Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

Anti-War.Com reports:

New International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano may have been the candidate of choice for Western nations, and in particular Israel, but he sought to assure the world today that he would remain independent and would seek to de-politicize the office.

In particular, Amano noted that going through the IAEA’s documents he didn’t see any evidence that Iran was trying to develop nuclear weapons. The IAEA had repeatedly certified that Iran was not diverting any of its civilian program’s enriched uranium to any other purpose, but outgoing chief Mohamed ElBaradei claimed to have a “gut feeling” that Iran secretly wanted the technology.

Amano seems less inclined, at least so far, to rely on his gut and is looking for hard evidence to back up the allegations by Western nations in general and Israel in particular, that the Iranians have a covert program.

More on this story here. But don't expect to read about it on any neocon websites.

0 comments

It's hard to believe, but the Walkman has been with us for 30 years. Here's my article from the Daily Express on the invention that revolutionised the way we listen to music, while above you can watch Cliff getting into the new technology in the early 1980s. (Video by wehavejoy)

FOR today’s iPod-generation the ability to listen to music while on the move is taken for granted. The sight of people walking, jogging, sitting on trains or buses with headphones on has become commonplace. But in 1979 it was something very new. The launch of the Sony Walkman, the world’s first portable personal cassette player to go on sale to the public exactly 30 years ago this week, not only revolutionised the way we listen to music but what we do in public spaces.

"This is the product that will satisfy those young people who want to listen to music all day. They’ll take it everywhere with them. It’ll be a hit,” predicted Sony’s chairman Akio Morita shortly before the launch. How right he was.

Within two years of its first appearance in Japan more than 1.5million units had been sold worldwide, in its first 10 years 50million were sold.

The Walkman was devised on the instructions of the Sony chairman who wanted a portable machine that would enable him to listen to opera while he was on transatlantic plane trips. Its forerunner was the “Pressman”, a miniature tape recorder for journalists, which was adapted into a stereo tape player by Sony engineer Kozo Ohsone. The idea of adding the headphones came from the company’s honorary chairman Masura Ibuka.

At the press launch of the invention journalists were escorted on to a bus and each given a Walkman. They were driven off to Yoyogi, a major park in Tokyo, and after disembarking were told to put on the headphones and push the play button. Sony also hired young people to walk along Tokyo’s busiest streets, offering their headphones to passers-by to listen to the high-quality stereo sound.

At the end of 1979 Sony introduced their product in the US as the “Soundabout” and in February 1980 it made its debut here as the “Stowaway”. But tourists who had bought the machines in Japan brought the original name with them so Sony decided to use the Walkman brand name worldwide. In Britain the machine was an overnight success with more than 100,000 sold in the first year. So quickly did the craze catch on that in 1986 the word Walkman appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time.

But the invention was not to every­one’s taste. “For those of us who liked getting on a bus or a train and overhearing or even taking part in conversations, there is something a bit bleak about the dozens of private solitudes which nowadays clamber aboard,” wrote critic A N Wilson, who has suggested that the Walkman, with its “infuriating tsst tsst, tsst, tsst noise”, may be “one of the biggest blights of urban life”.

In 1984 the CD Walkman, or Discman, was introduced. Five years later the video Walkman was launched followed by the Minidisc Walkman in 1992.

But it was not all plain sailing for Sony. The company faced a legal challenge from the German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel, who had invented the first portable personal stereo tape player in 1972. Pavel’s machine never went into production – the companies he approached did not believe in his “Stereobelt” – but by 1978 he had patented the device in several countries. After years of court battles Sony signed a deal with Pavel in 2004, reportedly agreeing to pay him more than $10million and royalties from the sales of several Walkman models.

Although the Walkman has been challenged in recent years by iPods and mobile phones which also play music the brand name is still going strong. To mark the 30th anniversary Sony launched the X-series Walkman, which has a touch-screen, 60 hours’ worth of music and a radio.

