Strikers playing with fire

The fire brigade strikes in conjunction with Guy Fawkes Night in November last year, involved over 5,500 fire-fighters, and caused a rift between the Fire Brigade Union (FBU) and the government.

Maria Jackson reported on the heated debate in November.

Close to a solution?


Now, a proposal to end the dispute will be discussed this Friday, according to the BBC.

FBU’s regional committee will then decide if they will switch to 10.5-hour day shifts and 13.5-hour night shifts, instead of the current nine-hour days and 15-hour nights.

FBU members are supporting the plan, and Brian Coleman, the chair of the London Fire Authority, said he was "delighted", and that he was glad the union "saw sense" about a "silly dispute which dragged on for six years".

Under Ryan Air's spell

Time and time again I've said: "I will never use this airline again!", only to find myself suffering on yet another of their flights a couple of months later. How does Ryan Air manage to keep us under their spell?

One of their pilots, who had the bad luck of sitting next to me on my last flight - having to patiently defend their sales tactic and much more, gave me some inside information.

It all looks so attractive at first; £20 for a round trip to Stockholm, Rome or Paris. But as everyone knows who has used this airline before, in the end the ticket often ends up costing as much as, or more, than BA, SAS, KLM or any of it's more decent competitors.

First the expensive taxes, then £10 for paying by card and another £5 to check in on-line is the minimum added.

Checking in luggage is another £20, and if you haven't checked in on-line it's another £40 penalty fee charged at the airport, and every single kg of over-weight over the mere 10kg limit will cost you £40.

Since the airports where Ryan Air lands are often long distances outside the destination city, add another £30-40 for trains and busses.


How they get the best pilots on the market

No designated seats, queuing up like cattle up to an hour before boarding, revolting food to rip-off prices, extremely annoying music at boarding and landing, generally bad service and ugly and cheapish looking interior, but still - their flights are booked to the last, un-foldable seat.

Apparently the Irish carrier made a pre-tax profit of £420m in the six months to 30 September 2010.

One must really compliment the airline on a successful marketing campaign. But I think what really annoys me is the greedy way of little extra charges here and there, and that nothing is spent on the comfort of the passengers.

"Why are there no pockets in the seat in front of you?" I asked the pilot next to me. "Well, it's all to save time in between flights - the less newspapers and litter the more time saved for the crew." He explained slightly embarrassed.

After opening up about the airline’s poor staff policies and telling me that a colleague of his was refused a day off on his wedding day, I of course wondered why he chose to work for them. He replied that: "For pilots it's one of the best paying airlines!".

I was both shocked and relieved by his answer. At least I should be in good hands of skilled captains – I always feared that security must be dangerously saved on as well. That is, if I ever fly with them again.  

  

Santa robbing King's guard of machine gun

Not even two weeks after the terrorist attack, that could have killed hundreds in central Stockholm, two men dressed in santa costumes stole a machine gun from a shocked guard outside the royal palace.

It was just before 2 AM, the night before Christmas Eve, when a quiet and peaceful Stockholm embedded in deep snow, was the target of yet another vicious attack.

This time it was one of the two guards outside the royal palace that was severely beaten and robbed of his AK5 machine gun.

The guards are fully eligible to use whatever force needed to protect the palace gates, but still, getting their hands on the automatic weapon was like a walk in the park for these two thiefs disguised as Father Christmas.

 Need to face the reality

Although Swedish police takes the crime very seriously since these kind of weapons are said to often be stolen by criminal gangs for use in armed robberies, the question remains; how could this happen?

A source from within the military told me about suspicions that this could have been planned from the inside.

It simply seems very odd that two armed guards, that apparently also have easy access to an alarm button, so easily could have been disarmed and did very little to defend themselves.

But regardless of this being an insider job, or a robbery of ill trained soldiers - it should have been avoided.

The terrorist attack that took place in Stockholm 11 December, where suicide bomber Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly was minutes away from a mass killing, should have been enough of a wake-up call.

Sad but true - to keep the ciizens safe, it’s time to realize that the days of innocence are a distant memory, even for what used to be an idyllic, safe, open and model democracy like Sweden.

Wikileaks - our friend or foe?

WikiLeaks, the international new media non-profit organisation launched in 2006, consitently causes hot debates over the good or bad of an open and transparent society at all costs.

Within a year of its launch, the site's database had published over 1.2 million documents of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources.

The organisation has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from all over the world. 

Julian Assange, generally described as its director, and Wikileaks have won a number of awards The Economist's 2008 New Media Award and Amnesty International's UK Media Award in 2009 to name a few.

But the critique is as common as the praise.

The good or evil of total transparency

The thought of a medium that reveals crime, corruption and breaches of human rights is very attractive.

In July 2007, the public could for example see the disturbing images from a secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad.

After launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, the US soldiers were laughing at the dead.

But where do we draw the line between providing citizens with their rightful information and letting out in the open what could be used by terrorists to serve their purposes?

Some information has after all been classified as secret for a purpose, and sometimes even to save lives. For example hiding the identity of threatened people and organisations.


Assisting the enemy

About a week ago, WikiLeaks released a secret list of infrastructure-related facilities and topics, from pipelines to smallpox vaccine suppliers.  

