2016年11月29日 星期二

'Snooper's charter' bill becomes law, extending UK state surveillance

The home secretary, Amber Rudd, hailed the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 as “world-leading legislation” that provided “unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection”.
But privacy campaigners claimed that it would provide an international standard to authoritarian regimes around the world to justify their own intrusive surveillance powers.
The new surveillance law requires web and phone companies to store everyone’s web browsing histories for 12 months and give the police, security services and official agencies unprecedented access to the data.
It also provides the security services and police with new powers to hack into computers and phones and to collect communications data in bulk. The law requires judges to sign off police requests to view journalists’ call and web records, but the measure has been described as “a death sentence for investigative journalism” in the UK.
The Home Office says some of the provisions in the act will require extensive testing and will not be in place for some time. However, powers to require web and phone companies to collect customers’ communications data will be in force before 31 December, the date when the current Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 expires.
The home secretary said: “The Investigatory Powers Act is world-leading legislation, that provides unprecedented transparency and substantial privacy protection.
“The government is clear that, at a time of heightened security threat, it is essential our law enforcement and security and intelligence services have the power they need to keep people safe. The internet presents new opportunities for terrorists and we must ensure we have the capabilities to confront this challenge. But it is also right that these powers are subject to strict safeguards and rigorous oversight.”
~~~
"One of the most extreme surveillance laws ever passed in a democracy."

The measure has been described as “a death sentence for investigative journalism” in the UK.
THEGUARDIAN.COM|由 ALAN TRAVIS 上傳

Sex abuse: Football Association to investigate allegations. Eric Bristow

Sex abuse: Football Association to investigate allegations - BBC Sport

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/38121724
21 hours ago - The Football Association has confirmed it is investigating allegations of sexual abuse infootball. Former footballers have come forward to say they were sexually abused as youth players. ... Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) chief executive Gordon Taylor says more than 20 ...


Eric Bristow suggested football sex abuse victims are not "proper men". Sky Sports won't be using him anymore.

2016年11月26日 星期六

Giant Bracknell Forest remembrance poppies stolen. The poppy has become a symbol of racism.

Councillor Dorothy Hayes said the theft of the four 6ft (1.8m) metal and fibreglass poppies was "heinous"

Giant poppies placed on roundabouts to honour those who have died in conflict are stolen.
BBC.CO.UK




Remembrance poppy
The remembrance poppy is an artificial flower, which has been used since 1921 to commemorate military personnel who have died in war, and represents a common or field poppy, Papaver rhoeas. Wikipedia



"When the poppy was first adopted as the symbol of remembrance it was shortly after the end of the first world war, when almost every family in the land still felt the raw grief of the time. In an utterly unintended way the remembrance customs now serve to sanitise war and even to make the military option a respectable political option."


Wearing a poppy was a pledge of peace. Now it serves to sanitise war
It’s time to change British remembrance traditions to refocus on how we…
THEGUARDIAN.COM|由 TED HARRISON 上傳



'Television bumpkins shed their crocodile tears only for the dead of First and Second World Wars'




The poppy has become a symbol of racism – I have never worn one, and now I never will

INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

2016年11月24日 星期四

UK government invests £1b in fibre and 5G


Image for the news result
The UK government has confirmed it will be borrowing to try to encourage investment in high ...

感覺上 4G 好像都還沒用很久,英國的部分家庭即將享有 5G 了。

2016年11月23日 星期三

報應:BA boss shocked to find out that third Heathrow runway will raze his HQ

哈哈,1977.9年我去英國,BA將我的行裡搞混了。一個月之後,該公司要我去領,並付倉儲費。
2016.11 現在英航有報應啦。

“We were never actually informed or advised by Heathrow that they intended to knock down our headquarters.”
Airline chief Wille Walsh furious about not being told of demolition – and about fact he will ‘end up paying for the destruction’
THEGUARDIAN.COM|由 GWYN TOPHAM 上傳

The wait before the fall. Trump Calls For U.K.'s Nigel Farage To Be Ambassador To The U.S.


The wait before the fall

Painful truths about a hard Brexit will begin to dawn on Britain

BRITAIN

When a building is demolished, a brief calm usually prevails at first. The dynamite blasts, the concrete exhales a few wisps and sways a little, there is a stillness for one or two seconds and then, with a groan, the whole thing comes down. Britain will live most of 2017 in that ethereal moment. In the spring, with Parliament’s blessing, Theresa May will detonate Article 50 of the eu treaty: the gelignite by which a country belonging to the European Union officially terminates its membership of the club. In Westminster that initial boom will drown out everything else, the puff of dust shrouding almost every other government policy. Yet by the end of the year, for reasons both domestic and foreign, Mrs May will have achieved little of substance.
Of course, Britain is now in unknown, volatile territory. Brexit strains, combined with a working majority of just 16, could force her to seek a personal mandate from voters at an early election, or even bring down her premiership. At times the year will feel like a long series of arm-wrestles between the legislature and the executive. But Mrs May is cautious and, with neither Labour nor the UK Independence Party in a good state, will probably resist the temptation to cash in on her soaring poll leads. Indeed, these should help her keep a lid on impatience and dissent in her party.
When she triggers Article 50, Mrs May will begin a two-year countdown to Brexit. The first couple of months will bring bureaucratic throat-clearing (the European Commission will lead the talks, with the European Council breathing down its neck). In the run-up to France’s presidential election, in April and May, mainstream French politicians will talk tough about Brexit to counter Marine Le Pen, the right-wing populist who wants her country to hold its own referendum on leaving the EU. Shortly afterwards German politics will turn inwards ahead of a parliamentary election in September, ­probably re-engaging in earnest with Brexit only in November, once a new coalition has emerged in Berlin.
To be sure, things will not remain entirely calm after Mrs May hits the red button. Every morsel of detail about her negotiating strategy will be a new battlefield. On the one side will be Brexiteer ministers including David Davis, the Brexit secretary; backbench Tories such as Iain Duncan Smith; and, most noisily, tabloid newspapers like the Daily Mail. These voices will militate aggressively for a rapid and total break from the union.
On the other side will be the real opposition: the pound. As the likelihood of Britain’s departure from the single market grows—a corollary of its uncompromising stance on immigration—the country’s economic prospects will decline. Sterling will struggle to find a floor, inflation will start to hurt, growth will fall below that of the euro zone and investment will slow. Businesses will raise their voices, making common cause with pro-European MPs, the Treasury (in the person of Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the exchequer) and a newly thrusting, liberal wing of the Tory party (led by George Osborne, his predecessor).
The tension between these two armies will grow. Some MPs will try, with limited success, to use the Article 50 debate to shape Mrs May’s negotiating position. A summer vote on the “Great Repeal Bill”, formally revoking the legislation that took Britain into the European club in 1973 (but also incorporating all current EU legislation into British law), will be another showdown.
But the real conflict will begin at the end of year. Once properly under way in the autumn, the negotiation will divide into two halves. The first, simpler one will concern the basic divorce settlement: the process by which Britain and the rest of the EU divide up the union’s institutions and pots of cash; and by which cross-border procedures and migrant populations are regularised. The second, trickier one will concern the new relationship between the two sides (which may end up resembling Canada’s free-trade deal with the EU). But this stands little chance of being sealed by early 2019, so by the end of 2017 the British will feel increasing pressure to do an interim deal covering the period between Brexit and that new, permanent settlement.
Fog in the Channel
Around this point negotiations may well hit deadlock, as Britain demands a temporary arrangement keeping it in the single market without full free movement, and its European partners cleave to their insistence that there can be no EU deal better than full membership. In Britain the role of the European Parliament and its veto over the country’s final settlement will become better understood. Brexit proper—the crashing flourish with which Britain quits the club—will play out in 2018 and 2019. But by the end of 2017, with talks struggling to advance and the clock ticking down, it will dawn on Britons that their hand is not as strong as many had once assumed.
*Will a date be set for an early general election in Britain before 1st July 2017? Test your forecasting skills at the Good Judgment Project/The World in 2016 challenge, at gjopen.com/economist
~~~
A Downing Street spokesman said dryly: "There is no vacancy."
The U.K. prime minister's office rejected the suggestion, pointing out that it already has an ambassador in Washington. A Downing Street spokesman…
NPR.ORG

