Investments attacked by students

Transcription

THURSDAY
The
The world online
CambridgeStudent
Lent 2009 Issue 6
Investments attacked by students
Alice Baghdjian
Deputy News Editor
unethical. The University declined to
publish information about its investments under the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was fantastic to see so many
people at the protest today, showing the University how much their
students care about this incredibly
important issue,” Mischa Foxell told
TCS.
“Whilst we were protesting outside the Senate House the University
Council, who are the main governing
body of the University, actually had to
take the back route into their meeting to avoid us.
“Hopefully we made sure that they
can’t keep shutting their eyes to Cambridge’s failure to implement an ethical investment policy,” she added.
“They can’t
keep shutting
their eyes to
Cambridge’s
failure“
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Photo: Alice Baghdjian
Protesters have accused Cambridge
University of “turning a blind eye” to
Ethical Investment and “continually
not engaging with CUSU Ethical affairs” on the topic, at a student demonstration on Monday.
“Cambridge should be ashamed
to be lagging so far behind so many
other Universities both in the UK and
abroad on the issue of ethical investment,” said Mischa Foxell, CUSU Ethical Investment (SRI) Officer.
She told The Cambridge Student
(TCS):
“As it enters its ninth century the
University is working hard to increase
its endowment fund, but it is turning
a blind eye to the fact that financial
sustainability has to be accompanied
by ethical sustainability to ensure the
future of Cambridge as a great university.”
Roughly 200 people attended the
hour long protest. The group, which
included supporters of CUSU Ethical Affairs and members of Amnesty
International, waved banners and
signed a petition to raise awareness
of ethical investment and encourage
the University to adopt a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) policy.
Cambridge University at present
has no SRI policy, whilst investment
policies in place at different colleges
vary greatly. A 2009 Freedom of Information Act revealed in a TCS investigation earlier this term, however,
that most colleges have no comprehensive ethical investment policy.
Furthermore, it exposed the fact that
several Colleges, such as Trinity and
St. John’s, have investments in the
arms manufacturers BAE Systems and
QuinetiQ, as well as in Rolls Royce;
companies condemned by Campaign
Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) as
The CUSU Ethical Investment Campaign, launched last term, has sought
to encourage the introduction of an
SRI policy at Cambridge University.
Campaigners have set up a petition
for students, staff and alumni, as
well as a ‘penny the Vice-Chancellor’
initiative, which involved sending
postcards with a penny attached to
the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alison
Richard, to highlight the campaign.
“It would not be tolerated if Cambridge University publicly endorsed
companies which violate International Human Rights Law or damage the
University’s educational mission. It
should not be tolerated that the Uni-
versity can financially support these
companies through its investments,”
reads a statement on the campaign
website. “The University needs an investment policy that reflects its commitment to human rights, education,
and sustainability.”
Despite the growing profile of the
campaign across the campus, the
University has not officially acknowledged the issue of ethical investment,
something which protestors criticised
on Monday.
“The University have not openly
responded to the protest on Monday,”
Foxell told TCS.
“This is unsurprising given that
they haven’t responded publicly to
a CUSU motion calling for an ethical
investment policy, our requests for a
review of their refusal to respond to
a Freedom of Information act on the
University’s investments, hundreds of
‘Penny the Vice-Chancellor’ postcards
from students calling for an ethical
investment policy, and online campaigning and petitioning.”
The Vice-Chancellor was unavailable to comment on the issue.
Other universities in the country
have already implemented ethical
investment policies, including St Andrews, Edinburgh, Manchester and
Oxford.
Susan Nash, an NUS Executive,
who addressed protesters at the demonstration, stressed the importance
of educational institutions adopting
an SRI policy.
“Educational institutions are
publicly funded beacons of the community which help us to form an understanding of the wider world, so it
is important that they have Ethical
Investment Policies,” she told TCS.
“Universities have a duty to reflect
the values of the students and staff
themselves and should not be contributing indirectly to groups that are
destructive to human rights.”
She also told TCS that in spite of
the University’s lack of response to
the campaign, the NUS would pursue the issue further and contact the
Vice-Chancellor in writing about the
implementation of an SRI policy at
Cambridge.
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02|News
News in Brief
Former Vice-Chancellor
dies
Professor Alex Deer, who was
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1971 to
1973, passed away this week at
the age of 98. Professor Dear
was a well-respected mineralogy
and petrology scholar as well as
a noted Arctic explorer. He began his career at Cambridge in
1934, when he won a research
studentship at St John’s College. He also served as master of
Trinity Hall and co-authored a
internationally praised book on
rock-forming minerals, among
many other publications.
Police dog suffers shock
Fire Tops Up Mobile
Shop
A fire broke out Tuesday evening over T-Mobile, a mobile
phone shop off Petty Cury in
Cambridge city centre. Three
fire appliances attended the
scene after the blaze was reported around 6pm. There were
no injuries and was under control by 7.45pm. One onlooker
recounted to The Cambridge
Student that it was a minor fire
and “no one was paying much
attention.” “People were more
concerned with finding routes
around the area since fire engines cordoned off the street,”
he added.
Cafe closure off the boil
Katie O’Donoghue
Jane Ashford-Thom
Student at Queens’ College have
launched a Facebook campaign to
save the Q Bar café.
The café, which is open from
10.30 to 5pm every weekday, sells
a range of hot drinks, sandwiches
and paninis.
In recent months, it has been
struggling as students have tightened their belts to cope with the
rising cost of living.
“More and
more people
are opting to
drink in their
rooms not the
bar”
However, the Q Bar café has encountered something of a change
in fortune since several Facebook
campaigns were launched to attract
students back. Business has visibly picked up since the launch of a
‘Save the QBar Coffee Shop!’ group,
which now has over 260 members.
The group’s founder, Queens’
graduate student Johanna Hanink,
felt that the bar’s image among
students was a problem. “People
thought of it as the bar, not a café
in the daytime,” Hanink told The
Cambridge Student (TCS).
Hanink also told TCS of her delight at the response to the cam-
Photo: Mike Totton
A local police German shepherd police dog was left in
shock this weekend after a
Cambridge police dog unit
vehicle crashed into Lloyds
TSB bank on Sunday. A
police spokeswoman said:
“Officers were responding
to an emergency when the
collision happened. The dog
would have been locked in
his cage. The dog was in a
state of shock but otherwise unharmed and was put
to bed.”
The three officers involved
in the crash suffered minor
injuries.
The Cambridge Student | 19/02/09
Email: [email protected]
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
paign: “Kat, the manager, and I
were in here the day after I created
it, checking every few hours. It was
growing exponentially; 30, 100, 200
members; we were shocked.”
The Q Bar staff have launched
a number of new initiatives in the
past few weeks, in an attempt to
prevent its closure. A loyalty card
scheme has encouraged students
to purchase their lattes and teas
in College rather than at corporate
coffee chains such as Caffé Nero and
Starbucks.
This was welcomed by Queens’
student Catherine Gregory, who
told TCS that “the coffee in college
is good quality, far more reasonably
priced than Starbucks and much
more convenient to get to.”
Closing time, which had been
cut to 3pm at the beginning of
Lent term, has since changed back
to 5pm as business has improved.
Hanink and others are now using
the bar to supervise undergraduate students, and there has been a
marked increase in the number of
people choosing to eat lunch or simply work there in the afternoons.
Bar manager Kat Thorpe has expressed her relief at the improvement in business, as she had previously been faced with the possibility
of laying off two members of staff.
However, she warned that Queens’
bar still has challenges ahead.
“More and more people are opting to drink in their rooms rather
than down at the bar, and we are
having to organise more special
events nights to make money, which
wasn’t necessary in the past,” Thorpe told TCS.
Nevertheless, she added that “it’s
a relief that the coffee shop’s business has picked up, and that students have realised that it will close
if they don’t use it. It’s important
for people to realise that you don’t
have to be Queens’ student to come
and use the coffee shop. I think
it’s a great facility for the college to
have.”
Sidney students banned from bar
James Burton
News Reporter
A bop that took place on Thursday evening at Sidney Sussex
led to disciplinary action being
threatened against all third and
fourth year students, including
an eight-day bar ban.
“As far as
we knew,
everything was
fine”
The party, which took place after an annual dinner for all third
and fourth years, had been organised without first obtaining permission from the relevant college
authorities; vomit was also found
in the toilets, and, at an emergency meeting on Friday morning with
the Dean and Manciple, students
involved were told that music had
been played until after 11:30pm,
in breach of licensing laws.
However, one source told The
Cambridge Student (TCS) that, as
far as they were concerned, everything had followed “normal
practise. We were surprised to hear
that what we thought was normal
was in breach of regulations”.
The student, who wished to
remain anonymous, stated that
“the duty staff member for the
night stayed, as he is supposed
to do, until the Porter arrived to
lock up at midnight. At this point,
he checked the toilets and went
home. As far as we knew, everything was fine”.
TCS understands that the vomit
appeared in the interval between
the toilets being checked, and the
porter locking the bar.
Despite a full apology from the
event’s organiser at an emergency
meeting on Friday, it was decided
that all third and fourth years
should be given an eight day ban
from the bar.
All third and
fourth years
are to be given
an eight-day
ban
This led to a response from
the Sidney Sussex College Student
Union’s executive (SSCSU), who
issued a statement (later backed
unanimously by over one hundred
students at an open meeting) endorsing any protest deemed nec-
essary unless negotiations on the
punishment were reopened by five
o’clock on Monday evening.
Following meetings with several
senior members of college, who
one student describes as “extremely supportive and concerned”, and
a submission of a formal request
for an appeal against the punishment by SSCSU, an email was sent
to the executive by the Dean stating that, since the person who had
vomited had come forward, the bar
ban would immediately be rescinded, and that the issues of permission and a breach of licensing laws
had been dropped.
SSCSU is drawing up new protocols in conjunction with the
academic body to ensure further
warnings and more time for discussion are given before a punishment of this scale is imposed in
future.
The Dean of College was unavailable for comment.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
News|03
Employee alleges racist bullying at Christ’s
Photo: Mike Totton
Pete Jefferys
Investigations Editor
A former employee at Christ’s College has told The Cambridge Student (TCS) that she was forced to
resign due to “sexist” and “racist”
bullying.
The 29 year old, who is French,
alleges that two letters sent to the
Catering Manager at Christ’s were
ignored and that her experiences
of aggressive behaviour and what
she refers to as “xenophobic” remarks went unchallenged by the
college.
She further alleges that upon
her resignation she was told by
senior catering staff at the college
that she was, in fact, “the problem”.
The woman, who does not wish
to be named, described her experience as “moral harassment”. She
told TCS she had seen many instances of racism within the Christ’s
Catering Department.
She described
her experience
as “moral
harassment”
A woman of Hungarian origin
was allegedly told to “go back to
Poland” by a British colleague.
Other alleged incidents include being reprimanded for speaking in
French to British Muslims and be-
ing publicly told to “go home” by
other members of staff.
The letters of complaint, shown
to TCS, describe a barrage of “little
attacks” on a daily basis leaving
the woman “exhausted and really
upset”.
The second letter, dated 27 January 2009, condemns the Catering
Department for not looking into
the problem and gives notice of the
woman’s resignation.
The woman, who graduated
from the Sorbonne University in
Paris, was forced to take a minimum wage job in catering after being rejected by various employers
in the software sector.
She claims that potential employers in Britain would repeatedly
hang up the phone on her after
hearing her French accent. She
had come to Cambridge to live with
her boyfriend, a researcher in the
Faculty of Astrophysics, and had
previously had high hopes for living in the UK, telling TCS that she
thought someone with her qualifications and experience would have
a strong chance of graduate level
employment.
Not entirely dissuaded by her experiences, she told TCS that “people
are really warm here, except when
it comes to employment”.
Students at Christ’s were surprised to hear about the allegations.
Clementine Beauvais, a French
undergaduate, told TCS: “I was
shocked to hear about the xenophobic bullying. Whilst at Christ’s,
I have never come across any racism. I don’t, though, have any di-
rect experience of the atmosphere
in the catering department.”
In recent weeks, racial tensions
in the workplace have made headlines as thousands of workers went
on wildcat strikes in protest at the
use of foreign workers at the Lindsay oil refinery in Lincolnshire.
The strikes were criticised for overt
racism and nationalism, although
strikers protested that they were
merely echoing Gordon Brown’s call
for “British jobs for British workers”.
TCS was told by the former catering employee that, despite the
alleged xenophobia, she intends
to stay in Cambridge with her boyfriend and is now intending to pursue work as a librarian.
Christ’s College has declined to
comment on the allegations.
University pay review shows men still better off
Carly Hilts
Co-Editor in Chief
An investigation into pay differentials between male and female
staff at Cambridge University has
revealed “significant differences
in the average stipend paid to
men and women in the same staff
group.”
The review, which was written
by the Equal Pay Review Group as
part of the equal pay audit commissioned by the University last year,
revealed that the average stipend
for female employees is £28,247,
while for men it is £37,157; a difference of some 31.54%. Within
pay groups (or ‘grades’, as they are
classed in the report) men are more
likely to be at the high end of the
pay scale.
The report suggests that this
might be because they have worked
at the University for longer.
At the same time, statistics
published in the notice in The Reporter on February 16th revealed
that while, as of July 1 2008, 4119
of the University’s 8539 staff were
female (about 48%), proportionately more women are employed in
lower-paid jobs and more men are
in higher grades of pay.
This overall imbalance in gender distribution could affect pay
statistics; women outnumber men
in grades 5-6, while the balance is
reversed in grades 8-12.
Furthermore, some pay classifications contain as few as five members of staff.
Male and female wages mostly
differentiated by 3% or less within
grades, which means that the University is not required to act. Ac-
cording to The Reporter, any subsequent action will be in accordance
with advice from the Equality and
Human Rights Commission, which
says that no action is necessary
concerning a gender-related pay
differential of under 3%. A differential of 3-5% should be “regularly
monitored”, while “action is needed to address the issue and close
the gap” if male and female pay
differs by over 5%.
The main exception is in grade
12, which represents senior academic staff. Here there is a differential of 5.2% between male and
female pay. The review, carried
out by members of the Human Resources Division and trade union
representatives, also found that
there were almost seven men for
every woman in the top group.
According to The Reporter, “sta-
tistics from the Senior Academic
Promotions indicate that we receive fewer applications from women than from men for such senior
positions.”
“Action is
needed to
address the
issue and close
the gap”
Grades 9-12 are used to classify
academic staff. Of the 464 staff
in grade nine, 36.85% are women.
In grades 10-12 the percentage of
women declines, reaching 12.47%
in grade 12.
A note in The Reporter commented: “Further investigation is
needed into why this imbalance
occurs.”
In some grades, however, there
are cases where women earn more
than men. In grade six, which concerns clerical staff, women outnumber men and their average pay
is about 2.51% higher. Moreover, in
grades 5, 7 and 9, that is, non-clinical research staff, the report found
“very low differences in pay.”
As a result of the report, the Review Group has recommended that
the Human Resources Committee
should “support the broader engagement and development of the
Equal Pay Review process within
the work of the Human Resources
Division during 2009.”
A new report will be submitted
next year.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
04|News
Medieval design for the modern age
UK, in an effort to help combat
the 27% of UK carbon emissions
from households.
Photo: Masons News
“The design is
cost-effective
and relatively
simple to
build”
Anna Croall
News Editor
A team of architects, including
several based at Cambridge’s
Architecture Department, have
designed a zero-carbon home in
Kent using 600-year old Medieval design techniques.
The house, which is one of
the first zero-carbon homes in
the UK, is called “Crossways”,
and is a four bedroom property
intended to become a template
for future production on a larger scale.
The design team, headed by
architect Richard Hawkes, includes Michael Ramage, Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex
college, based at the Cambridge
University Department of Archi-
tecture, and Philip Cooper, who
also teaches in the department.
The design of the house is
adapted from a Mediterranean
technique, “timbrel vaulting”,
which originated in fourteenth
century Spain, using thin bricks
to create light, yet durable,
buildings.
It is one of the first zerocarbon homes to be built in the
In addition to the structural
features, which allow for the
avoidance of energy intensive
materials without compromising on strength, the house’s
energy sources reflect its green
credentials. Using a combination photovoltaic and thermal
heating system, any heating for
the house will be powered by
solar energy, using this especially efficient system.
Though this technology is
currently expensive, driving
up the cost of the eco-house
to £450,000, it is hoped that,
in the long term, this design
could pave the way for energy
efficient, and therefore moneysaving, houses in the future.
Michael Ramage commented:
“The design is cost-effective
in that the home is relatively
simple to build and, once you
know what you’re doing, it’s
quick.
“Many of the costs come from
the new technology it uses for
energy storage and generation.
If those become more widely
available, making a similar
house cheaply in much larger
quantities may be possible.”
The designers have also
sought to use local materials,
where possible, including “Kent
peg” roof tiles.
The architect, Richard Hawkes,
who is also the house’s first occupant, stated:
“The building demonstrates
how contemporary design can
celebrate local materials and
integrate new technologies to
produce a highly sustainable
building that sits lightly on the
Earth.”
The house featured on Channel 4’s ‘Grand Designs’ programme on Wednesday evening.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
News|05
Smoke link to dementia
James Garner
The Occasional Student
Dan Heap
News Reporter
‘We’re All Going Mad’
Photo: Lanier67
Cambridge University scientists
have confirmed the link between
passive smoking and the risk of
developing dementia. In a report
published this week in the British Medical Journal, a team of researchers from Cambridge, the University of Michigan and Plymouth’s
Peninsula Medical School, led by
Cambridge’s Dr David Llewellyn,
demonstrated that there is a 44%
increase in risk of cognitive impairment when someone is exposed to
high levels of second-hand smoke.
