Four gunmen on two motorcycles shot dead three Express TV media workers and injured a fourth in the North Nazimabad suburb of Karachi on January 17 – http://www.cpj.org/2014/01/three-media-workers-killed-in-attack-on-express-tv.php. This was the third attack on the media group’s employees in six months. In August, terrorists opened fire on their office in Karachi, injuring two workers, and…
I attended a moving and powerful Holocaust Memorial Day Ceremony yesterday. This annual event provides a focal point around the world to remember the horrors of Auschwitz, Kristallnacht and the March of Death. Holocaust Memorial Day events also recall the genocides since: Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. Survivors spoke of their losses, and of their…
Why have an EU referendum in the middle of the time we are likely to be negotiating the terms?
On 16 January, Prof Chris Binnie and I met Lord de Mauley, Minister responsible for the Thames Tideway Tunnel. In a presentation (attached) Prof Binnie demonstrated that a combination of measures which have been shown to work elsewhere is highly likely to meet the requirements of the ECJ judgement and other legislation; the only questions…
How should we celebrate 25 years of WWW?
How can we use new technology to engage more people in politics and change our political institutions?
The Transparency Bill – on which I seem to have spent most of my waking hours, excluding the few days with our grandchildren over Christmas – has had some very positive results for the House of Lords. Setting aside the particular areas of agreement and disagreement the reputation of the House has been improved in…
On Page 1 of the Times for January 13th you imply that those MPs who signed the “Time Running Out” letter all want to arm the Syrian rebels. In fact they called for strengthening the hands of those attending the Geneva II conference. This would help the agreeing of ceasefires and the ending of sieges. …
The volume of correspondence received in the Palace of Westminster continues to decline. Each year, I table a question to find out how many items of correspondence were received in the Palace of Westminster in the previous year. I have just received the figures for 2013. Last year, 2,490,256 items were received, excluding parcels, courier…
The Aggregate levy was introduced over ten years in order to discourage the use of primary sources of aggregates from deposits beside rivers and quarries and encourage the use of recycled or secondary materials instead. There were and are good environmental reasons for this levy but, of course, the large producers don’t like it and…
