In the final act of the hilarious school fee fixing scandal, the OFT has ruled that 50 independent schools may have broken competition law by telling each other what they were going to charge parents.
This sort of information exchange, as you might imagine, is just slightly illegal. If the bursar at my school, the amiable but non-whizz-kid Major Dixon (retd) is anything to go by, it was just good chaps keeping each other informed (in flagrant breach of the law).
The ever-excellent Ben Goldacre discusses the fact-lite coverage of MRSA in the tabloids.
BBC news reports that Kaliningrad (Królowiec, Koenigsberg) – the capital of that small sliver of Russia that used to be a bit of German East Prussia – is going to erect a statue, and name a square in honour of, one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Given that the city’s existence in its present form is a direct consequence of the Great Patriotic War (World War II), perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s something of a nostalgia for the old days in what is now a vast Russian military base.
The Sunday Times reports that the MoD is selling off Burlington, a massive nuclear fallout shelter designed to house the Queen, the Prime Minister and 4,000 civil servants. The city lies 120 feet underground in an old mine in the West Country – and with a rail connection from the Great Western main line (branching off in a tunnel). It even has a pub – modelled on the Red Lion in Whitehall.
To you, sir, £5m (plus maintenance of the military base above).
If you were watching Newsnight this evening, you’ll have seen a classic bit of technojournalist gush over a ‘revolutionary’ new browser called Flock, that’s going to sweep away MSIE and is created by these extraordinary people called geeks who eat pizza and … oh, forget it.
Anyway, the free ad worked to the extent that I’m now sitting here using a beta of Flock and … er … it’s just another browser. Specifically just another browser based on Mozilla, like Firefox and Camino.
Except this one allows you to:
Comrades! On to the Winter Palace! Forward with the Revolution!
In a discussion on imperialism on Metafilter, someone said that the Indian flag had been patterned on the Irish tricolour, by way of solidarity between anti-imperialist national movements. I thought this sounded a bit odd, so did some research.
I’d always assumed the Indian flag was green for Muslims, orange for Hindus, chakra (wheel) for Buddhists and white for peace. Interestingly, though, that interpretation is specifically rejected in the official Flag Code, which reads:
“Bhagwa or the saffron colour denotes renunciation of disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to soil, our relation to the plant life here on which all other life depends. The Ashoka Wheel in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principles of those who work under this flag. Again, the wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change”
Nehru said, at the adoption of the flag:
“Some people, having misunderstood its significance, have thought of it in communal terms and believe that some part of it represents this community or that. But I may say that when this Flag was devised there was no communal significance attached to it.”
That’s me told.
Oh, and the discussion on Flags of the World mentions an Irish link in the original model of the flag – the red/white/green of the Indian National Congress.
Wikipedia has an international list of enacting formulae – the bits that go at the front of Acts of Parliament.
Though not a monarchist by any means, I always think that the British enacting formula is pleasantly orotund:
BE IT ENACTED by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:-
Le Figaro reports that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, new president of Iran, has called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’ – the first time for several years that an Iranian leader has made such a statement.
The Paris government has condemned the statement. No sign of it on the British or US press yet.
As the death toll of US service personnel in Iraq touches 2,000 (and, of course the death toll of Iraqis is much higher), the New York Times has a long piece profiling some of the families of the dead.