AgentAxeman

Is it just me or should this woman be locked away for her own good? "We are not your weapons – we are women By Amanda Kijera, civic journalist and activist in Haiti Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for. It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night. Accepting the helplessness of my situation, I chucked aside the Haiti bracelet I had worn so proudly for over a year, along with it, my dreams of human liberation. Someone, I told myself, would always be bigger and stronger than me. As a woman, my place in life had been ascribed from birth. A Chinese proverb says that “women are like the grass, meant to be stepped on.” The thought comforted me at the same time that it made me cringe. A dangerous thought. Others like it have derailed movements, discouraged consciousness and retarded progress for centuries. To accept it as truth signals the beginning of the end of a person–or community’s–life and ability to self-love. Resignation means inertia, and for the past two weeks I have inhabited its innards. My neighbors here include women from all over the world, but it’s the women of African descent, and particularly Haitian women, who move me to write now. Truly, I have witnessed as a journalist and human rights advocate the many injustices inflicted upon Black men in this world. The pain, trauma and rage born of exploitation are terrors that I have grappled with every day of my life. They make one want to strike back, to fight rabidly for what is left of their personal dignity in the wake of such things. Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected. Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Because women–and particularly women of color–are forced to bear the brunt of the Black male response to the Black male plight, the international community and those nations who have benefitted from the oppression of colonized peoples have a responsibility to provide women with the protection that they need. The United Nations, western women’s organizations and the Haitian government must immediately provide women in Haiti with the funding that they need to build domestic violence and rape crisis centers. Stop dividing Black families by distributing solely to women, which only exaggerates male resentment and frustration in Haiti. Provide both women and men with job training programs that would allow for self-sufficiency as opposed to continued dependency on whites. Lastly, admit that the issue of racial integration might still need addressing on an international level, and then find a way to address it! I went to Haiti after the earthquake to empower Haitians to self-sufficiency. I went to remind them of the many great contributions that Afro-descendants have made to this world, and of their amazing resilience and strength as a people. Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience. It woke me up, made me understand on a deeper level the terror that my sisters deal with daily. This in hand, I feel comfortable in speaking for Haitian women, and for myself, in saying that we will not be your pawns, racially, politically, economically or otherwise." http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/0...s-we-are-women/?

ours are fine. wor lass tests them regular with her cooking!

General Election 2010: Leaders divided on alien invasion Michael Deacon has grilled our political leaders on how they plan to tackle earth's imminent annihilation by aliens. Aliens almost certainly exist – and if they visit Earth, they're unlikely to be very nice to us. So says Stephen Hawking. It's widely agreed that Professor Hawking knows quite a lot about space. Bearing this in mind, I suspect I speak for all right-minded people when I say OH DEAR GOD WE'RE ALL DOOMED. Can our political leaders save us? I asked them for their thoughts. David Cameron "We mustn't fear change. I believe in change for Britain. Change for families. Change for schools. And – why not? – change in the Earth's dominant species. "Last week I was on Neptune and I met a 4.7million-year-old being who had served on an intergalactic warship for 6.2million years. And he told me that, after millennia of human government, Earth needed to take a new line on immigration. "Namely, that we let his people in so they could turn us all into slaves." Nick Clegg "Thank you, Michael, for your brilliant question. "When these beings attack our planet, the parties will have to accept that and work together for a fairer universe. If we get a hung parliament, the world won't end. "Well, unless the aliens blow it up with massive lasers or something." Gordon Brown "I agree with Nick. Or possibly David. Or possibly King Zargon the Great, Overlord of Jupiter." Nick Griffin "Once again, we see the political elite throwing open our borders to illegal aliens. "These life forms will undercut British wages. They'll demand fewer workers' rights. And they'll work longer hours because they've all got 17 arms. "Yesterday, campaigning in Barking, I barely saw an indigenous Brit. It was a sea of green faces. Honestly, it was like leafleting on bloody Mars." Alex Salmond "As Earth faces destruction, there is one question, above all others, that must be addressed. "What does it mean for Scotland? "It is a democratic disgrace that, during their preparations to destroy our planet, the aliens have not sought to include the governing party of Scotland in their discussions. I hereby launch an urgent appeal for a £50,000 'fighting fund' with which the SNP can mount a legal challenge against these aliens, and demand fairness for Scotland in their efforts to annihilate mankind."

i would gladly use it as a makeshift weapon to beat over the head of ex police singer Sting!!

