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I'm back in Las Cruces, New Mexico, spending the break between semesters in the spot where I plan to eventually retire. When I was here last summer (2016), I visited the Unitarian Universalist Church so decided to join the people gathered there on Christmas Day. Not many showed up—about twenty or so. The service was abbreviated. The emphasis was on singing Christmas carols from the hymnal. Unitarian Universalists, it appears, love to sing.
Inside the bulletin on a separate sheet of paper, Catherine Massey, the Director of Music, wrote an essay titled "Sunday Music Notes." She asks, "How can music help us respond to the needs around us?" She listed several ways we can benefit from singing and chanting. One way is calming the self, enabling us to better cope with life's struggles. Singing can also bring comfort to the sick and/or dying as well as to their families. She used her final paragraph to write about the necessity of music in social action movements.
…[S]inging has been an integral part of many social action movements, from the American Civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s to the anti-apartheid movement of South Africa. Ysaye Barnwell, member of the African American women's a cappella group "Sweet Honey in the Rock," has said that for a social justice movement to gain and maintain momentum, it needs songs to be sung by the people. She believes recent movements, such as Occupy Wallstreet, have had limited success because the people on the streets haven't found their songs.
I am still grieving about the choices many American citizens made during the recent U.S. election. Although disheartened, I know I am not alone in my grief and outrage. I hope that decent people will push back against the misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, xenophobia, and just plain hatred that this new administration stands for and will, no doubt, perpetuate. We need music and songs to carry the "resistance" forward.
Perhaps we can resurrect some of the oldies: Tracey Chapman's, "Behind the Wall," Bob Dylan's, "The Times they are A Changin'," Billie Holiday's, "Strange Fruit," Tom Robinson's, "Glad to be Gay," Mahalia Jackson's, We Shall Overcome," and Sam Cooke's, "A Change is Gonna Come." This is but a sampling of the work done by those musician/artists that have gone before us. Perhaps we can build on the courage and resiliency of their music to create our own music as we work towards a more just world.
When I was a child, I remember accompanying my missionary father to the villages on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as he (and others) preached the gospel to "those in darkness." The open air street meeting would begin when several of the missionaries (and their helpers) clapped their hands together in order to attract a crowd. As soon as a knot of people gathered, the meeting would begin by singing a song—usually this one:
Cantad en alta voz
Noticias de un amor
Que infunde confianza al hombre pecador.
(Sing in a loud voice
News of a love
That gives confidence to the sinner man.)
It had a rollicking tune and several people would often keep time to the music by hitting their thigh or tapping their foot on the ground.
I grew up in what I call a "cultic expression" of Christianity. Music was considered peripheral, really, to the essential message of my parents' (and the cult's) version of Christianity, yet music was reluctantly used as a means towards an end—getting people to hear the "Word of God."
Protestant Christianity has a rich history of hymnody that undoubtedly propelled the movement forward after Martin Luther (1483-1546) broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. Luther loved music, was a prolific hymn writer, and used many popular bar tunes of the day to accompany those hymns. Perhaps Luther is best known for "A Mighty Fortress is our God," based on Psalm 46.
A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing;
Our helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing:
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and pow'r are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal. (1st stanza)
Succinct with its message, singable with its verse.
Even though many Muslims shun music, one cannot deny the musicality of the azan (call to prayer) wafting from the minarets in Muslim-majority countries as the faithful are called five times a day to prayer. The azan is quite simple. The musicality of the human voice gives it its power.
God is great.
I bear witness that there is no deity except God.
I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Come to prayer.
Come to success.
God is greatest.
There is no deity except God.
Islam, like all expressions of religion, has a wide variety of interpretations. Many Sufis unapologetically use singing and dancing in their rituals. Some call their dancing "turning," noting that "everywhere you turn, there is the face of God."
I used the above religious examples because they are familiar to me, not because I "believe in" them. I think the examples show how a movement gains legitimacy and power through music and song. Music is an integral part of our humanity. Music empowers us.
To be effective, a movement needs a song to carry its message.
I plan to go to the women's march in Washington DC on January 21, 2017. Perhaps those who are organizing the event will encourage us to sing our way through the streets of Washington as we use our songs to bring into being a new creation. The "oldies, but goodies" wouldn't be a bad place to start.
Esther Nelson is an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Va. She has taught courses on Human Spirituality, Global Ethics, Christian-Muslim Relations, and Religions of the World, but focuses on her favorite course, Women in Islam. She is the co-author (with Nasr Abu Zaid) of VOICE OF AN EXILE REFLECTIONS ON ISLAM and the co-author (with Kristen Swenson) of WHAT IS RELIGIOUS STUDIES? A JOURNEY OF INQUIRY.


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Injuries to children from lead paint cause irreparable harm - brain damage that is irreversible, nervous system disorders, delays in development, and many other permanent conditions. Lead poisoning robs vulnerable children of the potential to become all they might be, and particularly afflicts children of color, who represent nearly 95 percent of the victims in New York City, according to a report (in pdf format) by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
A new law, which the New York City Council is expected to enact this week, is the product of many lessons learned in the struggle against pediatric lead poisoning in the decades since the city first banned lead paint in 1960. Yet when the council members vote, it will be in defiance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who vetoed the bill (in pdf format) in December. He was wrong to do so.
"Childhood lead poisoning remains a significant public health problem in New York City," according to the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development(in pdf format) "Over the last five years, more than 35,000 NYC children have been newly identified as having elevated blood lead levels." In fact, the numbers may be far higher, since less than a third of children are actually tested, according to the Health Department (in pdf format).
According to studies(in pdf format) by Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mt. Sinai Medical Center, the social costs of childhood lead poisoning in New York City alone are in excess of $1.27 billion a year.
The history of efforts to combat this problem is long and convoluted, some of it detailed online by the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning . In 1982, the city passed Local Law 1, which required the abatement of all lead paint, in any condition, in homes where young children reside. While many experts believe that full abatement is, in the long term, the best way to prevent lead poisoning, and in the long run more cost-effective, there were concerns about the immediate costs of such an effort.
The 1982 law was replaced by Local Law 38 in 1999. That law was criticized by virtually every expert in the field as far too constrained, limiting landlord responsibilities only to peeling paint, and leaving out lead dust and the conditions that cause lead dust.
Indeed, the failure of the law to consider lead dust was a key reason why the state's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, last year struck down Local Law 38, after declaring that the "numbers of New York City children with elevated blood lead levels remain alarmingly high."
The high court's decision gave new impetus for the City Council to re-examine the current lead poisoning prevention policies, and on December 15, 2003, by a vote of 44 to 5, the council passed a new lead poisoning prevention bill, Intro 101A. The mayor vetoed it later that month.
The new bill represents, in significant part, an attempt to find a middle ground between the 1982 law (which is the law under which the city began operating again starting last year ) and the now nullified 1999 law.
The overall approach of the new bill is to recognize that if landlords are going to be permitted to leave lead paint in place, they must be proactive in assuring that the lead remains in a condition that is not immediately hazardous to the occupants. Thus, while the new law will not require the 1982 law's full abatement, it will continue the mandate that owners maintain a safe dwelling at all times, using their knowledge of the particular characteristics of the buildings they manage. And more specifically, it requires that work involving repairs or disturbance of lead paint always be done by properly trained personnel using safe work practices. They must be particularly mindful of lead dust, which is so highly toxic that a particle less than the size of a grain of coffee sweetener is sufficient to inflict brain damage on a child.
Under the new law, landlords will be required to actively ascertain whether children under the age of seven reside in multiple dwellings units (as under the window guard law) and if so, must inspect those units at least once a year (and more often if necessary) for lead hazards, and promptly and safely correct them. Lead hazards can include not just peeling paint, but also "friction surfaces" (painted surfaces that bind and rub), "impact surfaces" (painted surfaces that get damaged by banging), and "chewable surfaces" (those that teething infants are mouthing). Lead dust is also a defined hazard, and peeling lead paint in common areas must also be corrected.
The arguments of the mayor and other opponents of the bill, such as Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute writing in Gotham Gazette in December, seem to be based on misstatements of the plain language of the law, as well as wholly unsubstantiated scaremongering. We have written a detailed point-by-point response to Vitullo-Martin's article, and a response to the mayor's veto. In general, they are claiming that requiring landlords to maintain their rental properties so as not to be hazardous to the occupants will result in buildings that become poorly maintained or even abandoned. This is Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning -- requiring something to be safe will make it unsafe -- and is reminiscent of arguments undoubtedly made at every juncture in the history of housing reform in New York, going back to the requirement of indoor plumbing and adequate air and light when the tenement laws were reformed a century ago. As in the past, these will prove to be unfounded.
Equally unfounded are assertions that the bill will make conscientious, responsible owners liable. The problem has never been conscientious owners -- by definition they don't poison children, and one can't be held liable unless there is a victim. While the number of children lead-poisoned each year remains shockingly high, it is still a relatively small percentage of the potential threat; the city estimates there are 300,000 apartments with both some lead painted surfaces and young children in residence. Thus, it is readily apparent that most landlords already are capable and diligent in keeping their buildings in safe repair, and careful, responsible property owners should have no reason to fear the new law. The problem, rather, is the reckless or negligent landlords who cause great injury to our children, and who should continue to be accountable for the consequences. What possible social policy is advanced by changing ours law to immunize them?
