Gordon Brown and Jack Straw impose a pay cut on prison officers (”pay discipline”) while vastly increasing their work burden, and refusing to act to curb the massive increases in income and wealth that city financiers are awarding themselves: a disgusting mess [More >>>]
The FCO website publishes astonishing and shaming statistics about the huge number of demands by Brits abroad for consular assistance following e.g. deaths, arrests, hospitalisations and lost passports, with intriguing discrepancies between figures for different countries [More >>>]
Some comments on a few good and rather more less good things collected recently from the print media [More >>>]
My wife’s paper at http://www.barder.com/family/history/org_slavery2 reveals that while many of my ancestors were persecuted, at least one owned slaves. Who, then, she asks, should apologise to whom? [More >>>]
Indeterminate sentences are an abominable breach of natural justice, and not just because of the Kafkaesque situation in which prisoners who have served their tariffs can’t be released because the prison courses which are a condition of release aren’t made available to them [More >>>]
Read the vivid description of an Australian’s visit to Vietnam in June 2007 by Jill Greenwell, sharp observer and writer of clarity and precision: http://www.barder.com/misc/vietnam.php
