Sites, which would increase conflict with…
Continue reading …Steve Jobs “was a historical figure on the scale of a Thomas Edison or Henry Ford,” writes tech guru Walter Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal ; but, more than that, he was also a man of “stunning breadth” who loved to talk about his “sweeping ideas for the digital revolution….
Continue reading …Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan defended his bank’s controversial new $5 debit card fee in a CNBC interview yesterday, saying that most customers would avoid it, and that the bank had given customers plenty of warning about it. Asked to respond to President Obama’s statement that banks don’t have…
Continue reading …Ed Miliband drops former ministers from shadow cabinet in first reshuffle
October 6, 2011 No Comment
Shadow health secretary John Healey and shadow business secretary John Denham to make way for backbench successors Labour is to attempt to step up its attack on the government with the promotion of backbench MPs to replace two former ministers in Ed Miliband’s first reshuffle of his shadow cabinet team. Labour claimed that both the shadow health secretary, John Healey, and the shadow business secretary, John Denham, had told the Labour leader some time ago that they did not want to carry on in frontline positions. The party insisted the departures were civilised and that they had not been sacked. It is generally accepted in Whitehall, however, that Healey had underperformed. Sources said he stood down after he was offered a more junior role having fallen out of favour with the leadership for failing to make political capital out of the government’s NHS reforms. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the last Labour government, has been tipped as a replacement. He is familiar with the brief, and well placed to lead Labour’s response when the government publishes a social care white paper in spring next year. The paper will bring issues on which Burnham has previously developed well-respected ideas back onto the political agenda. John Denham’s departure is more of a surprise. The former universities minister is close to the Labour leader, being one of only four shadow cabinet members to have backed Ed Miliband in the Labour leadership election. He is thought, however, to have been unhappy with parts of Miliband’s party conference speech that dealt with the business sector. Miliband hopes to go into the new parliamentary term with a fresh slate after a mixed reaction to his conference speech delivered in Liverpool a fortnight ago. Healey was the second most popular candidate when MPs stood for election to the shadow cabinet a year ago, but his performance has confirmed to Miliband the problems with those elevated to the cabinet through popularity rather than ability. Miliband is understood to believe he has been poorly served by the patchy quality of shadow cabinet members over the last year and during this year’s conference. John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, urged him to use new rules allowing the party leader to choose his frontbench team to shake up his shadow cabinet. Having stayed away from conference for the first time in 40 years, Prescott said: “This is a Tory government that’s doing some outrageous things and we haven’t had many words of protest. Ed, you’re the leader, get a shadow cabinet who’ll do that.” The new rules were approved by the Labour party conference and Miliband is using the last day of the conference season inter-regnum to assemble a stronger line-up. The MP for Leeds West, Rachel Reeves, who previously worked at the Bank of England, is expected to be made shadow chief secretary to the Treasury. Angela Eagle, who currently holds the position, is expected to be made shadow energy and climate change secretary, replacing Meg Hillier after the latter’s lacklustre performance. Other new intake MPs tipped for promotion include Michael Dugher, the MP for Barnsley East; Tristram Hunt, the MP for Stoke; and Gloria del Piero, the MP for Ashfield. Suggestions that the former lord chancellor Charles Falconer would return to politics as shadow leader of the Lords, opposing Lord Strathclyde, were dismissed. Some shadow cabinet members expressed alarm at the frontbench names being floated. One source said: “Here is a man who has won an election, changed the rules governing who must be in the shadow cabinet but is nonetheless seeking to fill it with Blairites who are not the people who supported him to become leader.” Ed Miliband Labour House of Commons John Denham Labour party leadership Allegra Stratton guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …The Occupy Wall Street movement staged its biggest demonstration yet yesterday, with thousands marching from lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to Foley Square near City Hall. Their ranks were bolstered by students, workers, and members of more than 30 unions, DNAinfo reports. But the night also saw things get ugly once…
Continue reading …Westboro Baptist Church says it will picket Steve Jobs’ funeral, but apparently God also hates irony: Leader Margie Phelps announced the protest via a Twitter announcement made on an iPhone. “The irony here is almost unbelievable,” notes Josh Wolford on Web Pro News . Jobs’ sin? Phelps tweeted that he “had…