It is national policy(in pdf format) that childhood lead poisoning be eliminated by 2010. Given that New York City was one of the first jurisdictions in the nation to ban lead paint, New Yorkers should be seeking to achieve that goal even earlier. Intro 101A is a major step in that direction.
--Matthew Chachère and Andrea Rodriguez are staff attorneys at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. Legal Services, which represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that overturned Local Law 38 of 1999 (NYCCELP v. Vallone).

subset: commoncrawl


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You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 11, 2011.
Shanghai has to be one of the stranger words. I wonder how many people in the city of 上海 know that the name of their city is synonymous with this forceable employment. Well, today, we're going to watch it happen . . . live (sort of) on this blog. Bohemia and Quantico Creek head west, when suddenly
there it starts to happen . . . these two units are about to disappear.
That's it, the deed is done. . .
for a few seconds, and then all
is well as the two Vane units continue for some dock in Bayonne.
Fotos by Will Van Dorp. By now, Hanjin Shanghai has darted in and out of Wilmington via the Cape Fear River and made for Savannah.
San Francisco had its James Kelly. Is there a New York name associated with the practice?


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We are at the portal of what systems scientist Béla Bánáthy called the "fourth generation" humans.
What distinguishes this fourth generation from its predecessors is evolutionary consciousness, according to Bánáthy, a professor emeritus at Saybrook University until his death in 2003.
Bánáthy defined evolutionary consciousness as the knowledge and awareness of how we get to a point in our human history from the perspectives of our consciousness, our cognition, and our social systems.
We are the first generation of humans that have access to concrete information regarding the human trajectory and the knowledge of where this trajectory can lead unless we decide to consciously participate in the evolution of our planet.
To make this concept clear, we need to start with the first three human generations identified by Bánáthy and other social scientists.
The first generation of modern humans—the Cro-Magnon—is only 50,000 years old. The Cro-Magnons were the first humans to develop self-awareness.
Their predecessors—humanoids, early homo-sapiens, and Neanderthals—did not have a consciousness distinct from their environment. During the seven million years that the humanoid form graced this Earth, consciousness was a dreamlike state that was undifferentiated from nature. These people lived in oneness with their environment and with others.
This state of consciousness changed when the homo-sapiens-sapiens, or the Cro-Magnon, burst into the evolutionary scene. This final form of human woke up from its dreamlike state and acquired self-identify. One interesting fact about the Cro-Magnons is that they were the first humans to have fully developed speech apparatus and were capable of complex communication.
So the Cro-Magnon changed the consciousness paradigm and established the first generation of modern humans. Their consciousness model was magical, sensory-based, capable of reflection, and focused on "today."
Cro-Magnons lived in tribes and manufactured a number of tools, primarily for hunting. It took another 25,000 years or so for them to develop into the second generation of humans with the advent of agriculture. This second generation is responsible for building our ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia, to Greece, to Egypt, and to Rome.
Consciousness in this second generation evolved from magical to mythical. This generation was also capable of reflection and became emotionally-based. These humans focused on the future. Spiritually, they were earth-centered. Mother Earth was of fundamental importance to this generation because of the dependency on what the earth could produce to sustain living. Writing developed in the timeframe of the second generation of humans which lasted from 10,000 B.C. to 1,500 A.D. The technology of this generation was based on metals and what was needed for agriculture.
The third generation of humans entered the scene at the end of the Middle Ages. It was the Renaissance that gave birth to our current human generation. The Industrial Revolution was the backdrop for the evolutionary journey of this third type of modern human. Its consciousness shifted from mythical to rational; this generation also carried reflective properties, but became mentally-based. Communication expanded by way of the printed word and later into various electronic forms.
Nation states became the social structures for third-generation humans and technological development exploded into a multitude of directions. The third-generation human gained—for the first time—control of life. Its predecessors did not have the knowledge and technology to control much of anything. They were subject to the natural forces, including illnesses like the black plague.
Looking at life in the universe with very broad strokes, we can say that life started as energy—the Big Bang—then it became matter, and later life emerged. Third generation humans have done an outstanding job at controlling energy, mastering matter, and meddling with life itself.
Now as we move toward the fourth generation, we are a human race that have become co-creators with nature—a title that carries tremendous implications and responsibilities. The challenge that Bánáthy saw is that we, third-generation humans are not accepting our responsibility of co-creation. Instead, we continue exploiting energy, matter, and life for personal benefit. This is where the fourth generation human is needed—to assume the role of co-creator and guide the evolution of our planet to a level of life-affirming actions that benefit the whole.
Bánáthy stated that we are at the threshold of the emergence of our next evolutionary event. This event, he said, is marked by "conscious evolution, the self-guided emergence of the fourth generation of homo-sapiens-sapiens." The social scientist specified a number of markers that point to this threshold based on the evolutionary events that have preceded our three generations of humans.
Bánáthy taught that evolution—from a social context—has been pivoted on
a) The animating and organizing role of consciousness,
b) The enabling role of communication,
c) The instrumental role of technology, and
d) The driving role of creativity.
At this point in our development, we can no longer let evolution just take its course the way it has for the last seven million years. As psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi surmised: "We suddenly realize that, unless we take it in hand, this evolutionary process will continue under the sway of relentless change, a change entirely blind to human dreams and desires."
It is Csikszentmihalyi who taught us that, in order for us to engage in the task of directed evolution, we need to first attain a genuine understanding of evolution itself. This is something that Banathy also maintained.
We also need a moral code to guide our choices. Csikszentmihalyi noted that this code should take into account "the wisdom of tradition, yet it is inspired by the future rather than the past; it should specify right as being the unfolding of maximum individual potential joined with the achievement of the greatest social and environmental harmony."
Barbara Hubbard, a futurist, suggests that we are seeking a new, guiding worldview. She tells us that "this guiding worldview is, I believe, conscious evolution. It holds that through our unprecedented scientific, social, and spiritual capabilities we can evolve consciously and co-creatively with nature and with the deeper patterns of creation."
Duane Elgin, an American author, believes that conscious evolution brings the era of reconciliation. In his book, Awakening Earth, Elgin defines a number of reconciliations that we third generation and emerging fourth generation humans need to settle. They include spiritual, racial, ethnic, gender, ecological, generational, and economic reconciliations.
Bánáthy reminded us that we attain evolutionary consciousness as we understand how evolution has worked in the past and what conditions were necessary for the emergence of a new generation of humans. Aside from the attainment of an evolutionary consciousness, the social scientist identified four prerequisites for engaging in conscious evolution:
- The acquisition of evolutionary competence by evolutionary learning,
- Attaining competence in social systems design,
- Having a willingness to engage in conscious evolution and, above all,
- Changing our own consciousness.
I personally believe that we are in dire need of conscious evolution. Turning on any news channel gives us nothing but a view that our third generation brethren can quite easily make that generation the last in this planet. Seven million years of nature trying out different models of us humans have led to our present generation, quite capable of destroying the marvel of our creation.
It behooves us all to take on the role of co-creators embracing our powers and responsibilities to bring forth a future that we want where the fourth generation human can emerge in harmony with all of nature and in balance with ourselves and every form of life on this planet.
In her most recent post, Evolutionary Leadership: The Embodiment of Systems Being, Kathia Laszlo—a professor of organizational systems at Saybrook University who studied evolutionary theory under Bánáthy at Saybrook—tells us that "evolutionary leadership is a means for each one of us to understand that we have a role to play in the creation of a better world no matter what our field, interests, or expertise." This is the type of conscious evolution that will herald Bánáthy's fourth generation human and the future of life in our planet.
Read other posts by Jorge Taborga
Keep up with our community: Facebook | Twitter | Saybrook's Organizational Systems Program


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Several online gaming sites were recently hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that used a new type of assault on the victims: a Network Time Protocol Amplification Attack.
Such attacks rely on the use of publicly accessible NTP servers to overwhelm a victim system with UDP traffic, according to the US –CERT site.
"It's the first time I've ever seen volumetric NTP at noteworthy levels," says Shawn Marck, CEO at Black Lotus, which provides DDoS mitigation services, adding his impression is that the DerpTrolling group, which took credit for the attack, is doing this mainly for the kicks they get in disrupting online games like War of Wizard and Steam.
"The NTP attack worked pretty well," said Barrett Lyon, founder of anti-DDoS service Defense.net. It had been known that an attacker could manipulate an NTP server to generate attack traffic against a target, but DerpTrolling's denial-of-service hits in early January are regarded as dangerous proof of a new DDoS attack vector.
+More on Network World: Anti-Bot Working Group to fight DDoS attacks from cloud infrastructure | Arbor Networks introduces cloud-based DDoS service | DDoS attacks against banks raise question: Is this cyberwar? +
US CERT issued an advisory on NTP amplification attacks on Jan. 10, stating the exploitation of these servers was caused by vulnerabilities left unpatched. But Lyon sees a different problem. He says the older NTP servers simply can't prevent the type of exploitation carried out in NTP Amplification attacks because older NTP gear doesn't support processes such as rate-limiting that might prevent it.
NTP servers are "forgotten pieces of infrastructure" that almost no one thinks about — until something like this new example of a DDoS attack comes along, says Lyon, an industry veteran who also founded anti-DDoS security firm Prolexic Technologies, which was just acquired by Akamai.
