In September, I mentioned the pledge made by film critic Mark Kermode that, in the event that this year there are ten films released in 2009 that are worse than Bride Wars, he would give up film criticism.
The popular TV programme 'Sesame Street' may be celebrating its 40th birthday, but is it really nothing more than a sinister Left-Wing plot to indoctinate America's children?
This looks like one of John 'The Tool' Rentoul's "questions for which the answer is no", but conservative wing nuts at the right-wing blog Big Hollywood disagree. Having dug up a two year old clip that appears to parody a well known conservative 'news' channel, they are claiming that Oscar the Grouch is "one more soldier to the Left’s war on Fox News."
Why? Because dear old Oscar, reporting for Grouch News Network (GNN), is told by a viewer: "from now on, I'm watching Pox News. Now there's a trashy news show!"
You see what they did there? Pox News? Fox News! At least one comment on the Big Hollywood site has the sense to say:
If we conservatives are to be successful in the media, we can't keep grabbing our skirts and shrieking every time we are parodied, especially when parodied on a equal level with left leaning counterparts. Man up.
But most other moonbats on the site seem unwilling to man up - they really do believe this is more evidence of communism taking control of the US. Could this be the most paranoid, unreasoning generation of Americans since the 1940s?
A short clip of the event at SOAS where Noam Chomsky spoke - and that I was unable to attend, despite having a free ticket, because of illness. Not that I'm still grumpy about this, you understand...
The sister of a Birmingham man who died in police custody has spoken about her brother’s health and the behaviour of police officers the night he was arrested.
Sharon Powell said her 38-year-old brother Michael was a “loving, family man” and despite a history of mental illness he was “fit, well and healthy”.
Michael Powell died in a prison cell at Thornhill Road Police Station in Handsworth after being arrested for smashing windows and damaging his mother’s home in Wilton Road, Lozells, in September 2003.
His family have maintained that the police’s heavy handed behaviour during the arrest was racially motivated and he would have been treated differently had he been white.
During the inquest held at Sutton Coldfield Town Hall into Mr Powell’s death, it emerged that the father-of-three had a history of mental episodes which included being found on a roof and being treated by a mental health team at his home in September, 1999.
It was also revealed that Mr Powell’s family had paid for mental health treatment at the private Woodbourne Priory Hospital in Edgbaston in 1994.
Ms Powell told coroner Stephen Campbell she received a call from her sister Judith at 12.30am on September 7, 2003, while she was talking to another friend on a different phone, informing her that the police had been called to her mother’s house.
When she arrived at the house, the road was blocked off by people and police. She said: “There was about six to eight police officers, I saw my brother on the floor, these police officers on top of him.”
“I couldn’t see any part of his body apart from his shoes.”
Ms Powell said after the van drove off, she took details from a number of witnesses present and asked a police officer why hadn’t he gone in an ambulance to hospital instead, asking if it was because he was black.
Hugh Davies, who represents 10 officers from West Midlands Police, put it to Ms Powell that her version of events had been affected by a dream a friend had about her brother, a van and people dressed in black.
Mr Davies said: “You remember previously that a friend had described a dream she had.
Ms Powell said: “My friend had a dream that all the people were in black and there was white van and a white van hit my brother.
Mr Davies said: “In each statement, you’ve described each and every police officer as wearing black as in the dream. In fact several of them were wearing fluorescent jackets.”
Mr Davies also said there were three to four officers restraining Mr Powell and they were not on top of him as she had previously said.
My good friend Cilius Victor will be talking to Attica Locke about her first novel Black Water Rising at an event organised by Newham Bookshop on
Wednesday 11 November at Stratford Circus Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15 1BX
at 7 pm. Tickets at £6 from Stratford Circus Box Office on 0844 357 2625 or from www.stratford-circus.com.
Reminiscent of early John Grisham and Walter Mosley, Black Water Rising is a taut, fast-paced novel heralds an exciting and powerful new voice in fiction. Big oil and corporate corruption meet their match with Jay Porter, a personal injury attorney down on his luck, who suddenly finds himself in a situation spiralling out of control. Jay knows a boat ride on the Bayou won’t measure up to his wife’s expectations of a birthday celebration, but it’s all he can afford. Halfway through dinner, gun shots and sharp cries for help ring out. When he fishes a woman out of the Bayou, he knows that this charitable act will lead to no good. Unravelling the woman’s past, Jay finds himself enmeshed in a web involving greed, politics and corporate corruption. And the secrets of his own past come back to either haunt or save him.
