Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The age of austerity is over, as the well-heeled splash out on Porsches and Dom Pérignon champagne, according to retailers of luxury goods....Porsche, the luxury carmaker, said this week that orders for its new Cayenne sports utility vehicle, due to arrive in European showrooms next month with a €55,400 ($75,000) price tag, were stronger than expected . . . LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury goods group by sales, said sales of its Dom Pérignon champagne and premium Hennessy XO cognac in the first three months of the year had been “much better” than last year:

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“This man has been sacrificed to propitiate the gods,” said local official Kalyan Mukherjee. “This is a shame for Bengal where the ruling Left coalition claim they have eradicated social evils and combated superstition,” an opposition leader Samir Kumar Ray said.

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Have you ever wanted to put yourself in the place of someone detained by KGB officers during Soviet times? Well now you can. While Soviet museums and parks across Central and Eastern Europe have proved popular over the past decade, tourists are now seeking first-hand experiences of life behind the Iron Curtain at Lithuania’s newest Soviet attraction. Welcome to Deportation Day, a “live history lesson” based on the accounts given by victims of Stalin’s gulags. Complete with KGB guards, doctors barking orders in Russian and muscled interrogations, the four-hour dramatization takes tourists to a replica of one of the camps where millions of residents of the Soviet Union were detained:

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Mike Huckabee, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, says the effort to allow gays and lesbians to marry is comparable to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use:

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The Vatican’s second-in-command has linked child sex abuse by priests to homosexuality. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone denied celibacy was to blame for the sex scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, homosexuality and paedophilia were inextricably linked, the Vatican’s Secretary of State declared:

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The UK too is now more unequal—in incomes, wealth, health, education, and life chances—than at any time since the 1920s. There are more poor children in the UK than in any other country of the European Union. Since 1973, inequality in take-home pay increased more in the UK than anywhere except the US. Most of the new jobs created in Britain in the years 1977–2007 were at either the very high or the very low end of the pay scale:

(Dead Link)