Passports for patients is an idea that revives the old lie that migrants are ruining the NHS, not £22bn of government cuts

"As anyone who works on the NHS frontline is bitterly aware, it isn’t “health tourists” but the government’s £22bn of cuts during this parliament that is decimating our ability to deliver safe, quality care."

Passports for patients is an idea that revives the old lie that migrants are ruining the NHS, not £22bn of government cuts
THEGUARDIAN.COM|由 RACHEL CLARKE 上傳

2016年11月21日 星期一

Military Cross (The Fitzwilliam Museum), Battle of Loos, Survivors


 Military Cross (The Fitzwilliam Museum), Battle of Loos, Survivors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Loos

---
https://allpoetry.com/Survivors

Survivors

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain  
  Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.  
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—  
  These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.  
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed  
  Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—  
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud  
  Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride…  
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;  
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.


~~~


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIzHt1Dxu8k

November - Military Cross




The Military Cross (MC) is the third-level military decoration awarded to officers and (since 1993) other ranks of the British Armed Forces, and used to be awarded to officers of other Commonwealth countries.

Military Cross - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cross

2016年11月16日 星期三

European ministers ridicule Boris Johnson after prosecco claim

Prosecco
Grape Variety
Prosecco is an Italian white wine. Prosecco DOC can be spumante, frizzante, or tranquillo, depending on the perlage. It is made from Glera grapes, formerly known also as Prosecco, but other grape varieties may be included. Wikipedia

The Guardian
'He basically said: "I don’t want free movement of people but I want the single market." I said: "No way." He said: "You’ll sell less prosecco." I said: "OK, you’ll sell less fish and chips, but I’ll sell less prosecco to one country and you’ll sell less to 27 countries." Putting things on this level is a bit insulting.'

Italian minister Carlo Calenda says UK foreign secretary’s Brexit approach insulting after exports claim
THEGUARDIAN.COM|由 ROWENA MASON 上傳