Attica Locke is a screenwriter who has worked in both film and television for over ten years. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab and most recently completed an adaptation of Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park. She is currently working on a television series about the civil rights movement, based on the writings of historian Taylor Branch. Born in Houston, Texas, and named after the uprising at Attica prison in 1971, she lives in Los Angeles.
Here we go again. The former 80s radical and Brent South MP Paul Boateng, once the chair of the GLC's police committee and a critic of the Met, continues his journey from left to right in spectacular style.
When Boateng was elected to Parliament in 1987, he famously declared in his election speech, "today Brent South, tomorrow Soweto!" Somehow, I doubt whether the young leftwinger imagined then that one day he would be making money from the kind of unaccountable business that has caused so much misery to Africa, by joining the board of a military company that supplies mercenaries for hire.
The Sunday Times reports that Boateng, who was Britain's first black Cabinet Minister before Tony Blair gifted him the post of High Commissioner to South Africa, is now a member of the board of Aegis Defence Services, the company run by Colonel Tim Spicer. Spicer was at the centre of the arms-to-Sierra Leone scandal in 1998 and is a business associate of Simon Mann, the recently returned mercenary and coup plotter who was released from imprisonment in Equatorial Guinea. Whilst in office as High Commissioner, Boateng was involved in lobbying the ANC government against anti-mercenary legislation designed to prevent South African citizens fighting for foreign armies as 'dogs of war'. The Times report says that South Africans are believed to be the second largest nationality after Americans working for private military companies in Iraq, where Aegis has multi-million pound contracts.
Mr Boateng, we salute your indefatigability in the pursuit of money at the expense of principle. The days of standing up to Met Commissioners Sir David McNee and Sir Kenneth Newman must seem like a long, long time ago.
I'm in Leamington Spa at the moment and at lunctime today, with a hangover still spinning away in my head from last night's 'quiet drink', I went over to the town's new Gurdwara Sahib with Jas and Sang for a guided tour.
The temple opened at the end of October and cost almost £11 million. It was paid for by the local Sikhs and is indoubtedly impressive: it's obvious where the money was spent by the quality of everything inside. It is also the only gurdwara in the town - unlike other areas where there is a large Sikh population, there are not separate temples based on caste. The gurdwara is not, however, without controversy. Not everyone in Leamington's Sikh community thinks that so much money should have been spent on a building, as I have picked up in conversations over the last couple of months.
An alternative point of view, one that argues it is more important to "invest in people not cement" and to direct funds towards tackling social problems like alcoholism and domestic violence, is summed up in this comment to a otherwise rather adulatory article on SikhNet.
Plans to expand carbon markets at the United Nations climate talks this December could trigger a second 'sub-prime' style financial collapse and fail to protect the world from global warming catastrophe, according to a new report from Friends of the Earth.
'A Dangerous Obsession' focuses on the trade in a new artificial commodity - the right to emit carbon dioxide - which the UK and other developed country governments want to expand into a global market and are promoting heavily in negotiations before the Copenhagen summit. The trade in carbon permits and credits, mainly based in Europe, was worth $126 billion in 2008 and is predicted to rose to $3.1 trillion by 2020 if a global carbon market takes off.
But the majority of the trade is carried out not between polluting industries and factories covered by carbon trading schemes, but by banks and investors who profit from speculation on the carbon markets - packaging carbon credits into increasingly complex financial products similar to the 'shadow finance' around sub-prime mortgages which triggered the recent economic crash.
This risks the development of sub-prime carbon and the possibility of an eventual collapse in confidence in the market, with catastrophic consequences for the global economy and also for our prospects of avoiding runaway climate change.
Friends of the Earth's report warns that the UK Government's obsession with carbon trading as a solution to climate change is high risk, irresponsible and dangerous. Existing carbon trading schemes are not delivering promised emissions cuts and relying on them to reduce emissions globally is gambling with the health of the planet and the future of billions of people.
Carbon trading is also being used as a smokescreen by rich countries to avoid their legal and moral commitment to provide money and technology to developing countries to grow cleanly and adapt to climate change.
