Late last Thursday, Congress moved to vote on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act , which proposed to give $7.8bn towards the healthcare costs of the brave "first responders" at Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many firefighters and aid workers developed respiratory problems following their efforts, including 55 who developed cancer as a direct result of the toxins released. Unfortunately, though the Act won a majority – 255 to 159 – it was unsuccessful, as it did not secure a two-thirds super-majority (a condition the Democrats had brought upon themselves – more on this below). Yet, the outcome was overshadowed by the drama that took place moments prior to voting, when Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner took to the floor in the House of Congress amid a series of speeches from his party, and began to deliver one last, impassioned pitch to his colleagues – chiefly, to those on the other side of the fence – in ...

Of all the temples and mosques, rites and rituals the Indian Subcontinent has thrown at me, none has enthralled and enticed me as much as 'The Shrine of Red Royal Eagle'. On a conical mound, in the Sindh, lies the historic town of Sehwan Sharif, one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in all of India and Pakistan. On its northern outskirts are the ruins of a huge fort used by Alexander the Great as he passed through this way. The fort was occupied by a succession of dynasties up to the 16th century. Arab chroniclers mention of its refurbishment in the 11th century and recent French archaeology uncovered work by the Hindu King Brahma as well as the Buddhist Gandharan Empire. But the town owes its greatest importance to the Mausoleum of Sheikh Osman of Marwand, known to his followers as Lal Shah Baz Qalander (Red Royal Eagle) who died in 1274. He arrived here from Marwand near Tabriz in Iran in 1260 and within a decade had ten's of thousand Muslim and Hindu followers. He b ...

When I was younger, a death grip was something only Mr Miyagi, erstwhile trainer of “Daniel son” in the Karate Kid movies, could do. In my mind it involved fingers and necks and instant comas. But this week has seen a redefinition of the move and one that I’m far from happy about. The new post-modern “death grip” refers to the way some people hold their iPhones. Apparently the device, if held in a particular way loses all signal – something which Apple have blamed on the Vulcan-like grip of the owners rather than their own software. As appleinsider.com recently reported it, “Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs stoked a whiplash of blogger frenzy when he reportedly responded that users "were holding it the wrong way," blocking the signal with their hands.”This most recent incident really confirms that Apple has made the transformation from business to religion. How else could the suggestion that people are holding a device incorrectly prompt a “whiplash of blo ...

A heroin dependency makes it difficult for forty-six-year-old John Bailey to keep a job, pay rent, or maintain stable relationships. Consequently, Bailey, who also suffers from arthritis, diabetes and seizures, has spent several years living on the streets. During these years, he would sleep under park benches, covering himself with discarded newspapers to stay warm and hidden. On colder nights he might venture into a shelter, which offered heat, but which also required him to engage in the ‘one-eyed sleep’, a state of semi-alertness prompted by the fear of having one’s possessions stolen. Bailey has also been severely beaten both in the shelters and in the city parks. Presently, a rehabilitation program has helped Bailey to remain drug free for several months and he has a job of sorts. But he is wary of taking his current life for granted. ‘This is not my first time rising,’ he admits, recalling past bouts of being sober and housed. 'Raw existence can be only a few slips awa ...

It took the final election result of 2010 before I truly understood the early eighteenth century. On the morning which marked the consummation of the New Politics, a noted, hirsute Liberal Democrat activist approached me over breakfast and shook me by the hand. This being Balliol JCR, I was the best he could do by way of symbolic Toryism: an underwhelming, motheaten tiger in a zoo more noted for its herbivore collection. "Welcome to government," I said, feeling uncomfortably far from satire. ‘The Coalition’ suffers from problems of definition more, I think, than from those of will. That bald ‘Coalition’ won’t do alone; it sounds dystopian, the government in a book by Cormac McCarthy or Magnus Mills, encompassing shades of the unsuccessful Mitchell and Webb sketch about the post-apocalyptic ‘Emergency’. My instinct – after considering the social ramifications of ‘The Operagoing Coalition’ – was to go back rather further. The first internet suggestio ...

It’s been a full sixteen years since the Labour Party last had a proper leadership election, and so much has changed since a fresh-faced Tony Blair triumphed over Margaret Beckett and John Prescott back in 1994. Then, the Labour movement was in the midst of a real debate that had been opened by Neil Kinnock with his policy review after the 1987 general election defeat; a debate that was dominated by characters of radically different political persuasion, from Tony Benn and Bryan Gould, to messieurs Mandelson, Brown and Blair. What is so remarkably refreshing when one looks back on the policy review period is the extent to which real dialogue flourished within the party, both within the academic sphere and at the annual conference, where speakers were regularly given a rough ride by the activists in attendance, and the leadership’s motions shot down. New Labour's leadership effectively succeeded in closing down internal dissent within the party Fast-forward to the Labour Party o ...