Previous studies identified active smoking as a risk factor for
cognitive impairment and dementia, but this is the first study to
highlight the dangers for adult
non-smokers who are exposed to
cigarette smoke, after an earlier
study drew attention to the dangers for children.
Dr. Llewellyn and his team took
saliva samples and a detailed history of their exposure to smoke from
5000 people older than 50, participants of the English Longitudinal
Study of Ageing. By measuring
levels of cotinine (a by-product
of nicotine), the researchers were
able to assess levels of exposure to
second-hand smoke.
They then analysed the results
of a set of neuropsychological tests
in order to measure cognitive impairment, including verbal memory
(recalling words immediately and
after a delay), numerical calculations, time orientation, and verbal
fluency (naming as many animals
as possible in one minute). The results were added together to create
global score for cognitive function.
Those who scored in the lowest 10
per cent were identified as suffering from cognitive impairment.
The authors of the study proposed a number of possible explanations why exposure to secondhand smoke may increase the
odds of dementia, including an
increased risk of heart disease and
stroke which are known to increase
the risk of cognitive damage: cigarette smoke can damage endothelial cells, which reduces the amount
of blood flowing to the brain and
heart by constricting blood vessels
and causing clots.
Dr. Mark Eisner of the University
of California said that the study
will hopefully lead to greater public awareness about the dangers of
second-hand smoke. Eisner said
he would like to see this “eventually translate into political action aimed at passing smoke-free
legislation in regions of the world
where public smoking is still permitted.”
Sarah Day, of the Alzheimer’s Society, welcomed the study: “Whilst
we don’t know what causes dementia there is increasing evidence
that a healthy lifestyle can help reduce your risk of developing one of
these devastating diseases. Giving
up smoking; eating the right foods
and getting plenty of exercise are
simple steps you can take in the
fight against dementia.’
Photo: Mike Totton
Cam level rises to 7-year high
Nat Rudarakanchana
News Reporter
Substantial rain and melted snow
over the past week have resulted in
the River Cam rising to its highest
level in seven years.
Last Thursday no fewer than
seven flood warnings were in effect across the county of Cambridgeshire, with an additional severe weather warning issued by the
Met Office.
The Cam calmed down fairly
quickly, leaving the majority of
riverside residents unaffected by
the inundation, with the notable
exception of one houseboat, which
came adrift. Luckily, a team of University rowers managed to rescue
the houseboat and anchor it to its
mooring close to riverside.
As a result of the flood risk, the
patio of local pub The Anchor was
closed for a full week from Monday,
reopening only three days ago.
Sarah Barker of The Anchor related to The Cambridge Student
(TCS) how a host of small sandbags
blocked the river’s entry via the
double patio door. She reported
also that the riverside pub was especially threatened on Wednesday,
when water began to seep in dangerously despite precautions. The
sandbags can still be seen arranged
carefully on the patio.
Both the Environment Agency,
a large organization concerned
with managing environmental hazards, and the Met Office have now
dropped their flood warnings.
Last Saturday I found a Spanish website streaming the FA Cup
match between Blackburn and
my beloved Coventry. Finding the
commentary indecipherable,
I
chose to accompany the game with
a Vandellas compilation. Thus,
Blackburn’s late equaliser came to
the strains of Jimmy Mack. I might
have noted this strange combination at the time had my immediate interest not been redecorating
my floor with the contents of my
desk.
Unusual juxtapositions like this
occur on screen every so often. I
think of the first time Greta Garbo
was cast in a comedy, or the first
time Orlando Bloom was cast as
an actor. Television is a goldmine.
Examples include Stephen Hawking’s appearance on Richard and
Judy and Richard Dawkins promoting The God Delusion opposite
Bill O’Reilly, doyen of Fox News.
(Symptomatic of the culture clash
was the infobar that popped up,
billing Dawkins as, ‘Athiest.’)
Even the BBC has its moments.
I still don’t know why a contestant
was allowed to choose The Day
Today as a specialist subject on
Mastermind. The consequence was
John Humphrys asking, “According to Alan Partridge’s sport bulletin, why has the football match
between Richmond Arithmetic
and Nottingham Marjorie been
postponed?” The answer, fired off
in staccato, “Bent Pitch.”
These instances came back to
mind after an unlikely guest on
The One Show, a magazine format
hosted by ubiquitious Brummie
Adrian Chiles, and Christine Bleakley, who has that coveted ability
to talk about absolutely anything
and say absolutely nothing. Regular guests are Myleene Klass, Gyles
Brandreth and Clare Balding. This
week they invited Morrissey, who
in one interview from his ‘80s heyday commented, “The only sorrow
of the Brighton bombing is that
Thatcher escaped unscathed.”
The producers only had to rewatch Morrissey’s last big TV interview to question his suitability for
the teatime slot. That occasion,
even with Jonathan Ross radiating
sycophancy at full beam, proved a
disjointed affair, yielding one illuminating exchange as Ross tried
to befriend the singer,
“Do you like having new friends?”
“I don’t like people, to be honest”
“How many friends do you have?
“Seven.”
The One Show interview with
Morrissey thus had the presenters
gambolling furiously in an attempt
to empathise with the singer, who
managed to contradict virtually
their every utterance. Talking of
his fanbase, Morrissey said, “I get
the sense that people are there
for life.” Bleakley, “But with that
comes responsibility…”
“I don’t feel any responsibility.”
Bleakley, changing tack without
missing a beat, “as long as you’re
enjoying it you hope the fans do
as well.”
“Well, I don’t know about enjoyment.”
Chiles then asked, “You’re not
fearful of letting them down with
your next album?”
“Oh, definitely not.”
Preparing to go to a clip of Morrissey’s new video, the presenters
struggled to end on a positive,
“I think that’s good.”
“It must be quite liberating.”
The video ended. Chiles, “Are
they still good fun to do?”
“They never were.”
Of a singing career, Chiles asked,
“Does it get easier or harder?”
“It just remains the same.”
Nearing the end, Bleakley tried
to wrap up the interview, with an
aside to Chiles, “An unlikely popstar in many ways,”
Morrissey couldn’t let that go.
“Am I a popstar?” He asked
aloud. “I wouldn’t think so.”
Compounding the madness was
the decision for Morrissey to stay
on the couch for the whole show.
During a segment on rising unemployment, Chiles tried to include
The Smiths star, asking him about
his experiences on the dole. “I was
quite happy to be unemployed because I didn’t want to work,” he
replied. Sensing this sentiment
required greater exposition, not
least for Chiles, statistically television’s hardest working man,
Morrissey added, “I didn’t want to
have a job.” Chiles and the other
guest nodded unsurely; Bleakley
emitted an awkward giggle.
Chiles next remark, “We’d all
have to sympathise with the
white collar workers, who’ve
only ever really enjoyed success,
who’ve had no experience of,”
was interrupted by those familiar
Mancunian tones, “So, therefore,
why sympathise with them?” An
audible gasp. “It’s hard though,
when you’re paying bills” leapt in
Bleakley, adding swiftly, “Isn’t it,
Nina?” After Nina’s lengthy advice
for those struggling in a shrinking
job market, Morrissey chipped in,
“Or why not just paint?”
And that was all before the last
guest, bearded, explained why it’s
tricky to draw a six in the air and
circulate your leg counter-clockwise simultaneously.
06|News
Campus Voices
Life’s work flushed
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Oxford bike battle ends in boozy brawl
A PhD student at the University of Leeds has threatened to
sue after cleaners incinerated
his seven-year-old collection
of lizard faeces. The student
received an apology and the
offer of £500 compensation
but turned it down with the
line “see you in court”. He told
The Leeds Student, “To some
people it might just have been
a big bag of lizard shit, but to
me it represented seven years’
painstaking work. The loss has
altered the course of my life
forever.”
Survey results ‘leek’ed
A survey has found that Pontypridd in Wales is the least
popular place in the UK to be
a student. The town scored a
measly 44% approval, compared to Manchester, Sheffield
and Newcastle which all scored
62%. The survey compared attitudes towards the University
towns’ shops, transport links,
safety, facilities and nightlife.
Cambridge students haven’t
got many more reasons to be
cheerful than those from Pontypridd, scoring 56% approval
in the survey. Oxford were,
unsurprisingly, more full of
themselves – rating their town
at 60%.
Apathetic Oxford?
After four and a half hours debate the Oxford Student Union
(OUSU) chose not to condemn
the Israeli action in Gaza. The
motion was decisively defeated with 39 colleges voting
against. One Oxonian lamented
the decision telling Cherwell,
a student newspaper, that he
thought it a real shame that
nobody in Oxford had the
“guts to make bold political
statements any more. We’re
all apathetic drones, which is
sickening”.
A joke too far
The University of Birmingham
have taken legal action against
one student paper after a spoof
advert caused widespread offense. The advert, which was
placed in The Sanctuary newspaper, offered various pieces of
crockery with the faces of child
killers emblazoned upon them.
Criminals featured included
Myra Hindley, Ian Brady and
Fred and Rose West. Readers
were encouraged to celebrate
the “plucky, mischievous Brits
who did gratuitous violence
best”. The ‘joke’ caused outrage
amongst victims’ families’ support groups and University officials.
Both colleges are situated on Turl
Street, where the ‘dash’ took place.
Photo: Stevecadman
Victoria Hermon
News Reporter
What should have been a celebratory drink, honouring the winner
of an age-old, traditional bike race
at Oxford University, ended in a
drunken brawl after rival students
broke into each others’ colleges last
Friday.
Violence erupted after the “dubiously legal” Turl Street Dash, which
sees students from Exeter College
race their adversaries from Jesus
College on a specified route around
the town.
Apart from an incident in 1979,
after which police and fire crews
had to be called out to stop a num-
ber of fights, the race has incurred
only a friendly and healthy rivalry,
until now.
The problems started after the
race when a group of Jesus undergraduates enticed their rivals out of
their bar with provocative chanting;
bikes left in the street after the race
were then thrown against the walls
and many were reported broken.
Things became more heated
when a group of Jesus students
entered, unauthorised, into Exeter
College. From there, a brawl broke
out within a relatively large group
of students, some said to be under
the influence of 15 units of alcohol.
The action escalated so quickly
and the fighting got carried away to
such an extent that the Dean, Bar
Manager and Porters had to get involved themselves to break up the
scrap, the bar manager reportedly
being assaulted significantly in the
process.
The fighting was proceeded by
members of Jesus urinating on the
walls, grounds and bikes of Exeter
College and a ‘break in’ attempt to
enter the buildings which sparked a
huge manhunt on the part of the
Exeter student body.
This in turn prompted a number
of Exeter students to mimic their
rivals’ actions, trying themselves
to gain access to the other college’s
buildings.
Indeed, the chaos only subsided
when Duncan Cook, Jesus’s JCR
President, managed to control the
crowds by shouting at them to disperse and for his own students to
return to their own grounds.
With much of the action being
caught on CCTV, and both Deans
promising a thorough investigation,
it would appear that the fallout
from the race is far from over, as it
has been promised that the perpetrators will be punished.
The claim that “inter-collegiate
relationships are back to normal”
seems slightly optimitic so soon after the event; it is hard to believe
that such passion could be so easily
squashed.
Oxford college angered by reports of student debt
Louise Wallace
News Reporter
Pembroke College, Oxford has
refuted the accusation that the
college is facing “financial chaos” and that students are being
hounded for unpaid fees.
The allegation, which John
Church, the college’s Bursar, told
The Cambridge Student (TCS) was
a ‘complete misrepresentation of
the situation’, first appeared in
the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell.
It was claimed that students
who owed money were threatened
with the possibility of not being
able to graduate.
The misunderstanding between
Pembroke College and the press
continued in The Daily Telegraph,
which reported on the 10th Febru-
ary 2009 that “hundreds of Oxford
students could fail to graduate after amassing debts of £200,000”.
In the same article it was alleged
that the University had pledged
to “chase students” who had not
paid college bills.
Speaking to TCS, Church rejected these claims.
He emphasised that these figures were incorrect – undergraduate debt comprising only a very
small amount of the £200,000.
He also clarified that the College’s intention to follow up unpaid fees applied to only a very
small number of students.
These did not include those
who had applied for hardship
funds.
The policy that students who
owe money without explanation
or application for support are
prevented from graduating is university wide rather than specific
to Pembroke College.
“All we ask
for is that
students are
responsiblewe do try to
help”
“Pembroke College with the
full recognition and support of
the JCR has been pressing for the
prompt payment’ of college bills,”
commented Mr Church.
“We have made it clear that
those suffering from hardship can
seek support,” he added.
“Pembroke is known in Oxford
as a particularly friendly college.
We do try and help our students.
All we ask for is that students are
responsible”.
The Bursar’s position was confirmed by the College’s JCR President Caroline Daly in an interview
with The Oxford Student.
“I do not feel that there are
any underlying financial problems
or disagreement with the student
body,” the President said.
Church asserted that Pembroke
College made a profit in the past
financial year and that it retains a
healthy balance and endowment.
Yet the misunderstanding between Pembroke College and the
press reflects an increasingly
pressured financial climate for
students.
The Cambridge Student |19/02/09
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
News|07
Animal rights activist convicted
James Burton
News Reporter
Mel Broughton, one of the men responsible for the Stop Primate Experiments at Cambridge University
(SPEAC) campaign, was last week
sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for conspiracy to commit arson at Oxford University, following
the discovery of two petrol bombs
inside Templeton College, Oxford,
in February 2007.
“We are more
determined
than ever to
continue the
campaign”
The SPEAC campaign aimed to
halt the construction of a new primate research facility in Cambridge
in 2004, which never went ahead.
The university announced that
its decision to stop building work
was due, in part, to animal rights
activism, an admission which was
used at the time by campaigners to
claim a major victory for the antivivisection movement.
Following this success, Broughton and another activist, Robert
Cogwell, went on to found SPEAK,
The Voice of the Animals, a group
whose campaign centred on opposition to similar testing facilities
at Oxford University.
Broughton, who is 48, had previously served a prison sentence in
1999, after the discovery of a bomb
in his car, and was first arrested in
1988 for attempting to free a dolphin from a Lancashire amusement
park. He was charged in connection with the Oxford campaign in
2007, for possession of an explosive substance with intent to commit arson. Although he was later
acquitted of this, the jury could
not reach a conclusion on other
charges against him, leading to a
retrial.
The activist was described by
Judge Patrick Eccles, who presided
over the case, as having been involved in “a ruthless campaign to
instil fear to all those connected to
the laboratory, whether they were
workers, managers, academics or
tradesmen.”
A spokesperson for the University of Oxford told The Cambridge
Student that “the University has
always accepted the rights of protestors to voice their objections
within the law.
“However, we will continue to
work with all relevant authorities
to protect staff and students from
criminal activity of any kind.
“Oxford is committed to the
Mel Broughton, previously active
in animal rights campaigns in Cambridge, was convicted this week in
Oxford.
Photo: Richard Lowkes
principles of replacing, reducing
and refining animal research wherever possible.
“However, there are some areas
of investigation into diseases such
as cancer, stroke, heart disease,
diabetes, HIV, muscular dystrophy,
motor neurone disease, epilepsy,
Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s where
it is simply not possible to make
progress that will save and improve human lives without using
animals”.
SPEAK’s website makes no
mention of Broughton’s conviction, although it does state that
“the SPEAK campaign has never
been involved in illegal activities
against the University”. After the
trial, a spokesperson for the group
said that “we are more determined
than ever to continue the campaign against Oxford University’s
abuse of animals.”
Government delays debate as Unis face financial struggle
Robert Costa
Deputy News Editor
Universities around the country
at risk for bankruptcy will not
see help from the government
until after the next general election, which can be no later than
spring next year.
A major debate in Parliament
expected this year on the current
cap on student fees will now remain dormant as many universities struggle to survive.
Adrian Smith, the government’s Director-General for Science and Research, sparked
controversy when he told The
Guardian “that debate has been
kicked into touch until after the
general election because neither
party wants to touch it. In the
meantime, universities are going bankrupt because they don’t
have enough money.”
Smith’s comments have become an embarrassment to Ministers, who have refused to state
their position on fees until a review is complete.
The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills dis-
agrees with Smith’s claim.
A spokesman at the Department told reporters that:
“Universities are not going
bankrupt and the timing of the
fees review is not a threat to
their financial viability, a view
shared by the Higher Education
Funding Council that administers
the Government’s record investment in higher education, spending the bulk of the £11 billion a
year by 2011.
“The timing of
the review is
not a threat to
the financial
viability of
universities”
“It is inevitable that people
will talk about tuition fees but
Ministers have always been clear
that an independent review will
begin this year following our debate on the future of higher edu-
cation. This remains the case,”
said the spokesman.
Graeme Paton, Education Editor for The Daily Telegraph, reviewed the situation and reported last week that the majority of
students at higher universities
currently pay more than £3,000a-year to cover tuition costs.
“So-called ‘top up’ fees were
introduced in 2006 despite widespread opposition from MPs, students and academics,” said Paton.
“Critics claim students will be left
with debts topping £20,000 when
they leave university under the
new system.”
Vice-chancellors around the
country have been hoping that
the government would raise the
cap as the economic climate
worsens. Yet, speaking in London, Smith questioned whether
the current system is viable in
sustaining universities through
the economic trouble.