It's not just the old infrastructure but the latest new mobile devices are being exploited by attackers to launch DDoS attacks.
Today, Prolexic issued its quarterly global DDoS attack report, noting that even Android-based mobile devices are being spotted as instruments to launch DDoS attacks.
In the report, Prolexic says its response team "uncovered evidence of the use of mobile applications launching DDoS attacks against enterprise clients, including one of the world's largest financial firms." Prolexic says signatures matching AnDOSid, a DDoS attack tool for Android devices, were observed in DDoS attack campaigns.
While use of mobile devices to launch DDoS attacks is still considered unusual, there's no reason to think it might not grow, Prolexic points out. In its report, Prolexic also notes the rise of NTP as an attack vector.
"The NTP protocol is implemented in all major operating systems, network infrastructure devices, and embedded devices. By using UDP, NTP is subject to spoofing. In addition, misconfiguration of network equipment can allow enterprise infrastructure to be used as an unwilling participants in a DDoS attack. This can be achieved by responding to requests for NTP updates and directing the response to the victim host and overwhelming it with NTP traffic."
According to Prolexic's report, the "traditional" attack vectors include the likes of ICMP and SYN floods but these declined last year in favor of UDP fragmentation floods.
Where do DDoS attacks come from?
According to Prolexic, the U.S. is thought to be the main source of DDoS attacks during the last quarter, constituting 23.62% of what Prolexic saw. That's up a disturbing 14.5% for the U.S. compared to the last quarter. China used to hold the top spot for DDoS but is now in second place at 19.09%. Thailand was third at 13.59% Other countries, including the United Kingdom, South Korea, India, Turkey, Italy, Brazil and Saudi Arabia all follow on a top 10 list.
DDoS attacks are often carried out by means of large-scale botnets that cyber-criminals control through compromised desktops or servers to manipulate them to launch streams of unwanted traffic at targets. It's possible to get a lot of firepower by stealthily taking over the servers in hosting centers around the world to do this. Some hosting centers (sometimes called 'bulletproof' hosting) simply don't seem to care.
Microsoft for several years has taken up the banner of shutting down botnets in takedowns wherever it can around the world, mainly by taking aggressive legal action whenever possible.
Rich Boscovich, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit which carries out this anti-bot effort, says it involves getting visibility into malware and locating computers at ISPs all over the world. "We've taken third-party servers off hosting providers as part of our takedown," he says, adding, "We know there's significant chance of retribution from criminals when their botnets are taken away."
And Microsoft's network resources do become subject to DDoS attacks because criminals can quickly and easily re-purpose botnets that might have been used to generate spam, for instance, into cannons blasting out attack traffic. Among other things, Microsoft uses anti-DDoS gear from A10 Networks, custom-designed, says Boscovich. He declined to go into specifics about this but merely added DDoS is a "real danger."
DDoS attacks are often measured based on speeds they achieve, the higher often being the most destructive in swamping networks or crashing applications, so anti-DDoS vendors are always striving to achieve higher speeds for defense. A10 Networks, for instance, which unveiled its Thunder line of standalone anti-DDoS gear today, said it can handle 37GGbps to 155Gbps. The company says service providers and large enterprises would be the most likely buyers. Prolexic says it saw DDoS attacks reaching 179Gbps in the last quarter.
What's the motivation behind DDoS attacks?
Admittedly, there's nothing particularly new about DDoS attacks which have been around in one form or another since the early days of the Internet, along with the later tales of botnets and the Russian cyber-mafia. But many say the motivations for trying to blast away at the networks and applications of others seems to have grown.
In the early days it was extortion, asking for payment to stop the attacks. Today, business competitors may pay to attack other competitors, too. "You hear it all the time, especially in the casino space or the escort space," says Shawn Marck of Black Lotus. "The majority of attacks are economically motivated."
But political activism is also a factor these days as angry protestors supporting one cause or another are egged on by groups such as Anonymous to launch DDoS attacks. However, it's been the protestors joining the DDoS campaigns that get arrested more often than the organizers, notes Chris Risley, CEO at Defense.net.
Many governments are also believed to be making use of DDoS from time to time, say Lyon and Risley. North Korea is thought to attack South Korea this way, and the Iranians are believed by some to have been behind the widespread attacks against U.S. banks in the fall of 2012. Many more governments, including the U.S., also quietly have their hands on the DDoS trigger, they suggest.
For anyone who wants to launch a DDoS attack, it's quite simple to go online and pay as little as a few dollars as hour to buy the access to do it, according to Defense.net. There's also "advertising online claiming to test your systems for DDoS, when they're really conduits for selling DDoS services," says Lyon. He adds on Pastebin, you can find blatant ads for DDoS with guarantees it will work.
According to the Prolexic report, the average attack duration totaled 22.8 hours. Attackers favored striking network infrastructure about three quarters of the time, with application-layer attacks taking up the remaining 23.4%.
Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security. Twitter: MessmerE. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com


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POPSUGAR Shout Out For June 12, 2014
POPSUGAR Shout Out: Kim and Kanye's Love Nest
- Peek inside Kim and Kanye's lavish honeymoon house — Home
- Video: Stumped for Father's Day? Check out these foolproof gadget gifts — Tech
- 12 reasons traveling was way more dope in the '90s — Smart Living
- How to save your blowout in every sweaty Summer situation — Beauty
- 15 ways to work kids' brains in the Summer — Moms
- How much of a foodie are you? — Food
- Did the World Cup opening remind you of a Disney cartoon? — Celebrity & News
- 36 cardio workouts to blast fat at the gym — Fitness
- Scope out a bookish garden wedding — Love & Sex
- Disney characters you didn't know had famous voices — Entertainment
- Did you know stop-motion dinosaurs nearly ruled Jurassic Park? — Tech
- The sexiest neckline you might not be wearing yet — Fashion
Source: Casa Aramara, WENN.com


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People keep asking me for help with advancing the warp on long peg loom weavings.
So I have made a video showing the stages of how to move the weaving down the warp strands- on long, wide warps, it takes a lot of effort!
I wove my husband a mat for his morning pilates and he loves it.
So do the dogs, so the mat does NOT live on the floor!
It's 2 feet wide by 6 feet long.
The loom is from Dewberry Ridge Looms and the yarn is from Briggs and Little.
It's 100% wool and makes a scrumptiously cushioned rug.
Here's the video that explains the process of advancing the weaving:


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The battle over birth control - Contraceptives in schools. DuSable clinic at heart of controversy.
| Chicago
Marie Simpson is a widow and grandmother who's bewildered when she has to count all her grandchildren. She names and numbers them on her fingers up to 10, then stops. ``I can't count 'em,'' she says, adding that some were born in wedlock, some out. Some had teen mothers; some didn't.
Although she's a shy woman and doesn't speak much above a whisper, Mrs. Simpson knows what she wants. She wants to curb the high rate of teen pregnancies - even if it means giving out contraceptives at school-based clinics. In 1985, teen pregnancy estimates topped one million for 15 to 19-year-olds, plus an additional 30,000 for teen-agers under 15 years of age.
Mrs. Simpson showed up at a meeting on Chicago's South Side to lend support to the DuSable-Bogan health clinic that has met with a blitz of opposition for dispensing birth-control devices. The clinic is based within DuSable High School - and that's where the snag is.
Verbal skirmishes over the clinic's birth control program erupted long ago between advocates and critics, but not until recently did the imbroglio land in the legal arena.
Thirteen black clergymen from the South Side, parents, and an anti-abortion group filed suit this fall in Cook County's Circuit Court to halt the handing out of contraceptives at DuSable-Bogan. Although the clinic itself isn't a defendant in the suit, multiple charges were brought against the Illinois Department of Public Aid, the Chicago School Board, and the DuSable principal.
The list of charges includes violation of students' privacy because of clinic questions relating to sexual activity; failure to warn parents of risks involved in the use of certain birth control devices; an invasion of parents' rights to instruct their children; and violation of a Supreme Court ruling requiring school neutrality on issues involving religion (the use of contraceptives is counter to some peoples' religious beliefs). The suit also charges that the clinic program is designed to control black population.
Ann Stull, secretary for Pro Life/Pro Family Coalition, a plaintiff in the suit, says, ``there are some things you can't fix quickly because they have been wrong for so long.'' And she views the dispensing of contraceptives at schools as ``a quick fix, a technical answer instead of character reformation.''
The Rev. Hiram C. Crawford, pastor of Israel Methodist Community Church and a plaintiff, also criticizes the clinic on moral grounds. ``It pushes fornication,'' he says, and ``usurps the authority of parents and church.''
Although the clinic exists, rent-free, beneath DuSable's roof, it's a separate entity funded by the Illinois Department of Public Aid and private foundations. The professional medical staff offers 10 health services to students, most of whom can't afford private health care. Much of the clinic's work reaps accolades or goes quietly unnoticed. It's the birth control aspect that has catapulted the name of DuSable onto local and national TV, into newspaper and magazine headlines, into a legal case, and onto the lips of people who previously had never heard of the all-black school on the city's South Side.