Mine is a Green Party target seat. fuckin hell Meenz! Be afraid...................................... BE VERY AFRAID!!!121"!""$!"£%$43546523121``

out of that lot i'd be pleased if we got Gunter, Williams, Dorrans (probably not come tho) and Adam. all depends on who we move out tho i suppose........

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All the more reason to have it then!!

Hiccy St. Georges day everyone!!

Classic!!!! I actually did spit out alcohol at that!!

Frankie and Bennys! Its great and it opens early!

nah, you's are all just loonies!!

I voted for Enrique. Nolan was a close 2nd for me but Rickys had the best season out of the 2. (imo)

no need to get cross lads! its all in fun remember!!

Agree with the first bit of the second para but alas you let yourself down with the second bit. fuckin hell, and i thought i was intolerant!

I hope someone puts a claim in against you and your insurance costs go through the roof you scummy little man. why would someone put a claim in against me??? i wasnt driving. i wasnt even anywhere near the scene of the accident. you scummy little arsewipe!

aye, trouble is it was wor lasses fault! and MF, i think the bus hit wor lasses right arse cheek so its probably a right off!! seriously chaps, thanks for the comments. really appreciate it!

Mrs Axeman and little master Axeman were involved in a car crash tonight. Off side rear quarter was hit by a bus. I thank the lord (or whichever lord you choose to follow) that they wernt injured. Makes you appreciate what you have.

tbh, I'd be happy with any of them.