“Sooner or later,” the UK may
have to “abandon the complete
market-forces, student-demandled model of higher education,”
said Smith.
“[Do we say] actually ‘some
things are too important just to
be left to student demand [and]
other things are not so important that they should be allowed
to expand hugely because kids
happen to want to do those subjects?
“This is a
damning
criticism of the
Government’s
education
policy”
“This is quite heavy stuff…
how do we design the future and
the financial sustainability of the
higher education system?”
For now, the battle in Westminster continues.
Adam Afriyie, the Conservative Shadow Science Minister,
told The Daily Telegraph:
“It is extraordinary that such
a senior civil servant should
launch such a blistering attack
on the Government’s failure on
science.
“It is a desperate act of a failing Government if ministers are
deliberately exaggerating improvements to hide their failure.
“We need a robust qualifications system in our schools and
a stronger presence for science in
government.”
David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, added:
“This is a damning criticism of
the Government’s education policy.
Ministers cannot simply ignore these comments from someone working at such a senior
level in their own department.
“These comments totally undermine what little faith there
was in the new diplomas and
there must now be an even
greater concern that our education system is failing to stretch
the most able children.
The fact that such a senior
civil servant believes that ministers are exaggerating improvements will shatter confidence in
the Government’s entire education strategy.”
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
08|News
Photo: Vin Shen Ban
Former Malay leader in Cambridge
Robert Costa
Pete Jefferys
The former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Bin Mohammed, visited Cambridge University
on Wednesday, speaking to an audience of over 100 students gathered at Emmanuel College on the
subject of “Malaysia at the crossroads”’
The talk began with the organ-
isers joking that they didn’t want
any flying shoes, in reference to
the incident earlier this month
when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao
narrowly missed being hit by a shoe
during his Cambridge address.
Dr Bin Mohammed was introduced by a student who made it
clear that the former leader was
one of “the most important and
prolific politicians in Malaysian
history” although not one to avoid
controversy, noting that some have
described the ex-Prime Minister as
an “anti-Semite.”
It was a brutally honest way to
begin, since Dr Mohammed was recently quoted as saying “the Jews
rule the world by proxy. They get
others to fight and die for them.”
Dr Bin Mohammed then began
his talk by referencing the driving
themes of his political career. He
noted that he tried to correct inequalities of wealth which divided
his country along racial lines and
claimed “not everyone can make
democracy work.”
Dr Bin Mohammed is 83 years
old and has been a long-time force
in Malaysian politics.He served as
Prime Minister of Malaysia from
1981 to 2003 and is considered one
of the main shepherds of industrialization in his country.
As one BBC political analyist
noted: “While his colourful reputation abroad stemmed from frequent barbed comments about the
West and his scant regard for human rights, his authoritarian but
essentially pragmatic policies at
home won him much popular support and helped transform Malaysia into an Asian economic tiger.”
“The country
has not been
making the
progress we
expect”
“The perception is that government is weak in Malaysia,” said Dr
Bin Mohammed during his lecture.
“There are demands being made
along racial lines. We were progressing for 50 years but now stalling. The people feel like the country is not being well run.”
He also noted caution about
the movement towards free speech
in Malaysia, saying “people want
freedom of speech, an end to racial
division but this had led to weak
government... the country has not
been making the progress that we
expect.”
Whilst noting the benefits of
social and racial cohesion, Dr Bin
Mohammed’s ‘crossroads’, as he defined them, were between focusing
on an economic revival and focusing on full-scale integration.
He noted that the decision was
‘tough’, but the tone of his speech
suggested he favoured the former.
“The racial problem is rearing
its ugly head again in Malaysia,”
he said. “We are at a crossroads.
Either we disregard race and go on
or we cater to demands based on
race.”
“Malaysia was on the road to being developed but a new change of
strategy has stalled this,” Dr Bin
Mohammed continued.
He also commented on the current Malaysian government: “This
government is less racist but that
has led to instability and lack of
growth.”
Although a controversial figure,
the former Prime Minister was supported by most of the audience
and received a standing ovation at
the start of the talk.
After the speech, Dr Bin Mohammed took part in a lively
question and answer session during which he spoke about the new
Obama administration, UK education and the future of Malaysia.
Prof opposes autism screening New Cambridge to
Jen Mills
News Reporter
Research performed by the Cambridge Autism Research Centre has
revealed that increased levels of
testosterone exposure in the womb
can be associated with autistic
traits in children.
Since the results of the research
were announced, some confusion
has arisen in the media as to its implications as a first step to developing a prenatal autism test, with the
ethical issues that this involves.
In actual fact the discovery was
made accidentally by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who opposes
the availability of such a test, and
his team, without any intention of
developing a screening process for
autism.
The discovery was made in a
study of 235 non-autistic children,
which tested the levels of foetal
testosterone and the number of
autistic traits displayed by the children (autistic traits can be present
in anyone, even without the condition).
While this is a significant breakthrough, there is not yet any definitive way to predict if a foetus
will develop autism. Testosterone
levels in the womb have also been
linked to many other characteristics a child may display.
The Cambridge Student (TCS)
recently reported that high foetal
testosterone levels are linked to aggression in men, and that this can
be measured by the length of index finger to ring finger. According
to University of Alberta researchers, the shorter the index finger in
comparison, the more aggressive
the man will be.
“The value
of a person’s
life cannot
be judged by
autistic traits”
Baron-Cohen told TCS that, in
his opinion: “The Guardian seriously confused the public by suggesting that our new research (which
they had misreported) could serve
as a prenatal test for autism, with
all of the ethical issues that such
an idea would raise.”
He said the report in The Guardian that high testosterone levels
cause autism was incorrect, as “all
we had discovered was that higher
levels of testosterone in the womb
is associated with having more autistic traits. it is a subtle but important difference.”
In a correction printed by The
Guardian, he explained that his
personal views are against such a
test. He said, “I believe that if there
was a test for autism (and there is
none yet), while some parents may
exercise their legal right to opt for
a termination, I am not in favour
of discriminating against a foetus
purely because it might develop the
condition.”
Speaking to Community Care, he
stressed that “autism is not a disease” and that people with autism
can still enjoy a high quality of life.
He said, “the value of a person’s life
cannot be judged by characteristics
such as whether they have good or
poor social skills, or whether they
are talented or ordinary or have
learning disabilities.”
In his opinion “no one’s right to
life is greater or less than anyone
else’s.”
London rail route
Katie O’Donoghue
News Reporter
The Government has announced
plans to introduce new ‘superexpress’ trains to rail routes between Cambridge and London.
The aging high-speed trains which
currently run between Cambridge and
the capital will be replaced by lighter,
greener models capable of reaching
up to 125mph. The new trains are
expected to enter service on the East
Coast Main Line in 2013 and to be
fully operational by 2015.
Over 90% of respondents to a
survery online said that they would
welcome a proposed new train station
at Chesterton. Those who frequently
travel on services to London, also embraced promises of a 21% increase in
passenger capacity on the new trains.
One student, Aigneis Cheevers, told
The Cambridge Student (TCS) that
“It’s a relief that this is finally happening, as the trains to London can
become so overcrowded at peak commuter times.”
In the Greater Anglia Route Utilisation Strategy, it was estimated that
by 2021 the number of peak passen-
ger journeys in the Greater Anglia region will grow by an average of 19%,
rising to over 28% if additional capacity is provided.
However, the decision to award the
£7.5b contract for the construction of
the new trains to a Japanese-led consortium has attracted some criticism.
Derby-based locomotive builder Bombardier will manufacture the trains
and the first 70 of 1,400 carriages will
be constructed in Japan.
Unions and opposition MPs reacted
sceptically to government claims that
the contract would secure 12,500 jobs.
“We need to clarify what on earth is
going on and how much work will be
done in this country,” remarked Keith
Hazlewood, of the GMB union.
In response, the Government has
stressed that 70% of the value of the
contract will remain in the UK, and
Transport Secretary Geoff Hoon has
described the plans as the single biggest investment in inter-city trains
for a generation.
“This announcement demonstrates
that this government is prepared to
invest, even in difficult economic
times, by improving our national infrastructure,” said Hoon.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
News|09
New Museum Site
stars in new film
Photo: Sir Cam
Jane Ashford-Thom
News Reporter
Various peculiar occurrences at
the New Museum Site on Sunday,
ranging from cars being mysteriously suspended in midair, to Royal
Mail vans driving where there is no
mailbox and stereotypically dressed
mad professors dashing around the
parking area, have recently been
explained by Mediascape Productions.
Simon and Daniel Griggs, senior
members of the family-run production company, whose mission
statement expresses an “aspiration
to make a statement in the world
of creative media, film and television” are currently using the New
Museum Site to shoot ‘The Parking
Place’; a feature length film about
the conflicts between a Cambridge
professor and a mailman over parking arrangements.
The New Museum Site, off Pembroke Street, houses several University departments, including African
Studies and Chemical Engineering.
The company’s website features
several pictures of the production,
which show tents pitched in the
New Museum Site car park, and
many pictures of a green BMW being lifted by a crane.
In the film, the two characters
are understood to go to drastic measures to secure a particular parking
place.
Their efforts include “camping
out at night, lifting cars about,
playing dead and letting tires
down”.
As well as being a quirky comedy, the film is also intended to resonate on a more profound level with
its audience as a film about class
struggle, through the competition
between “two men from completely
different ends of the social ladder”. It is also understood to have a
“twist” at the end.
The production company are in
partnership with several influential film councils, such as the UK
Film Council, Brit Films and Screen
East, which are contributing to its
£10,000 budget.
The film is due to be released in
2010.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
10|Bursting The Bubble
World News
Italy
Centre-left opposition leader
Walter Veltroni - Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi’s main challenger - resigned on Tuesday
after his Democratic Party suffered a significant defeat in a
local election in Sardinia at the
hands of Berlusconi’s Conservatives.
Sardinia become the second
region the conservatives have
captured from the centre-left
since their victory in April
2008’s national elections.
Mexico
Cambodia
The first UN-backed tribunal of
a former Khmer Rouge leader
has finally opened, 30 years
after Pol Pot’s bloody regime.
People queued for hours to witness the trial, which took place
at Phnom Penh court, Cambodia.
Kaing Guek Eav is charged with
crimes against humanity and is
the first of five defendants from
the ultra-communist regime
under which an estimated 1.7
million people perished.
Russia
Russia, a country hit hard by
the global financial crisis after
years of economic growth, has
announced a significant 15%
cut in its budget for the 2014
Winter Olympics.
Feeling the global pinch, Deputy Prime Minister Dmtry Kozak
said it would be possible to save
about $8.3bn (£5.8bn) on construction costs.
Mali
Some 700 former Tuareg rebels
have surrendered their arms
at a ceremony in Mali, marking their official return to the
peace process. They have been
fighting for a greater political
role and more economic development in their desert region.
The surrender comes following
a promise made by Mali’s government to invest in areas inhabited by the Tuareg nomads
if they abandoned calls for regional autonomy.
Zof Stanley
TCS Reporter
On Monday, local authorities in
the North West Frontier Province
(NWFP) of Pakistan announced a
deal to implement Islamic Sharia
law in the Malakand region, where
Taliban fighters have waged a yearlong campaign. The violence was
concentrated in the district of Swat
valley, once a popular tourist destination.
Though Pakistan’s army sent
troops into Swat in 2007, over 6,000
militants have terrorised the valley
in the past few months, killing local leaders, closing girls’ schools and
forcing an exodus of people.
While local officials claim that
the deal is the only way to put an
end to the insurgency, the militants
have announced a 10-day ceasefire
in order for the peace talks to proceed. The deal, however, has not
yet been formally accepted. President Asif Zardari will sign an order
implementing the law once peace is
fully restored, his office says.
The move was initially met with
a great deal of criticism from the
west, with NATO declaring fears
that the deal would only create a
new “safe haven” for extremists.
Britain’s High Commission in Islamabad also issued a statement expressing concern about the failure
of previous peace deals in Swat: “we
need to be confident that they will
end violence, not create space for
further violence.” On Monday, President Barack Obama’s special envoy
to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, voiced deep concern
about the strength of Taliban mili-
Photo: tenweer1
Hundreds of Mexican demonstrators on the Mexico-US border have blocked key crossings
into the US in protest to the
controversial presence of US
soldiers combating drug trafficking in the country.
While protesters claim that the
soldiers have abused civilians,
Mexican government officials
have said that the blockades
were organised by drug gangs.
Taliban make gains in northern Pakistan
tants in Swat as he ended his first
visit to the region since taking up
his post.
However, the picture might be
somewhat more complex. On Tuesday night, there were reports that
US officials privately backed the
deal as an attempt to split the Taliban concentrated in Swat, led by
Mualana Fazlullah and focused on a
local campaign for Sharia law, from
the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban led by
Baitullah Mehsud, who controls
much of the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border. The fact that the deal is
being brokered by Mr Fazlullah’s
father-in-law, Sufi Mohammad, a
radical cleric who once lead the cry
for Sharia but has since renounced
violence, may lend some support to
this claim.
Mr Mehsud’s organisation, accused of masterminding the assassination of former prime minister
Benazir Bhutto, is viewed as the
more serious threat. With the Swat
Taliban based just 80 miles outside
Islamabad, the alliance between
the two groups has caused alarm
throughout Pakistan and in Washington.
The suggestion that the authorities are seeking to divide the
militants should also be seen in the
context of President Obama’s deployment of 17,000 more troops to
Afghanistan, needed “to stabilize a
deteriorating situation”.
The war in Afghanistan is continuing to impact upon Pakistan’s
delicate political situation. On Monday, after a suspected US drone tar-
geted a Taliban base on the border
of Afghanistan in the fourth missile
attack since President Obama took
office, any lingering expectations
that he might reverse the course
set by the previous administration
were ended. The reported discovery
of a secret CIA airbase in southern
Pakistan has provoked widespread
anger and will put the civilian government, elected only last year, under even more intense pressure.
Mr Zardari recently denounced
the spread of Taliban influence
throughout Pakistan, but he also
admitted that his army lacks the
necessary intelligence to counter
the militant threat. With both fear
and anger growing rapidly amongst
its population, Pakistan faces the
very real danger of destabilisation.
Analysis: Pakistan’s struggle
Sarah Filler
TCS Reporter
As the Swat Valley in north western Pakistan comes under Sharia
law this week, the impact it will
have on an already volatile nation
is uncertain.
What is certain, however, is
that many people now look on
with foreboding at what appears
as an ominous spread of militant
and terrorist power into Pakistan’s
interior.
While some view the peace
deal as promoting the creation
of a Taliban sanctuary in a region
that is already 70% under military control, others view it as a
concession made by a government
embarrassed by the severe losses
sustained in a year of fighting
with guerrilla troops a quarter of
their size. Pakistani analysts are
among those who have criticised
the peace deal which enforces
Sharia law, despite claims from
government officials that the
truce is in the best interests of
the people.
Fundamentally, the government’s image has come under
scrutiny, not only because it has
failed to provide for the safety of
its people, but it has also neglected to restore faith in a tired and
run-down judicial system.
What makes a country, created
in 1947, with fresh hopes for the
future, become so unstable that it
must resort to alternative methods of governance?
Pakistan is home to over 158
million people from a multitude
of diverse ethnic origins. With
95% of the country aligning with
Islam, it is thought that diminished religious diversity and the
blurring of religious and state policies have led to the acceptance of
extremism.
In its short history as a separate state, Pakistan has attempted - unsuccessfully - to exist as
both a democracy and an Islamic
state, oscillating between civilian
governments and military dictatorships. The events of this week
are no different.
Pakistan’s ‘circular history’
seems set to continue as the
government surrenders more and
more authority through delegation. Athar Minallah describes the
government’s actions in relation to Swat as “surrendering to
a handful of extremists” and an
abdication in the face of overpowering insurgency. Events certainly
seem to echo those in the semiautonomous ethnic areas of north
and south Waziristan, which have
both become strongholds for Taliban militants.
The Pakistani government,
however, does not see it in this
light: it views the concessions as a
vital effort to prevent an attempt
by the Taliban to win over remaining residents of the Swat Valley to
their cause.
It is questionable whether
this approach will be successful
or rather, whether it will pose
more of a threat to the country
and the rest of the world as the
Obama administration foresees.
Pakistani legal experts fear that
a truce allowing Sharia law to be
enforced will not only undermine
government policies, but embolden other militant groups in the
country. Musharraf’s government
insists, however, that the composition of the truce is in line with
the constitution and simply activates laws already agreed to by
both Bhutto and Sharif: it is not
recourse to strict Islamic law.
Whether or not the introduction of Sharia law in the Swat Valley will pose a threat to national
integrity will have to be seen. But
undoubtedly, the increasing scope
of Taliban influence is a cause for
concern which needs to be closely
monitored by Musharraf’s steadily
weakening government.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
Bursting The Bubble|11
Chavez allowed to run Kosovo celebrates one
year of independence
for president in 2012
Tuesday witnessed a host of
street parties, open air concerts
and fireworks all over Kosovo as
the country celebrated its first
full year as an independent nation state, and honoured those
who died fighting for its creation.
In a move seen as marking
the final chapter in the bloody
breakup of Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s
ethnic
Albanian-dominated
parliament in Pristina declared
unilateral independence from
Serbia on February 17, 2008.
There were those, however,
who saw no cause for celebration – namely Kosovo’s Serbian
population which accounts for
just 100,000 of the country’s
two million inhabitants. These
Serbs, living predominantly in
the north and clinging to a few
municipalities close to the Serbian border, refuse to accept the
authority of the Kosovo government and stand as a powerful
reminder that ethnic divisions
are very much present in the
region.