Patricia Davis-Scott, director of the comprehensive health clinic, which started in July, 1985, attests that the counseling sessions focus first on abstinence, and in no way is the clinic involved in abortions or abortion counseling. Written parental consent is mandatory, before any contraceptives are handed out, she says. Students also must pass physicals and be free from drug, alcohol, and tobacco use, she adds.
DuSable-Bogan is just one of 17 school-based clinics across the country that actually distributes contraceptives. Another 32 clinics write prescriptions for birth-control devices, and an additional dozen send students to various nearby agencies for such services. These figures, soon to be updated, were tallied by the Support Center for School-Based Clinics in Houston. The center's new count is expected to include 11 more clinics, an indication of a growing acceptance of school-based health centers that get into the family-planning act.
Although New York City's nine clinics have been involved in birth control for some time, out-and-out criticism just recently began to be voiced there. And in New England, Boston and neighboring Cambridge are crackling with debate, trying to decide whether it's a good idea to play follow the leader on this issue.
The first clinic of this sort opened at Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, Minn., in 1973, at a time when 79 out of every 1,000 female students in the school had babies. By 1976 the school birth rate had dropped to 35 out of 1,000. Although Mechanics Arts High School has since closed, four other St. Paul high schools have clinics, recording a teen birth rate of 26 out of 1,000 female students in 1984.
In that same year, DuSable had definite teen pregnancy problems. The school - with approximately 1000 male and 1000 female students - draws more than half its population from the city's Grand Boulevard area. In 1984, the Grand Boulevard area recorded that 436 females between the ages of 10 and 19 gave birth. About 300 of these were to high school age women.
``Kids today, you'd rather they used them [contraceptives] than not,'' says Simpson, the grandmother in a jaunty blue hat, who twists the handle of her pocketbook as she talks, visibly embarrassed about the whole topic, but convinced she should add her soft two-cents' worth to the pro-clinic chorus.
``When they [teen-agers] have the babies, they expect the mother or grandmother to take care of them,'' she says. And this particular grandmother doesn't view that set-up as a desired family situation. Retired since last year from a food-service job, Simpson says, ``I'll do what I can to help, but ...'' and she lets her sentence fade midway.
``It [DuSable] could have been a school for pregnant women,'' says Tyrone Cotton, a senior who has six brothers and three sisters. ``Some say it [dispensing contraceptives] encourages sexual activity,'' but the 18-year-old student doesn't agree with that charge, explaining that this particular lifestyle already was prevelant before the clinic opened. ``Anyway, now I see less pregnancy,'' he says.
But retired high school teacher and plaintiff Stull doesn't feel these ends justify the means, because she does ``not approve of lowering standards to fit the conditions. A parent who knows his kid is stealing doesn't say, `I'll teach you how not to get caught.''' Instead, says Stull, the parent keeps trying for reform.
According to Stull, who taught for 28 years in the Chicago Public Schools, the present contraceptive policy is ``basically saying: we don't care what you do, just don't get pregnant. It's as if schools have joined the soap operas. I can't see using the authority of the schools to condone immorality,'' she adds.
The DuSable-Bogan clinic is still too young to assess its effectiveness in stemming teen pregnancy, anyway. ``We have no statistical data yet, but unoffically, it seems less,'' says Mrs. Davis-Scott. ``I can tell you we're not giving prenatal care to 300!'' At present, 15 female students are receiving this prenatal help.
Donna McGruder is one of these. She's 18, unmarried, and expecting in December.
``The clinic, it helps me a whole lot. And they treat you with respect,'' says the DuSable student whose eyes look up, down, beyond but not at her listener. Donna says she wants the baby although she's ``scared to have it. My friends make me scared,'' she says.
Living with her grandmother, the teen-ager tells that her own mother visits sometimes ``and stays for a while, then she goes away.'' Donna, who has plans to work while her grandmother cares for the newborn, has already started job hunting but no leads have turned up yet.
``It's [teen pregnancy] a problem of poverty, not a racial problem,'' says Judith Steinhagen, DuSable's white principal, who has held that post for nearly 12 years. A national survey from the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), in Washington, D.C., backs her up on this point, stating that US teen-agers who are poor and who lack basic academic skills - whether they're black, white, or Hispanic - have nearly the same rates of teen-age childbearing. The CDF report states that impoverished teens are four times as likely to have poor basic skills as teens with family incomes above poverty. And that teens with poor basic skills are five times as likely to become mothers before age 16 as those students with average basic skills.
``Many children born to children are years behind when they get to school age,'' Steinhagen says. ``You just can't make up for the experiences that children of older middle class parents have had by the time they come to school, especially in speaking and listening skills.''
She explains that, in many instances, the unemployed and the poor must hustle for food, shelter, and survival before they can afford time for skill boosting. Along with other educators, Steinhagen contends that low self-esteem plays a key role in teen pregnancy. So does the closed door to employment, a crisis constantly confronting young people trapped within ghetto borders.
There's no dispute, the DuSable area is in tatters, ranked as one of the country's highest concentrations of poverty with unemployment figures averaging 22 percent (the national rate is seven). The high school stands in the shadow of the Robert Taylor homes, a public housing development that stacks poverty skyward. Twenty-eight buildings, each rising 16 stories, house approximately 28,000 people whose average age is 15. The majority of DuSable's students come from these homes, and 79 percent of them live below the poverty level, many existing far beneath the government's cut-off line of $10,989 annually for a family of four.
According to clinic director Davis-Scott, 33 percent of the teen mothers nationwide have a second baby within two years. ``If the teen didn't drop out of school the first time, the potential for her dropping out the second time is even higher,'' Scott says.
Alfreda Jones knows all about this scenario. She has five children, none enrolled at DuSable now. In speaking about her youngest daughter, Mrs. Jones says, ``My young one, she got pregnant when she just got in the door [of DuSable]. She was 14. Had it at 15. Had another at 17. Maybe if they'd had birth control when she was there, she wouldn't have had the babies.'' The daughter, who dropped out of school, now lives on welfare and is trying to get her GED (General Educational Development) diploma.
Michael Ellis and Shirley Bims Ellis, who have a freshman daughter, Michele, at DuSable, are both in support of the clinic's birth-control efforts. They cite abstinence as the only real solution to teen pregnancy among unmarried youths.
``But at this particular time in this particular place, we are trying to meet the current problem practically,'' says Mrs. Ellis. ``Children simply can't care for babies either financially, mentally, or physically,'' she explains. ``We are black people trying to help ourselves. There is no way we can survive if we have children having children.''
Not surprisingly, opponents of the clinic disagree.
``They [the parents] are guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. They're just as responsible as if their child broke a car window. The courts take children away from parents for all other crimes but not teen pregnancy,'' Rev. Crawford says. For teens over 16, the pastor says, ``they should marry and take care of their responsibility. They're old enough to legally have a job, and they're legally at the age of accountability.''
In the past 16 months, DuSable students have made more than 14,400 visits to the clinic. Of these, approximately 12,400 were for physicals, immunizations, first aid, and other medical services. Only about 14 percent were for contraceptives or counseling on sexual activity.
A registered nurse, Davis-Scott is also director of a similar clinic that opened this fall at Orr High School on Chicago's West Side, where teen pregnancy and infant mortality rates are high, and incomes are low. The population is principally black and Hispanic. As with DuSable, the Chicago School Board split over the contraceptive issue. But those members contending that the birth control role is inappropriate for schools lost ground. And Orr students - with written parental consent - can get their contraceptives behind the black door marked 109.


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We're in the middle of the holiday season with all of its requisite parties, dinners and general overindulgence. However, sometimes in the midst of festive meals and a few too many cocktails, we start to crave something a bit lighter. Sablefish with Caramelized Fennel and Cherry Tomatoes is just the dish to serve: it's on the lighter side but is still packed with lots of flavour.
What is Sablefish?
Sablefish is also commonly known as black cod, butterfish and sable. It is a mild, buttery white fish, typically caught in the North Pacific Ocean off British Columbia and Alaska. According to The Monterey Bay Aquarium and their Canadian counterpart, SeaChoice.org, sablefish is considered a 'Best Choice' for sustainability, meaning that stocks are abundant and well managed.
Sablefish with Caramelized Fennel and Cherry Tomatoes
Makes 4 servings
- 4 sablefish (black cod) fillets weighing about 4 oz. (113 grams) each
- 2 Tablespoons olive oil
- 1 cup thinly sliced fennel (white part), sliced about 1/4" thick
- 12 large cherry tomatoes, halved
- ½ cup dry white wine
- ½ clove garlic, minced
- 2 sprigs of thyme
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- Fennel fronds for garnish (optional)
For Crumb Topping:
- ¾ cup breadcrumbs made from fresh bread (about 1 thick slice of bread)
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 1 teaspoon finely chopped fresh thyme
- ½ teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed (use a mortar and pestle or the side of a large knife to crush them)
- A pinch of salt and pepper
- Prepare the Crumb Topping: In a small bowl, add the breadcrumbs, oil, chopped thyme, fennel seed, salt and pepper and stir together until all breadcrumbs are moist. Set aside.
- Sprinkle a pinch of salt and pepper evenly over the fish fillets and set aside. Preheat the oven broiler and move the rack to the top position.
- Heat a large ovenproof, non-stick skillet on medium heat and add 1 Tablespoon of olive oil. Add the fennel slices and sauté until they caramelize and turn a dark golden brown, about 14 minutes. Be sure to stir the fennel around so it doesn't burn and remove any pieces that brown quickly.