The list had been developed for the purpose of protecting the most vulnarable parts of  infrastructure worldwide. Now, with public access the information provides a goldmine for terrorist networks.

One might wonder if publishing this really can be defended, and regarded as relevant information for us all, especially when in the wrong hands it could lead to devestating effects.


Walking the talk?

And the important question remains who within Wikileaks ultimately decides what information to publish, and what the structure of power and responsibility is within the organisation.

How can rest assure that this power will not be cunningly misused by the wrong people with a hidden agenda to leak certain information at the right time - causing devastating effects that could put us all at great danger?

The Wikileaks people strongly speak for transparency in society, but do they really live up to this in terms of their own organisation?

The consequenses of the launch and widespread attention of Wikleaks remains to be seen in the future to come.

Journalists and conflict reporting

Award winning journalist Ross Howard argues in his handbook Conflict Sensitive Journalism that it's through good reporting that conflict is reduced. But what is the role and responsibilities of journalists in conflict reporting?

Even if the primary goal of conflict reporting shouldn't be to solve the actual dilemma, Ross Howard says it's "through neutral and impartial reporting, journalists make the public far more well-informed about the conflict beneath the violence, and can assist in resolving it".

Although not all conflicts are violent, when we speak of conflict, we usually refer to violent disagreements where people fear for their safety and survival.

Howard believes that there are several elements of conflict resolution that good journalists can deliver, automatically, and as part of their daily work; channelling communication, educating, correcting misperceptions, identifying underlying interests and acting as an emotional outlet are some of them.

The challenges of good journalism

Good, professional and impartial journalism is difficult work at the best of times.

The relevant information can be very hard to access, and the constant time pressure and deadlines are imminent.

A violent conflict challenges neutral and constructive journalism even more. Censorship, limited access, propaganda and of course personal risk, can make the job incredibly difficult, but also even more important.

There’s always a tough balancing act knowing when to report on a conflict and when not to. The report itself might put innocent people at risk. But the biggest danger of all is lack of information.

With sufficient information, the public and victims of the conflict can withstand propaganda and misperception in a much stronger way.

And the fact that the conflict is being reported on to the outside world, might create invaluable confidence-building support that can play a crucial role in solving it.

The Social Network

It looks like such a simple idea and the obvious step in modern, social technology. But behind the Facebook phenomenon we find a ground breaking genius who changed the way of modern networking and communication forever.  

Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network tells the story of the founders behind Facebook, and its fairy tale success, reaching 500 million active users in less than six years.

The cast includes Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Brenda Song, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella and Rooney Mara.

Having just been dumped by his girlfriend, Harvard freshman Mark Zuckerberg, spends the following night hacking in to the university intra-net, and creates the website Facemash, comparable to "Hot or not".

The site invites fellow students to grade the looks of female sophomores, and during its first four hours on-line it attracted a staggering 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views.

Zuckerberg is charged with breach of security and violating copyrights, but even though he face expulsion, the charges are soon dropped.

Spurred by his success, and baffled by the attention the site received, Zuckerberg soon started taking the first steps towards developing the social networking site - today known as Facebook. 

Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in history, but his success have lead to vast legal complications. And the lawsuits by three Harvard students claiming he stole their idea, has a central part of the plot.

The geek who became a billionaire

It's a cleverly portrayed success story about the geek that became a billionaire, and compellingly shows how Facebook satisfied, and perhaps also created, the need of global networking. 

Although skilfully acted, Jesse Eisenburg's portraial of Mar Zuckerburg sometimes feels slightly too "geeky" and even close to autistic.

Justin Timberlake, playing Napster founder Sean Parker, who joined the Facebook team at an early stage, proves that he's far more than a talented singer.

The film feels highly relevant to most of us, as many could easily confess to finding it hard to even imagine an every-day life without Facebook.

Or as Entertainment Weekly put it: "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers' birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?"

The numbers of beauty

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, the saying goes. But actually beauty has been proved to depend on ratio, and is based on mathematical formulas. Scientists have even shown that rather than learnt, the idea of beauty is innate in a newborn infant.

The ideal proportions and the length and width of our nose, mouth, chin, the position of the eyes etc. all form what scientists call the Golden Ratio.

This is the same ratio that has been used by architects and artists throughout history to create famous objects of beauty like Michelangelo's "David" and the Greek temples.

In experiments UK researchers have interestingly shown that newborn babies as young as one day old appears to prefer to look at attractive faces. 

Face recognition and attraction to beauty and proportions, researchers at the University of Exeter say, is hardwired at birth, and not learned.

By showing paired images, that had been graded 1-5 in beauty by a broad group of people, they noticed that most babies spent far more time fixated on the more attractive face.

Beauty based on statistical average

Research has found that by melding together hundreds of different images of faces, a statistical average of facial characteristics is reached that is very attractive.

To the baby, pretty faces can therefore be seen as representing the stereotypical human face, which they have evolved to recognise.

The eyes of the beholder may have varied preferences in terms of what is attractive and not, and luckily we don't all look the same.

But even if this research should be taken with a pinch of salt, it looks like we can actually talk of such a thing as beauty as a norm.