Perhaps the reason why the Walkman has been so successful is that its 1979 launch coincided with the advent of Thatcherism. We were moving away from the collective, towards the individual. Up to the late Seventies our pleasures were mainly shared: we all watched the same TV, went on the same sort of holidays. From the Eighties leisure became tailored to the individual.

The Walkman, which enabled you to listen to the music you wanted wherever and whenever you wanted, was in tune with the new individualistic spirit of the times – the perfect accessory for the “Me” generation. Today it’s hard to imagine a world where we can’t take our music with us wherever we go.

0 comments

This week’s Wally(ess) of the Week is the graceless Serena Williams (pictured above), who marked her success at Wimbledon not by praising opponents, but by big-headedly making fun of the world rankings system which make the Russian Dinara Safina world number one.

What a contrast to the sporting behaviour of another American tennis player- defeated mens’ finalist Andy Roddick.
After playing his heart out in yesterday’s epic four-hour 16 minute mens’ final- Roddick said: “I just want to say congratulations to Roger. He’s a true champion and he deserves everything he gets”.

Roddick didn't complain about the sun in his eyes, poor line calls, or anything else-he simply paid a warm tribute to the tennis legend who had beaten him.

As the Daily Mail reports, Roddick’s pluck and humility won over the Wimbledon crowd.

And although Roddick didn’t win the trophy, I think this gallant performer- and great sportsman- has come out of Wimbledon with much more credit than Serena Williams.

0 comments

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazis. Here’s my Morning Star article on the massive contribution Belarus made to the anti-fascist struggle.

Question: Which currently existing nation lost the largest percentage of its population in World War II - a higher percentage than that of France, Britain and the US combined?

The answer is Belarus, which lost a staggering one-third of its people in The Great Patriotic War - a total of 2.5 million citizens.

As Stewart Parker states in his excellent book The Last Soviet Republic, "the destruction wrought on Belarus was immense in terms of human life and of infrastructure." Thousands of towns and villages were destroyed, many, like Katyn, burnt to the ground with all their villagers.

This week marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the nazi occupation and the event will be commemorated across the country and in Russia too.

To find out more about the sacrifices that Belarus made during World War II in the struggle against the nazis - and the way that its experiences during the war has helped shape the country's foreign policy today - I met up in London recently with the country's ambassador to Britain Aleksandr Mikhnevich.

"Not a single country involved in the hostilities was faced with such appalling atrocities and destruction," Mikhnevich told me. "The war left a deep mark in history and in the minds of the Belarus people."

I asked him for some examples of heroism in his country's anti-nazi struggle.
"One can talk for hours about the heroism of the Belarussian people and all the peoples of the USSR during the war. I will give one example. A small garrison deployed in the Brest Fortress was fighting with invaders for a month. The German troops were already near Smolensk but battles in Brest - 600km from the front line - were still underway. Even Hitler arrived by plane to Brest in July 1941 as he couldn't understand why his powerful army could not capture this small islet on Belarussian soil."

By the end of 1941, six months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the whole of Belarus was under nazi occupation. But the people refused to lie down and lick the jackboots of the illegal invaders. The resistance movement was strong and determined.

By 1943, there were 75,000 partisans active in the country. Overall, a total of 370,000 partisans fought in Belarus, with fighters coming from other Soviet republics and from western European countries too.

"The scale of the partisan movement was self-evident as single partisan zones sprang up in 1943 - two and half years before the hostilities were over," says Mikhnevich. "Around 60 per cent of the occupied territory was recaptured by the partisans. Government was restored in those areas, bringing the life of civilians back to normal. Belarussians took part even in the French Resistance."

Arguably no other country invaded by the nazis did more to protect its Jewish population than Belarus. In July 1941, the nazis established a Jewish ghetto in the capital Minsk with over 100,000 inmates.

Parker relates how the head of the ghetto, Yefim Stolerovitch, recounted after the war that though the Germans did find individual collaborators, "they were the exception and not the rule. The dominant characteristic of the Belarussian population was one of friendship and sympathy towards the Jews."