- Once the fennel has caramelized, remove from the skillet and set aside on a plate. Return the skillet to the burner and turn heat to medium-high. Heat the remaining olive oil and place the sablefish fillets in the pan, skin side down.
- Reduce the heat to medium and cook the fish for two minutes. Carefully turn the fillets over and cook for another two minutes.
- Turn the fish once again, so the skin side is down. Add the cherry tomatoes, wine, garlic, thyme and lemon juice and cook for another 2-1/2 to 3 minutes or until the fillets are almost fully cooked through. Return the cooked fennel to the pan.
- Press a couple of spoonfuls of the breadcrumb mixture onto the top of each of the fillets. Place the skillet with the fish under the oven broiler, watching very carefully, until the crumbs turn golden and crisp, about one minute.
- To serve: Divide the caramelized fennel and tomatoes between four servings and mound in the centre of each plate. Place a piece of the sablefish on each portion of fennel/tomatoes and spoon the pan sauce over the fish.
- Garnish with a sprig of fennel frond, if desired, and serve immediately.
Bon Appétit and Enjoy!
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Copyright Trish Coleman. Please contact the author to obtain permission for republication.
This article first appeared on Suite 101.com.


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The 'Iron Lady' at the peak of her powers, with tank and flag, in 1986.
The Brighton Bombing:
During the 1984 Conservative Conference, an IRA bomb partly demolished the Grand Hotel in Brighton, almost killing the Prime Minister and a number of her cabinet. The action was intended as a response to Mrs Thatcher's hard-line at the time of the 1981 Hunger Strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. The plot had been to assassinate her and the whole of the cabinet in order to plunge the country into political chaos, resulting in withdrawal from Northern Ireland. When the bomb went off at 2.50 a.m., Margaret Thatcher was working on official papers, having just finished her conference speech. The blast scattered broken glass on her bedroom carpet and filled her mouth with dust. She soon learned that the bomb had killed the wife of cabinet minister John Wakeham, he himself narrowly escaping; killed the Tory MP Anthony Berry and had badly injured Norman Tebbit, paralysing his wife. After less than an hour's fitful sleep, she rewrote her speech and told the stunned conference that they had witnessed an attempt to cripple the government, commenting that…
… the fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.
The final death toll from Brighton was five dead and several more seriously injured, but its consequences for British politics, which could have been momentous, turned out to be minimal. If the IRA could not shake her, could anything else?
The Gorbachevs in London:
In November 1984, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at the VIP terminal at Heathrow airport, together with his wife, Raisa. The British had spotted him first, in the summer of that year, if not earlier. He was a lawyer by training, which he had done at the end of the Stalin period. So, while he accepted there were rules to be obeyed, he also knew that they were only really there to be bent. He and Raisa did a great deal in their few days in London, but they did not perform the obligatory ceremony of laying a wreath on Marx's tomb in Highgate Cemetery. Instead, they paid impromptu visits to Westminster Abbey and Number Ten Downing Street. The Foreign Office arranged a formal lunch for the Gorbachev at Hampton Court Palace, to which they invited a couple of hundred worthies, including BBC journalist John Simpson. He was seated next to a man from Moscow who was to become Gorbachev's most senior advisors. Simpson asked him whether Gorbachev would really be able to make a difference to the Soviet Union. The Russian replied:
"He will have to," he said. I noticed he didn't trouble to question my assumption that Gorbachev would get the top job.
"Because a great deal has to be done. Much, much, more, I think, than you in the West realize."
The Thatcher Revolution at Home – "Don't tell Sid!":
If Labour had been accused of creating a giant state sector whose employees depended on high public spending and could, therefore, be expected to become loyal Labour voting-fodder, then the Tories were intent on creating a property-owning democracy. The despair of Labour politicians as they watched it working was obvious. By the end of the 1980s, there was a large and immovable private sector in Britain of share-owners and home-owners, probably working in private companies, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and increasingly un-unionised. The proportion of adults holding shares rose from seven per cent to twenty-five per cent during Thatcher's years in power. Thanks to the 'right to buy' policy for council tenants, more than a million families purchased the hoses they lived in, repainting and refurbishing them and then watching their value shoot up, particularly as they had been sold them at a discount of between a third and a half of market value. The proportion of owner-occupied homes rose from fifty-five per cent in 1979 to sixty-seven per cent in 1989. In real terms, total personal wealth rose by eighty per cent in the eighties.
Looking below the surface, however, the story becomes more complex. Of the huge rise in wealth, relatively little was accounted for by shares. The increase in earnings and the house-price boom were much more important. The boom in shareholdings was fuelled by the British love of a bargain than by any deeper change in the culture. There was always a potential conflict between the government's need to raise revenue and it hopes of spreading share ownership. In the early eighties, ministers erred on the side of the latter. The breakthrough privatization was that of fifty-two per cent of British Telecom in November 1984, which raised an unprecedented 3.9 billion. It was the first to be accompanied by a 'ballyhoo' of television and press advertising and was easily oversubscribed. In the event, two million people, or five per cent of the adult population bought 'BT' shares, almost doubling the total number of shareholders in a single day. After this came British Gas, as natural gas fields had been supplying Britain from the North Sea since the late sixties, pumping ashore at Yarmouth and Hull, replacing the coal-produced system. With its national pipe network and showrooms, natural gas had become the country's favourite source of domestic energy and was, therefore, a straightforward monopoly. The government prepared for the sale with another TV campaign featuring a fictitious neighbour who had to be kept in the 'dark' about the bargain sale – "Don't tell Sid!" This raised 5.4 billion, the biggest single privatization.
With the equally bargain-price shares offered to members of building societies when they de-mutualised and turned into banks, Britain developed a class of one-off shareholders, 'kitchen capitalists'. They soon sold off their shares at a profit, few of them developing into long-term stock market investors, as had been hoped. Those who kept their shares did not go on to buy more, and rarely traded the ones they had acquired as a result of the privatizations, demutualisations and former employment options. The long-term failure to nurture a deeply rooted shareholding democracy has added to the contemporary criticism that public assets were being sold off too cheaply. The then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson later admitted that wider share ownership was an important policy objective and we were prepared to pay a price for it. The failure, ultimately, to achieve that objective showed that there were limits to the Thatcher Revolution. The most successful privatizations were the ones where the company was pushed into full competition, as with British Airways, Rolls-Royce and British Aerospace. The utilities – gas, electricity, water – were always different, because they were natural monopolies. Yet without competition, where would the efficiency gains come from? This question was left as a rhetorical one, unanswered until decades later. The water and electricity companies were split up in order to create regional monopolies, with power generation split into two mega-companies, National Power and Powergen. In reality, few people outside the 'Westminster village' cared who owned the companies they depended on, so long as the service was acceptable. Britain was becoming a far less ideological country and a more aggressively consumerist one.
Heseltine and the Helicopters:
In the winter of 1984-85, the great Westland Helicopter crisis that broke over the Thatcher government was a battle between ministers about whether a European consortium of aerospace manufacturers or and American defence company, working with an Italian firm should take over a struggling West Country helicopter maker. While this was a government that claimed to refuse to micro-manage industry, yet the fight about the future of the Yeovil manufacturer cost two cabinet ministers' jobs and pitted Thatcher against the only other member of her cabinet with real charisma, Nigel Heseltine. The small storm of Westland gave early notice of the weaknesses that would eventually destroy the Thatcher government, though not for another five years.
One weakness was the divide throughout the Tory Party over Britain's place in the world. By the 1980s, helicopters were no longer a marginal defence issue. They would become crucial to Britain's capabilities, the new army mule for hauling artillery over mountains and across stretches of water. United Technologies, the US company whose Sikorsky subsidiary built the Black Hawk helicopter, wanted to gain control over part of Britain's defence industry. Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State who had been so helpful to Mrs Thatcher during the Falklands Campaign was now back at his old company and 'called in his markers' for the American bid. Adopting a position of outward neutrality would probably have favoured it anyway as a further strengthening of the Special Relationship between the UK and the US. But on the other side, supporting the European consortium, were those who felt that the EC had to be able to stand alone in defence technology. Michael Heseltine and his business allies thought this was vital to protect jobs in the cutting-edge science-based industries. The US must not be allowed to dictate prices and terms to Europe. So the conflict was concerned with whether Britain stood first with the US or with the EC. It was a question which would continue to grow in importance throughout the eighties until, in the nineties, it tore the Conservatives apart.
The second weakness exposed by the Westland Affair was the Thatcher style of government, which was more presidential and more disdainful of the role of cabinet ministers than any previous government. The Prime Minister was conducting more and more business in small committees or bilaterally, with one minister at a time, ensuring her near absolute predominance. She gathered a small clique of trusted advisors around her. Just before her fall, Nigel Lawson concluded that she was taking her personal economic advisor, Sir Alan Walters, more seriously than she was taking him, her next door neighbour in No 11, her Chancellor of the Exchequer. She used her beloved press officer, Bernard Ingham to cut down to size any ministers she had fallen out with, briefing against them and using the anonymous lobby system for Westminster journalists to spread the message. In his memoirs, Ingham angrily defends himself against accusations of the improper briefing of the press, yet there are too many witnesses who found the Thatcher style more like that of the court of Elizabeth Tudor than that of a traditional cabinet, a place which demanded absolute loyalty and was infested with sycophantic favourites. In the mid-eighties, this was a new way of doing the business of government and to ministers on the receiving end, it was freshly humiliating.