“We’ve had quite a tense
situation because Serbs didn’t
recognise the independence
while the Albanians thought
everyone should recognise it,”
Oliver Ivanovic, a moderate Serb
leader and Serbian government
official, told the BBC. “This creates political tension which can
easily escalate and we have had
incidents which have been motivated by this lack of understanding.”
One year on, Kosovo’s declaration of independence has
so far only been recognised by
54 of the UN’s 192 member nations, including the US and Japan. Serbia - backed by China,
Russia and India - vehemently
refuses to recognise Kosovo as
an independent state and, as
such, has won UN General Assembly backing in October to
challenge its legality before the
International Court of Justice
(ICJ) in the Hague. Speaking on
Monday, Serbia’s President Boris Tadic said his country would
never recognise Kosovo: “Serbia
will never take a single action
that implies Kosovo’s independence.” The ICJ is expected to
take between one and two years
to issue its decision on the legality of the breakaway Serbian
territory’s independence.
As a mark of defiance in the
face of the anniversary celebrations, Serbian deputies travelled
from Belgrade to the northern
Kosovo municipality of Zvecan
on Tuesday to attend a session
of their alternative parliament.
Meanwhile, however, speaking before MPs at a special parliament session, Prime Minister
Hashim Thaci said that Tuesday
was the “biggest and most important holiday for the people
of Kosovo,” and hailed his country’s first full year as an independent state as one of “historic
success,” citing such achievement as 6% economic growth,
the creation of thousands of
new jobs, and the construction
of dozens of new schools and
thousands of miles of new roads.
Certainly, in the space of a year
Kosovo has acquired many features of an independent state
including a new constitution,
an army, a national anthem, a
flag, passports, and identity
cards.
While purchasing his nation’s
blue-and-yellow flag for the celebrations, Gezim Pula thought
little of President Tadic’s bold
assertion that “Kosovo is not
a country.” Despite its latest
moves, “Serbia has no impact
on Kosovo and there is no way
back,” said Pula, capturing the
forward-looking mood of the Albanian majority across the nation on Tuesday.
Italy
Truffle trouble
Germany
Beware of balaclava-clad kids
India
Charming!
A top executive has refused to pay
a 4,000 euro bill after dining on
truffles with five guests at Milan’s
two Michelin-starred Cracco restaurant.
Allegedly, the party of six consumed about 300 grams of truffle,
costing an extravagant 10.90 euros
per gram. They refused to pay, however, disputing both the weight and
amount consumed.
Eight police cars and dogs were
dispatched in the German city of
Aachen on Monday after authorities were alerted of two “dodgylooking figures” wearing balaclavas
on a factory site.
After surrounding the site, the
policemen moved in, only to find
beneath the masks a 12-year-old
and 13-year-old pair of mischiefmakers.
Some 1,000 snake charmers have
staged a rally in eastern India, protesting against a law that has made
their profession illegal.
The charmers marched in the
city of Calcutta playing their flutes
and demanding the right to perform with live snakes which has
been banned since 1991. The ban,
they claim, threatens the survival
of their way of life.
once Chavez’s political mentor, calling it “constitutional fraud, which
the country must repudiate and reject.”
The wording was changed in Sunday’s 69-article referendum from that
proposed in 2007 so that permission
to run for more than two terms was
extended to all elected officials and
not just the President. Other articles
in the referendum included a proposed 6-hour working day, leaving
time for “personal development.”
Opinion on Chavez is somewhat
divided: while some claim that he
has reduced the rate of extreme poverty and improved the economy, Un
Nuevo Tempo, the main opposition
party, says the opposite, accusing
Chavez of bringing about the “destruction of the economic system”
leading to inflation and unemployment. They also claim that Venezuela now has the highest inflation of
the Americas, along with the “high-
est level of corruption” excluding
Haiti.
The charismatic President, who is
no stranger to controversy, once described George Bush as “the devil” at
a UN General Assembly in 2006, and
has accused the US of attempting to
stage numerous coups to oust him
from power.
Chavez claims that he needs to
run for President again in 2012 because Venezuela’s “socialist revolution” needs at least another 10 years
to take root. Many Venezuelans
agree: Gonzalo Mosqueda, a 60-yearold shopkeeper, told the Associated
Press on Sunday: “This victory saved
the revolution...Without it everything would be at risk - all the social
programs, and everything [Chavez]
has done for the poor.”
However, Leopoldo Lopez, leader
of Un Nuevo Tempo, called the referendum campaign “the most unequal, the most abusive campaign of
all,” comparing it to a battle between
David and Goliath in which Goliath
won. He suggested that the referendum was successful only because it
had huge government funding and
“blanket state coverage.”
Despite major opposition, the
referendum gained a larger victory
than polls predicted, with a winning
vote of 54%, which was followed
by mass celebrations in the streets
of Caracas. When Chavez addressed
his supporters in Caracas he said: “I
am ready: with today’s victory we
start the third historical cycle of the
Bolivarian Revolution, from 2009 to
2019.”
Predictions have been made that
Chavez will remain in office as long
as his role-model, Fidel Castro did,
who was President of Cuba from
1959 until early last year. However,
concerns have been raised that the
global economic downturn may put
Chavez under more pressure to perform. Perhaps this constitutes one
reason why the referendum has been
held now, before the onset of further
economic difficulties.
Hungary
‘Flying Gizi’
India
Bovine beverage, anyone?
First coming to the police’s attention in the 1950s and convicted
more than 20 times, a notorious
83-year-old Hungarian thief was
caught at a break-in on Thursday.
Kosztor Sandorne, dubbed ‘Flying Gizi’ by the Hungarian media,
has swapped flying - her preffered
mode of ‘get-away’ transport - for
the train which is free for pensioners in Hungary.
A hard-line Hindu organization is
planning to launch a new soft drink
made from cow’s urine.
The flavour is still unknown,
though a spokesman has said that
it may contain products such as
aloe vera and gooseberry.
Many Hindus consider cow urine
to have medicinal properties and
it is often drunk in religious festivals.
Abi Williams
TCS Reporter
Photo: Rogimmi
Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, won a referendum on Sunday
allowing him to run for president
again in 2012.
Following the socialist leader’s
rise to power after a coup in 1998,
Chavez was re-elected in 2006.
However, Venezuela’s constitution
previously barred anyone from running for office after two consecutive
terms. Chavez has now stated that
“unless God has planned something
else, unless the people have planned
something else”, he intends to run
again in 2012.
The referendum has attracted
much controversy, with opposition
parties accusing Chavez of running
an ‘unequal’ and ‘abusive’ campaign.
The referendum was originally rejected in 2007, with Luis Miquilina,
Sophie Rodger
International News Editor
Mad World
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
12|Bursting The Bubble
ICC to issue arrest warrant for Sudanese Head of State
Rachel Hamburg
TCS Reporter
sonnel in the region. Any outburst
could put these individuals in
danger, in addition to thousands
more NGO and aid workers present
there.
Destabilization would also endanger the millions of refugees
who have been driven from their
villages in Darfur and into camps
that are protected by joint UN-AU
peacekeeping forces. The Security
Council, as well as other members
of the UN, must weigh up these
considerations. Yet, despite worries
about how Bashir and his country
will respond, most international
human rights organizations support the indictment.
The conflict in the Darfur region
of Sudan began in 2003, when the
Sudanese government began arming Janjaweed Arab militias to carry out attacks against rebel groups
in the region. The Janjaweed’s primary tactic has been a scorched
earth campaign, attacking, burning, and otherwise destroying the
villages of Darfurians who are the
same ethnicity as the rebels. More
than half a million people have
been killed in the region, and at
least 2.5 million displaced. These
millions of refugees rely on international aid groups for survival
Photo: Damas_Fin_008
Tension has been mounting in The
Hague after news broke last week
concerning the impending indictment of Sudanese president, Omar
al-Bashir for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.
The International Criminal Court
(ICC) is expected to release a warrant for Bashir’s arrest within the
next two weeks, making him the
first head of state to be indicted
by the court since its formation in
2002.
While Britain, France, and the
US have supported the move for
Bashir’s indictment, China and
Russia, the UN Security Council’s
other two permanent members,
are calling for the indictment to be
deferred, as are the African Union,
the Arab League, the Organisation
of the Islamic Conference, and the
Group of 77, an influential UN bloc
of developing nations.
Those against the indictment
are calling for the Security Council
to invoke Article 16 of the Rome
Statute, which would require the
ICC investigation to be postponed
for 12 months.
Opponents of the indictment
argue that it would destabilize Sudan, and that any peace that has
been brokered between the government and the rebel groups would
be jeopardized.
According to a senior diplomat
from one of Darfur’s neighbouring
countries, “If the court is allowed
to go ahead, it will cause a lot of
trouble for the whole Horn of Africa
region. Sudan is big. It touches everyone.” Some have also expressed
anger over the ICC’s involvement in
the Darfur conflict, calling it an instance of “white man’s justice.”
Since the request of the ICC’s
chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, for the issue of a warrant for
Bashir last year, a three-judge panel has reviewed the report which
charges Bashir - leader of Sudan
since 1989 – with responsibility for
the recent crimes and atrocities in
Darfur. Sudan, however, does not
recognize the ICC, which has previously indicted two Sudanese officials for war crimes in Darfur, neither of whom has been surrendered
to the court.
For the UN, the case is sensitive not only because of issues of
violating state sovereignty, which
it is designed to protect, but also
because there are 20,000 UN per-
and safety.
Intervening in Darfur has been a
volatile issue for the international
community since it began in 2003.
In the past five years, though, despite widespread outcry against the
atrocities committed in the region,
the international community has
failed to uphold the promise, ‘never
again,’ that was first made after the
Holocaust, and then again after
genocides occurred throughout the
second half of the 20th century.
The conflict in Darfur has al-
ready destabilized neighboring
Chad, and the rest of Sudan is also
at risk of spiraling into violence.
This year, South Sudan will vote on
whether to secede from the North,
and tension between North and
South, which were embroiled in
a devastating civil war until 2005
will inevitably mount.
Many believe that the Darfur
conflict must be appeased before
the North-South treaty expires, or
the country will be at even greater
risk of another civil war.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
Comment|13
Kicking the Stamford Bridge Blues
Abramovich is one of the few who might have something to learn from the banking community
Tal
Grant
A
Queens’
banner displayed
during Chelsea’s recent disappointing
performance against
Hull read “Three
months of excuses
and it’s still crap. Ta ra Scolari”.
Shortly afterwards, Big Phil became
the most recent victim of the Chelsea manager turnover binge.
‘Chelsea have had more managers than I’ve had hot dinners’ said
the 30-day old baby on the tube the
other day. Including Jose Mourinho’s chop, three Blues managers
have been sacked in quick succession, each at a time when Chelsea
were seen to be slipping from title
contention. Except for Grant, who
just wasn’t famous enough.
Economic theory would have
you believe that this hiring and
firing malarkey has no place if you
want results. Central banks around
the world have increasingly become
more independent to better serve
the interests of society (i.e. provide
low inflation), in an effort to legally restrict economy-boosting, shortterm-thinking politicians. While
such plans have recently gone to
ground as central banks have been
succumbing to politicians and
dropping interest rates at the drop
of a hat, they are based on sound
theory.
Alex Cukierman, a leading economist at the Tel Aviv University,
developed an important measure
of central bank independence: the
central bank governor turnover
rate. A low rate implies that central
bank governors are not replaced on
a regular basis (on the whim of the
ruling party), but outlast different
political regimes, being independent of the gory political process
and hence able to provide beneficial outcomes for the people.
The same could be said about
football management. If owners
stayed out of the process and let
football managers find their feet,
maybe results would follow. Not
that plying world-class footballers
with champagne and cash on your
oligarchic yacht won’t help an
incumbent manager – although
Shevchenko was wank – but leaving
the manager to do his job might be
the best policy for club owners.
Luiz Felipe Scolari is a proven
top-level manager. My goodness,
Chelsea are fourth, get over it!
It’s not even his team he’s playing with! Inheriting the likes of
Drogba and John Terry isn’t exactly
a bad deal, but Scolari even hinted
in the recent transfer window that
he wanted to make some trades,
but that such a decision was out of
his hands. Perhaps a couple more
summers might have allowed him
to fully see out his vision.
The Chelsea
board must
learn that their
short-termism
will not be
rewarded
Look back at the banner I
opened with. I’ll confess, I made
it up. The banner actually read
“Three years of excuses and it’s
still crap. Ta ra Fergie.” It was held
up by Manchester United fans during the 1989-90 season, following
a dissapointing start to the season
where Alex Ferguson managed six
losses and two draws from eight
games, three years after he took
charge of the club.
But the United owners kept the
Glaswegian on and, despite his
penchant for chasing away greats
like Van Nistelrooy and Beckham,
as a manager he is practically flawless. Rafa Benitez, too, has been
given the time to build his team
and is en route to a championship
if he keeps it up.
Then again, a separate economic
theory exists to suggest that incentives are crucial and perhaps the
threat of the sack might serve to
give managers a good kick up the
arse and eradicate complacency.
Danny Fiszman & Co. might want
to pursue that concept. But, managers must at least be given time
and space to do their thing, and
the gung-ho hire-and-fire culture
of football managers in its most extreme form must be moderated.
The Chelsea board must learn
that their short-termism will not
be rewarded. ‘Long live Hiddink’
banners might be the best policy if
you are a Chelsea fan.
Tal Grant is a 3rd year Economics
student
Enough of our nuclear negligence
Unless we can come up with means of responsible waste disposal, nuclear power simply isn’t viable
Peter
Wood
A
Robinson
Isn’t it time
that the
government
stopped
promoting
nuclear power?
With very little fanfare, they
recently found that the Sellafield
MOx Plant, one of the key units in
the medium term management of
the UK’s nuclear waste was com-
pletely unfit for purpose, as such it
should probably be shut.
How has this not been bigger
news? I’d be the first to admit that
policy documents aren’t as interesting as the Newnham Nuns performing fellatio on an oompa loompa.
But oompa loompas don’t pose
threats to national security. If terrorists get hold of an oompa loompa, they can’t use it to contaminate
London for the next 240,000 years.
Professor Andrew Blowers, an expert
on the nuclear power industry, once
described Sellafield as “possibly the
most dangerous place on earth”.
And yet the government still wants
to move forward with creating a
new generation of nuclear waste.
There’s nothing wrong with nuclear power, per se. The new power
plants aren’t that likely to go into
meltdown. Even if a similar scale
accident to Chernobyl would make
much of the South East uninhabitable for a good few thousand years.
The most worrying part about nuclear power is the waste. We just
don’t know what to do with it, and
we never have.
There are only two real options,
long term deep geological disposal,
or short term in storage in fuel
ponds. They’re not great. The fuel
pond means leaving radioactive
waste in reservoirs until we know
what to do with it permanently. The
geological disposal means boring a
mile deep hole into the ground and
sealing it in forever, which is about
as long as it takes to stop being
dangerous.
These aren’t viable options. To explain, just imagine it’s the washing
up. The fuel pond is like leaving the
whole mess in the sink and praying
that someone invents a dishwasher,
and quickly. In the mean time you
have to stand guard and make sure
that your bedder doesn’t steal it
to make a bomb, or mistake it for
something else and spread radioactive waste all over the kitchen. The
geological disposal is as high-tech
as throwing the whole lot out the
window and hoping that no-one
ever goes in the garden.
Nuclear power had its chance in
the 1970s. We still don’t have a long
term plan to deal with radioactive
waste. We can’t watch over it until
it stops being radioactive, and we
don’t know how much it will cost
to clean everything up. We are just
finishing 60 years of nuclear power,
there is no reason to do it again.
Peter Wood is a 3rd year Geography student.
Image: dog on wheels
fter 60 years of trying, the UK still has
no way to permanently dispose of
nuclear waste. Now
the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is recommending that large parts of the
Sellafield nuclear waste reprocessing plant should be considered a failure and shut down. Isn’t it time that
the government stopped promoting
a new generation of nuclear power?
The nuclear power industry in
Britain is currently in a state of
flux. The last generation of reactors
are aging away, and by 2025 only
Sizewell B will still be operating.
Against this, the government is
currently establishing the planning
regulations for a new generation of
nuclear power plants, the first to be
built since 1995.
Until recently, the national
strategy has been to keep the existing power plants in operation, but
to avoid building any more until
we worked out what to do with the
tonnes of highly radioactive waste
that are already being produced every year.
The NDA, for the 99% of students
who haven’t heard of it, is the government body with responsibility
for the UK’s nuclear legacy. It is essentially charged with formulating
strategies for decommissioning old
nuclear power stations and dealing with the radioactive waste they
leave behind.
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14|Comment
(A)pathetic?
Critics of student activism miss the point
Liam
McNulty
t feels apt to be writing this
piece in the wake of the occupation of the Law Faculty
in solidarity with Gaza and
more than a dozen similar occupations across the UK. The
diverse range of students acting for
motives ranging from the political to
the simply humane underscores the
fact that not all students are apathetic and indifferent to the world
around them.
The motivations for this article
are two-fold: partly to counteract
the predictable torrent of bile that
will emanate from certain sections
of the student community, and
partly because such outpourings of
reactionary criticism appear in the
student press every time Cambridge
students take action of any sort on
virtually any issue. This article is
posed as a challenge to those who
readily wield their pens at any sign
of student activism; a criticism of
the attitudes that account for this
knee-jerk response, and a defense
of student protest, especially those
who acted on their consciences and
occupied the Law Faculty.