from techradar "HTC Desire After unleashing the massively impressive HTC Legend, its bigger brother, the HTC Desire, is here - faster, bigger and more powerful and still packing the Android punch. It might be the Nexus One rebadged, but this is a behemoth of a phone in its own right; has HTC tried to do too much? We reviewed a Desire from T-Mobile, which is first in line to offer the phone on UK release, but we also checked out our findings from another Desire review unit straight from HTC, to really find out how it compared to the competition. While the Legend was all about style and functionality in one tidy package - the HTC Desire takes a slightly different approach. Instead of the gorgeous aluminium chassis, we're given a slightly more low-key brown case and a huge 3.7-inch OLED capacitive touchscreen. But while the screen certainly is massive, the phone itself doesn't seem gargantuan. The screen reaches the edge of the chassis nicely, and the four buttons on the front of the HTC Desire are almost flush and set in attractive aluminium. If you're looking for comparisons between this and the Nexus One, the first is highly obvious: the trackball is gone. HTC has given the phone the Terminator eye once more (head back to the HTC Legend review if you want to know why we're glad it doesn't glow red and threaten humanity) which is basically an optical trackpad that registers finger motion over the sensor. The phone is very slim indeed, with dimensions of 119 x 60 x 11.9 mm, and weighs in at just 133g. If you're counting, that's 2g heavier than the iPhone 3G and the exact same weight as the iPhone 3GS - and that makes it very pocket friendly indeed. It has a rubberised chassis, which is a little hard to grip at times. We're not talking so slippy you'll be dropping it all the time, but it still can be a little difficult to hold in one hand, especially if you have dinky digits. That said it sits very nicely in the hand, with a sumptuous curved chassis feeling very nice and making it easy to press the buttons on the front with the thumb. There's actually very little button-wise on the HTC Desire, with only six in all. The front four buttons are standard HTC Android fare (Home, Menu, Back and Search) and the Terminator optical trackpad also clicks in as an enter key. The up/down button on the left-hand side of the phone is flush to the chassis, as is the power button on the top - which sits next to the 3.5mm headphone jack atop the HTC Desire. The power button also functions as the lock key, and is very nicely placed to press whenever necessary (and trust us, we've seen some horrors; we're looking at you, Samsung Galaxy). That's it button-wise, as there's no camera key (instead the HTC Desire uses the trackpad to take a snap or two) which is a little sad - we still love a dedicated shutter button. The USB slot is hidden at the bottom - no cover to keep the dust out, but on the plus side it's once again microUSB, banishing the memory of the horrid miniUSB port from HTC designs of old. There's also a microSD card slot for extra memory - but that's hidden below the battery, and can't be taken out without turning off the phone. The screen is simply to die for - we mentioned it was an OLED capacitive effort earlier, but that brings such glorious colour reproduction and 3.7-inch is a great size for media and the internet on a phone. It's a little tacky under the touch - the iPhone for instance feels a little smoother - but we're being very, very picky with that, as it registers the slightest touch with ease. The design is sleek, and the Desire certainly looks the business - sleek and compact, while still showing off the power of the OLED screen. Yes, it lacks the style of the HTC Legend, but we think it more than makes up for that in function. HTC is excellent at keeping packaging minimal, and the Desire once again comes in a coffin-like box with the standard kit inside. This means a microUSB cable, which plugs into an adaptor to make a wall charger, and the standard headphones which double as a hands-free kit. HTC hasn't seen fit to update these, but they're functional and work well to use for calls and media, providing you don't have the same odd-shaped ears as us. There's not a lot more, but with the minimal space in packaging you can see why HTC has kept the components down. We would like to see some PC software on a CD or memory card, but it can be downloaded from the site with ease. The HTC Desire is a feature-rammed phone with the hardware to support it. It's got a huge screen with the 1GHz processor underneath, and the Sense UI is a system that keeps getting better with every iteration. Coming just after the HTC Legend, it improves on all the issues we saw with that (battery life, Peep and Friendstream slow to update etc) and adds in some decent extra hardware as well. We liked We liked nearly every single thing on the HTC Desire - it just works as you want it to as a phone and an internet tablet at the same time. The Sense UI, Leap View and social network integration is all seamless and useful, the Live Wallpapers are super cool and the internet browser with pinch to zoom is fantastic. Music and video playback was rich and simple, the camera is probably the best we've seen from HTC, the overall experience was fast and intuitive - in short it's easier to find things we didn't like. We disliked We'll level with you - there's not a lot wrong with this phone. The Bluetooth music playback is a little patchy and the battery will drop a little easily if you leave everything updating in the background. Although the latter is a little annoying out the box (HTC wants you to use lots of updating widgets from the start) once you take some things down (or set them to manually update) the battery use is a lot better. Verdict In short, this is a phenomenal phone - one of the best we've ever had on TechRadar. Usually when we like a phone on the first use, we end up horribly disappointed after a little time with it, but the HTC Desire kept on performing and achieving when we thought it wouldn't. The screen is lovely, the design is slick and processor makes everything happen in a flash - all you'd want from a smartphone. Sure, some people will want slightly nicer design (we'd advise you check out the Legend) or a simpler home screen and richer app store at the moment (look at the iPhone 3GS) but as a piece of hardware it's without par in the mobile world. A stunning phone, and one that will show the world that Android isn't just for the hackers and phone geeks any more."

Yeah that's exactly what I thought. I'm thinking about getting one of these HTC Desire things, just for a change. got one. its fantastic!! completely blows wor kids iphone 3gs out of the water. 600mins 500txts unlimited net £25 per month. http://www.mobilephonesdirect.co.uk/Brands...447/p31043.aspx

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ah man, ffs!