But if there was one minister unlikely to take such treatment for long, it was Michael Heseltine (pictured below at a Conservative Party Conference). He was the only serious rival to Thatcher as the 'darling of the party' and media star, handsome, glamorous, rich and an excellent public speaker. He was said by his friend, fellow Tory MP and biographer, Julian Critchley, to have mapped out his future career on the back of an envelope, while still a student at Oxford, decade by decade, running through making his fortune, marrying well, entering Parliament and then, 1990s, Prime Minister. Though Heseltine commented that he could not remember doing this, it was in character. As a young man, he had flung himself into the characteristic sixties businesses of property investment and magazine publishing. A passionate anti-socialist, he had won a reputation for hot-headedness since once picking up the Mace, the symbol of Parliamentary authority, during a Commons debate about steel nationalization, and waving it at the Labour benches in such a violent manner as to earn himself the nickname 'Tarzan'. His speeches to Tory Party conferences were full of blond hair-tossing, hilarious invective and dramatic gestures. In her memoirs, Thatcher portrayed Heseltine as a vain, ambitious man who flouted cabinet responsibility. The Westland crisis was, in her view, simply about his psychological flaws. However, they agreed about much, but was a more committed anti-racialist than she was and more deeply in favour of the EC, and she always regarded him as a serious and dangerous rival.
The two bigger beasts of the Tory Party in the eighties went to war on behalf of the two rival bidders for Westland. She was livid that he was using his position as Defence Secretary to warn the company's shareholders about the dangers of going with the Americans, potentially shutting out European business. She thought he was tipping the scales against Sikorsky, despite Westland's preference for them. Certainly, Heseltine repeatedly made it clear that the Ministry of Defence would not be buying their Black Hawk helicopter and did much to rally the European consortium. Thatcher, meanwhile, was deploying the public line that she was only interested in what was best for the shareholders while trying to make sure the Americans were kept in the race, ahead of the Europeans. Eventually, she sought advice from the government law officers about whether Heseltine had been behaving properly. A private reply was leaked in order to weaken his case. Furious about this wholly inappropriate act which he suspected was the responsibility of Thatcher and Ingham, Heseltine demanded a full inquiry. During a meeting of the cabinet, she counter-attacked, trying to rein him in by ordering that all future statements on Westland must be cleared first by Number Ten. Hearing this attempt to gag him, Heseltine calmly got up from the cabinet table, announced that he must leave the government, walked into the street and told a solitary reporter that he had just resigned.
The question of exactly who had leaked the Attorney General's legal advice in a misleadingly selective way to scupper the European bid then became critical. The leaking of private advice broke the rules of Whitehall confidentiality, fairness and collective government. The instrument of the leak was a comparatively junior civil servant to the Trade Secretary, Leon Brittan. But it was unclear as to who had told Colette Brown to do this, though many assumed it was her boss, Bernard Ingham. He denied it, and Mrs Thatcher also denied any knowledge of the leak. After dramatic Commons exchanges during which she was accused of lying to the House, she pulled through, while Leon Brittan was made a scapegoat. Some of Thatcher's greatest business supporters such as Rupert Murdoch then weighed in on the side of the American bid. Eventually, amid accusations of arm-twisting and dirty tricks, the company went to Sikorsky and the storm subsided. But it had revealed the costs of the Thatcher style of government. Getting the better of foreign dictators and militant trade union leaders was one thing, but behaving the same way with senior members of the cabinet and the Tory Party was quite another. Heseltine wrote later:
I saw many good people broken by the Downing Street machine. I had observed the techniques of character assassination; the drip, drip, drip, of carefully planted, unattributable stories that were fed into the public domain, as colleagues became marked as somehow "semi-detached" or "not one of us".
'Shadowing' the Deutschmark & 'Diva' Diplomacy:
There were also debates and rows about economic policy in relation to the EC. The Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, wanted to replace the old, rather wobbly system of controlling the money supply targets, the Medium Term Financial Strategy, with a new stratagem – tying the pound to the German mark in the European Exchange Rate System (ERM). This was an admission of failure; the older system of measuring money was useless and in the world of global fast money. Linking the pound to the Deutschmark was an alternative, with Britain subcontracting her anti-inflation policy to the more successful and harder-faced disciplinarians of the West German Central Bank. Lawson was keen on this alternative 'shadowing' method; in effect, he was looking for somewhere firm to plant down policy in the context of the new global financial free-for-all. Thatcher disagreed, arguing that currencies should be allowed to float freely, but at the time little of this debate was known beyond the specialist financial world.
Other 'Europe'- related debates were conducted more openly in general political life. The mid-eighties were years of Thatcherite drift over Europe. Jacques Delors, later her great enemy as President of the European Commission, had begun his grand plan for the next stages of 'the union'. Thatcher knew that the ERM was intended one day to lead to a single European currency, part of Delors' plan for a freshly buttressed European state. Lawson ignored her objections and shadowed the Deutschmark anyway. But when the cost of her Chancellor's policy became excessive, she ordered him to stop which, under protest, he did. However, the Single European Act, which smashed down thousands of national laws preventing free trade inside the EC, promised free movement of goods, capital, services and people, and presaging the single currency, was passed with her enthusiastic support. She rejected the sceptics' view that when the continental leadership talked of an economic and political union, they really meant it.
Back in the mid-eighties, personal relationships mattered as much in modern diplomacy as they had in Renaissance courts, and the Thatcher-Gorbachev courtship engaged her imagination and human interest. She was becoming the closest ally of Ronald Reagan, in another international relationship which was of huge emotional and political significance to her. In these years she became an 'international diva' of conservative politics, feted by crowds from Russia and China to New York. Her wardrobe, coded depending on where an outfit had been first worn, told its own story: Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black. Meanwhile, she was negotiating the hard detail of Hong Kong's transitional status before it was handed over to Communist China in 1997. She got a torrid time at Commonwealth conferences for her opposition to sanctions against the apartheid régime in South Africa. At home, the problem of persistently high unemployment was nagging away, though it started to fall from the summer of 1986 seemed to fall.
The Bombing of Libya and 'BBC Bias':
Then there was the highly unpopular use of British airbases for President Reagan's attack on Libya in 1986. This provoked a controversy, not for the first time, between the BBC and the Thatcher government. The PM's supporters on the right of the Tory Party had long been urging her to privatize the BBC and she herself appeared to believe that it was biased against her government; by which she meant that it was too independent. She still remembered the irritation she felt at some of the phrases its leading broadcasters had used back in the Falklands War: if we are to believe the British version, etc. Her view was that as the British Broadcasting Corporation, a public service broadcaster supported by the television license fee, it should give the British government's view without questioning it. Yet it was perfectly obvious that the reason the BBC was so respected both in Britain and abroad was that it was genuinely independent of the British government. The BBC was legally obliged by its Charter to remain independent of party political control. Lord Reith, its first Director-General, had successfully resisted Churchill's attempt to take over its radio service for government propaganda during the General Strike of 1926. It was one of the few great organs of state which Margaret Thatcher was not able to dominate in some way, a constitutional reality which made her visibly restless on occasions.
Because the American aircraft which bombed Libya took off from bases in Britain, that made it a British issue. The pretext for the attack was a terrorist attack on a Berlin nightclub used by American servicemen, but far from being the work of Libyan agents, it proved to have been carried out by a group linked to the Syrian government. There was a good deal of public disquiet about it, especially since it was strongly suspected that the Reagan administration was primarily bombing Libya to teach bigger and more formidable countries, chiefly Iran, a lesson. Libya was a feeble, though intermittently nasty little dictatorship which could never organise significant acts of state terrorism. The real battle was a propaganda one. Colonel Gaddafi (pictured below in 1979) claimed that his daughter had been killed in the raid, and showed her body to the journalists in Tripoli at the time. It wasn't until some time later that it became clear that he had adopted the little girl as she lay dying from her injuries. But whoever's daughter she was, she was certainly killed by the American bombing.
The British government was rather rattled by the hostility which sections of the public were starting to show over the bombing; and since, at the times of crisis, people tend to turn to the BBC for their information, some senior ministers felt that this public opposition was the fault of the BBC and wanted it to be taught a lesson. The chairman of the Conservative Party, Norman Tebbit, announced that he would be investigating the BBC's coverage of the raid. The BBC allowed itself to seem rattled by the threats he and his party made, which made him feel justified in his approach. John Simpson, the BBC's World Affairs Editor recalled sitting with a few journalists in the canteen at the Television Centre when the tannoy went:
'PBX. Calling Mr John Simpson.'
I hurried over to the phone. The deputy editor of television news was on the other end.
"We've just had Tebbit's report," he said. "It's serious. The editor would be grateful if you could get up here."
I finished my fish and went up. A small group of worried-looking people were sitting round in the editor's office. The editor handed me a copy of the document Tebbit and his researchers at Conservative Central Office had compiled. I looked through it rather nervously, anxious to see what it had to say about my own reporting of the attack. It made a few neutral comments, then one which was rather complimentary; that was all.
"That's all OK," I blurted out, voicing my own relief. Nothing much there."
