Operation: Budding Genius

Times Online reports that Alistair Darling has pulled out of out of Davos -

“A spokeswoman for the Treasury confirmed that Mr Darling would not be going to the event, and had been due to fly to the WEF earlier this week. It also emerged today that David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, has also pulled out of Davos.

A spokesman for the Treasury said it was decided that since a number of people Mr Darling had been due to meet had pulled out of Davos, his time would be better spent doing other things.”

What better things could Mr Darling be turning his attention to? Rescuing the failing economy would be the first thing that springs to mind.

The Telegraph report “that the UK will be at the bottom of the league table of major developed countries this year, in the weakest year for the global economy since the Second World War”

This means that the UK is set to face a worse recession than any other major country in the world. The future looks bleak however according to a report in The Australian Post“FOR a nation that has just been officially told by the International Monetary Fund that it is about to suffer the worst recession of any developed country since 1945, Britain is remarkably relaxed.

There are no threats of mass strikes by workers fearing for their jobs, no calls for a crisis election and certainly no hints of the street riots that have recently been seen in several other European countries.”

Although I do not condone the actions of those in other countries at least they are making their feelings known to those in charge. A relaxed attitude is one that has served to place Britain at the bottom of the league table. . British politicians NEED to get a grip of the situation, instead of the constant bickering between the different political parties, the government needs to work as a team that mean TOGETHER. A viable solution can only be achieved if all parties are in agreement.

An Indian Court has been called to ban Google Earth amid suggestions the online satellite imaging was used to help plan the terror attacks that killed more than 170 people in Mumbai last month.

read more | digg story

Exclusive report from Tech crunch, You Tube are currently making plans to allow the big media giants to profit from advertising revenue. This is a big step for the future of broadcasting and points the way forward in terms of the industry.

“Big media companies have always had a love-hate relationship with YouTube. They don’t know whether to sue YouTube for abetting copyright infringement or get in bed with it because it is the biggest Web video game in town. YouTube is trying to convince them that love is better than war by giving them a cut of advertising revenues from their videos that appear on YouTube, regardless of who put them there.”
read more on Techcrunch:

A report in The Independent  argues that There have been two versions of the assault on Gaza played out over the past three weeks. One is the moderated account aired in the West; the other is the unexpurgated account of civilian deaths filmed in vivid close-up inside Gaza.

The Channel 4 documentary Unseen Gaza explored the the war on Gaza from  the media perspective as foreign news organisations were refused access into the Gaza Strip. John Snow offers an insight into the frustation expressed by UK journalists as the IDF created a closed military zone along the borders of Israel and moved reporters on to a specially designated hill overlooking the territory, but away from the fighting.

An article on which I read on Media Channel indicates that the ban on journalists is a form of censorship and questions the motives behind the Israeli decision.  The ban did not however did not  apply to journalists already living and working in Gaza although it seems that they were targeted during the conflict.

What gives Israel the right to ban foreign media? Surely that only happens in countries such as Zimbawe and China whose leaders run oppressive regimes and inflict fear or terror on its citizens without intereference from the outside world.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A calm manner, rhetorical gifts and the promise of new ideas all contributed to Barack Obama’s rise to the U.S. presidency as Americans put their trust in him to rescue the economy from its worst crisis in decades.

Now the public and the financial markets want to see if he can deliver.

When he takes the oath of office on Tuesday, Obama will inherit a deepening recession, a shattered financial system, a housing-market meltdown and trillion-dollar budget deficits well into the future.

Well aware that stemming the economic decline is the No. 1 priority for his first 100 days in office, Obama is diving in.

Rescuing economy tops Obama’s 100-day agenda | Reuters

Facebook Users Go to War over Gaza – TIME: “Social-networking websites may have started out as online cliques where friends could swap opinions on music, pop culture and other bits of innocuous personal trivia. But as the conflict in Gaza has unfolded, it’s becoming evident that sites like Facebook are increasingly being used to express political views, adding an acrimonious, even menacing undertone to what were once lighthearted online forums.”

The largest Palestinian militant Islamist organisation is Hamas, formed in 1987 at the beginning of the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.Hamas takes its name from the Arabic initials for the Islamic Resistance Movement.Branded a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the EU, Hamas are seen by its supporters as a legitimate freedom fighting force defending Palestinians from a brutal military occupation

BBC NEWS article

“I think President Bush might very well be the worst president in U.S. history,” -Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joseph Ellis (2008)

As the Bush administration draws to its logical conclusion I have been reflecting on what aspect of his Presidency he will be best remembered.

The comments made by Kayne West in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina?

Maybe for his war on terror or should that be his war of terror which he inflicted on the innocent Iraqi people who have died as a result of his search for invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction?

His game of hide and seek then hide again with Osama Bin Laden?

Or maybe his vision of a world in which “freedom will prevail” sorry I mean his vision that America will prevail especially in offering support to the genocide of thousands of innocent Palestinians.

By authorising his signature on a memorandum which stated that the Third Genenva Convention regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime, did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban sealing the fate for those abused at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay?

Those will be some of the things that I will most remember, well done you did your father proud Mr Bush, and you get the credit for his legacy.

Life is like a box of chocolates!!!

BEIJING: China has blocked 41 websites after getting Google and other search engines to apologise for carrying porn and lewd content. This is among the measures taken by the government to ‘purify’ the Internet during a month-long campaign launched last week.” Read more: