Category: News
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Close Small Schools, Open Large Prisons?
The last couple of days have seen local government proposals to close hundreds of small village schools in the England, and central government proposals to build Titan ‘super-prisons’ in England and Wales. Both policies seem in doubt now, as central government has written to local governments reminding them of their obligations to keep small schools…
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Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton: Dynasty or Democracy?
In my recent post about predictions for 2008, I was (not) surprised to find most of the debate being around the comment of the collapse of the Emerging project. Actually, I think it’ll be more about the language changing, but hey. What garnered no comment was the prediction about ’08 being the year when people…
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Sad News: John O’Donahue Dies
It’s was with enormous sadness I received the news that John O’Donahue has died. Martin Wroe, who had for so long championed him at Greenbelt Festival, sent me this email: Our friend John O’Donohue has died. John was on holiday in France with the family of Kristine, a wonderful woman he met at Greenbelt just…
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ID Cards | Data Protection | Education/Legislation
The Customs and Revenue department announced today that it had somehow ‘mislaid’ discs containing all of the details of 25 million people in Britain claiming Child Benefit. Personal details, bank details, National Insurance numbers and addresses were all part of the records that went missing in an internal mail delivery. And this is within a…
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Storyquest | Lara Croft is no Wise Guide | Antisocial Behaviour
Storyquest is the national festival of story-telling and the spoken word, and runs for the whole of November. Alongside many keynote events, the organizers – the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Children & the Arts – are simply encouraging families to ‘fill their homes with stories, capturing the moment when a story gets inside you…
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No More Our Father? | IVF, Sexuality and the Father Figure Clause
I’m not one for ‘natural order’ arguments, but part of me is drawn that way over the news that the ‘father figure’ clause currently in British IVF legislation is potentially going to be dropped. A government joint committee report “took issue with the proposal to remove the current requirement for IVF clinics to take into…