It would be wise to flag up a few
qualifications. Legitimate criticism
of student activism, made in good
faith and with constructive intentions, is something that no one
should resent, provided that the
critic has an alternative solution
and is not merely denigrating the
personal character of activists. Reflection on the efficacy of particular
means to reach certain ends is both
helpful and healthy.
The student
occupations
are part of a
reawakening
of sleeping
consciences
Unfortunately, this is not the sort
of criticism that one often finds in
the pages of TCS and Varsity. Time
and again we read attacks on the
character of activists, questioning
their right to take action, founded
solely on negativity, pessimism and
unconstructive ranting.
All of this misses the point that
it matters not who the activists are
but what they are doing. Raising
awareness of issues is a good in and
Sweeping condemnation of films like The Reader is unwarranted
Image: qba from Poland
I
Homerton
of itself and achieving tangible and
meaningful change is even better.
Don’t shoot the messenger if the
message is the right one. Ad hominem attacks are the refuge of those
with nothing to contribute; smearing people as Bolsheviks helps no
one.
The important point to raise
about the occupations of student
campuses is that it is part of a national movement and a re-awakening of the sleeping consciences of
Britain’s students. Many of those
taking part in the occupations did
not originally intend to, but were
fired up by scenes of the sheer humanitarian crisis in the aftermath
of Gaza.
Hollywood humanisation
Jess
Touschek
Caius
It matters
not who the
activists are
but what they
are doing
An occupation is not an isolated
spectacle but a link in the chain of
solidarity, inter-connected in real
time through social networking
and the internet. It is this connection with other students across the
country that injects meaning into
the protests and helps to sustain
them when spirits are low. On our
own it would mean nothing; there
is indeed no force weaker than the
feeble strength of one. It would be
premature to draw any comparisons
with forty years ago but this movement hopefully has the potential to
become our generations’ contribution to the ongoing struggle for a
better world, a digitally-remastered
version of the soixante-huitards.
There are many things wrong
with our global society, most of
them beyond our capacity to affect
change. However, students can force
their universities to take real action
to alleviate some of the suffering in
Gaza. Institutions such as ours are
very rich, very powerful institutions
and their investment choices can
have a real impact on the world.
Students felt that the usual
channels for dialogue were closed
and had little faith in the Kafkaesque university bureaucracy to deliver tangible results in a reasonable
timeframe. It was for that reason
they took action. I would ask all
the critics and pessimists to use
their energy constructively and join
with all of us to make a difference.
Together.
Liam McNulty is a 1st Year History student
K
ate Winslet’s runaway
train of an awards
season seems to have
been tainted this
week by a flurry of
infuriated comment
on the film that got her there. Ron
Rosenbaum of the online magazine
Slate spends 3000 words churning
out reasons for dubbing The Reader
“The Worst Holocaust Film Ever
Made”, chief among which is its purported “desire to exculpate the German people of guilt for the crimes of
the Hitler era.”
I don’t have a particular problem with Rosenbaum’s rabid dislike of the film: I saw it and was
moved by it, though I agree that
the appalling decision of Winslet’s
character to allow 300 Jews to burn
alive is glossed over far too lightly
by Stephen Daldry.
My personal bugbear is the histrionic insistence on a collective
and continued national guilt, and
the impulse to characterise every
German who lived through the Nazi
regime as a contemptible, inhuman
murderer.
Six decades
on, it is time
for some small
measure of
understanding
I should confess that I’m in an
unusual position. My maternal
grandmother is a Bavarian German;
my paternal grandfather was an
Austrian Jew. My other grandfather
was a member of the Royal Navy. I
doubt there can be many sides to
this execrable story that I haven’t
heard from one relative or another,
and though I would never claim my
perspective to be unimpeachable, I
do think that, six decades on from
the start of the Second World War,
it is time for some small measure of
understanding.
There is no excuse for the Holocaust. None. It was a crime of sickening and monstrous proportions,
and one whose legacy has haunted
and will continue to haunt the
world well into the future. However, the idea that each German was
as liable as the next warrants some
qualification.
The assertion that the public
were unaware of the transportation
and extermination of vast swathes
of the population (maintained to
this day by many Germans, including members of my family) takes
some swallowing. In my opinion
it was probably more a case of not
wanting to see the truth rather
than a wholesale ignorance. The
difficult question we have to ask
ourselves is whether, in similar circumstances, we would behave any
differently.
One forgets, for example, just
how rigid a structure of control
Hitler managed to establish within
a few short years of gaining power.
Deluges of dogmatic propaganda,
combined with the carrot-and-stick
approach of prosperity for the obedient and violent harassment for
the dissenting, inevitably nurtured
a strict don’t ask/don’t tell policy.
I’m loathe to draw such a hideously disturbing comparison,
but it should also be pointed out
that Barack Obama is not the first
politician to be elected to office
by promising hope to a populace
stricken by financial hardship. Had
they taken the time to read Mein
Kampf, the sheer wickedness of
Adolf Hitler might have been immediately obvious, but the simple fact is that the vast majority
didn’t. And by the time they began
to wake up to it, it was already too
late.
It is ridiculous to suggest, as
Rosenbaum does, that the German people themselves were not
victims of the Nazi regime. They
were forced into a devastating war,
just as we were, then had to live
through 45 years of fragmented
foreign occupation, expected to
perform a ceaseless ritual of selfflagellation that, if people like Ron
Rosenbaum had their way, would
continue into perpetuity. The generation growing up in Germany today certainly mustn’t be allowed to
forget – no-one must – but should
they have to pay hand-over-fist for
the failures of their grandparents
or even great-grandparents?
Would we
behave
differently
in similar
circumstances?
It’s comforting to believe that,
faced with the same situation, we
would stand up for the right, risking our lives and livelihoods in the
face of overwhelming odds and
incomprehensible evil, but we celebrate heroes for a reason: they are
rare. Kate Winslet plays an ordinary
woman, blighted by personal demons, who colludes with the most
despicable organisation history has
ever known. If she deserves her
punishment, she also deserves a
modicum of our compassion.
It is understandable that films
which attempt to humanise the
Nazis, such as The Reader, Downfall, and even Tom Cruise’s ludicrous Valkyrie, are often greeted
with indignation and disgust.
They are, however, invaluable – if
only because, in showing ordinary
people performing extraordinary
crimes, they remind us that nothing is beyond the bounds of common humanity. Unless we remain
alert to that truth we run the risk
of history repeating itself with unthinkable consequences.
Jess Touschek is a 2nd year English student and TCS Comment CoEditor
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
Comment|15
Flushing culture down the ‘Tube
YouTube is the final mind-numbing step in the dumbing-down of the entertainment industry
Jack
Rivlin
Downing
I
have a difficult relationship with YouTube. As
much as I enjoy watching
videos of pandas sneezing,
I can’t help finding it all a
bit crude. The problem with
YouTube is that whilst it is undeniably fun, it is also a part of a problem
which has for a long time gripped the
entertainment industry: the lowest
common denominator approach. The
paradox of the internet is that as our
ability to communicate improves, so
too does our desire to put it to useless ends.
The new generation of userdirected websites like YouTube
and Facebook have been hailed
as a ‘democratic’ phenomenon,
whereby information – and media
created by laymen rather than
super-rich corporations - can be
shared easily between ordinary
people. The reality is very different. YouTube is owned by Google,
a company worth £33bn, and Facebook makes its money through
what is essentially the sale of its
members’ personal information.
YouTube is paid to feature certain
videos, and has become a fertile
advertising ground for music and
films. It is no coincidence that
the one useful user-run website
of any importance is Wikipedia, a
non-profit organization.
Meanwhile, the truly ‘democratic’ content, the actual usercreated videos paint an even
more depressing picture of modern culture. Seemingly millions
of brain-dead Americans have
created videos featuring one of
three things: low-quality videos
of girls in their underwear; cover versions of songs they heard
on Guitar Hero III; and rants to
their webcams on the intolerance
of Islam. The dream that YouTube could combat apathy and
be a new site of political engagement is just a dream. None of
the top 13 most viewed videos
about Barack Obama feature Barack Obama.
It gets worse. Perhaps the best
argument against democratic
media is a 30 second visit to
2girls1cup.com - a website featuring a video so depraved that
you are forced to be entertained.
Shouldn’t we be concerned that
a video featuring women shitting into a cup and vomiting on
each other has become one of
the defining images of our generation? The truth is that we live
in a 2girls1cup society. We want
crude, naked information, and
we want to either laugh or vomit
within 60 seconds.
None of the 13
most viewed
videos about
Barack Obama
feature Obama
Depth has been sacrificed in
favour of a vacuous world of entertainment where Paul O’Grady
is considered worthy of an MBE.
YouTube is symptomatic of what
art critic Waldemar Januszczak called our “cut and paste
society.” No one truly creates
anything these days: they simply cut and paste ideas and images from somewhere else. Who
wants to write a good sitcom? It
is far easier to make a montage
of tramps beating each other up
and set it to a backing track by
Scouting For Girls, a band with a
sound so manufactured you can
almost smell the Bakelite.
We are now trapped in a vicious circle. YouTube is so deeply
ingrained in our culture that
life has begun to imitate art - it
has become a source of culture.
Happy Slapping videos may have
been removed from the website
but the phenomenon continues,
replicating the original videos
that appeared on the internet.
Anthony Anderson hit the news
last year after he urinated on
a woman as she lay dying and
shouted “this is YouTube material.” If we dumb-down our culture, we diminish ourselves. A
video appears on YouTube, we
give it a 5 star rating and thousands of similar ones appear:
each as devoid of imagination as
the next.
This problem of the media is
not about snobbery; it is about
‘high’ or ‘low’ culture. No one can
genuinely argue that Big Brother
or Chris Croker’s Leave Britney
Alone are anything more than a
cheap, unchallenging thrill. But
challenging the viewer is what
genuinely brilliant entertainment does: comedy or not, a
video should do more than just
extract a mindless guffaw from
the viewer. The great fallacy of
the YouTube generation is that
we can create something that
can be enjoyed by everyone. The
result has been a ‘lowest common
denominator’ approach to entertainment. It’s not that I didn’t
enjoy sex xxx hardcore like the
other 22,062,475 people who
have watched it, I just think that
‘sarah69legs’ could do something
better with his or her camera.
Jack Rivlin is a 2nd year PPSIS
student and TCS Comment CoEditor
Image: Cl émentine Beauvais
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
Interview|16-17
Parliament Square goes up in smoke
George Marangos-Gilks talks to Legalise Cannabis
Alliance activist Don Barnard
Photo: Ryan Macnamara
‘It isn’t
possible to
change this
regime through
democratic
means’
a spliff. He was 67 but had a lively
and mischievous spirit that revelled
in telling stories. He explained that
he smoked to ease arthritic pains
but that he had also been a recreational user all his life.
He said: “When I was campaign-
22% of 16-24year-olds used
cannabis in
2005-6
ing in the 60s, 70s and 80s smoking was a private thing but at large
festivals like Smokey Bears picnics
everyone did it and the police just
stood by and watched. It all depends upon the situation.
“Back in the day we never got
nicked because we were quite a
powerful lobby and the media loved
us. There were thousands of us, all
out for the cause, all standing and
fighting together. By the 80s and
90s society became more tolerant
so people didn’t have as much to
fight for. Today attitudes are reversing – society is becoming more
intolerant but people are scared to
stand up in support of cannabis
because they fear losing or being
denied a job. People put themselves
first; everyone is too comfortable
and happy; they only care about
themselves and that’s a shame. It’s
a shame that I don’t see students at
rallies anymore.
“In the late 1990s Howard Marks
(‘Mr. Nice’) and veteran cannabis
campaigner Rob Cannabis (who
changed his name by deed poll)
regularly led groups of campaigners
to police stations demanding to be
arrested; it never happened. I recall
one occasion in Norwich when we
got to the police station and the
doors were locked so we couldn’t
hand ourselves in.”
As we went to find a quiet cafe
Don stopped by a policeman and
asked: “I know you’re not allowed
to have an opinion, Officer, but if
you could, wouldn’t you like to be
here with us today, smoking a gentle bit of weed?”
The officer smiled and replied:
“Like you said, I can’t have an opinion; ask me when I’m off duty.”
Don let out one of his boyish
laughs and continued: “So how
have things been today then?”
The officer responded: “Fine,
there’s been no trouble at all, very
civilised, the odd whiff of cannabis every now and then but no
problems.” I respected the officer’s
tolerance and diplomacy - “whiff”
was a massive understatement, the
place reeked – you could smell it in
any direction for 30 metres.
This was a weird situation. I was
in Parliament Square demonstrating
against a decision to make cannabis even more illegal, yet everyone
was breaking the law and smoking
openly in front of police officers.
Isn’t it hypocritical of the Police
to turn a blind eye?
“Yeah, it’s bullshit. They say one
thing and do another. The Govern-
ment is saying that cannabis is
harmful; that’s why it’s illegal. They
claim the reclassification reflects
the increased potency and that this
increases the danger of use. But the
Government doesn’t treat cannabis
in the same way as other widelyused harmful drugs like alcohol and
tobacco.
“We all know the dangers of alcohol and tobacco but we will never
stop using them. The Government
understands this so focuses on
regulating not banning. Remember
that alcohol and tobacco are drugs
too – they are just legal and regulated which means the negative
side effects are limited. The Government tries to advertise the dangers,
to educate and to inform people of
the harm they can do. They also
help those who are abusing it. They
put a tax on it to discourage its use.
They put age limits on to protect
the young. They specify situations
when you’re not allowed to use the
drug such as when driving.
“This doesn’t happen for cannabis. We all know it is harmful. The
So you are saying that the current
system is failing; that we get the
worst of both worlds, that people
use cannabis but completely unregulated?
“Precisely. Because we have to
buy cannabis illegally we are exposed to a criminal world of violence and hard drugs. Even before
we smoke we are at risk and there
is the problem of quality because
it is not in the public domain and
no regulation takes place. ‘Soap
bar hash,’ largely from Morocco, is
polluted with all sorts of unknown
dangerous substances.
“In the US, alcohol is regulated
so it is hard for teenagers to procure. Weed isn’t so it’s relatively
easier to get – they are a nation
of teen potheads. Dealers there and
everywhere will sell to kids of any
age. There is no protection for the
young at all. There is also far less
advice and information of the effects. Sure there are web pages like
‘Talk to Frank’ that inform people
of the risk but these are limited in
scope and influence. Anyway, talking to Frank and frank talking are
not the same thing.”
So what is the solution?
“I would like to see cannabis removed completely from the Misuse
of Drugs Act. For cannabis to be
sold in an outlet of some description. We can’t have coffee shops
because of the general smoking
ban, but essentially I want to see
a system in which cannabis is not
illegal but regulated. Cannabis
outlets would separate the trade in
cannabis from the trade in Class A
and Class B drugs. Users could get
good quality and safe cannabis,
for a fair price in a safe environment and it would only be sold to
those legally old enough. All of
this would also put money back
into the economy not the pockets
of drug dealers. This money could
also be used to help fight the worst
effect of cannabis use.
So just how dangerous is cannabis?
“It’s the most dangerous drug in
the world. It can land you in jail
for 5 years. How much more danger
do you want from a drug?”
“Officer,
wouldn’t you
like to be here
with us today,
smoking a
gentle bit of
weed?”
And in terms of health implications?
“Well it is harmful. But looked
at in a relative context it is far less
harmful than either alcohol or tobacco. Cannabis has never killed
anyone- the other two are mass
killers. There have been hundreds
of studies on the physical and psychological effects but they all end
in small print. More information is
needed.
“Saying that, I’ve read hundreds of reports that conclude cannabis use is relatively safe. Some
research suggests small minorities
of people do suffer some negative
psychological effects but even then
this is extremely hard to prove. It
is hard to say definitively that cannabis caused a mental problem and
that it was not some other factor.
For example, many argue that cannabis doesn’t induce psychological
disorders but that the type of person likely to use cannabis is also
likely to suffer from psychological
disorders.
“Smoking anything puts you at
risk of cancer because combustion
creates carcinogens but we don’t
have to smoke cannabis to gets its
effects. We can always eat it or use
a vaporiser. Regardless, if people
feel cannabis is having a negative
influence they should simply stop
using it. The law doesn’t force anyone to smoke it merely gives you
the option.”
At this point Don handed me a
list of quotes from reputable sources and scientific journals. The following two stood out:
DEA Judge Francis Young
“In strict medical terms marijuana
is far safer that many foods we
commonly consume. For example,
eating 10 raw potatoes can result
in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to
eat enough marijuana to induce
death.”
Lester Grinspoon, MD, Harvard.
“Cannabis is remarkably safe. Although not harmless, it is surely
less toxic that most of the conventional medicines we use every
day.”
I continued my questions.
Is the Government infringing
upon our liberty by stopping us
from using cannabis?
“Yes. Cannabis use is a matter of
personal choice. The Government
has no right to stop me using it.
If we have the right to harm ourselves through drinking alcohol
and smoking tobacco shouldn’t we
have a similar right to do so with
cannabis? If there is no victim
there is no crime. Who am I hurting other than myself if I smoke?
“This matter does not concern
the state. Cannabis users are not
a drain on society. Unlike alcohol,
which makes people aggressive and
violent, cannabis is calming and
peaceful. There are no grounds for
the Government to argue that my
using cannabis has a negative effect upon others. I’m 67, how does
my smoking a bit of weed to ease
my arthritic pain and relax impact
upon anyone else?
