British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world.

The prospect has alarmed civil liberties groups who fear it represents a 'sea change' in the state's relationship with children and one that may lead to juveniles being erroneously accused of crimes. Under laws being drawn up behind closed doors by the European Commission's 'Article Six' committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union's 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.

The use of fingerprints and other biometric data is designed to prevent passport fraud and allow European member states to meet US entry visa requirements, but the decision to fingerprint children has disturbed human rights groups.

Full article

Why is everything allowed in the name of security? Is fingerprinting children going to be of any use at all? I always read many opinions but never get any clear answers.

Public sector workers such as police, teachers, nurses and firemen cannot afford to buy property in two-thirds of UK towns, the Halifax bank has said.

Property is most unaffordable for those in London and south-east England.

But rising prices in northern England, the South West, Midlands and Scotland are putting home ownership out of the grasp of such workers, it added.

Halifax arrived at its conclusions by dividing average regional property prices by average annual wages.

Out of 519 towns surveyed by the Halifax, 339 (65%) were deemed unaffordable.

Full article

It is not just key workers, it's getting to the stage where only the elite will be able to afford a house.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Beatles album Revolver, there is a free e-book that can be downloaded here.

The same website has some other stuff about the Beatles that should be interesting for anyone into music and/or the 60s.

Syncronised swimming in Trafalgar Square
or
swim the entire length of the river Thames

One major difference this time is that Israel enjoys an indulgence from Washington far beyond anything previous, essentially giving it a free hand.

While previous administrations, despite commitment to the strategic alliance with Israel, kept at least some distance in earlier crises, the US under George W Bush immediately adopted Israel's primary war aim.

There could be no ceasefire until the "root problem - Hezbollah is addressed". Israel would not be under pressure to halt until Hezbollah had been defeated and destroyed.

The agony of Lebanon was, like the carnage in Iraq, part of the birth pains of the New Middle East for the neo-conservative ideologues in Washington.

This was Israel's contribution to the war on terror, dealing a blow to a proxy offspring of those "axis of evil" nations, Syria and Iran.

Full article

I don't see anything good coming out of this. I went to look for a "simulation" that was created at the time of the invasion of Iraq, again its message is so true and very relevant.

I've been using the Internet for nearly ten years now. I don't even remember what I used to do online besides sending emails.
I remember though the exciting days of costly dial-up and thinking "oh no, my phone bill".

Going back 9 or 10 years these are what some websites looked like:

Microsoft October 1996

BBC December 1998

Altavista April 1997 what we used before Google

Yahoo December 1996

To view more pages the Web Archive contains 10 billion archived web pages going back to 1996.
Now I'me getting ready for the approaching storm.

As Mr Blair is so concerned about our health I would like to point out the importance of decent housing.

10% of privately rented accomodation in the UK is unfit for human habitation

I've seen private accomodation in London that is beyond belief.

One million children in the UK live in housing that is overcrowded or unhealthy

Shelter's leaflet

Temporary accomodation

My local council has to pay on average £240 a week for a double room in a B&B, some of these B&B are definitely substandard (I knew a lady who through no real fault of her own had to live for a while in one of those places and within a week her hands were covered in scabies, she was also terrified as she could not lock her door properly).
Everybody knows that many of these places are not acceptable and still so much of the taxpayers money is used to pay for this poor short term solution that benefits no one besides the owners of these places.

Bad housing does affect people's health and their view of themselves, I think the social cost is huge and as usual some people are making money on other's people misery.
But that's obviously ok.

gets on my nerves.

People must take more responsibility for their health to relieve pressure on the NHS, Tony Blair is expected to say.

In a major speech, the prime minister will warn the service could be crippled by the cost of treating those affected by obesity, alcohol abuse and smoking.

Full article

He is waffling on now about choices and decisions...

