Deprived parts of the UK capital are in danger from the cutbacks of Tory mayor Boris Johnson, opposition members (AMs) of the London Assembly say.

According to Labour AM Valerie Shawcross, Johnson's cut backs have made “a bonfire of transport projects in areas in need of regeneration, in Labour constituencies”.

Recent budget proposals have also threatened emergency services and clamped down on cultural activities.

Johnson's proposed 15 per cent of [...]

I shall never understand the Labour view on education. You think they would be proud to have a minister who is the son of an immigrant and who spent the first 11 years of his life in care. But Andrew Adonis (born Andreas - his father was a Greek Cypriot) is a hate figure for many in the party.

Perhaps Labour members are uneasy that his career owes nothing to [...]

Mocha chocca libraries

Many were terrified by the picture of new "21st century libraries" painted by the Secretary of State for Culture, Andy Burnham, this week: libraries modelled on Waterstones and Virgin Megastores, filled with mobile-phone-talkers, McDonalds-eaters, Wii-players and Youtube-watchers, with books featuring low down on the list of priorities.

More terrifying still, however, is the fact that this sort of thing seems to work: in [...]

Q: What does "superstruct" mean?

Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation.

The Institute for the Future is a think-tank based in California and on October 6th they launched their new project, Superstruct, which bills itself as the “World’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game.” If that sounds a little lofty, it’s because it is. Superstruct is concerned with nothing less than [...]

Such has been the media furore over the return to Cabinet of Peter Mandelson that it seems almost sacrilegious to suggest that, once the dust settles, the return of new Labour’s prodigal son may be overshadowed by a mere reorganisation of Whitehall departments.

Yet while stories about how Peter patched it up with Gordon and what Tony thought about it dominated last weekend’s newspapers, it is the absence of energy [...]

Most religions conceive human beings as consisting of three parts: the physical body, the soul, and the spirit.

Hinduism calls the spirit, "Brahman," "Atman" or the absolute (metaphysical) self and the soul "jiva," or the miniature self. Buddhism calls the spirit the true heart, or Buddha-heart, and the soul the earthly heart, or the illusory heart. Taoism calls the spirit god's heart (which is absolute), and the soul the [...]

In a curious editorial featured within EDGE online, BBFC boss David Cooke rubbishes suggestions that his organisation is involved in any kind of ‘spat’ with PEGI and / or ELSPA. Since the Byron report and the opening shots in their very public, public consultation at the Westminster Media forum, things have been getting progressively more bitter. Even if the BBFC aren’t engaged in a spat with ELSPA (the [...]

Gordon’s Alive!

Consensus is now the order of the day in Westminster, and bloggers have been following suit – declaring Brown victor at the dispatch box, as PMQs returned this week. Labour councillor Bob Piper had a few nerves on Tuesday, and was hoping for a commanding performance from the dear leader to maintain his post-conference momentum:

"A good solid performance at PMQs will also stiffen the backbone and [...]

The Political Betting website is always worth a look and today it has a fascinating piece about the betting on Vince Cable to succeed Alastair Darling as Chancellor. The Betfair next chancellor market (something I must say I didn't know existed) now has him as favourite at 2.15/1.

The site quotes a piece for The First Post website by their "Westminster Insider" The Mole asking what will happen [...]

Tories leave Birmingham after a strange conference, emerging from the bubble. One Parliamentary Candidate described the round of sedate parties, lack of whoopee and absent feral behaviour as, "Must have been what it was like to be at a garden party in 1914, you know that something unpleasant is brewing, you just don’t know what."

There was certainly a feeling of preparation in Birmingham, the machine is working. Many candidates [...]

Along with materialism, differences in religions have brought conflicts to people resulting in many wars all over the world. CaoDai, a new faith founded in Vietnam in 1926 by the Supreme Being via spiritism, with the principle that all religions are of one same origin (which is God, although called by various names or no name), having the same teachings based on Love and Justice, and are just diverse manifestations [...]

During the summer, as Labour remained fixed at more than 20 points behind the Conservatives in the opinion polls and as the plot to oust Gordon Brown gathered momentum, it was said that he could be saved only by a bomb, a terrorist outrage so extreme that it would force the Labour Party and the nation to unite behind its beleaguered Prime Minister. Well, Mr Brown has his bomb in [...]

Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith and Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles sound like the kind of chaps who might have led skirmishes along the North-West Frontier in the days of the Great Game. Their names may be redolent of the era when an officer bound for the east set off from his St James's club with a volume or two of Kipling in his trunk; but this should not make us overlook the wisdom [...]