“The onus should be on the Government to prove why I shouldn’t
be allowed to smoke. But the Government is happy to hide behind
the Law and refuse to open up
debate about it. I’d like to see a
lot more discussion of the matter.
I’d like to see your researchers and
professors in Cambridge carry out
further testing and research of its
effect.
“In addition I’d like to see students reading these studies and
thinking critically about the Law
and enforcement strategy. Everyone should be looking at the successes and failures of the current
strategy to cannabis. I’m quite sure
that if people go through the arguments and consider them carefully
they too will see the violation of
rights that is taking place.”
Photo: Ryan Macnamara
C
annabis – it’s illegal but
widely available, widely
used and widely tolerated. According to the
British crime survey,
22% of 16-24-year-old
used cannabis in 2005-06. Given its
prevalence, you could be forgiven
for thinking that Government will
slowly adopt the liberal Dutch attitude. But the opposite is happening; a couple of weeks ago, on the
28th of January, cannabis jumped
classification categories from C to
B. It now carries a maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment for possession (up from 2) and/or an unlimited fine. In protest to the jump,
The Legalise Cannabis Alliance held
a day long demonstration in Parliament Square.
I went along to join in the festivities and meet Don Barnard, a
prominent figure in the party. In
prior correspondence, Don told me,
“if you have any trouble finding me
ask a guy with a pink beard to point
me out”. It worked. Don greeted me
with a hand shake and handed me
logic of the Government is to make
it illegal because this stops anyone
using it which in turn stops any
harm but we all know that people
will never stop smoking. Why not
regulate it like they do with alcohol and tobacco? Now, I don’t believe cannabis is harmful enough
to warrant being illegal, but for the
sake of argument let’s say it is. It
is clear that cannabis law enforcement is ineffectual. Everyone is
bloody smoking and the Government knows it.
Why is the Government maintaining these double standards;
saying we shouldn’t smoke it but
allowing smoking to continue? This
sort of approach pushes cannabis
into a grey area and that benefits
no one.
“If I get caught with any other
Class B drug I will automatically get
arrested. There is no warning, no
on the spot fine. But those caught
with cannabis are hardly ever arrested, they are cautioned and let
go. So cannabis isn’t really a Class
B or a Class C. It lies in-between in
a grey area. “
Have you ever been prosecuted
for smoking cannabis?
“Not for smoking, but I was done
for cultivating cannabis in 1994.
A few weeks after I was arrested a
doctor in Liverpool was found not
guilty for supplying cannabis to
his daughter who had MS. Being
a political animal I thought ‘I’ll
have some of that’. I pleaded not
guilty on the grounds of medical
necessity but it didn’t work.
In the end I was ordered to do
50 hours community service but
it was great. We spent the whole
time smoking joints and cutting
hedges. Since then there have
been a number of people contesting the law in court – some won
some lost.”
Do you know of anyone who has
received the maximum 5 year
jail sentence?
“The short answer is ‘no’. In
theory anyone caught it possession can go away for 5 years but
I don’t know of anyone getting
banged up for that long. In reality prison sentences for possession are extremely rare. It could
happen; it all depends upon the
circumstances and the discretion
of the court.
Mostly people receive a warning, then heavy fines, then community service before jail is considered. This begs the question
why the maximum penalty has
been increased if it is never going
to be used.”
18|Editorial and Letters
The
CambridgeStudent
Protest begins at home
Given the furore over Cambridge’s Socially Responsible Investment Policy- or
lack thereof- over the weekend, and
the occupation of the Law Faculty a
couple of weeks ago, one would be hard
pushed not to be under the impression that student activists are pretty
focussed on the University’s policies
and how its actions affect people often many thousands of miles away.
That said, it is rare that we witness students protesting on behalf
of a group of people rather closer to
home; university staff, the people
behind the scenes at Cambridge.
This week we learned about a female member of the catering staff at
Christ’s who felt forced out of her job
amidst alleged aggression and racism.
Yet it is seldom that we see campaigns
concerned with the wellbeing of college kitchen staff or bedders, many of
whom come from outside Britain. The
reason that the 29-year-old Frenchwoman’s story seems to have come out
of nowhere is that this kind of thing
is rarely talked about by students.
Likewise, when was the last time
you heard a student worrying about
the wages of female university employees? Yet a recent ‘pay audit’ published in The Reporter has revealed
“significant” gaps between the salaries
of men and women at Cambridge, and
that women are outnumbered by their
male contemporaries almost seven
to one in senior academic positions.
These are not issues that you tend
to see on the hastily-photocopied
leaflets stuffed into your hands as
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
Volume 11 Issue 15
Old Examination Hall, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF
Tel: 01223 761685
you scurry between lectures, or on
homemade banners clutched by students outside the Senate House.
Yet the Editors of this publication are
heartened by one exception to this trend
that they have seen this week: last Saturday a group of over 350 workers and their
supporters marched through the streets
of Cambridge to protests against 160
proposed job cuts at Cambridge University Press. Among their ranks was a large
number of students. This is not an issue
that will directly affect any of the young
people who demonstrated on that day,
but hearing their voices join the shouts
of “what is your priority? Save the jobs
at CUP!” reassured this Co-Editor that
Cambridge students are not all so fixated
on the big picture that they are blind to
the problems facing people in this city.
Crossword
By Apis
Answers in next
week’s edition
Across
1.Ultimately, keep losing
your hats (6)
4.About Alf’s family vellum
(8)
9.Radio source quality
reduced specific absorption
rate (6)
10.19 used to weave
atmosphere, by the sound of
it (8)
12. Amelia Earhart’s fourth
to disappear by way of
unfinished trip to unknown
(8)
13. Clumsily stubs a toe,
removing aliens from
submarines (1-5)
15. Smooth part of San Diego
(4)
16.Smashed massive lid that Apis claims may be
found in a bath of loquats (5,5)
19.Correctly deliver inheritance (10)
20. Town in which jazz trumpeter and loquats may be
found, according to Apis (4)
23. Slightest pause put me in front (6)
25. Ram five icky apple tops in birdhouses (8)
27. Adherent’s circle pleads briefly, grasping one (8)
28.Spit weed specifically left where lettuce heart
should be (6)
29. Legal disputer’s brief literally holding back horse
computers (8)
30. Catalyst gives energy to couple of unknowns in
music magazine (6)
Down
1. Behold: roofless illegally-occupied homes which
Apis says Miles Davis may bathe in (7)
Your Letters
Send your letters to [email protected]
Mental health issues
Dear Editors,
I welcomed your front page article
on the mental health of Cambridge
students, but was dismayed to read
that “nearly 20% of those who suspect they have suffered from a period of mental illness... would feel
uncomfortable talking to their DoS
or Tutor about academic problems”.
In my second year I found myself
unable to cope with my academic
work due to mental illness and I am
in a minority of people who have
degraded (twice) due to it. My DoS
and various college tutors have been
fantastic and without their support
I would no longer be at Cambridge. I
would urge anyone who is suffering
to seek help. Whilst the University
provides some excellent sources of
help, I suspect that many students
have not been as fortunate as I have
in receiving help from their College.
I dread to think of the number of
students over the years who have
given up with their degree when
with even a small amount of help
they might have made it through.
Yours,
Eleanor Coen
Newnham College
Praying and proselytizers
Dear Editors,
2. Seller of envelopes to post kind of mail right (9)
3. Lion catches ant in shed (4-2)
5.Lincoln tries, at first, to offer encouragement (4)
6. Predict food, beer, disorder (8)
7. Damaged Koran’s currency (5)
8. Name vomiting arch-enemy (7)
11. Fighting force having disappeared, surrounding
one on fire (7)
14. Swarm home, getting little rash after secondclass, eye-opening first encounter (7)
17.Standard unit of visibility replaced with Ångström,
producing sustainable condition (9)
18. Sing drunkenly following potential e-mail scam
(8)
19. Miles Davis in a bath of loquats, initially
confused, using two distinct pitch collections (7)
21. Kidnapee’s interjection rises up on platform (7)
22.Sir George on a horse-drawn vehicle (6)
24. 23, topless and drunk, is put back (5)
26. Family computer’s first network (4)
Last week’s solutions: Across - 1 Sportsmanship, 9 Ongoing, 10 Retrial, 11 Tongs, 12 Covenant, 14 OK Computer, 15
Mr Lewis’ article about the impropriety of praying for others is based
on a category error. Praying for nonbelievers is not considered a form of
proselytism by Christians. Let us assume Mrs Petrie was praying for the
patient to be converted. In the case
of prayer for conversion, a Chris-
Yours sincerely,
Hugh Burling
St John’s College
Corrections & Clarifications
In our investigation into mental
health issues last week, we mistakenly called the head of the University Couselling Service Mark Phlippen rather than, Mark Phippen.
We apologise for any confusion
caused.
Last week’s crossword was missing a
clue and another was incorrect. We
apologise for any displeasure.
The Cambridge Student endeavours to be as accurate as possible in its reporting. It is possible for inadvertent errors to
creep in and we are very happy
to issue corrections. Please e-mail
us at [email protected].
The Team
Editors Carly Hilts and Shane Murray [email protected] Thursday Editor Ryan
Roark [email protected] Subeditors James Garner, Dan Heap and Katie Spenceley
[email protected] News Editor Anna Croall [email protected] Deputy
News Editors Alice Baghdjian, Robert Costa and Sita Dinanauth International News
Editor Sophie Rodger [email protected] Design Editor Chris Lillycrop design@
tcs.cam.ac.uk Comment Editors Jack Rivlin and Jess Touschek [email protected].
ac.uk Investigations Editor Pete Jefferys [email protected] Deputy
Investigations Editor Michael Fotis Interviews Editor George Marangos-Gilks
[email protected] Theatre Editor Will Wadsworth [email protected].
ac.uk Deputy Theatre Editor Fran Smith Film Editor Emma Dibdin [email protected].
ac.uk Deputy Film Editors Hannah Disselbeck and Niall Pay Music Editors Stuart
Mason and Toby Smith [email protected] Sports Editor Dan Rourke sport@tcs.
cam.ac.uk Deputy Sports Editor Rob Newman Puzzles Editors Jason Sanders and
Mark Taylor [email protected] Web Editor Ben Barnes Features Editor Annie An
[email protected] Fashion Editor Helen Ritchie [email protected] Deputy
Fashion Editors Amy Mulvenna and Claire Wilkinson [email protected] Science
Editor Laura Corrigan [email protected] Arts & Literature Editors Frances Winfield
and Ruth Halkon [email protected] Food & Drink Editor Victoria Woolley food@tcs.
cam.ac.uk Board of Directors Matt Horrocks (Chair), Mark Curtis (Business), Adam
Colligan (CUSU Coordinator), Carly Hilts, Shane Murray, Chris Lillycrop and Alex Coke-Woods
[email protected]
Byte, 17 Ogre, 19 Aristocrat, 22 Orthodox, 23 Deuce, 25 Israeli, 26 Inexact, 27 Periodic Table.
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tian is not proselytising as when
we pray, God answers the prayer,
carrying out the request: the orant
has not made an effort. The reply I
suspect Mr Lewis would give is that
if it feels like proselytism to him, it
is. This is absurd. You cannot define
the meaning of other people’s actions. It is also inappropriate to use
CICCU to caricature religion in general. Praying, out loud or otherwise,
is perfectly innocuous. The suggestion that Christians ought not to be
involved in public service because
they are on a proselytising mission
is a dangerous one. Mr Lewis may
like to consider the social importance of every hospital, charity or
academic institution bearing the
name of a saint - all outrageous
proselytes - before exiling us from
his ‘civitas pagani.’
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THEATRE
Three Sisters
Fran Smith
ADC Mainshow
17th-21st Feb
O
Waiting For
Godot
Laurie Coldwell
Verkerk
conveyed the
dark humour
and tragedy of
a Chekovian
character
Certain members of the cast deserve to be singled out and praised
for their performance. Misha
Verkerk, who played Ivan Romanovitch Chebutykin, managed to
there have always been a thousand
different interpretations. Some
aren’t valid – Waiting for Godot is
not about sprockets. Director Patrick Garety has looked within Beckett’s dark abyss, closed his eyes and
come out holding ‘soporificness’
and applied it to the whole play.
Not only is that a difficult word to
say; it makes his production difficult.
It really was an
achievement in
mediocrity
Corpus Christi Playroom
17th - 21st Feb
Russian idealism and hope that
Chekhov was so expert in depicting, and in its cruel destruction in
a number of different forms, from
the belief that nothing is worth
anything, and questioning of the
very existence of humanity, to a
very clearly human expression of
loss and pain. The focus on candles
at the beginning on the play hammers home the point about human
fragility, and these candles are
significantly extinguished during
the second half. If you have been
suffering from a bout of week five
blues, this production will at least
put your own woes into sharp perspective.
Charlie Lyon’s Boy. And he doesn’t
say much.
Pozzo, Lucky and Estragon all
disappoint – Alex Lass’ Estragon
particularly so. Hunch-backed and
inexplicably English in contrast to
Vladimir, his eyes confusingly kept
focusing up to the top left and for
some reason he was always licking
his lips and bafflingly disrupting
dialogue tempo; it was a struggle
to understand him as a character.
Combined with a soporific Pozzo
and Lucky, the middle section of
Act I, which should be a tour-deforce in farce, oration and ensem-
ble entertainment, lagged heavily.
Many interpretations of the play
allude to purgatory, but at times, it
felt as if I was there myself. No audience member at any play should
feel the need to get out their mobile and text. In one particularly
dead section I counted four glowing screens and, considering how
difficult it is to see all the audience
in an L-shaped space, it really was
an achievement in mediocrity.
This all reflects back on the
direction. It feels unfocused and
smacks of the thought that the
text is so superior that it can run
itself. There are funny moments,
clever set pieces, but they are few
and far between and too reliant on
Kavanagh’s pace and characterisation. When the audience did laugh,
the laughter came unevenly, identifying those who knew the text
well.
It is as if Garety decided that,
when directing, it is best to do the
same as his production’s protagonists, and do nothing. Equally, like
Vladimir and Estragon, many audience members will sit there, waiting for something better to come
along.
Photo: Patrick Garety
V
LADIMIR: You didn’t
notice anything out of
the ordinary?
ESTRAGON: Alas!’
It would be easy to
construct this review
just in quotes. For a play in which
nothing happens – twice – ‘Waiting
for Godot’ has always been full of
everything and nothing. Contained
in the silences, the music-hall patter and the red-raw stripped words,
Waiting for Godot is not meant to
be an easy play to watch, but the
silences should be elegantly crafted, not just long, the patter should
be fast and funny, not just fast.
That’s not to deny there are some
nice moments, but this is hidden
in a mismatched cast of varying
ability. Ben E Kavanagh’s Vladimir
is exemplary. His Irish brogue, his
irritability and dialogue could have
walked straight from the purgatorial craggy island of Father Ted, and
he carries much of the comedy. It
is a pity the only character able to
keep up with his verbal boxing is
convey an exemplary combination
of the dark humour and tragedy
of a Chekhovian character, where
the humour does not overcome the
pain and depression that the character ultimately falls into. In terms
of the way that the production
dealt with the humour implicit in
a number of Chekhov’s plays, there
was on occasion a slight tension in
the performance where the actors
made a large joke out of a line that
was perhaps intended to titillate,
but not to cause hilarity. Three Sisters is a more serious example of
Chekhov’s work, and these laughs
were perhaps misjudged, coming
at the expense of a faithful interpretation of the play.
Having said this, however, the
characters which were clearly comic made the most of their roles.
Tom Williams as Vassily Vassilyevich Solyony delivered a wonderfully dead-pan performance that
worked to make the occasions
when he moved away from such
presentation all the more powerful. The production was slightly
marred by the way that Irina Prozorov, played by Katherine Jack,
did not appear as such an innocent and idealistic character as the
part required, which meant that
her gradual decline into desperation was not quite as dramatic as
it could have been. Patrick Warner,
as Alexandr Ignatievich Vershinin,
while excellent in most aspects,
was not entirely convincing in his
more passionate ‘philosophising’,
when he lacked the intensity to
entirely convey the ideas he was
proposing.
This production maintained the
Photo: James Graveston
ne of Chekhov’s longer
works, Three Sisters is
a play written in 1900
and carries the ideals of its period to a
crushing conclusion.
It bathes its characters in tragedy,
demonstrating the way that hope
and ambitions can be crushed. The
play spans the arc from apparent
happiness to destruction, with a
strong focus on the internal reflection and deception, centering
on the love and relationships that
the family have, and how they
twist into pain. However, even at
the start there is an ominous background of depression, as we learn
from the very beginning that the
happiness of Irina’s ‘name-day’
coincided with the anniversary of
their father’s death. The characters
are filled with desire and ambition,
but this is contrasted with a crippling inactivity, and Chekhov cre-
ates an intricate interplay between
the two that can have no victor.