Yes, I do believe that people have responsibilities but I object to be held responsible for everything. I don't live in a vacuum, I live in a society (does it still exist?) and it doesn't matter how much care I take of my life there are still aspects I cannot control.
Argueably in most cases if we need medical care we have some degree of fault, smoking, drinking, eating too much, playing sports, driving a car, getting up in the morning, having a stressful job, being poor etc.
It is my fault if I don't save enough for my pension, my fault if I don't retrain for a new career, my fault if I don't get a mortgage.
My fault if my children misbehave although if I want a mortgage and a pension it means that both my partner and I have to work full time thus neglecting the children.
I was working up to 60 hours a week (unpaid overtime) to help sustain Blair's economy and that didn't do much for my health and family life but it was probably my fault for having bad time management, it was not the employer's fault for cutting down staff and taking on more and more work.
And after that I was still supposed to bring up my children, prepare and eat healthy food, sleep properly and go to a gym to keep healthy.

This article is definitely US based. But I see similarities with certain things in the UK and other examples can be found with not much effort.

But the high cost of poverty was brought home to me within a few days of my entry into the low-wage life, when, slipping into social-worker mode, I chastised a co-worker for living in a motel room when it would be so much cheaper to rent an apartment. Her response: Where would she get the first month's rent and security deposit it takes to pin down an apartment? The lack of that amount of capital -- probably well over $1,000 -- condemned her to paying $40 a night at the Day's Inn.

This is very true, I've met people in London that stayed in hostels long term as they could not afford to pay one months rent and one months deposit.
The same is also becoming increasingly common as it is more and more impossible for anyone not related to Richard Branson to have enough money for a mortgage. Therefore people are forced to continue to fork out money for a high rent which is only making some fat rich landlord fatter and richer.
And those cases are a catch 22 scenario, as you spend so much each month in rent you will never be able to save enough to get out of that.

Home content insurances are more expensive if you live in a poor area.
Without a car and a PC your shopping options are limited and that might mean that you cannot shop around for cheaper options.

You don't have a freezer and you cannot buy in bulk thus saving money. And so on.

At least 41 pensioners were killed by a hospital superbug in the squalid wards of Stoke Mandeville because senior executives ignored the dangers and concentrated on delivering the government's waiting time targets, health inspectors warned yesterday.

Even after a public outcry prompted an investigation by the Healthcare Commission, the renowned hospital in Aylesbury failed to introduce basic measures of infection control. Earlier this year, when the NHS trust had supposedly corrected its mistakes, inspectors witnessed "dirty wards, dirty toilets and commodes, bedding and equipment lying on floors, faeces on bed rails, pubic hair in baths, mould and cobwebs in showers".

They went into the hospital to investigate three outbreaks of Clostridium difficile, a deadly bacterium that has infected 498 patients at Stoke Mandeville since October 2003. Anna Walker, the commission's chief executive, said there were "serious failings on the part of senior managers who did not follow advice on stopping the spread of infection". Members of the trust board "mistakenly prioritised other objectives such as the achievement of government targets, the control of finances and the reconfiguration of services".

Full article

Today is my "complain about the NHS day".
I hate the word target anyway.
The article above describes what I hope is an extreme case. But I have doubts about other hospitals after what I've seen in a couple of London hospitals.
Firstly, I have encountered several hospitals cleaners who as usual were not employed by the hospital, not even by the subcontractors but were casual workers that worked for an agency. I talked to a couple of them and to be honest to them it's just a temporary job, they could not care less. This week here, next week elsewhere.
I think that if you are not committed to your employees, employees are not going to show much commitment and pride in their jobs. I can see the same pattern in my casually employed postmen. At least twice a week I get mail addressed to someone else, I still don't know where my mail goes. Every other week we get a different postman.
The other issue is that nobody seems to take responsibility, if a cleaner does not work properly there is nobody that feels has the right or duty to do something about it now, there might be a procedure of reporting poor performances but it does not seem to be immediate. They are not employed by the NHS so who cares?
I don't have any figures with me but I would not be surprised if the practice of subcontracting these services is actually more expensive to the NHS than employing and managing people directly.
Secondly, I've seen hospitals where the visiting hours were from 10 am to 8pm. (It's cheaper to get relatives and friends to do the nurses job after all). I' ve seen people having the whole office coming to visit, no joke it was about 20 people all at once for one patient, they had a bloody party in there. Surely that it's not the way to keep the place clean, especially as you will not see any cleaners until the following morning.
I'd better stop ranting.