A copy of the full report, 'A Dangerous Obsession', is available here (PDF)
The folowing report on the inquest into the death of Mikey Powell is from the Birmingham Post:
A witness has described seeing a police car run into a man who later died in police custody.
Michael Powell died six years ago in a prison cell at Thornhill Road Police Station after being arrested for smashing windows and violent behaviour outside his family home in Lozells.
His family have maintained that heavy-handed behaviour on the part of police prior to his death was racially motivated.
Speaking at an inquest into his death Ernest Walters, a family friend who was dating Mr Powell’s sister, said he saw the 38-year-old standing in front of a police car when it revved its engine and ran him over, causing him to be flipped up on to the bonnet of the car before rolling off the roof.
Mr Walters said he had arrived at the the family’s home at about midnight on September 6, 2003, and had become suspicious when he saw Mr Powell walking away from the property which had a broken front window. He saw that he had blood on his shirt and a belt with a large metal buckle wrapped around his hand.
Mr Walters said that when police arrived he saw Michael break the car window before it sped off, but said it returned and after a stand off with Michael, ran into him.
He said Michael was able to stand up and again approached the police car.
“At that point I didn’t want anything else to happen to him, so I grabbed him from behind,” he said.
“I shouted at the police to come and hold him and restrain him, to put some handcuffs on him because he was not well.
“But when they came closer I saw what they had in their hands I realised they hadn’t come to help him.”
Mr Powell was later hit with a baton and sprayed with CS gas before being taken to a cell where he was later found not breathing. Judy Powell, Michael’s sister, who also gave evidence at the inquest at Sutton Coldfield Town Hall, reiterated the family’s stance that police action was racially motivated.
She said: “If it was a white person and they saw the blood they would have taken him straight to hospital and sorted him out and found out what was going on. Because he was black they threw him in the van like he was an inhuman being.”
The inquest also heard from Miss Powell that she suspected her brother had been taking crack cocaine and heroin. A fact that she had not reported to police.
She also confirmed that he had suffered from previous “episodes” which had resulted in him going into a residential care unit and receiving care in the community.
The family of Ian Tomlinson, who died during the G20 protests in London on 1st April, will be attending the MPA Civil Liberties Panel on Thursday 5 November 2009 from 09:30 – 12:30 in London’s Living Room, City Hall.
The family hope to have questions answered about the nature of police tactics both planned and used on the day, in particular, use of force against the public. They will also raise concerns about press communications to the public after the event.
The MPA is holding the meeting to secure "public confidence in policing tactics" as part of its review of the events surrounding the G20 demonstrations.
Random Blowe is the personal and political blog of Kevin Blowe, a charity worker, campaigner and proud 'stopper' based in Newham in east London.
I am an activist with the community-based anti-racist organisation Newham Monitoring Project, a member of the board of trustees of the custody-deaths charity INQUEST and has been actively involved in the Justice4Jean campaign. For over a decade, I was the secretary of the United Families & Friends Campaign, the coalition of relatives and friends of those who have died in the custody of the state. I was also a founder member of the 'NoLondon2012' anti London Olympics bid campaign, thus proving that not every battle can be won.
Somehow, I also manage to find time to write, travel, see loads of films, act as Vice Chair of the Trinity Community Centre in East Ham and as secretary of the Buwan Kothi International Trust (BKIT), which raises funds for projects in rural Haryana in northern India. In an incredibly short space of time, BKIT has raised enough funds to build a school named in memory of my great friend and comrade Gilly Mundy, who died in March 2007 aged only 36.
Gilly's death was a reminder, to me and to his many, many friends, that our time is short. We don't have the luxury of waiting, of just hoping that governments will ever change the world for the better, or that justice will simply prevail, or that climate change is the next generation's problem, or that someone else is bound to act on our behalf.
Whilst I enjoy writing for this blog, there are times when you can do, or you can comment, but not both. Which means that sometimes I'm too busy to keep writing and updating as much as I'd like...
All comments on Random Blowe are moderated and those that I consider to be downright abusive, wildly off-topic, misogynist, racist or homophobic will never appear.
Other blogs may welcome this kind of commentator in order to encourage robust dialogue. Personally, I prefer informed debate to meaningless dialogue, no matter how 'robust' it may be. So if you disagree with something, make a counter-argument. But if the best you can come up with is an ad hominem attack, then this is where you should really be hanging out...
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