The Tiny Tips column from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard
In his first speech as president of the Worldwide Wildlife Fund UK, Prince Charles has warned that he is an “endangered species” and that so is the rest of mankind:
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YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things. Good. Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action:
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He [John Bird] sums himself up: “I am a self appointed grandee of the poor. I am one of them who got out and got into a position to help, so I will mollycoddle Lord Mandleson, Cameron, Blair, and Brown, anyone if it helps.” He remains refreshingly critical about the magazine: “I don’t want to read The Big Issue and read how miserable it is living under capitalism. I want to know what you’re going to do about it, how you going to dismantle it:
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Michael Gove slackens rules on use of physical force in schools. Education secretary seeks to stem ‘erosion of adult authority’ by recruiting former male soldiers to the classroom:
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It will take another 98 years for women executives to reach equal pay with men at the current rate, the Chartered Management Institute reports. Men are paid on average an extra £10,546, although women saw pay rises of 2.8 per cent this year compared to men’s 2.3 per cent, and women are now securing equal or higher starting salaries:
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When we decided to keep Hirohito on his Japanese throne, we winnowed down the number of Japanese war criminals to be hanged. Oddly, it was Churchill who wanted the worst of the Nazis to be executed on the spot; it was Stalin who wanted a trial. It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gaddafi ). The last two were or are wanted for killing “their own people” – in itself a strange expression since it suggests that killing people other than Iraqis or Libyans might not be so bad:
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Three hundred and fifty thousand: That’s a conservative estimate for the number of offenders with mental illness confined in America’s prisons and jails. More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than in hospitals or treatment centers.
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Ester Abeja has experienced both physical and emotional atrocities. She was captured by Uganda’s feared rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and was forced to join them. But not before the soldiers made her kill her one-year old baby girl, by smashing her skull in, and then gang raped her:
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