Private clinics set up to carry out minor surgery have not brought major benefit to the NHS, MPs believe.

A network of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) has been established in England to drive down waiting lists and increase choice.

The Commons health committee says waiting lists have fallen but this is more likely to be due to extra money in the NHS than the impact of the ISTCs.

It also warned that the programme could lead to cuts in services at hospitals.

Full article
Somehow I have always had the feeling that this was not going to work.
Someone is making money though.

The report said the centres were "poorly integrated" with the NHS and were not training doctors.

They said putting the extra money spent on ISTCs into the NHS may have been a cheaper and more efficient option.

The state of a local park in London.

Grass used to green in England.

Around 30.000 children in the UK are prescribed Prozac. Well over 300.000 children are prescribed Ritalin, a drug related to amphetamine (incidentally Kurt Cobain used to take that as a child and see what happened to him).
Why do we need to sedate our children? Yes, their behaviour improves but at what cost?

Although the BBC is relatively sane compared to other TVs there are instances when I feel a bit uncomfortable.
One example is last weeks lenghty reporting of British evacuees from Lebanon. Although it's very good news to know they are safe and well I thought that to know what they were eating and so on was a bit OTT considering the overall situation.
I thought it was just me but thanks to the powers of information of the net I've found somebody else (a lot more qualified than me) who shares the same view.
As this guy is a freelance journalist who lives in Israel his website is packed with articles and pictures.

As the situation in the Middle East is getting more and more confusing I found this simple chart quite useful.

Apparently TV is getting less popular all the time in the US, viewing figures are at an all time low.
While the Internet is getting more popular. I can relate to this as I've always found TV viewing too passive, I've never been a serious TV watcher.

Anyway, this morning I downloaded this new open source video/internet TV viewer called Democracy, it supports Windows, Mac and Linux.
I tried others in the past and was always disappointed.
The interface looks quite sleek, I can see it has a choice of channels, in a few words quite a lot to choose from.
I will try to watch something now, I suppose it is a start.

The situation between Lebanon and Israel gets worse, it is now another humanitarian crisis and Israel is getting ready for ground attack. I'm not really bothered with who is wrong or right in this as nobody ever is completely right when violence is concerned, at least in my opinion. And as usual who pays for it are those that are never heard. Besides the Lebanese civilians that are suffering for this, there are thousands of Asian labour workers who went to Lebanon to work mainly in the tourist industry.
Now they have no jobs, no money to get back home and they often come from countries too poor to organise a proper evacuation. They are basically left destitute amidst the bombs.

A couple of days ago I read in the news that in the UK a school banned "Imagine" by John Lennon as it was negative towards religion.
Since I can remember, and that seems to get worse, many conflicts in the world appear to have been inspired, one way or another, by religion. And that's a fact, religion seems to me quite capable of putting itself in a bad light without the help of pacifist musicians. A religious faith that is prepared to kill will never be my religion.

It's too hot to write about anything serious so here's something I've found:
Jimmy Page's (the Led Zeppelin's guitarist) first TV appearance when he was 14 years old and wanted to study biological sciences.

I found this guy who writes his blog from Beirut.
He also draws and he has recorded this track which you can download from his blog:

STARRY NIGHT (excerpt) 6.31 min

a minimalistic improvisation by:
mazen kerbaj / trumpet
the israeli air force / bombs

recorded by mazen kerbaj on the balcony of his flat in beirut,
on the night of 15th to 16th of july 2006.

Brazil has expressed its disappointment over the decision not to prosecute any police officer involved in the fatal shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Mr de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian, died at Stockwell station in London on 22 July last year after police mistook him for a suicide bomber.

Full article
Brazil might be surprised, I am not. I might be getting too old and cynical but I feel there are some categories of people that are very unlikely to ever go into trouble.

I don't know who is to blame in this unfortunate case but I feel someone somewhere did not do things properly.
In my little world I have also found out that there is another category of people that never seem to pay for their mistakes and that is doctors.
I had major problems with my GP who decided not to listen to me for a whole year and a bit (he always told me to rest and take paracetamol) until things got so bad that I went to A&E.
At my first appointment with a consultant I had to be lectured like a three year old about how stupid I'd been for not going to see a doctor earlier.
There is a so called complaint procedure but what you get is normally a letter of apology, they are sorry to know that you feel that the treatment you received was not of the highest standard, nothing else. And even that takes a very long time. You can only sue if you have clear evidence of medical negligence and error (for instance if you are dead). But we know, for instance, that the first consultant I saw will never be prepared to put in writing what he'd told me that time not if it goes against another doctor.
So you just have to grin and bear it.

CBS will start advertising on a strange place: eggs.
It reminds me of those people that auction on EBay their foreheads or backs for advertising.
I'm trying to think on what other places they can place advertising, they sky is the limit really.

I was looking at this product a kind of electronic tags that you can place on your mobile or keys so that you will always find them.

The Serenity consists of three boxes about the size of a book of matches. The slightly larger one is the basestation and the others - called tags - are to be attached to something you are likely to forget. If either of the tags gets more than 5m from the basestation then bleeping commences and you know to go back and get something you forgot - as long as the thing you forgot wasn't the basestation.

I always lose keys and my mobile among other things, so something like that would be useful for me but I normally phone my own mobile to trace it (provided I remember where the landline phone is) and I don't think I will not lose this objects and tags instead. I need something more drastic, sort of embedded

The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers has changed look and management.

The character of Basil Fawlty was inspired by a former manager at the hotel; he gave John Cleese and the Monty Python team a frosty welcome when they booked in 1971. The ferocious host berated them for not holding their knives and forks correctly and threw one of their briefcases over a wall believing it could be a time bomb.

Full Article

I had a few encounters with people working in the service industry that made you feel small.
My most recent experience was in a hotel in Munich whose owner always demanded to check in our bags to ensure that we did not take any food in the rooms. We also stayed in a hotel in Rome where the guy at the reception was always moaning loudly when he had to hand us the room keys. His attitude seemed to be: you wanted a room now stay in it, what's this business of coming and going a couple of times a day?

To be honest I'm totally fed up with the Zidane business, what has been said or not and why.
I think they were both wrong and full stop, I think everything and its opposite has been said ten times already.
But this page managed to make me laugh

I knew that obesity is a problem in the Western World and particularly in the US.
But I've never realised it was so bad until I had a look at this animated map of the US.
In the past twenty years it has reached what I could only describe as epidemic proportions.

I know that Le Pen complained some weeks ago that there were too many foreigners in the French football team.
Now we have this other idiot, an Italian senator that said:

As the victorious Azzurri returned to a heroes' welcome in Rome on Monday, Calderoli celebrated it as a "political victory" over a mixed-race French team.

Italy had "beat a team which, in the quest for results, sacrificed its own identity by selecting blacks, Muslims and communists", the senator said, in comments that were rejected by members of Italy's new centre-left coalition government.

Full article

The Londonist tells us a story of someone who criticised one of those metal detectors that have been placed in some Tube stations.

My friend Phil and I were going through a metal detector on the way out of Highbury & Islington tube on Friday evening around 8.30pm, on our way to a gig. Phil, who has a degree in physics, said to me in a low voice that the metal detector was a "piece of shit that wouldn't stop anyone". Obviously, someone was listening, as all of a sudden, half a dozen policemen jumped on him and hustled him over to the corner of the tube station, where he was detained for about 20 minutes for the grave crime of swearing in public, and fined £80 for the privilege. For swearing! On the tube! If it's such a crime, then I owe them about a million pounds, as swearing on and at the tube is the only way to deal with the pain of having to travel on the dratted thing every day.

Full Article

It is also wise not to buy any of these T-shirts as it has already been proved to be dangerous in a few documented cases. Last November a gamekeeper was arrested for wearing one and last week people fined (£80 again the same as "swearing" on the Tube) for selling them.

I only know I don't like it.

One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.

58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.

42% of college gra