It’s about 9.30 in the morning as I write this. One child is off sick, seemingly with tonsillitis, another is off school for Rosh Hashana, and I will deliver him to his father later today. The three dogs have not been walked, but our cleaning lady fed them. Rosh Hashana child has forgotten his homework at school. He later confesses that his tearful plea not to be sent to school [...]

At a time of national crisis, it seemed there was only one man with the experience and steadfastness of purpose to see us through these dark times. This had been the mantra since Gordon Brown's Manchester speech and, as the economy unravelled, it was beginning to gain purchase. It's spin. Of course it is. But there is a time and a place for propaganda, as the cabinet's latest addition, Peter [...]

So, a pretty good week. Really feels like there is a new atmosphere. All is flux - the world is crumbling. Tories on the back foot. Happy days are here again.

Obviously, the biggest piece of political weather-making has been the "Mandelson masterstroke" gambit. We can only apologise, when Ed sent the initial email canvassing opinions, for sending one back entitled: "Hell, Yeah! And Sarah Palin for Prince William's [...]

Sarah Palin skipped over the low expectations set for her debate with Joe Biden in St Louis, brazening her way through with a firm grip on her talking points, a few winks, and a pitch so folksy - "doggone it", "you betcha" - that even George W Bush, the aw-shucks standard-setter, would have sounded like Henry James beside her.

But the redemption of John McCain's running mate from Alaska was [...]

The great American athlete John Carlos once described "those people of grace who raise sport to something more than a game". Carlos and Tommie Smith had stood with their black-gloved fists held high on the winners' podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, damning racism and poverty. They were men of grace. Sep was very different, but he had the grace.

Sep died the other day. He was 88, [...]

We are witnessing the collapse of the world financial system. To have said that even a month ago would have been to invite ridicule, but now it seems only a statement of the obvious as banks implode, governments panic and investors run. The initial liquidity crisis that broke in August 2007 and drove Northern Rock to the wall has evolved into a crisis of insolvency and finally into a crisis [...]

A good chess player plays several moves in advance. Today, it is important to anticipate the path of the current financial crisis and ensure that what has begun does not become even more brutal in 20 years' time.

But it is even more important to ask ourselves what the economic crisis reveals about our ability to control all our tsunamis, financial and otherwise. Foremost is the worst imaginable tsunami: an [...]

I couldn't help noticing, on the morning after the world's economy imploded - when Congress rejected the bailout bill the first time around - that there wasn't a single female voice on the Today programme in the prime hour between 8am and 9am. Not one: not a presenter, nor a politician, not a reporter, banker, or economist. I idly counted 25 male voices during that hour. And not a single [...]

This is not the moment to be playing petty politics. I find it extraordinary that Labour ministers can spend time briefing that I have been too keen an advocate of deregulation, and even more bizarre that they think people will believe them when they say deregulatory views caused the current crisis. They should take a cold shower and then do their jobs as regulators of economic policy more carefully.

In [...]

When, in August, Peter Mandelson found himself at the same restaurant - the Taverna Agni, on the Greek island of Corfu - as the shadow chancellor George Osborne, the unlikely meeting was "by chance, not by choice". Contrary to reports, the dinner, with 20 others, did not involve Mandelson "pouring poison" about Gordon Brown into Osborne's ear (though Osborne attacked certain senior Tories, according to some of those present). Instead, [...]

Amusement not horror was the Talibrown's initial reaction when the Supreme Leader floated resurrecting the Prince of Darkness. Oh, how they laughed in the bunker, thinking Gordon Brown had developed gallows humour. Mandy's name was dropped by Big Gordy into Downing Street conversations, I discover, several days before the most unlikely reconciliation since Corrie's Ken and Deirdre got back together. Mandy restarted as he finished. As soon as he slithered [...]

If ever you wanted proof that the news you read arrives through a white filter - that it is selected, reported, edited and interpreted by groups of people that are overwhelmingly white - then the coverage of the departure of Sir Ian Blair from the Metropolitan Police Service provided it.

Let us set aside the Daily Mail (though in a sense it set itself aside by an eccentric insistence that [...]

Mohammed was only 13 years old and wasn't especially tall or powerful, yet I was terrified of him. "I'll fucking kill you. Do you get what I mean, geezer? I'll fucking deck you!" he screamed at me as I asked him to leave my classroom. He had hit a boy over the head and spent much of the lesson swearing. By this time, I was trembling with rage and fear, [...]

[...]

As the first decade of the third Christian millennium draws to an increasingly troubled close, the verdict of historians on its significance can already be anticipated. Two themes will predominate. The first, exemplified by the present carnage in the financial markets, will be the quickening of the west's decline relative to China and India; the second, not entirely coincidentally, will be the tensions in the relationship between the west and [...]