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Mandy Fleming ‘lost it’ when she realised her spouse had splashed cash on his boat after pleading poverty to her A “manipulative and angry” woman has been jailed for 18 months after drilling holes in her estranged husband’s £75,000 yacht and causing it to sink on Valentine’s Day. Mandy Fleming “lost it” when she saw her husband Adam had bought a new television and other equipment for the vessel, named Double Dragon, while telling her he had no money. She drilled three holes in the hull of the boat, which was berthed at Brighton Marina, and turned on cooker gas taps turning it into a “bomb”, the Old Bailey heard. Fleming, 47, of Sheerness, Kent, had admitted endangering life by causing criminal damage in 2004, during a hearing last month. She wept as she was sentenced on Thursday, with judge Richard Hone telling her: “You were a manipulative, angry and troubled individual.” She was told she would have to serve half the sentence, less the 10 weeks she had initially spent in custody. Fleming had gone to the yacht for a “menage-a-trois” with her then lover, David Brown, and his wife Nemone, the court heard. After seeing new electrical equipment and some bills for work which had been done on the yacht, she rang her estranged husband, a haulage contractor, and berated him for spending money on the vessel, said Mark Gadsden, prosecuting. “She returned to the shore and equipped herself with a drill which she took on to the boat and drilled three holes. “Between them, they were sufficient to cause the boat to sink.” She then turned the cooker gas taps on. The court heard turning on a light would have been enough to blow up the boat. The slowly sinking vessel was seen the next morning and berthing master Chris Cheyne smashed a porthole to get into the yacht, intending to pump it out. “He noticed a wedding photograph of the couple in a glass frame had been smashed deliberately,” said Gadsden. “A volatile mixture of propane gas and air had been created and all it would have needed was for someone to turn on an electric light or torch, or respond to a mobile phone or radio, for it to have exploded.” Cheyne told the court: “I had a radio on me and I knew the smallest spark would trigger off an explosion.” Four people on nearby boats had to be evacuated. Damage estimated at £40,000 was caused to the boat. Police later found an entry in Fleming’s diary which read: “Lost it, got drill and sunk boat. Now I am in shit.” The court heard the couple married two years before the incident and the yacht was bought during the marriage. It was her third marriage. They have since divorced. Oliver Blunt QC, for Fleming, said: “She has little recollection of the gas being turned on. They had all been drinking and were very much the worse for wear.” Fleming had initially been charged with damaging the boat but was later charged, with David Brown and another man, of plotting to kill her husband by hiring a hitman. But the charges were dropped last month after supergrass Gary Eaton, the chief witness, was discredited. Earlier this year, his evidence was also excluded from the failed prosecution of three men charged with murdering private detective Daniel Morgan . Crime Caroline Davies guardian.co.uk
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If Israel’s parliament approves the proposal, 30,000 Bedouins could be removed from their homes in Negev within 60 days Six Arab-Israeli towns in Israel’s southern Negev region have ground to a halt in protest at government plans to confiscate swathes of land from the Bedouin community. If the proposal passes through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, unopposed, 30,000 people could be forced from their homes within 60 days. Schools, shops and municipal offices across the region closed for the day allowing more than 8,000 people to stage a demonstration in Beersheba rejecting the plan – the largest civil protest in the city’s history. Arab-Israeli MP Jamal Zahalka said they were united against the proposal. “We want to send a very clear message to the Israeli government – we are saying no. This demonstration proves that Israel’s plans will be thwarted. Nobody here today will co-operate with them.” He added that the protesters would not allow another Nakba, the Palestinian term for the events of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands became refugees. The Israeli ministerial committee approved a plan to settle the long-standing land dispute between the Bedouin communities in the Negev and Israel on 11 September. Based on a report produced for the prime minister’s office, it suggests that more than 30,000 Bedouin living on land claimed by Israel should be resettled in six towns created and recognised by the state in 1973. Of the 12,000 sq km (2,965,000 acres) of Negev land, the government plan apportions 200 to the Bedouin, with compensation offered to anyone forced from land they can prove ownership of. Around half of the Negev’s 180,00 Bedouin live in unrecognised villages, without running water, electricity or public services of any kind. They are the poorest minority group in Israel. Mark Regev, spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said the aim of the government was to assist the Bedouin minority by assimilating them into wider Israeli society. “The Bedouin community has a lower standard of health care and education than the rest of Israel, they live in substandard conditions. We are investing 1.2bn shekels [£210m] to move them into the mainstream, to reduce that gap. “The idea that the Bedouin do not want to make this move is simply not true.” Bedouin leader Amal Elsana-Alh’jooj said the report failed to recognise Bedouin claims to the land prior to the creation of Israel, as recommended by the government-commissioned Goldberg committee in 2008. An estimated 90,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev before 1948. “If we accept what they are offering, we will see a violent, over-crowded poverty-ridden area,” she said. “We want to restart the negotiating process so we the Bedouin can start to contribute to the area and not just be people living in poverty.” Israel Middle East guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Better luck next year, Bob Dylan . Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer was today awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature. The AP calls the 80-year-old a “perennial favorite” to win, and notes that Swedish journalists regularly camp outside his apartment in Stockholm on the big day in anticipation of victory. It…
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