‘I tell people I do yoga to be healthy and stay in shape. Secretly I do yoga to stay flexible so I won’t be bad in bed’. ‘My mom killed my dad long before he killed himself’ ‘I don’t really love you’ Can you keep a secret? My secret is a sad, obsessive addiction. An addiction to other peoples’ hidden scandal, other peoples’ sins, other peoples’ failings, other peoples' regrets. An addiction to a captivating, stimulating, delicious form of art. An art that brings the same thousands of viewers back each week, each day even, to appreciate, to ponder, and to reflect. For those of you who have missed the boat, I’m addicted to the internet phenomenon that is Postsecret.com PostSecret began in January 2005 as the brainchild of American, Frank Warren. The concept of the project is very simple: to display on the web the secrets of anonymous Americans, mailed into the site on a personally decorated postcard. The site is updated each Sunday morning with a brand n ...

It needed to be written. A predictable wistful-turn-of-the-decade-piece hailing the end of the Noughties and the inevitable onset of the Tens (not quite as catchy. Tennies? Sounds a bit like over-the-counter diarrhoea medication. Give me time on this one) and a bit of token drivelling about the internet now being a vital yet terrible extension of our personalities and the carbon footprint that is ominously stamped all over our middle class fun... Well I refuse to give in. I like the 21st century and all of the soullessness it delivers. I like the convenience of expressing the very depth of my soul through one sentence in a neat little box beneath my Facebook profile picture. Now finally the emotionally awkward have a chance to communicate love/sadness/confusion through handy specific combinations of punctuation, :-) indeed. I enjoy the enigmatic nature of “Maybe Attending” events, shamelessly Wiki-ing my way through higher education, and being able to Google all those annoying th ...

In Britain, we like to think of ourselves as fairly rational. However bad we are, at least we accept overwhelming scientific evidence. We might fly more than anyone in the world, but we feel slightly guilty because we know that we’re burning the atmosphere up. Our education system is a shambles, but at least some of our children have heard of Darwin. With regard to the war on drugs however, this week our government abandoned such principles by sacking David Nutt - previously their chief scientific advisor - for criticizing the government approach to drugs classification. No longer is drug policy based on science. Instead, it has become an article of faith that drugs are bad, and policy works from there. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic, even our most respected scientists. Mr Nutt’s sin in this case was simply stating was has been obvious to most young people for years anyway. Outside of crack cocaine and heroin, most illegal drugs are much less harmful than our legal drugs ...

“It’s something like the priesthood now,” my then tutor said a while ago, adjusting her cassock. She had heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and consequently wanted to enact a chat, and, I assume, a sanity check. For myself, I’ve always heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and rarely paid them overmuch attention. “I mean,” she continued, “do you know what you want to do, what it is? It requires a sort of cold, full-on dedication now, of course. The gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist anymore.” The chick had, naturally, got to the node of the matter. I’m aware that the gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist, that we’ve gone from Sliggers (see prior article) to sloggers, but I am young and foolish and, in my moments of reconciling myself to the Worship of Athena, I do like to think I could help to reverse that process. In this article I will try and articulate how, by musing on what the academy was, what it is, and what it might become, in two ...

There is a huge gap at the heart of David Cameron's political philosophy. I call it Cameron's rather than the Conservative Party's because it is hard to imagine that those to the right of the party are wholly on board with his vision of a 'big society'. The manifesto invites ordinary citizens to play a more active role in the running of their communities. This would involve groups of teachers, parents and other volunteer groups establishing and running schools with state funding. Communities could take over and run pubs threatened with closure. A mere 5% of local support would be needed to trigger a referendum to veto council tax rises or planned transport initiatives. Cameron is relying on the society he calls broken to provide the solutions itself Cameron wants every adult to be a member of a community organisation. The thinking behind such manifesto pledges is that the state is too large and is not capable of solving every problem the nation faces. However, a rolling back of the ...

It could have been epic; it could have been huge. As the Tories launched their manifesto at Battersea Power Station this week, they rounded up a handful of their work experience girls and gopher boys to stand outside and hold aloft a great banner bearing the words “We’re All In This Together”, all for the benefit of the cameramen flying over the venue in the network helicopters. Inside, David Cameron invoked Kennedy’s line about asking what you can do for your country, whilst all around the keyword of the day was “Change”. We use words like “crisis” or “genius” or “legendary” so much that they begin to lose their meaning, and it becomes all the more difficult to realise when we are presented with the real deal. The same is true of the word “revolution”. The Conservative Party – whether out of earnest idealism, or a desperate attempt to throw together all the interesting ideas that have come out of the right-wing think tanks over the last decade in order t ...