After being arrested at Dover on 15 July, Christian Emde and Robert Baum are due to appear in court in London Two German men have been charged with terrorism offences after they were arrested at a major UK port. Christian David Erkart Heinz Emde, 28, and Robert Baum, 23, were on Tuesday charged with offences under the Terrorism Act. They were arrested by officers from the South East Counter Terrorism Unit at Dover port in Kent on 15 July. They are accused of collecting or possessing information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism contrary to section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Both men have been remanded in custody to appear at City of Westminster magistrates’ court on Wednesday. UK security and terrorism guardian.co.uk
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Ed Balls labels chancellor ‘breathtakingly complacent’ in attack on government tax and spending plans Ministers insisted there would be no backsliding on the government’s hardline austerity programmes after data showed that Britain’s economy grew by just 0.2% in the spring. Amid Treasury relief that output did not fall in the three months to June, George Osborne, the chancellor, said a U-turn on deficit reduction would put economic stability at risk. The rest of the world would consider Britain to be “completely mad” if the government abandoned its deficit reduction plans, he said. But Osborne was accused of being “breathtakingly complacent” by the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, who said the economy had flatlined as a result of the government’s tax and spending plans. “The positive news is that the British economy is continuing to grow and is creating jobs,” said Osborne. “And it is positive news too that at a time of real international instability we are a safe haven in the storm.” Although the City believes that Osborne will now have no choice but to trim his growth forecast for 2011 to little more than 1%, allies of Balls recognise that it may take another third quarter of poor growth, due to be published in October, for the chancellor to be seriously challenged and for the public to recognise that they are the victims of a reckless political experiment. In the first sign of Conservative pressure for a change of course, the London mayor Boris Johnson said: “You have to look at ways of stimulating growth now. “Certainly you should look at national insurance, you should look at ways of stimulating consumption, confidence in the market, and certainly I think [look at cutting] the 50p tax rate as a signal that London is open for business, that London is a great international competitive capital.” Balls responded to figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that the economy had grown by just 0.7% over the 12 months to June by accusing the chancellor of being “in total denial” over the state of the economy and called on Osborne to reverse his decision to raise VAT to 20% at the start of the year. “People up and down the country will hear that, look at their own lives, their bills, local shops and think he doesn’t understand what’s going on” Balls said. “These figures show that last year’s recovery has been recklessly choked off by George Osborne’s VAT rise and spending review. “The economy has effectively flatlined for nine months and this is very bad news for jobs, living standards, business investment and for getting the deficit down. “Just 0.2% growth over the nine months since this government’s spending review and VAT rise compares to 2.1% in the previous nine months when the economic recovery was taking hold. “Every other major economy in the world has faced challenges like high world oil prices but their economies have continued to recover while Britain has barely grown at all over the last nine months.” The Treasury and Downing Street denied reports there were tensions over economic strategy after the ONS said that the UK had so far recouped only 2.5 percentage points of the 6.4% drop in gross domestic product suffered during the UK’s worst post-war slump. David Cameron said: “Unlike previous governments, there is one team at the heart of this government: that is the chancellor and the prime minister working together.” Urged on by the business secretary Vince Cable, Osborne will return to fresh growth measures in the autumn statement, and will look at possible tax cuts in the spring budget next year, with the chief target likely to be the abolition of the 50p income tax rate. It also appears that Jeremy Heywood, the Downing Street permanent secretary, urged civil servants at a cross-government meeting last week to do more to support the deregulation agenda. Cameron has been frustrated at what he regards as the enemies of enterprise in Whitehall, including the way in which some civil servants either add extra regulation or resist deregulation. The chancellor dismissed suggestions that he was at odds with the prime minister over economic policy as “nonsense”. “The absolutely fundamental requirement is economic stability. Without that you have nothing,” he said on Radio 4′s The World at One. “Would we really take the risk of yet more debt? Would we risk the sky high interest rates, the economic instability? “Our economy is stable at this time because this government has taken the difficult decisions to get to grips with Britain’s debts. Abandoning that now, as some argue we should, would only risk British jobs and growth.” Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said: “It’s hurting, but it isn’t working. Ministers told us that deep rapid cuts would get the economy back on course and leave the private sector room to grow. But the treatment has turned out to be worse than the disease, and with the government borrowing more last month than they did a year ago they are not even tackling the deficit effectively. The detail in the figures is even more worrying. There is no sign of an export-led recovery with productive industries falling by 1.4%. And the cuts are now beginning to bite as the government made no contribution to growth last quarter.” Economic policy Economic growth (GDP) Unemployment and employment statistics Economics Tax and spending George Osborne Ed Balls Conservatives Trade unions Larry Elliott Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …File this in your notebook under “in case you didn’t believe prejudice and bigotry lives on” here in the United States. I won’t even try to summarize this. I’ll just give it to you straight : Kymberly Wimberly, 18, got only a single B in her 4 years at McGehee Secondary School, and loaded up on Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She had the highest G.P.A. and says the school’s refusal to let her be sole valedictorian was part of a pattern of discrimination against black students. Wimberly says that despite earning the highest G.P.A. of the Class of 2011, and being informed of it by a school counselor, “school administrators and personnel treated two other white students as heir[s] apparent to the valedictorian and salutatorian spots.” Wimberly’s mother is the school’s “certified media specialist.” She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard “in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly’s status as valedictorian might cause a ‘big mess.’” McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the “big mess” comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her “that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian,” although the white student had a lower G.P.A. I guess the school authorities found it uppity that someone who had the highest GPA in the school would actually expect to have the valedictorian honor bestowed on her. I think I’ll set a Google Alert for this one…and hope for an appropriately punitive outcome.
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Even if you want it, divorce is about as much fun as running your tongue along the edge of a new razor blade. It also leaves a similarly painful wound. My divorce was no different. Overnight the once solid furniture of my life had been rearranged. And the dream of a happy ending had vanished like smoke on the wind. So, I did what every newly untethered, fifty-something divorcee would do — I moved to Vegas. In retrospect, I have no idea why moving to Sin City sounded like a good plan. Maybe it wasn’t so much a plan as a blind leap, like hurling myself off a cliff. Vegas had never been on my to-do list. Oh, I’d been there . . . once. As I recall I’d been overwhelmed by Siegfried and Roy’s show and underwhelmed by everything else. Maybe I moved to Vegas because it was different. For a girl raised in the South during the last gasp of the Donna Reed era, Vegas was as close to Somewhere Over the Rainbow as it was possible to get. Perhaps I’d gone temporarily ’round the bend. Maybe my move was a desperate cry, a shout into the darkness to the me I used to be. Who knows? What I do know is that the rules that had governed my existence no longer applied. In light of the fact that the bedrock of my life had recently crumbled beneath my feet, this struck me as a good thing. Disconcerting, but good. I remember standing in front of my new little condo, which was a third the size of the house I’d left, with all I had in the world stacked in boxes on the driveway, and thinking, This is it? This is all I have to show for all the years I’ve put in? Yup, that was it — the sum total, of a life I’d left behind. I called the Goodwill folks and gave it all away. Well, except for a handful of clothes — and those didn’t last long. My first big dinner out in Vegas was at the restaurant with some friends I had known “before” — before marriage, before divorce — old, old friends. They were already seated at the Coyote Café when I arrived. Without preamble or social grace, my girlfriend gave her husband a knowing look then said to me, “Honey, those clothes have got to go. You look so . . . East Coast. In Vegas, preppie just screams clueless.” Well, if it looks like a duck . . . I smiled at the waiter perched expectantly at my elbow. “A gin and tonic, no tonic, please.” While I gulped my drink, I surreptitiously watched the people around me. Most of the outfits I saw would’ve been appropriate for working the street corners back in Dallas. A grin tickled my lips. This could be fun. At some point in the evening, my friend and I excused ourselves and headed toward the bathroom. We followed a short woman with long blond hair tottering on five-inch heels. She wore fishnet hose and a Lycra mini so short that dignity, if she had any, would necessitate remaining in an upright position. A leather biker jacket with the face of Elvis pieced together in multi-colored