Thousands more armed forces personnel will be forced to leave service as officials prepare for second wave of cuts The number of compulsory redundancies within the armed forces is likely to soar during the next round of cuts, which will require thousands more people to leave service, defence officials have admitted. As the defence secretary, Liam Fox, sought to justify the first round of job losses, his department was bracing itself for the second wave and the likelihood that most people who wanted to volunteer for redundancy might have done so by now. “By the time we get to rounds three or four, it’s hard to imagine there will be any volunteers left,” said one Whitehall source. Another official added: “It’s hard to tell how things will look, but this is not likely to get any easier.” With Labour and some analysts again questioning the wisdom of the speed and scale of the redundancy programme, Fox and the armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, insisted it was the only way to bring the chaotic budget at the Ministry of Defence under control, and that the government had had no room to manoeuvre. “The responsibility for these redundancies lies with the incompetence of the last Labour government who left the nation’s finances broken and a £38bn black hole in the defence budget,” said Fox. “The tough measures we have taken will bring the budget largely into balance for the first time in a generation. “Of course redundancies are always sad news, but we will continue to have strong and capable forces and we appreciate the hard work of our brave armed forces.” Harvey admitted that the armed forces would not be able to conduct the breadth of military operations in the future, but said the current stretch would ease as the efforts in Libya and Afghanistan wound down. “Over the next three years, the pace of operations should decline,” he said. Sir Menzies Campbell, a member of the Commons foreign affairs committee, said this was the only way the armed forces could cope and that the UK would have to tailor its military ambitions. “The first lesson for the calculation of defence expenditure is to keep obligations and resources in balance,” he said. “It’s just as well we are out of Iraq, Libya is approaching a military conclusion, and that we have a fixed date for withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan. Otherwise we could be seriously embarrassed.” Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said he did not believe the MoD had a “coherent plan”. The RAF is making 930 personnel redundant in the first tranche announced on Thursday – 490 are compulsory job losses. The army has notified 920 people that they have been selected for redundancy, of which 260 are compulsory. The Gurkhas were hit hardest, with 140 of them being told that they were being made redundant against their wishes. It is hoped that some of them will be able to apply for posts within other infantry regiments, though with the army being cut by a fifth by 2020, there are unlikely to be too many openings. Supporters of the Gurkhas reacted with fury and dismay to the news, and said they feared the brigade would be targeted again when the second tranche of redundancies gets under way in the new year. “I just hope the Gurkhas that have been made redundant today get the same support and welfare that other British soldiers are entitled to,” said Tikendra Dewan, of the British Gurkha Welfare Society. “That has not always been the case.” An MoD spokesman said: “No decision has yet been taken on when the second tranche of redundancies will begin, but it will be in early 2012. “There will be up to four tranches to reach the redundancies we need by 2014/15.” Ministry of Defence Military Defence policy Liam Fox Gurkhas Public sector cuts Nick Hopkins guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Credit the power of the Internet. An online outcry convinced JC Penney to stop selling a T-shirt for girls ages 7-10 emblazoned with the slogan: “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” The chain pulled the sexist shirt and apologized after complaints…
Continue reading …Could “robo-signing” be on the way out? Robo-signing is the now-notorious practice of agents who work for major mortgage lenders allegedly signing documents without having properly reviewed them, in order to speed struggling borrowers into foreclosure. A task force of all 50 state attorneys general is currently probing the banks’ alleged use of the procedure,
Continue reading …
Madonna’s jaw-dropping take on the story of Wallis Simpson is a primped and simpering folly, preening and fatally mishandled Whatever the crimes committed by Wallis Simpson – marrying a king, sparking a constitutional crisis, fraternising with Nazis – it’s doubtful that she deserves the treatment meted out to her in W.E., Madonna’s jaw-dropping take on “the 20th-century’s greatest royal love story”. The woman is defiled, humiliated, made to look like a joke. The fact that W.E. comes couched in the guise of a fawning, servile snow-job only makes the punishment feel all the more cruel. Or could it be that Madonna is in deadly earnest here? If so, her film is more risible than we had any right to expect; a primped and simpering folly, the turkey that dreamed it was a peacock. Andrea Riseborough stars as Wallis, the perky American social climber who meets Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) in London, where she is drawn like a magnet to his pursed lips and peevish air. Yet Madonna has also taken the decision to run Wallis’s story in tandem with the story of Wally (Abbie Cornish), a trophy wife in 1990s New York, who totters in and out of the drama like a doped pony. Wally, it transpires, was named after Wallis and is obsessed by the woman to a degree that struck me as deeply worrying, but which Madonna presents as evidence of impeccable good taste. From time to time, the ghost of Wallis even pays Wally a call to dispense beauty tips or comfort her when she’s lying injured on the bathroom floor. “I’m here,” coos Wallis. “I’ll always be here.” And seldom has a promise sounded more like a threat. Madonna wants us to see these two as spiritual twins, in that they are both dazzled by expensive trinkets and searching desperately for love. We know instantly that Wallis’s first husband is a wrong ‘un because he drags her from the bath and beats her, and we are invited to take a similar view of Wally’s spouse when he starts claiming that Wallis and Edward were Nazi-sympathisers, which is patently absurd. “They might have been naive,” Wally scolds him. “That doesn’t mean that they were Nazis.” What an extraordinarily silly, preening, fatally mishandled film this is. It may even surpass 2008′s Filth and Wisdom, Madonna’s calamitous first outing as a film-maker. Her direction is so all over the shop that it barely qualifies as direction at all. W.E. gives us slo-mo and jump cuts and a crawling crane shot up a tree in Balmoral, but they are all just tricks without a purpose. For her big directoral flourish, Madonna has Wallis bound on stage to dance with a Masai tribesman while Pretty Vacant blares on the soundtrack. But why? What point is she making? That social-climbing Wallis-Simpson was the world’s first punk-rocker? That – see! – a genuine Nazi-sympathiser would never dream of dancing with an African? Who can say? My guess is that she could have had Wallis dressed as a clown, bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower to the strains of The Birdy Song and it would have served her story just as well. Xan Brooks Rating: 1/5 Venice film festival 2011 Venice film festival Festivals Drama Madonna Xan Brooks guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …A viral YouTube video showing young showoffs clinging to the side of a speeding train in India while they perform stunts have shocked officials certain that such hijinks are bound to end in death. The boys in the film first cling to a train as they “surf” along a station…
Continue reading …