Go on Boris lad!! "Nick Clegg to win the General Election? Has someone put something in the water supply? The current madness for all things Lib Dem cannot last. Nick Clegg will soon be gone with the wind, argues Boris Johnson. By Boris Johnson It must have been a couple of years ago that I was having dinner with the great Max Hastings, former editor of this paper, and he was being so gloomy about Conservative prospects that I scented a financial opportunity. Tell you what, I said, let's have a bet. A thousand pounds says the Tories will win the next election. How about that? "Done!" said my old mentor, with the wolfish gleam of one taking candy from a baby. And from that moment on, of course, the Tories started to soar in the polls. Gordon Brown lurched from one disaster to the next. The British ruling class – the BBC, the NHS senior managers, the university vice-chancellors, those kinds of people – began to make the big subconscious assumption that there would be a change of government in 2010. At last the matter came to seem so settled that Max decided to run up the white flag. When David Cameron started to record poll leads of 20 per cent, a cheque arrived in the post for a thousand pounds. I promptly cashed it, and (to my shame) forgot to thank Max for being both so sporting and so realistic. It was big of him to acknowledge the way history was moving and even bigger to cough up before it was strictly necessary to do so. It was generous of him to take a wager, during a fairly bibulous dinner, on a fourth successive Labour victory – and I pray, as he looks at the current state of the polls, that Max isn't suddenly starting to get his hopes up. It would only be human, after all, to start to wonder. Will he win that grand after all? Will this amazing and ludicrous burst of Cleggophilia keep the Tories from government? Will I have to cancel the summer holidays and sell the car to pay back my old chum Hastings? Will I hell. My bet remains quite safe. I am certain that the Tories will win, and that the current fantasy of a Liberal Democrat resurgence is the biggest load of media-driven nonsense since the funeral of Diana. Watching that debate, I had the clear impression that Cameron aced every question. His answers were clear, concise and knowledgeable, and in my focus group of 12- to 16-year-olds he was the overwhelming winner. "David Cameron knows more than the others," said the 12-year-old, "and everything he says is true!" Gordon Brown seemed stale and deeply unconvincing in his core assertion, that it was necessary to keep wasting exactly the same amount of money in order not to stall the recovery. As for Clegg, I remember thinking that it was indeed a historic debate – the moment when the idea of a third force in British politics finally shrivelled under the Manchester TV lights. He was by far the worst, with many of his answers seeming to be semi-masticated versions of something Cameron had already said. And so you can imagine my amazement when those polls started to come in, and the news that the punters overwhelmingly scored it for Cleggie. It was one of those times when there seems to be only one solution to the problems of British politics, and that is to dissolve the electorate and summon a new one. What has happened to us all, when serious papers can start raving about "Prime Minister Clegg"? Has someone put something in the water supply? Has some sulphur yellow cloud descended imperceptibly from Iceland and addled our brains? These are Lib Dems we are talking about! They say anything to anyone. They are not so much two-faced as positively polycephalous. They go around every university campus promising to abolish "Labour's unfair tuition fees" – while dear Cleggie tells his party conference that this policy, this cardinal Lib Dem policy, would cost £12 billion and that the country can't afford it. In the north of England you will find plenty of Lib Dem literature extolling their "mansion tax", a proposal on which they remain deafeningly silent in places like Richmond and Kingston, where it would mean a vast new tax on people who happen to live in overvalued houses. Everybody treats Vince Cable as a semi-holy Mahatma Gandhi of British politics, because he is supposed in some way to have anticipated the financial crisis. Actually his most notable recommendation before the crisis was that Britain should join the euro – a move that would gravely have worsened our current position by leaving us in a Greek-style straitjacket. What crouton of substance did Clegg offer last Thursday, in the opaque minestrone of waffle? He wants to get rid of Trident. Great! So Lib Dem foreign policy means voluntarily resigning from the UN Security Council, abandoning all pretensions to world influence, and sub-contracting our nuclear deterrent to France! They are a bunch of euro-loving road-hump fetishists who are attempting like some defective vacuum cleaner to suck and blow at the same time; and the worst of it is that if you do vote Lib Dem in the demented belief that there could ever be such a thing as a Lib Dem government, you won't get Prime Minister Clegg. You'll get Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for five more holepunch-hurling years, because the Lib Dems almost always vote with Labour, and in my years in Parliament I can't remember a single moment when they opposed a Labour measure to expand state spending or state control. I can't think of anything worse for this country than some great ghastly soggy Lib-Lab coalition, dripping with piety and political correctness and unable to take the decisions we need for fear of offending the vast hordes of public sector special interest groups they collectively represent. That is why the current madness cannot last. The Lib Dems are everywhere today, like the orange spores of an exploded puffball. Next week they will be gone with the wind. Clegg is the beneficiary of cunning Labour spin, bigging up the third party in order to take the shine off the Tories. But when people understand that a vote for Clegg is a vote for Brown, they will stay their hands, and they will see that it is only by voting Tory that they can give this country the change it needs. That is still my prediction, and if Max disagrees, we can always increase the stake."