suede on the back completed her ensemble. Needless to say, she turned heads all the way across the casino. I elbowed my friend, “Is that how I should dress?” Apparently I’d had too many gins with no tonic, as the woman turned at what I thought was my whisper. She was eighty, if she was a day. In an instant, I sobered. Man, even the octogenarians rocked mini-skirts and knock-me-down-and-f@#k-me shoes. Humiliated, I looked with scorn at my khakis and cashmere cardigan and felt . . . hope. I needed new. I craved new. New clothes seemed like a good place to start. So, I designed a budget and a plan of attack. A new skirt here. A pair of skinny jeans there. I had to wait for a sale to buy that killer pair of stilettos, but eventually they, too found their way into my tiny closet. Growing bolder, one day I spied a cute figure in a tennis skirt with a matching sweater bending over the meat display at the local supermarket. Having just joined a tennis league, I thought I could use an ensemble like that. I tapped my fellow tennis enthusiast on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Sorry to bother you. But could you tell me where you bought your outfit?” The figure turned. It was a guy . . . with great legs. I didn’t bat an eye. I noted the name of the store, thanked him profusely, then went shopping. With each new acquisition, I pitched an old one, until none remained. All that glittered was new . . . literally. Slowly, like a chick pecking at the shell, a new me pushed her way into the light. Who knew that changing the outer would change the inner as well? Yes, I’ve found the me I was meant to be . . . in Sin City. I try not to overanalyze that. The other night, I came downstairs in a slinky, off-one-shoulder, fitted dress with a rather strategic cut-out . . . oh, and those kick-ass shoes. The new man in my life whistled and said, “Back where I come from, that is a stay-at-home dress. But, you look amazing.” I took in his East Coast attire– double-breasted blue blazer, creased gray slacks and loafers– and grinned. Hooking my arm though his, I whispered, “Welcome to the new me.”
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CBS's Michelle Miller leaned towards supporters of taxing junk food on Tuesday's Early Show, playing three sound bites from them and none from opponents. Miller only made one vague reference to the opposing side, and she immediately followed it by playing up the supposedly positive result of the tax: ” While some say a new tax is the last thing we need, it could mean a healthier America .” The correspondent led her report by hyping how “we're paying quite a hefty toll” for creating “cheap fast food,” and launched into her first sound bite, which came from Michael Jacobson, the executive director of the perennial “food police” organization, the Center for Science in the Public Interest. After a second clip from Jacobson, Miller lamented how ” poorer consumers are often priced out of healthier options, because fresher, purer foods cost more . With the percentage of obese adults doubling in the past 30 years, and the percentage of obese children tripling, the annual health care cost of obesity has soared to over $100 billion.” The CBS News journalist then turned to her second “industry expert,” Mark Bittman of the New York Times, whom she labeled as merely an “author and food columnist,” without mentioning the media outlet that he writes for. Only two days earlier, as Clay Waters of MRC's TimesWatch noted , Bittman pushed for taxes on ” things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks ” in a Sunday article in the Times.
Continue reading …Oh, the schadenfreude: Cheater Jesse James and famously tattooed Kat Von D have broken up, thus ending the engagement that grossed out the world . “I’m so sad because I really love her,” James tells People . “The distance between us was just too much.” (James lives in Texas; Von D shoots…
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It’s an age-old problem: Positive female cartoon characters are rare, and even if they are presented as likeable heroines central to the plot, their bodies are unattainable (She-Ra) or spilling out of seashell cups (Ariel). Sure, things have changed since the Betty Boop era, and traditional gender stereotypes are somewhat shrouded these days by storylines
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If you’re the type to stock your walls with Lord of the Rings-style elvish daggers (or, you know, build full-scale Portal gun replicas ), then you’ll love this official Mass Effect 3 mockup commissioned by the folks at Bioware. Arduously crafted by self-proclaimed graphic design dork Harrison Krix , the N7 assault rifle replica made its facsimile debut at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. With only a fortnight to work with, the DIY, prop-making hobbyist took the made-for-cosplay gun from a glued wood, styrene and PVC-detailed master concept to paint weathered, final collector’s edition mold. It’s an impressive feat you can view in heavily photographed detail at the source, but there’s still one thing we’re waiting on Krix to bring to life — that space-skipping SSV Normandy. Mass Effect 3 N7 replica gets real world debut for your Spacer pleasure originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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