The opening tableau of the production sets the tone for the eerie depression that is to follow, a
tableau that is energetically broken by a round of ‘ta ra ra boom
di-e’, the strains of which filter
throughout the production, and
reflect the desperate, snatched
happiness that eventually flees
from the characters. The translation by Rory Mullarkey is generally
effective; it results in an ease of
comprehension without losing the
slightly ethereal and weird quality of Chekhov’s language. On occasion it fails in this, becoming
too informal, with the occasional
occurrence of ‘hi’ and ‘ok’ grating
slightly - I did think I detected a
‘babe’ at one point, but as I cannot be entirely sure of this, I will
reserve my criticism. At any rate,
although these instances did not
entirely fit, the overall impression
was not hugely altered.
|20-21
Suits of Solemn
Black
Jessica
Jennings
ADC Larkum Studio
18th-21st Feb
T
Sophrosyne
Heidi Aho
Fitzpatrick Hall, Queens’
College
11th -14th Feb
I
t’s easy to review the
plays of the dead and
famous. These are the
plays that have passed
through many a director’s hands, and have oft
been savoured, or else impaled
upon critics’ fangs. Everyone has
opinions on these works, where
the sovereignty of the text has
been established and you’re free
to nitpick at lighting, casting -
characters, which, especially in
the case of Ruth (Ella Jones), was
done to great effect. Along with
the intricacies of characterisation,
the acting also at times filled the
studio with an almost tangible
atmosphere, particularly when the
beautiful Jezebel (Helen Parker)
swans in. Susie Chrystal, playing
Judith, should be commended in
her ability to manipulate tensions,
even if the chemistry between her
and John (Chris Nelson) was a little bit lacking.
All in all, the actors and the
production team (excluding
the clumsy and annoying clock
sounds) of Suits of Solemn Black
were let down by the material they
had to work with. It’s a shame
because the story touches on some
Theatre Digest
genuinely harrowing and deeply
emotional concerns that are only
elaborated on in the last ten minutes. The previous eighty minutes,
despite the banter and brilliant
acting that they contained, are
left drowning in retrospective
narrative that overwhelms them,
rendering the play underwhelming. Eventually, what should be
a touching and challenging story
about the abuse inflicted by a
violent, unfaithful father onto his
wife and daughters, and the guilt
and brokenness that remains, becomes a somewhat tiring middleclass melodrama centring around
self-absorbed men questioning
whether their dad really loved
them because “he just wasn’t that
interested.”
Smoker
Annabel Banks
Valentine’s was over, so love
was fair game – but this is
Cambridge, so by love, they
meant sex. The problem lay
in similarity of technique. Poems and songs can be effective
comically, but the ‘bait and
switch’ gets wearing when used
every five minutes. The show
needed variation and a damn
good trim. A smoker, though,
is an experimental forum, and
every now and again they create something special – it’s
just luck whether you’re there
to see it.
Film Night
Heido Aho
The simple
production
did its best to
untangle the
play’s dirty
laundry
The simple, clean-cut production did its best to untangle the
play’s dirty laundry, and the antitheatrical atmosphere combined
with the cosiness of the ADC’s
Larkum Studio created an intimacy
which sparked genuine affection
for the characters. The team also
used the small-scale studio to
explore more intriguing, quieter
that water tank centre stage in
Hamlet. Sophrosyne is new, and
I’m wary of sinking my teeth into
this amateur kitchen’s steak tartare. But there’s a review deadline
to meet. I’ll leave writer Freddy
Syborn to wrestle with questions
of freedom.
The play was at
its best when I
was forced into
the menacing
and the absurd
The lights went down in
Queens’ College Fitzwilliam hall
and I could just about make out
the grey silhouette of a figure
making her way to an armchair.
The play, charting two consecutive birthdays of Robert Mace, an
old playwright with the fire of rebellion still burning brightly (or,
paradoxically enough, darkly), began with the mad tirade of Betty,
his mother. These first moments
in a sense marked the general
trend of the play – constant ef-
Photo: Dominique Iste
he most surprising thing
about Suits of Solemn
Black, which after all
won Pembroke Players’
New Writing Competition, is that the production’s biggest flaw is the script
itself. Whilst writer Adam Hollingworth’s dark domestic humour is
genuinely funny, the play is dominated by retrospective narrative,
which is not only uninvolving but
also visually dull. Although this
retrospection at first creates suspense, it quickly turns into frustration, and prolonged frustration
develops very naturally into apathy
and boredom.
One of the more confusing
elements of the script is the
amount of time dedicated to the
boys’ feelings of vague neglect or
inadequacy in their father’s eyes
compared to that dedicated to the
shocking emotional and physical
abuse that the female characters
received. It appeared that the male
insecurities over paternal love and
their own masculine duty were
supposed to equate to the deep,
‘reverberating’ damage inflicted on
the female characters. Luke (Nick
Beck) uses the phrase “making a
big fuss over nothing” to describe
his brother’s concern over male
insecurity and lack of paternal
affection. This seems to be an apt
description in comparison to the
more serious issues in the play.
And yet these male insecurities
were dealt with in larger portions
than the quite horrendous issue of
domestic abuse.
forts to shock the audience which
often missed the mark, but some
moments of brilliance in terms of
character portrayal and flashes
of helplessness that emerge from
crude facades. Black comedy and
wit liaise to make the audience
cringe, laugh, and regret laughing seconds later, because some
things just shouldn’t be laughed
at.
The play was at its best when
I was shaken out of apathy and
forced to take a step into the
menacing and the absurd. Will
Hensher and David Isaacs, playing
Bob’s boyfriend and son respectively, were especially convincing, and the awkward silences
between the two successfully unfurled the incompetence of conversation in filling the black hole
of human desires and confusion.
Likewise, moments such as the
father’s revelation of, and consequent revelling in, the murder of
his dead wife’s ex-boyfriend were
powerful; festooned upon stage
was not man’s nobility but his inherent helplessness.
Three stars is the verdict for
many reasons – over-acting, under-characterisation and underdevelopment of subjects that
could have truly shocked the audience, such as racial hate and religion. Syborn’s dark humour and
sharp wit were slightly dulled by
the slow pace of the play, and
dialogue often disintegrated into
little more than a string of monologues. Characters hardly reacted
to one another – a sense of apathy
that was ultimately contagious to
the audience. And the final image of a rat with a penis on its
back was neither humorous nor
disturbing. But, then again, this
may be a matter of taste.
At one point in the play, Rob
cries out, frustrated at his incapability of capturing ideas with
words and the wastage of “flashes
of light spelling out letters”. This
line doubles as an apt summingup of Sophrosyne, a play with
insight lurking beneath the surface but lost in translation. The
ideas that made it through were
brilliant, but the fabric they were
woven into was sometimes flat
and often overshot.
If you’re into tough love, and
looking for a state of mind the
opposite of Sophrosyne to combine with your fifth week blues,
this may be your cup of tea on a
cold night. But don’t count on it.
I honestly didn’t know what to
expect. Drama with no speech?
It must be some sort of pretentious mime, a re-enacted tragedy of yet another glass pane.
But no – this play was an unmanufactured kind of impressive, with the emotion behind
a scene unravelling as if to you
personally, like a painting of
bold brushstrokes and ample
layers. The actors had an impressive range and subtlety
of expressions. Film Night was
truly the perfect antidote to
fifth week and credit crunch
blues.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Pippa Dinnage
Kiss of the Spider Woman was
fun and to take it too seriously
would be a mistake. The plot is
fantastically weird, the action
flitting between the real and
the imaginary, with glamorous dance numbers juxtaposing gritty interrogation scenes.
The host of cuts necessary to
compress the show into the
late night slot blurred the already bewildering plot. Despite
some excellent individual performances, it lacked the ‘wow’
factor that is so closely associated with musicals. But it was
fun, simple, and entertaining just what you want at 11pm.
All these reviews can be read in
full on our website:
www.tcs.cam.ac.uk
Many articles not included in
the paper, as well as larger versions of many of our printed
articles are available on our
website for the benefit of all
our readers.
If you wish to help with the
maintance of our website. Contact:
[email protected]
MUSIC
Indie-Rock
Compilation
Dark was the Night (4AD)
Out Feb 9th Richard Osmond
T
he track-list of Dark Was
The Night reads like a
who’s-who of the painfully fashionable indiefolk sub-genre. With
such a scene-defining
roster of contributors, this doubledisc charity album from the voguish 4AD label was always going to
be excellent, even if all the artists cruised along in neutral and
phoned-in a by-the-numbers b-side.
What makes this compilation exceptional, though, is that they did
not.
Sufjan Stevens’ effort, You Are The
Blood, is a case in point. I, for one,
would have been quite happy with
an upbeat three-minute slice of his
standard wide-eyed horn-drenched
exuberance or a trademark bittersweet banjo-ballad, but he has produced neither of these. Instead, his
offering is a ten-minute epic that
stands as one of his most complete
artistic statements to date. Oscillating wildly between the extremities of his career, it shifts abruptly
from the delicate acoustic beauty
of Seven Swans to the opaque electronic noise of Enjoy Your Rabbit
before culminating in a squalling
prog-rock crescendo which fires the
song, screaming, into space.
The album is studded with a host
of similar revelations. In another
extended-length piece, The Decemberists imbue their typical nautical
themes with newfound restraint
and maturity, together with a gorgeously slow-burning upright bass
part.
Antony Hegarty’s performance
of Bob Dylan’s I Was Young When I
Left Home sees the singer stepping
out of his comfort zone and into the
wilderness of dust-bowl hobo-yarns,
the aching purity of his voice contrasting fascinatingly with the absent Dylan’s atonal drawl. In Brackett WI, Bon Iver’s echoing distant
acoustics are given sudden physical
presence with the introduction of
an insistent electric bass, recorded
closely and cleanly.
Another strength of these songs
is the inventive yet respectful way
in which the artists honour their
sources and inspirations. The Dirty
Projectors’ loving assimilation of
new-wave’s staccato danceability
into a twangy folk aesthetic makes
the sudden appearance of Talking
Heads’ David Byrne feel completely
natural. When The Books replace
Cello Song’s fingerpicking with a
coolly arpeggiating synthesizer,
they recapture the baroque intricacy of Nick Drake’s guitar work without becoming lost in the fey romanticised haze that so often clouds
tributes to this troubled songwriter.
The New Pornographers’ cover of Destroyer’s Hey, Snow White is fleshed
out with all the emotion and drama
that Dan Bejar’s thin nasal voice
hints at but never quite achieves.
In summary, Dark Was The Night
is not a mere conglomeration of indie-folk’s biggest names. Instead of
resting on the laurels of these best
and brightest of stars, it showcases
them at their freshest and most
original. There isn’t room to catalogue every gem in this rich miscellany, and this is probably a good
thing. The real pleasure to be found
in this album, like in any compilation, is that of personal exploration.
I would hate to deprive listeners of
the joys of sifting slowly through its
variegated treasure-trove for themselves.
★★★★★
TCS Singles Section
Toby Smith + Stuart Mason check out this week’s hottest tracks
Jersey Budd - Visions of You
Empire of the Sun - Walking on a Dream
★★★☆☆ [EMI]
★★★☆☆
Somewhere
over
the
rainbow
Jersey Budd seems like the kind of person you would call a If you dress weirdly enough then you’ll get all the press
[Bandstocks]
‘top bloke’. Visions of You is an unpretentious bit of uplifting
rock with pounding drums and a Springsteen-esque vocal delivery. Perhaps it is a little middle-of-the-road but the ‘ooh la
la las’ and guitar solo finale make it sound fun, at least.
Skint and Demoralised - This Song Is Definitely
Not About You
[Mercury Records]
★★★★☆
This Song begins with a little drum-roll, a blast of organ and
jangly guitars. It’s Northern Soul meets Northern Indie! The
verses are spoken in a Leeds snarl accompanied by a prominent bass-line (winner!), while the chorus is as catchy as pop,
in true Northern Soul fashion.
Mongrel - Hit from the Morning Sun
[Indie]
★★★★☆
Mongrel are a supergroup consisting of two Arctic Monkeys
(bassist and drummer), one Babyshamble (bassist), one Reverend and the Maker (singer), and one Poisonous Poet (rapper). Hit From the Morning Sun is an addictive and weird song
that needs to be heard to be believed. There are weird electronic noises, guest female rappers, catchy riffs, and frenetic
drumming. It’s good when genres get along.
coverage you need. These guys blend MGMT with Jamiroquai
in a way which is neither as catchy, nor as funky as either.
At least MGMT’s ridiculously colourful image seemed to be
tongue-in-cheek; these guys eem to lack even a soul. That
said, it’s not bad, but it is forgettable.
U2 - Put your boots on
[Mercury]
★★☆☆☆
Whoa, Whoa, Whoa... U2 aren’t supposed to even try to rock
out. They make uplifting, ‘spiritual’, music which my mum
likes. This one actually has a guitar riff in it, and if we’ve
learned anything from Vertigo, U2 shouldn’t even try to do
riffs. While this tune has a funky groove, it lacks any kind
of direction. Maybe Bono should just concentrate on saving
the world. He’s more fun when he’s talking about starving
children.
The Virgins - Teenage Love
[Warner/Atlantic]
★★☆☆☆
It’s Wham! It’s literally Wham! It’s not indie-pop, not dance
punk, not new wave, not soul or any other genre, for that
matter. It’s just Wham! It is, like Wham, very catchy, but,
like Wham, you’re more likely to remember it due to that
time you got too drunk and thought it would be a good idea
to do a strip tease on the table....just me?
|22-23
Lost in Music: Week 5 Blues
Stuart Mason takes a Midnight Train to Georgia, to hear a blind boy sing the blues
tains the refrain: “no-one can sing
the blues like Blind Willie McTell”.
Anyone moving from the Dylan
song to some of Willie’s recordings
might be surprised: Dylan’s song is
sombre, while Willie’s own recordings often exude a sprightly charm.
The voice is achingly mournful and
hurt, but there is something playful
about the guitar-picking, rhythm
and lyrics that belie this blues pain.
Dylan’s song to McTell has an epic
sadness, but in Statesboro Blues McTell sounds like an abandoned child
who wants some sympathy-loving
from his “doggone queen”; like
most of McTell’s blues recordings, it
walks a tightrope between genuine,
soul-dragging sadness and cheeky
melancholy.
An ironic line in Death Cell Blues
phrases this differently: “They got
me ‘cused for forging [pause] and I
can’t even write my name”. It would
sound more like a joke if McTell
didn’t sound quite so upset about
it.
Half of the tracks on the compilation are blues songs, and all of these
blues display a typical relationship
between vocals and music. That is,
most of the blues songs sound like
a duet (or a conversation) between
guitar and voice. McTell was one of
the first guitarists to use the twelvestring acoustic and this, along with
his deft, finger-picking style and
bouncy rhythms, give the music a
depth and liveliness that is equal to
McTell’s charismatic voice.
The other ten tracks on the compilation are a miscellaneous bunch,
but are mostly up-tempo-good-time
or religious songs. Georgie Rag and
Atlanta Strut show McTell at his
most blithely entertaining, and
his guitar-playing at its most playful and uncomplicatedly cheerful,
while God Don’t Like It and I Got
Religion And I’m So Glad are fascinating duets between McTell and his
wife, Kate, whose voice is strangely
intense despite its relative thinness
besides Willie’s voice.
McTell is a charming host
throughout, and by the end of the
songs he feels like an old friend.
Dylan might have chosen his tribute to McTell to be so epic-sounding
because McTell’s songs (his voice,
his guitar-playing, and his lyrics)
feel like history, in some way. And
yet, you’ll find yourself wandering
round Sainsbury’s humming “Got
three women / Yellow, brown and
black” before the history behind the
catchiness dawns.
In praise of... Dubstep
Join the TCS Music team Email [email protected]
M
ost people familiar with the
name Blind Willie
McTell will probably have learnt
it from the Dylan
song, named after Willie, that con-
Dylan’s voice sounds like sandpaper,
while Willie’s voice is both crisp and
smooth, like a Crunchie McFlurry.
Willie was born around 1901 in
the state of Georgia, and is usually
listed as a Piedmont blues player
(Piedmont being a plateau region
located in the eastern United States
between the Atlantic Coastal Plain
and the main Appalachian mountains, stretching from New Jersey in
the north to central Alabama in the
south, if I remember rightly). The
Piedmont blues are distinguished by
a chirpy ragtime-like rhythm, and
this rhythm becomes infectiously
toe-tapping in Willie’s hands. Between 1927 and 1956 Willie recorded 149 songs for various record
labels. The 20 tracks collected on
this Complete Blues Series compilation (which sell cheap, and cover
various artists) stretch from 1927 to
1935, and contain some of the most
famous recordings.
Perhaps Willie’s most famous song
is Statesboro Blues, which expresses
his disgust at being mis-treated by
his woman, and the subsequent desire to put on some “travellin’ shoes”.
L
ast Thursday saw
Kode9 dj’ing at Fez
in Cambridge. Kode9
is the pseudonym of
Steve Goodman, the
Glaswegian Dubstep
artist, DJ, and label owner. Dubstep is yet another sub-genre of
dance music, but one that seems
to have received won unusual
amount of bad press. A friend of
mind has referred to it as a “creative black hole”, and another has
likened it to having your brain infiltrated by an evil spirit that then
goes about ceaselessly oppressing
your mind until you want to die.
To be fair, listening to dubstep
is a unique experience. The heavy
emphasis on deep (oppressively
deep) bass-lines, and the relative
lack of melody and vocals, along
with the generally dark feeling of
the music, does not make dubstep
a radio friendly genre.
But there is more to dubstep
than white boys pulling awful
moves on the dancefloor. Burial
has shown that dubstep can have
intelligence and that it can evoke
a variety of moods far more eloquently than many other music
genres, while Digital Mystix have
stuck to the dub-reggae roots of
the genre without sacrificing the
icy modernity that dubstep is
known for.
A new kind of music for a new
kind of century, dubstep is growing fast and in different directions. The multi-cultural nature of
the music, the music-makers, and
the music-listeners are all reasons
for optimism.
FILM
Not quite Hitchcock
Photo: picselect.com
Disappointing biopic of rapper Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. “The Notorious B.I.G.”