It's a Wednesday, and for Robert Wyatt, the musician and songwriter whose compositions mix intricate sound-worlds with defiantly left-wing politics, that means it's Sausage Bun Day. We are sitting at a table next to Stan's Van in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth, where he lives with his wife, Alfie.

Wyatt, with his aura of long white hair and beard, is talking animatedly about the cult American television series The [...]

On the afternoon of 25 July 1937, at the climax of one of the fiercest battles in the Spanish Civil War, a 26-year-old photographer named Gerda Taro methodically squeezed off shot after shot with her Leica. For miles around the village of Brunete, west of Madrid, lay the detritus of the Republican army, in retreat from a counter-attack by Franco's fascist forces.

Corpses, twisted metal, flames, smoke and explosions marked [...]

Large numbers visited Kings Place, London's beautiful new concert venue, during its opening week. They ambled about in the bars and restaurant, lounged in the armchairs by the ticket desk, snacked at the 60ft-long refectory table, took the air beside Regent's Canal and rode the escalators to the basement, where they could enter either of the lofty concert halls. One hundred performances were put on in the first five days, [...]

The godfather of all Mafia films is, naturally, The Godfather, but it has been hard for subsequent Mob stories to escape its influence. However, the new Italian picture Gomorrah, which focuses on the Neapolitan Camorra rather than the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, proves that there is more than one way to decapitate a horse. I'm speaking metaphorically: the days when organised criminals would put in the effort to stash the head [...]

Is there enough warmth on television? Craig Cash, who has co-written Sunshine (Tuesdays, 9pm), a new comedy-drama, thinks not. He would like to see more "warmth" and to experience fewer "cringes". So far as cringes go, all I can say is: he should probably avoid watching Alan Yentob's new series, The Story of the Guitar. But when it comes to warmth, I think he is wrong: the tog rating of [...]

The age of austerity is upon us. The time for ferreting and hunting has come. Farming Today (Mondays to Saturdays, Radio 4, 5.45am) has spoken!

If only the rest of you had been awake to hear. We must turn back the clock "to the meat enjoyed by our parsimonious grandparents". We must prepare to squeeze the urine from the bladders of wild rabbits and place the carcasses in huge communal [...]

Booker is 40. It now ranks as Britain's second oldest national fiction prize. Pride of place in that league goes to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an annual award in the gift of the Regius Professor of English at Edinburgh University. That department plausibly claims to be the first of its kind anywhere, which gives the prize - the first of its kind in Britain - a double lustre. [...]

The term "retrosexual" kept on coming to mind as I read this good-natured squib of a book. I can't quite remember whether I coined it myself, or found it somewhere. Anyway, who cares? Great artists don't borrow, they steal. So what is a retrosexual? In my definition, it is someone who has by no means unshackled himself from lunatic desire, but - on the other hand - ruefully acknowledges there [...]

Like many other commentators, Adam Boulton turned out to be wrong in his assessment of Peter Mandelson. "Mandelson's career as a Westminster politician effectively came to an end when he was forced to resign from the cabinet for a second time," he writes. Who could predict that anyone could be thrice appointed to the cabinet? Yet the seeds of Mandelson's re-emergence are here in Boulton's perceptive and fast-moving account of [...]

The Romantic generation of poets and thinkers, schoolchildren are often told, took a dim view of science. Like a lot of blunt instruments, this received wisdom is not without its uses. Wordsworth's witty and much-cited line, "We murder to dissect", pretty much sums up the bias: try too hard to understand, say, how a frog works, and all you'll end up with is a nasty, smelly mess of slop, bones [...]

The Spanish Civil War has a continuing fascination because it was the first modern war whose battle lines reflected a wider, almost dualistic international divide. Reaction and Progress, Liberalism and Authoritarianism, Hope and Fear themselves appeared to be engaged in a mythical struggle on Spain's streets and plains, capturing the attention of a whole generation. The impact the conflict had beyond its own borders was later echoed in popular anger [...]

"So many pieces of me! I must hold tight," exclaims Edwin Morgan in an epigraph to Ali Smith's witty, disturbing and challenging new collection of short stories. They explore the tricky business of defining the boundaries between the layered, multiple, individual self and other people, a powerful theme in all Smith's work.

The short story is adept at holding tight, suggests Smith, and in the opener, titled "True Short Story", [...]