The editor turned to me. I could see a faint ray of hope was glimmering for the first time.
"You think so?"
I realised that I had been speaking purely for myself. But it seemed unkind and unreasonable to destroy his only cause for optimism. He must have felt that his career was on the line.
"Oh sure, it's full of loopholes. Just go through it carefully and you'll find them all," I said.
I hadn't read it carefully enough to know if that were true, but I have never yet read a long document that you couldn't pick holes in.
Chris Cramer, a tough character who was the news editor at the time… agreed. Cramer and I were both affronted by the idea that in a free society the government should presume to dictate to the broadcasters and try to make them report only what the government wanted. Maybe we were both chancers too.
"John's right," he said. "We should go through this with a fine-tooth comb. We'll find lots of things wrong with it."
Which is what happened. We divided the Conservative Central Office document up between us, and spent the next couple of days going through it point by point. The document compared the BBC's coverage of the raid unfavourably with ITN's, and tried to make the case that the BBC had been deliberately biased. Some of the individual points it made were reasonable enough: the news presenter on the night of the bombing had added various inaccuracies to the sub-editors' scripts. (Soon afterwards she left the BBC.)
But it was silly to try to pretend that there was some underlying bias. I have never yet found a senior Conservative who really believed that…
It hadn't occurred to Norman Tebbit that the BBC would stand its ground since in the past it had fallen over itself with nervousness at the mere suggestion that the government of the day was upset with it. When it issued its response there was a big wave of public support for the BBC, partly because Kate Adie had established herself in the public eye as a brave, serious reporter, staying in Tripoli when the bombs were falling. Previously, women reporters had tended to be given social affairs to report on. Here was a woman who had become a war correspondent; something unprecedented on British television at that time, though there have been many equally brave successors since. But there was also public support for the BBC because, for all its failings, the BBC was considered to be as British an institution as any other in the country, and ninety per cent of the population had some contact with it each week in the pre-internet era. Norman Tebbit had failed to realise the British people did not like party political attacks on 'Auntie'. An opinion poll taken shortly afterwards indicated that Conservative voters supported 'the Beeb' on almost the same scale as voters for other parties. Thatcher, aware that she would have to call a general election within the next year or so, quickly distanced herself from her erstwhile lieutenant's campaign, leading to the first rift between the two of them. On the night she won the 1987 election, Simpson tried to interview her by the railings of St John's, Smith Square, next to Conservative Central Office, amid rabid Young Conservatives chanting calls for the privatisation of the BBC:
Transcript of interview with Prime Minister, 18.6.87:
Speakers: Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher, PC MP (non-staff), John Simpson (contract)…
JS: The crowd here seem to want you to privatise the BBC. Are you planning to do that?
MT: Well, I think… Well, you know, I must really go and speak to them.
Of course, she never again considered doing so, even if she had been temporarily persuaded by Tebbit's arguments. She knew what people would stand for, and what they wouldn't; it was when this instinct finally deserted her that her decline and fall began.
The 'Poll Tax' and the Peasants:
After the election, a wider dilemma emerged right across domestic policy, from the inner cities to hospitals, schools to police forces. Thatcher believed that government should set the rules, deliver sound money and then stand back and let other people get on with providing services. In practice, she often behaved differently, always more pragmatic and interventionist than her image suggested. At least, however, the principle was clear. But when it came to the public services there was no similar principle. She did not have the same respect for independent 'movers and shakers' in the hospitals, schools and town halls as she had for entrepreneurs and risk takers she admired in business. Before the Thatcher revolution, the Conservatives had been seen, on balance, defenders of local democracy. They had been strongly represented on councils across the country and had been on the receiving end of some of the more thuggish threats from Labour governments intent, for instance, on abolishing grammar schools. The town and county hall Conservatives had seen local representatives on hospital boards and local education authorities as bulwarks against socialist Whitehall. Margaret Thatcher herself had begun her political apprenticeship doing voluntary public work for her father, Alderman Roberts, sitting on various unpaid committees.
Yet in power, Thatcher and her ministers could not trust local government, or any elected and therefore independent bodies at all. Between 1979 and 1994, an astonishing 150 Acts of Parliament were passed removing powers from local authorities and switched to unelected quangos. The first two Thatcher governments transferred power and discretion away from people who had stood openly for election, and towards the subservient agents of Whitehall, often paid-up Tory party members. Despite his apparent love for Liverpool before the Militant takeover, Michael Heseltine attacked the whole of local government with new auditing with new auditing arrangements, curbs on how much tax they could raise, and spending caps as well. In the health service, early attempts to decentralize were rapidly reversed and a vast top-down system of targets and measurements was put in place, driven by a new planning organisation. It cost more and the service, undoubtedly, got worse. Similar centralist power-grabs took place in urban regeneration, where unelected Urban Development Corporations, rather than local councils, were given money to pour into rundown cities. The biggest city councils, most notably the Greater London Council, were simply abolished. Its powers were distributed between local borough councils and an unelected central organisation controlled by Whitehall. By 1990 there were some twelve thousand appointed officials running London compared with just 1,900 elected borough councillors. Housing Corporations took ninety per cent of the funds used by housing associations to build new cheap homes. In the Thatcher years, their staff grew sevenfold and their budgets twenty-fold.
Margaret Thatcher would say the poll tax, the name associated with the tax per head which was the catalyst for the bloody Peasants' Revolt of 1381, was actually an attempt to save local government. Like schools, hospitals and housing, local councils had been subjected to a barrage of ministers trying to stop them spending money, or raising it, except as Whitehall wished. Since 1945, local government had been spending more, but the amount of money it raised independently still came from a relatively narrow base of people, some fourteen million property-owners. Thatcher had been prodded by Edward Heath into promising to replace this tax, 'the rates', as early as 1974, but nobody had come up with a plausible and popular-sounding alternative. She had always disliked the rates system intensely, regarding them as an attack on self-improvement and other Tory values, and in government, the problem nagged away at her. Once, local elections were not national news; they were about who was best suited to run towns and counties, but in the late sixties and seventies they became national news, a regular referendum on the central government. Under Thatcher, the Conservatives lost swathes of local councils, resulting in more Labour-controlled councils which were even more distrusted by the central government, resulting in more powers away from them. The elections became even less relevant, fuelling more protest voting, and it soon became clear to government ministers that more councils were aping Liverpool by pursuing expensive hard-left policies partly because so few of those who voted for them were actually ratepayers themselves, therefore feeling no personal 'pinch'.
One way of correcting this anomaly would be to make all those who voted for local councils pay towards their cost. This was the origin of the poll tax or community charge as it was officially called, a single flat tax for everybody. It would mean lower bills for many homeowners and make local councils more responsive to their voters. On the other hand, it would introduce a new, regressive tax for twenty million people, with the poorest paying as much as the richest. This broke a principle which stretched back much further back than the post-war 'consensus' to at least the 1920s and the replacement of the Poor Law. But Public Assistance or social security as it was now known, was no longer charged or administered locally so that there was some logic in the change to a flat, universal charge. This proposal was sold to the Prime Minister by Kenneth Baker at a seminar at Chequers in 1985, along with the nationalisation of business rates. Nigel Lawson tried to talk the Prime Minister out of it, telling her it would be completely unworkable and politically catastrophic. The tax was discussed at the same cabinet meeting that Michael Heseltine walked out of over the Westland affair. It might have worked if it had been brought in gradually over a whole decade, as was first mooted, or at least four, as was planned at that meeting.
But at the 1987 Tory Conference, intoxicated by the euphoria of the recent third election victory, party members urged Thatcher to bring it in at once. She agreed since there was some urgency resulting from the dramatic increase in property prices in the eighties. Rates, like the subsequent council tax, were based on the relative value of houses across Britain, changing with fashion and home improvement. This meant that, periodically, there had to be a complete revaluation in order to keep the tax working. Yet each revaluation meant higher rates bills for millions of households and businesses, and governments naturally tried to procrastinate over them. In Scotland, however, a different law made this impossible and a rates revaluation had already happened, causing political mayhem. As a result, Scottish ministers begged Thatcher to be allowed the poll tax first, and she also agreed to this. Exemptions were made for the unemployed and low paid, but an attempt, by nervous Tory MPs, to divide the tax into three bands so that it bore some relation to people's ability to pay was brushed aside despite a huge parliamentary rebellion. When the tax was duly introduced in Scotland, it was met by widespread protest. In England, the estimates of the likely price of the average poll tax kept rising. Panicking ministers produced expensive schemes to cap it, and to create more generous exemptions, undermining the whole point of the new tax. Capping the tax would remove local accountability; the more exemptions there were, the lesser the pressure would be on the councils from their voters. Yet even the PM grew alarmed as she was told that over eighty per cent of voters would be paying more. Yet she pushed ahead with the introduction of the tax, due to take effect in England and Wales on 1st April 1990.
Bruges Bluntness & Madrid Madness:
The poll tax was one of the causes of her downfall in that following year, the other being Europe. This factor began to be potent in 1988, when turned against Jacques Delors' plans and went to Bruges in Belgium to make what became her definitive speech against the federalist tide which was now openly advancing towards her. The Foreign Office had tried to soften her message, but she had promptly pulled out her pen and written the barbs and thorns back in again. She informed her audience that she had not…
… successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new level of dominance from Brussels.
