Scottish Agenda: Time to give home-grown talent a better deal
The News Review:
- Scottish Agenda: Time to give home-grown talent a better deal
- LA’s newest soccer pitch has a very familiar ring to it
- Dispossessed deportees vs returned criminals
- Never too old to save the Earth
- Bowled over
- Peter York on Ads: The car of choice for robots and philosophers
Scottish Agenda: Time to give home-grown talent a better deal
Times Online – Jan 14, 2007
Last January it was Lexmark, this year NCR. Next year? Take your pick. One thing seems almost certain — bring in a big foreign company and one day it’ll pack its bags and head home. I used to work in Cumbernauld, which was built on the back of Burroughs, the American computer company. When it left after 25 years, one observer rather bizarrely compared it with the Romans leaving the Antonine Wall. Cumbernauld survived both, although the damage left by the Romans was nothing compared with what has been done to Cumbernauld town centre. These jobs have all gone for the same reason.
LA’s newest soccer pitch has a very familiar ring to it
Toronto Star – Jan 14, 2007
Beckham is to Pele as, say, Messier was to Gretzky (which might not be fair to Mark Messier, who was never told he was welcome to practise with a team but had no hope of ever playing in another game, as coach Fabio Capello of Real said of his B-list superstar yesterday). Time has a way of fogging memories, but those who ignore what’s gone before are destined to repeat the same costly mistakes. Soccer in North America can’t seem to decide if it will devote itself to developing home-grown talent or try to sell the sizzle of rest-of-the-world castoffs. Pele helped the Cosmos sell tickets but also opened the doors for the likes of Italian dynamo Giorgio Chinaglia, George Best, Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Juan Carlos and so on. The Toronto Blizzard had Roberto Bettega and Peter Lorimer. At the height of the Cosmos’ reign, in 1979, they were averaging 46,690 at Giants Stadium, but two years later they were down to 34,857 and in the NASL’s final season they were back to where they started, attracting an average of only 12,817. What happened? The money ran out.
Dispossessed deportees vs returned criminals
Jamaica Gleaner – Jan 14, 2007
, deported) each year from the deporting countries. They are home-grown, returned criminals. Their craft and criminal know-how were developed and honed in Jamaica. While overseas, especially in the U.
Never too old to save the Earth
BBC News – Jan 14, 2007
”
A former professor of Ecology and Environmental Science at the University of Ulster, he only turned to campaigning after retiring in 1986. For 10 years he was convenor of his local branch of Friends of the Earth in Bannside, Northern Ireland. A keen gardener, he was popular for bringing his home-grown organic vegetables to meetings. Last year he moved to Sheffield, where he joined local activists clearing parks and green spaces of litter and debris. He adds: “I have four children and seven grandchildren, and it does make you worry about what sort of world they will live in. ”
With advocates like Amyan, Irene and Joyce on their side, green activists will hope that our ageing population will also be an increasingly eco-friendly one too.
Bowled over
Telegraph.co.uk – Jan 14, 2007
livinginfrancehead H1. A lively 75-year-old former nurse at London’s Royal Free Hospital, Marie Charles is an example of yet another contemporary Caribbean phenomenon: a beneficiary of Britain’s property boom. “We had two houses in Hackney,” she says, “so we left one for the kids, sold the other and came home. It was time for some hot sunshine. “The advantage of the Fredericks’s place in the south-west of the island is that right on its doorstep are the magnificent Pitons (both climbable), other mountain and rainforest trails and the “drive-in volcano” of Sulphur Springs, with its therapeutic bathing… “The advantage of the Fredericks’s place in the south-west of the island is that right on its doorstep are the magnificent Pitons (both climbable), other mountain and rainforest trails and the “drive-in volcano” of Sulphur Springs, with its therapeutic bathing. The drawback is that it’s an hour and half’s drive from the Beausejour cricket ground where England’s group matches and one of the semi-finals are being held. Better located for the cricket is the Gros Islet home of Mary Bissette, a 57-year-old office manager for the St Lucia Cold Storage Company. The split-level accommodation – Mary has a four-bedroom apartment on the ground floor, I’m to have the three-bedroom apartment on the lower ground – might be in a less picturesque setting, but it’s only a few minutes by car or half an hour’s walk from Beausejour. “Obviously they’re concerned that a place is clean and comfortable,” she says.
Peter York on Ads: The car of choice for robots and philosophers
The Independent – Independent – Jan 14, 2007
Every Western democracy gets the motor industry it deserves. Ours had that Reg Varney quality, but everywhere – Wolfsburg (Volkswagen), Turin (Fiat) and Boulogne-Billancourt (Renault HQ) – there’s a national story with massive mythologies and nostalgia for the world before robotic car plants. But only in France, where they still have a home-grown motor industry churning away (part of it hyphenated on to the Japanese), could you ever have had a marque and a model romanced by an intellectual quite like Roland Barthes in a book of essays actually called Mythologies. There it is, the Citroën DS of 1957, epically ahead of its time, so designic, so hydraulic, a complete Nouvelle Vague in its own right, the actual contemporary of God-knows-what hopeless British Motor Corporation half-timbered Wolseleys and Rileys. The DS and the 2CV have anchored Citroën as a one-firm Alliance Française in the heads of generations of amateur car historians and culture vultures across the world. But then a few years back, Citroën went robotic.