This collection of interviews, articles and essays by the veteran musician is superficially a rather random selection. There are curt, intelligent but slight discussions of Boulez, Mozart and Schumann, meditations on the philosophy of music, and political pieces on Israel-Palestine. Yet, despite some repetition and disjointedness, this is a highly worthwhile book.

Barenboim’s writing is lucid and clear, with a cantankerousness that thankfully intrudes when the train of thought threatens [...]

Daniel Barenboim is a conspicuous presence in this collection of Edward Said’s musical criticism, as the subject of a fine late essay and as writer of the foreword. Said was a trained pianist, and this book pulls together 25 years of pieces on music, centring on regular reviews for the Nation and branching out into more discursive essays.

Perhaps disappointingly, for a critic of Said’s breadth, music here is defined [...]

“Includes confidential new material”, cries this updated edition of Michael Peppiatt’s 1995 biography, just in time for the Tate’s blockbuster exhibition. So, one might expect to thrill to boozy tales of Soho bohos, shudder at anecdotes of East End rough trade, and have the heartstrings pulled by tales of doomed love affairs.

Not quite. Peppiatt’s biography was one of the less scurrilous of those that emerged after the painter’s death [...]

The Russian formalist critic and screenwriter Viktor Shklovsky was a joyously odd writer. He borrowed Lawrence Sterne’s deceptively whimsical digressions and diversions, yet his work anticipated both Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effects and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of literary authority.

Shklovsky is a casual, friendly writer of aphorisms, tales and

self-mocking anecdotes. This first English translation of Literature and Cinematography (1923) is a useful short introduction, as many of Shklovsky’s most [...]

Twelve years ago in Berlin I picked up - of all the things to pick up in Berlin - an ancient travel guide to London, replete with advertisements for corset stays, temperance hotels and liver pills. It instantly became one of my most treas ured possessions, and not once have I considered putting it on eBay, instead planning fantasy journeys around town in taximeter motorcabs, omni buses, trams and the [...]

The booing at Spurs during the Hull game started at half-time. We know it doesn't help. The players are human, poor petals, so booing them only makes it worse. But what else can we do? Booing is part of a long and ignoble tradition - but usually fans have booed the other team.

I've been looking through my copies of the Sporting Chronicle for 1888, the first season of the [...]

Report by Ms de Meaner

Well done. £20 to the three winners, and a tenner to G M Davis for the excerpt. In addition, the Tesco vouchers for the best entry go to Michael Cregan.

Voice-over Coronation Street, sponsored by Cern, experts in making very little go a long way.

Title shots Cat with collar bearing the name "Schrödinger". Shot of the pub, "The Rowers Return".

Betty Hotpot [...]

Whole lot less shakin' goin' on

A council hoping to cut salt intake is handing out salt shakers with fewer holes to fish and chip shops.

King's Lynn and West Norfolk District Council has distributed around 200 five-hole shakers to 39 businesses, replacing the more common 17-hole variety.

The authority spent £450 on the scheme. David Harwood, of the council, said: "It's certainly cheaper than treating people in hospital for [...]

It’s been a historic week. O J Simpson has been found officially guilty. Sir Ian Blair has been found unofficially guilty. (I’m glad he’s left, though, because it means one less beige person may get shot this year.) Barack Obama has been linked to terrorism, again. It was my birthday. And I was sent to Torquay.

I had been sent to Torquay to perform at the English Riviera International Comedy [...]

Before the creation of the heavens and the universe, the cosmic ether was still, quiet, and void; and at the same time a kind of primordial chaos, indistinct and shadowy with mixtures of density (which we call "the Tao" or pre-creation ether).

In this cosmic ether appeared a great source of Divine Light called "Thai Cuc" (Monad) or the Supreme Being. The Monad then divided itself into Yin and [...]

The global financial crisis does not seem to distinguish between countries and regions or between sound and weak economic fundamentals. It seems that we have been through this before.

During the Asian crisis and later the Russian default of the mid 1990s, an analyst is quoted to have said that Yeltsin went to bed drunk and Brazil woke up with a hangover. Brazil was so far removed from Russia [...]

I first visited Israel more than three decades ago in 1971. A carefree 21 year-old, I worked as a volunteer for a couple of months on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights, right on the border with Lebanon.

Today, I can still vividly recall landing at what was then called Lod airport with a group of other volunteers and being driven north for several hours through the clear starry night. [...]

So how do I feel about my boyhood hero, Johnny “Rotten” Lydon, appearing in an advert for Country Life butter?

Is it against the principles of punk rock? Is it the ultimate sell out? It's not exactly cash from chaos, unless you count the chaos of the milk churn. Is he, as Bill Hicks would contend, removed from the artistic world for all eternity?

I [...]

Snuggled in a forested corner of western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh is prime stomping ground for both Obama and McCain's campaign teams as the days tick by towards the election.

With Pennsylvania identified as a key state for both sides, money has poured into persuading the burghers of Pitt to switch their vote to the other team.

All the teams have swept through the essentially blue-collar city, where steel was big business [...]

During my university years I took great delight in confusing the shoppers of Cambridge. In those days I often used a battery-powered wheelchair which I controlled using a foot switch. When I went into the city centre, I could see a puzzled expression pass over the faces of other pedestrians as they noticed the joystick on the wheelchair's arm and then realised that my hands weren't touching it. I could [...]

After the bursting of the credit bubble in August, 2007 Alastair Darling repeatedly assured us that Britain’s ‘economic fundamentals’ are sound. The implication was that the ‘real’ economy was quite distinct from the bubble economy inhabited by bankers, short-sellers and hedge fund managers. Consumers were given the impression that a firewall existed between them and the bursting credit bubble.

It now turns out that there is no firewall; even the [...]

In order to relieve humankind’s religious crisis, in 1926, via spiritism, the Supreme Being founded an innovative faith called CaoDai in Vietnam, with the principle that all religions are one, have the same origin and principle, and are just different manifestations of the same truth.

Because of human conflict, God has come to offer a way to bring people and religions together in harmony. CaoDai the Supreme Being said: [...]

The British-based Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi has become a highly controversial figure in the United States after being linked to Chicago-based businessman Tony Rezko - the weak link in the Obama campaign.

The freedom of information site Wikileaks has now published some fascinating material about Auchi's attempts to stop people writing about him.

Auchi was convicted of fraud by the French courts in 2003 for his involvement [...]

Australia is famously known as ‘the lucky country’. Although this was originally meant ironically, in many ways, it is. Despite embracing many of the financial sector innovations that have undone the American economy, Australia has an underlying economic lifeline: its vast natural reserves of iron ore, coal and gas mean that, as long as China’s economy continues to expand, its overall position is much healthier than the other Anglo-American economies [...]

If the recommendations of party leader Ciarán Cannon are followed, Ireland's Progressive Democrats won't be with us much longer.

Their disappearance will not be widely lamented.

When the PDs formed in 1985, economically and socially liberal politics had few consistent advocates in Ireland. As an enterprise-friendly party representing modern values, it proved a welcome tonic to the political establishment, with its civil war hang-ups and perpetual [...]

Most of the allegations of racism made by Britain’s most senior Muslim police officer Tarique Ghaffur are against Sir Ian Blair, so one might have hoped for a more positive response from the Black Police Association (BPA) to the Met Commissioner’s demise.

Instead, the BPA have announced a boycott of Met police recruitment drives aimed at black and minority ethnic communities because the BPA still believes the Met has [...]

Oh, those poor, innocent bankers and traders. Especially at Lloyds/TSB –they didn’t in anyway blight 10 years of my life. I’m sending love to them. I think it’s love – something that makes my ears bleed, anyway.

I’ve spent three days distracting myself from their plight by painting my mother’s house (located in what are now the rice paddies of Warwickshire) with a damp-repelling liquid that comes in an [...]

I had the honour of appearing on a panel at the American University in Washington DC with whistleblowers Katharine Gun and Daniel Ellsberg on October 24.

I have to pay tribute to the audience who sat patiently through two hours of speeches on the subject of whistleblowing.

If you want to see what kept them there, the whole symposium was filmed by the Real News Network and is [...]

Ever since she shot to global fame following her 1997 win of the Booker prize for The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy seems to have concentrated her creative energy on raising awareness about pressing social and political issues.

This is the woman who described terrorism as the “privatisation of war” and called George Bush a “world nightmare incarnate.”

No surprise then she was dubbed “the Indian author [...]

Hermetic America? Nobel Prize controversy

Nobel Prize judge Horace Engdahl’s criticism of American literature this week has incensed the literary world. His claims that American novels were ‘too isolated, too insular’ merited no more than a one-word response from author Giles Foden, and Harvard Professor Werner Sollors, specialist in American literature, complained of Engdahl’s ‘historical and literary myopia’.

But perhaps Engdahl has a point – or more [...]

I might have been mistaken but I'm sure I saw Peter Mandelson having breakfast with Lord Sainsbury on at least two occasions at Labour conference in Manchester. Did anybody else see them together at a rather grand round table in the Radisson Edwardian hotel or is it just my fevered imagination?

Since the appointment of the single most divisive politician in recent Labour history to the Cabinet of Labour's most [...]