There was much else besides. Her bluntness much offended continental politicians as well as her own Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. Next, she reappointed her monetarist economic advisor, Sir Alan Walters, who was outspokenly contemptuous of Lawson's exchange rate policy. So, she was taking on two big cabinet beasts with great Offices of State at the same time, creating a serious split at the top of government. Then, Jacques Delors, the determined French socialist re-entered the story, with a fleshed-out plan for an economic and monetary union, which would end with the single currency, the euro. To get there, all EU members would need to put their national currencies into the ERM, which would draw them increasingly tightly together, which was just what Lawson and Howe wanted and just what Thatcher did not. Howe and Lawson ganged up, telling her that she must announce that Britain would soon join the ERM, even if she left the question of the single currency to one side for the time being. On the eve of a summit in Madrid where Britain was due to announce its view the two of them visited Thatcher together in private, had a blazing row with her and threatened to resign together if she did not give way. She did, and, for the time being, the crisis abated.
Piper Alpha – The Price of Oil and Who Profited?
In June 1988, 185 men were burned or blown to death in the North Sea when an oil platform, Piper Alpha, blew up, yet there has been little commemoration of the tragic event over the past thirty years, in popular memorials (as contrasted with earlier coal-mining disasters of a similar scale), political memoirs or the general media. In the case of oil, the great adventure was lived out at the margins of British experience, halfway to Scandinavia, with its wild scenes played out in the bars of Aberdeen and Shetland, far removed from the media in Glasgow, never mind London. Exploration, equipment and production were also largely controlled by American companies. The number of British refineries actually fell in the eighties, the peak decade for oil production, from twenty-one to thirteen, and forty per cent of those were also owned by US-based companies. According to Nigel Lawson, the revenues from oil taxes gave 'a healthy kick-start' to the process of cutting the government deficit, though he always argued that the overall impact of North Sea oil was exaggerated, especially by the Scottish Nationalists (SNP). Ireland also benefited greatly from new investment from the United States in the search for new sources of oil and gas in Irish waters from the 1970s, and their exploitation in the eighties. In addition, as a poorer member state of the EU, the Republic gained a disproportionately larger share of the EU budget than the UK as a whole, so that by the end of the decade the Irish economy was expanding rapidly and the long-term pattern of Irish emigration was being reversed. Both British and Irish trade with the EU increased, and Ireland's economy became less dependent on Britain's.
Birt, the BBC & Beijing:
Following its own battles with Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit following the bombing of Libya, by the end of the eighties the BBC went on to become the biggest newsgathering organisation in the world and its reputation for accurate, impartial reporting continued to grow around the globe. In 1988, John Birt joined the Corporation as head of news and current affairs, reforming and revitalising that area before going on to become director-general. Under his leadership, there was a five-fold expansion. The foreign affairs unit grew to eleven people, and Simpson was made the head of it. The expansion came just in time considering how much the world was to change in the following year, in a series of seismic upheavals which affected almost every country on earth. In May 1989, Simpson and Adie teamed up in Beijing, covering the infamous massacre in Tiananmen Square:
In the BBC's offices I found the redoubtable Kate Adie. She had been out in the streets all night with her camera team, and was in bad shape. A man had been killed right beside her, and her arm had been badly grazed in the incident. Together we assembled our reports. There was no time to edit words to pictures, nor even of seeing the pictures. All we could do was write our scripts, record them, and send them off to Hong Kong with the cassettes.
I sat at the computer, numbed by everything I had seen and determined not to get too emotional about it. I'd made real friends among the students in Tiananmen Square. The thought that they might now be dead or injured, that one of their best and most decent manifestations of recent times had been snuffed out in front of me was too disturbing and too painful for me to deal with. And so I took refuge in the old BBC concepts of balance and objectivity; there wasn't an ounce of emotion in my script.
Kate's report was very different. It was full of emotion. Six months later, when I finally watched the two reports side by side, I thought that while mine was perfectly accurate it had nothing to do with the real feeling of what had taken place. Hers did. I suppose the two were complimentary, and they were certainly used side by side on the news in Britain.
Above. The Morning of 20 May in Tiananmen Square.
A Tale of Two Cities – a Hell of a Dickens:
On 14th July 1989, Simpson was in Paris, reporting on the meeting of the 'G7′, the leaders of the West's seven leading capitalist powers, hosted by Francois Mitterrand, the French President. With hindsight, the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution was perhaps the single moment which best reflected the triumph of liberal democracy over all rival systems of government. The wealth, the grandeur, the personal liberty, the prestige and power which were on display were greater than the world had seen before. Soon, however, the decline in the power of the United States became more obvious. Margaret Thatcher still seemed unassailable as Britain's prime minister, but would be politically vulnerable within a few months. While President Bush handed over the key to the Bastille which Lafayette had taken with him to America shortly after the Revolution, her gift to Mitterand was a first edition copy of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities: inexpensive, and not very good as history. It was a grudging, insular gesture, typical of British attitudes towards France in the 1980s, which had chosen to follow an economic policy which was the exact opposite of Thatcherism. She disapproved not just of France, but of the occasion and the whole business of celebrating revolution. Her view was that evolution was greatly preferable to revolution, which was of little use to those, in 1789 or 1989, who lived under an autocracy which refuses to evolve. Although Mrs Thatcher may have helped to persuade Ronald Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev was 'a man to do business with', according to John Simpson…
It wasn't Mrs Thatcher's economic principles which caused the changes in the Soviet bloc, but the simple, verifiable fact that Western capitalist society was effective, rich and reasonably free, while the countries of the communist bloc were manifestly not.
In the same month, four weeks after her climb-down at the Madrid summit, Thatcher hit back at her Chancellor and Foreign Secretary. Back in London, she unleashed a major cabinet reshuffle, compared at the time to Macmillan's 'night of the long knives' in 1962. Howe was demoted to being Leader of the Commons, though she reluctantly agreed to him having the face-saving title of Deputy Prime Minister, a concession rather diminished when her press officer, Bernard Ingham, instantly told journalists that it was a bit of a non-job. Howe was replaced by the relatively unknown John Major, the former chief secretary. Lawson survived only because the economy was weakening and she thought it too dangerous to lose him just at that point. He was having a bad time on all sides, including from the able shadow chancellor John Smith. When Walters had another pop at his ERM policy, he decided that enough was enough and resigned on 26 October, telling the PM she should treat her ministers better. He was replaced by the still relatively unknown John Major.
Budapest, Berlin & Bucharest: Falling Dominoes of 1989:
Meanwhile, all around them, the world was changing. On 23rd October I was in Hungary on a third, personal visit, when the country changed its name and constitution. It had dropped the word 'People's' from its title and was henceforth to be known simply as the Republic of Hungary. My first visit, an 'official' one, as a member of a British Quaker delegation, had been exactly a year earlier, when the withdrawal of Soviet troops had been announced, along with the decision of the then communist government that the 1956 Revolution, which had begun on the same day, would no longer be referred to by them as a 'counter-revolution'. A few days later in 1989, East Germany announced the opening of its borders to the West and joyous Berliners began hacking at the Berlin Wall.
Then the communists in Czechoslovakia fell, and at Christmas the Romanian dictator Ceaucescu was dragged from power and shot, along with his wife. According to John Simpson, who also witnessed all these events, including those in Bucharest at close quarters (as pictured above), found among the dictators' possessions was a Mont Blanc pen given to him by the British Labour Party, presumably during the couple's visit to London in 1978. This was instigated by the then Foreign Secretary, Dr David Owen who, along with James Callaghan, persuaded the Queen against her will that the Ceaucescus should be invited. The pictures below show them riding in State along the Mall. But I have written about all these events elsewhere. Suffice it to say, just here, that, since the early seventies, politicians of all persuasions were prepared to overlook Ceaucescu's increasing megalomania and the unpleasantness of the government he controlled because he represented an independent voice within the Warsaw Pact, refusing to send Romanian forces to crush the 'Prague Spring' in 1968. As early as 1972, a left-wing Labour MP had written:
As a result of unconditional acceptances of the past abuses of the legal system, Ceaucescu has declared that steps must be taken to ensure that such injustices can never occur in the future. The importance of democracy is therefore being increasingly stressed and… there is no question of rigging trials as occurred in the past. … Interference by anyone, no matter how important, is unacceptable in Ceaucescu's view.
The not-so-beautiful relationship which came to an end with the shooting of the 'Tsar and Tsarina' who built their own palace (below) in Bucharest after visiting Buckingham Palace. It was due to be completed just weeks after their overthrow.
After meeting Ceaucescu on his state visit in 1978, Margaret Thatcher, then the leader of the opposition, commented:
I was impressed by the personality of President Ceaucescu … Romania is making sustained efforts for consolidating peace and understanding.
The 'domino' events of the Autumn and Winter of 1989 in the eastern part of the continent, in which Margaret Thatcher had played a 'bit part' alongside Reagan and Gorbachev, would have a ripple effect on her own fall from power the following year. That was not something many of us involved in East-West relations anticipated even at the end of that year.
Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan Pan.
John Simpson (1998), Strange Places, Questionable People. Basingstoke: Macmillan Pan.
John Simpson (1990), Despatches from the Barricades: An Eye-Witness Account of the Revolutions that Shook the World, 1989-90. London: Hutchinson.


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