An example of this took place on July 21 1941, when the nazis roped a group of 45 Jews into a pit and then ordered 30 Belarussian PoWs to bury them alive. The PoWs refused and subsequently the Germans shot all 75.

Such acts of solidarity in Belarus were, as Parker notes, "in stark contrast to the overt anti-semitism that was reported by Germans in Polish, Baltic and Ukrainian territories."

The role that Belarussians played in protecting Jews in World War II has been acknowledged by the Israeli authorities. The Righteous Among the Nations is a secular award given by Israel to gentiles who risked their lives in the Holocaust to save Jews. There are no fewer than 587 recipients of the award in Belarus.
One of the Belarussians so honoured is Galina Imshenik who, together with her husband, rescued a little Jewish toddler named Yelena Dolgov. Sixty-five years later, Yelena and her husband care for Galina, who is now 96, round the clock. It's a wonderful story of human kindness being repaid.

Eventually, the combined might of the Red Army and the partisans evicted the nazi invaders from Belarus. Due to the worldwide recognition of the role that it had played in defeating fascism, Belarus, despite not being a sovereign state at the time, was made a founding member of the United Nations. And at the very first session of the UN general assembly a resolution proposed by Belarus was passed on the extradition and punishment of war criminals.

The enormous losses the country incurred during World War II continues to shape the foreign policy of Belarus today.

"Belarussian people as nobody else value peace, prosperity and universal values," Mikhnevich told me. "Our foreign policy is aimed exactly at the creation of a zone of neighbourliness. We will never forget the price of our freedom."

Since becoming a sovereign state in 1991, Belarus has taken a consistently pro-peace and anti-war line, opposing both the illegal NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and the equally unlawful aggression against Iraq in 2003.

The country that was at the forefront of the anti-fascist resistance 65 years ago is still standing up for the rights of free, independent nations today.

0 comments

In my First Post article on the influential neo-con faction in the Conservative Party I wrote:

Just as significant has been the way Cameron has protected his neocon allies during the expenses scandal - although they were arguably among the worst offenders. Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.
So too will fellow flipper George Osborne and Ed Vaizey, who claimed for over £2,000 in antique furniture bought from a business owned by David Cameron's mother-in-law.

Well, when it comes to protecting George ’Flipper’ Osborne, it seems that Dave will have a very hard job on his hands after this news.

The Mail reports:
If he (the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner) launches a full-blown inquiry it would mean a cloud hanging over Mr Osborne's career for months, until a verdict is reached. It will also fuel discontent on the Tory backbenches over the harsh treatment meted out to MPs outside Mr Cameron's inner circle over their expenses claims. Though several members of the Shadow Cabinet, including Mr Osborne, have repaid money to the Commons fees office, senior MPs complain that they have got off lightly compared to others.

The 'senior MPs' are quite right to be incensed about the double standards on show here.

UPDATE: Guido Fawkes has more on Osborne here.

0 comments

It's something of a tradition on this blog to post a classic clip from 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' when the temperature in Blighty tops 30 degrees. So, on what is likely to be the hottest day for several years, sit back and enjoy some really 'hot' comedy. Gunner Beaumont (aka 'Gloria'), is desperate to get discharged and get his 'Ticket to Blighty'. And desperate situations require desperate remedies.....

0 comments

The government has refused to re-negotiate its contract with privateer transport company National Express and is to take the East Coast railway line into public ownership.

But rather than making this move the first step in the renationalisation of the entire network, Transport Minister Lord Adonis says that it is the Government's intention to tender for a new East Coast franchise operator from the end of 2010.

Why? What Adonis seems to want is a system where losses are nationalised and profits are privatised. Get the East Coast line back in profit and then flog it to Richard Branson or another privateer, seems to be the government's intention.

As taxpayers- and railway users- we shouldn't put up with this nonsense.

It's time to call an end to Britain's Great Train Robbery and pressurise the government to renationalise the entire railway network. If Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland and the rest of Europe can have publicly-owned railways why can't we?

If you are in agreement, then here's the pressure group for you.

0 comments