Sarah
Woolley
Notorious
(15, 123 mins)
★★☆☆☆
C
You’d be
forgiven for
assuming there
was little more
to Biggie than
being big
Smalls married Faith Evans in
1994 but had affairs with Lil’Kim,
and many others. Both women
have confessional memoirs released
next year and it will be interesting
to read Kim’s reaction to a film that
portrays her as a rabidly jealous
woman. The film has her seething
her way through every scene and
suggests that she owes her entire
career to Biggie. It’s difficult not to
suspect that the movie’s creators
harbour a personal grudge.
Now and then Notorious tries
to reconcile the moral ambiguity
of Biggie’s life and music. Having
screamed obscenities at Lil’Kim,
Biggie later holds his daughter
close and tells her, “Don’t ever let
a man call you a bitch.” An acute
insecurity is belied in these scenes
when the film feels obliged to apologize for its subject.
In an interview Biggie once said,
“Everybody got their own mind. Go
to your parents for messages; come
to me for good music.” The film
fails to examine the link between
personal morality and great works
of art, if Biggie could have been
such a success without his dark
side. Nor does it ask why rappers,
of all musicians, are expected to
justify their lyrical content.
Biggie’s son portrays him in
childhood scenes at the start of the
movie but his musical development
is rushed and the film gets distracted by his unconventional image,
failing to grasp what made his music innovative. Woodward is often
given little more to do than wheeze
across rooms; you could be forgiven
for assuming there was little more
to Biggie than being big.
There is also, disappointingly,
no insight into Biggie’s lyrical craft.
This is in spite of the fact that the
film had access to people who witnessed the flow of Smalls’ poetry at
first hand. Scenes set in the recording studio are often linked back
to drama in Biggie’s personal life
and we lose that sense of magic,
that sense of a man bursting with
rhythm and style, that documentary footage could have exposed.
The film ends with archived news
footage reporting Biggie’s funeral
procession through the streets of
Brooklyn. It shows hundreds of
New Yorkers jumping to the beat of
Hypnotize. It’s a moment that can’t
help but make the biopic seem defunct and irrelevant compared to
what music can mean to people.
Last year a film, detailing Brooklyn during the long hot summer of
‘94, the year Biggie released Ready
to Die, received a limited release.
That film, The Wackness, tells the
story of a young man’s coming of
age during a time of revolutionary
changes. It was far more successful
at capturing the restlessness and
provocation of music that ultimately doesn’t provide any answers, but
asks the right questions.
Notrorious fails to recognize the
importance of hip hop in capturing a time and a place beyond the
drama of the East/West conflict.
It is a movie at odds with the soul
of its soundtrack, too preoccupied
with setting the record straight and
strengthening the brand of Biggie.
Perhaps if the producers had not
been his mother and Sean Combs,
we would have a love letter to the
artistry of the man, instead of a record of his private life.
Photo: picselect.com
hristopher Wallace
aka Biggie Smalls was
an only child who attended private school
in New York after growing up in Brooklyn. He
became involved in drugs and, after
time in prison, sent a demo tape to
Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs that would
launch his career. A possession
charge threatened to halt Biggie’s
ascent but a friend did three years
for him and, by the mid-nineties, he
was a multi-millionaire star and icon
for the New York music scene. At 24
he was shot and killed.
Playing Biggie, Jamal Woodward
nails every inflection and gesture
but can’t compensate for a script
lobbing hollow aphorisms at the audience. We twice hear that “Before
you change the world, you’ve got
to change yourself”, but the film
fails to reflect this sentiment in its
rush to get from his childhood to
his death. Despite the weak script,
the performances keep the film
from total mediocrity.
Notorious doesn’t want to revisit
the confusing mess of Biggie’s murder investigation, portrayed in the
2002 documentary Biggie and Tupac. Instead, the film tells a story
you’re probably seen before in a
thousand MTV montages.
|24-25
What women don’t want
Jennifer Anniston stars in yet another mediocre romantic comedy
5
Rubbish
Romantic
Comedies
You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Yet another film from the Tom
Hanks/Meg Ryan cheese factory… But unlike Sleepless In
Seattle, You’ve Got Mail is so
mind-numbingly dull that it is
truly painful to sit through it.
When it first hit the big screen,
it was an early film that starred
that great novelty, the internet,
but to a 21st century audience,
the plotline is banal, and the film
fluffy and unsatisfying. It’s not
even particularly funny.
Photo: image.net
Two Weeks Notice (2002)
Starring Sandra Bullock and Hugh
Grant (not a promising beginning),
Two Weeks Notice is about a Harvardtaught lawyer, who is fed up with
working for an immature millionaire
and quits. He sees he didn’t appreciate her, they realise they are very
much in love, they kiss and live happily ever after. The story is no worse
than any other rom-com, but it is
very hard to to care about such ultimately unpleasant and irritating
characters.
Meg
Atkinson
He’s Just Not That
Into You
(15, 129 mins)
★★☆☆☆
I
have to admit that I’m generally not a fan of romantic comedies. But having
looked at the premise of
this film, I decided to embrace the experience and
give it a chance. This ensemble piece
seemed to be offering something a
little less sickly sweet. It’s based on
a self-help book by Greg Behrendt,
Liz Tuccillo, and Lauren Monchik,
which claims to give advice on how
to read men, and hence stop wasting time on him if he’s, well, just not
that into you.
The film (with that mouthful of
a title) contains a series of overlapping storylines, each presenting a
different relationship problem. The
main story revolves around Gigi
(Ginnifer Goodwin), a desperate
woman who is constantly obsessing about when the men she meets
will call her, even resorting at one
point to a spot of mild stalking. She
never believes he isn’t interested
because she has been brought up
in a culture where women comfort
each other with any explanation –
I mean, he could have been hit by
lightning…
Already my patience was wearing thin; are all women such irrational, gullible idiots? She then bumps
into Alex, whose friend Conor has
been giving her the brush off. Alex
proceeds to put her straight on a
few matters. If he doesn’t call you
– he isn’t interested. If he says he’s
going out of town tomorrow – he
isn’t interested. If he gives you
his number and doesn’t take yours
(and even if he does) – he isn’t interested. It doesn’t matter whether
a friend of a friend once had a guy
not call for a year but later married
him – “you are not the exception,
you are the rule”.
And so it goes on, in a manner
quite unnerving for anyone taking
a date to see this (just imagine the
resulting analysis). Other storylines
involve a long-term relationship
where the man will not commit to
marriage, and a marriage where the
woman thinks, quite rightly, that
she can no longer trust her husband. And so on and so on.
It is too many ordinary films
rolled into one, with a cast of Alisters who are all woefully underused. Jennifer Aniston and Ben Af-
fleck are as bland as ever, Scarlett
Johansson proves she can play the
same character as last time, and
many of the other cast members
get lost in the crowd. Indeed, one
of the top-billed actresses, a barelypresent Drew Barrymore, plays a
rather expendable character whose
only role is to remind us that we
can now be dumped in many new
and technologically-advanced ways.
Only Goodwin, and Justin Long as
Alex, stand out.
It depicts
women as
desperate and
fixated on
marriage, and
men as afraid of
commitment
In the end it is far too long,
contains too much dialogue, and
the entire cinema laughed out loud
only twice. It depicts all women as
desperate and fixated on marriage,
and manages to present men as stupid, manipulative or scared of commitment, or all of these at the same
time. Meanwhile, gay men appear in
their usual role as advisors in chief
to girls who own a lot of pink.
The supposedly interesting selfhelp angle, and interspersed comments from “real” women, is lost
amid a cloud of awful stereotypes
and unrealistic situations. It even
contains the horrifying line – “I’m
the exception” – to which the even
cheesier reply comes – “You’re my
exception”. At which point even
my friend (who rather likes a good
rom-com) groaned audibly next to
me. I’m not going to tell you how it
ends, but if you’ve seen the trailer,
or indeed any other chick flick, I
don’t need to. This film is not an
exception. It follows all the rules.
But since there’s nothing risky
about this, it isn’t all bad. It is an
ordinary, forgettable rom-com. If
you have nothing else to see and
you like chick flicks then I’m sure
you’ll enjoy most of this. Maybe I’m
just a cynic, but I’m pretty sure this
film won’t teach you anything you
don’t already know. If I were you I’d
watch Mean Girls instead, which is
funnier by far and about the only
other film I can think of that was
inspired by a self-help book.
I did laugh twice, but I nearly
fell asleep half-way through. The
only conclusion I can draw is that
I’m just not that into this.
Maid In Manhattan (2002)
A modern-day Cinderella story.
Problem is, everybody knows Cinderella. Starring Jennifer Lopez and
Ralph Fiennes, this tries to give the
classic fairytale a new gloss and a
political message. However the
hotel maid’s life, sold as a great
hardship, is presented to us as a
glamorous subculture, and so any
political undertone falls supremely
flat, leaving nothing but a deeply
formulaic romantic comedy.
Crossroads (2002)
Let’s be honest - Eminem aside,
singer-turned-lead actor ventures
seldom go well. When the lead in
question is Britney Spears, you’re
on even shakier ground. Heading
up an otherwise Z-list cast, Spears
plays a young woman who - would
you believe it - longs to be a singer
- and sets out on a roadtrip with
two friends to find herself, much
to the consternation of her father
(that bloke from Ghostbusters.)
Suffice it to say, it’s bad.
How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days
With a premise drawn from fictitious gossip rag ‘Composure’ and
the Hudson-McConaughey dream
team reunited, it’s hard to understand why this little charmer failed
to turn six nominations into wins
at the Teen Choice Awards. Perhaps
Hudson losing out in the category
of Choice Hissy Fit was the main
reason why Fool’s Gold was inflicted upon audiences with little more
than a five year reprieve. Either
that, or the $200 million gross.
LISTINGS
19
Thu
20
Fri
21
Sat
22
Sun
23
Mon
24
Tue
25
Wed
|26-27
FILM
THEATRE
MUSIC
OTHER
He’s just not that into you? Take
your mind off it down at Vue.
‘I do beleive in Fairies’ - prove it,
by going to see Iolanthe at the Arts
Theatre this week
Ray Lamontagne is not a hobbit,
end of discussion.
The Fitzwilliam Museum: rumour has
it that a student once visited.
Ray LaMontagne@the Corn Exchange
19:30, £19:50
Folksy Singer Songwriter
The Kohn Concerts: Christopher
Maltman, baritone
He’s Just Not That Into You (12A)
Vue, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30, 23:20
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (12A)
Arts Picturehouse, 15:15, 20:45,
23:00
Three Monkeys (15)
Arts Picturehouse, 18:45, 21:00
Waiting For Godot : Corpus Christie
Playroom, 19:00, £5/£6
Eugene Onegin: West Road Concert
Hall, 19:45, £6/8/15
Three Sisters : ADC Theatre, 19:45,
£6/£8
Suits of Solemn Black : ADC Theatre
(Larkum Studio) , 22:00,£4/£5
The Big Book for Girls : ADC Theatre, 23:00, £4/£5
Playroom, 19:00, £5/£6
Hall, 19:45, £6/8/15
Three Sisters : ADC Theatre, 19:45,
£7/£9
Vue, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30, 23:20
23:00
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
Three Monkeys (15)
Playroom, 19:00, £5/£6
Hall, 19:45, £6/8/15
Three Sisters : ADC Theatre, 14:30
Matinee, 19:45 Evening, £6/£8
Notorious (15)
Vue, 15:40, 21:15
Withnail and I (15)
St. John’s College, 21:00
Vue, 11:00, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30
19:00, 21:10
The View@ The Junction
20:00, £13.00
Scottland’s finest Libertines wannabes.
NME Awards Tour@The Corn Exchange
19:00, £Sold out, sucks to be you.
Featuring Glasvegas, Friendly Fires,
White Lies and Florence and the
Machine.
Billy Ocean@the Corn Exchange
19:30, £24.50/£26.50
The UK’s most successful black artists
strikes out on a new tour.
Mumford and Sons@the Portland
Arms
20:00, £5
Vue, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
19:00, 21:10
Three Monkeys (15)
Part of the Darwin College lecture
series
17:30 to 18:30
Cambridge Union Society Acoustic
Night
8:00pm
Cambridge Union Bar
Art Scrapbooking WURkshop on
Beauty
2pm
Cafe Project, Jesus Lane
a creative workshop using collage
and scrapbooking to explore the
theme of beauty across cultures.
The Legacy of Antiterrorist Legislation and Policies in the Light of
Human Rights Standards
Vue, 11:00, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
21:10
Three Monkeys (15)
Vue, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
18:00
Three Monkeys (15)
Evolution and Conservation of
Biodiversity
Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue
CUWO vs OUWO: The best wind
music you’ll hear
4pm
Trinity College Chapel
Late of the Pier@The Junction
20:00, £9 adv.
Explosive Indie-Dance quartet bring
the DIY noise
The Spirit (12A)
St. John’s College, 19:00, 22:00
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
(12A)
Christ’s College, 19:30, 22:00
Notorious (15)
Vue, 17:00, 21:30
Vue, 11:00, 14:00, 17:30, 20:30
8:30pm
The Theatre, Peterhouse
£15/£5/Free
7.45pm-9pm
Nihon Room, AA Staircase, Pembroke
College
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT “VISION:
Assessing Our Legacy” - Launch of
800th Anniversary
‘The Goat’ or ‘Who is Sylvia’
Corpus Christie Playroom, 19:00,
£5/£6
Richard II
ADC Theatre, 19:45, £6/£8
Night Breath
Corpus Christi Playroom, 21:30,
£10/£21/£25/£27
‘The Goat’ or ‘Who is Sylvia’ : Corpus Christie Playroom, 19:00, £5/£6
Richard II:ADC Theatre, 19:45, £6/£8
Night Breath ; Corpus Christi Playroom, 21:30, £10/£21/£25/£27
Crystal Maze The Musical : Robinson College Auditorium, 20:00,
£6/£10
The Tempest : ADC Theatre (Larkum
Studio), 22:00, £5/£6
5.30pm
Fisher Building, St John’s College
Free Lunchtime Concert@Emmanuel URC
13:00, £Free
James Williams performs music by
Debussy, Ravel, Grieg and many
more.
Lord Adebowale at the Cambridge
Union
7:30pm
Cambridge Union
One of the most charismatic and
influential figures in the voluntary
sector and Chief Executive of Turning
Point.
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
28|Sport
Pink Elephants and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Zach Brown attempts a weekend with his eye off the ball
Zach Brown
what was going on here. Two
hours and forty quid later I decided it was time for a drink. As we
entered a wine bar off Brick Lane,
I caught a glimpse of a white shirt
hurtling through a Welsh defence
on big screen in the bar opposite.
6.23pm. A text. “OMG r u
watching da game? Wot a match!
England r being torn apart lol.” I
wince on behalf of Martin Johnson and grammarians everywhere.
A surreptitious check of the interweb before bed revealed that I had
been wrong about Frank Lampard
Snr.’s coaching abilities at Watford, getting thrashed by his son’s
overpaid yet irksomely talented
team; 3-1. Another twenty quid.
Romance really was dead.
Day two of my abstinence and
my enjoyment of Andy Murray’s
glorious victory over Nadal is
marred only by my distance from
both the match and any televisual
vessel capable of conveying it.
Being treated to lunch at Nando’s did not improve my mood.
Not only did I have to order at the
bar then collect my own cutlery,
the waiter beat me back to the table with the food! Now I’ve never
pretended to be much of a chef
but even I know that thirty sec-
onds is a suspiciously short time
in which to cook half a chicken.
As I drowned my sorrows in
extra hot piri piri sauce, my
thoughts wandered to the mustsee meeting between the season’s
two top-four challengers, Moyes
and O’Neil, and what the implications of this could be for the
English game. A sharp kick from
under the table brought me back
to wipe-clean Portugese-themed
reality with a thud, and those
joys fell away once more.
A text from my brother –
“United have just knocked in a
third. Giggs is on fire! Tell me
you’re watching this”. I’m not.
I’m being shown photos of family
members I’ve never met.
Disaster. At a quarter past nine
I’m caught watching the Milan
Tennis
Murray downs Nadal
Premiership Football
Chelsea leave it late
Crciket
Stanford accused
Golf
Woods to return at last
Blues Football
Blues complete comeback
Andy Murray beat Rafa Nadal in
the final of the ATP tournament
in Rotterdam, winning 6-3, 4-6,
6-0. Nadal, who received treatment for a knee injury throughout
the match, was unable to serve
properly. Murray also injured his
ankle, and consequently pulled
out of the Marseille Open.
Watford almost caused a cup
shock on Saturday, in Chelsea’s
first game without Luis Felipe
Scolari. Tamas Priskin put Brendan Rodgers’ side ahead with
twenty minutes to play, however a rapid hat-trick from Nicolas Anelka meant Chelsea progressed to the quarter-finals.
Sir Allen Stanford, the man behind
the Stanford Super Series in which
England participated last year, has
been charged with fraudulent behaviour. The charges relate to an
$8Billion investment fraud, and
the England and Wales Cricket
Board have suspended talks with
him.
Tiger Woods is set to return to the
golf circuit next week, after an
enforced eight-month absence. He
had reconstructive surgery on the
anterior cruciate ligament of his
left knee. Many experts wonder
whether he will be able to reproduce his past form, given the need
to readjust his swing.
The Blues fought back to a 2-1
victory over Lloyd’s of London.
After going a goal behind, the
Blues produced a stirring second-half performance, as a goal
a piece from Jamie Rutt and Max
Little allowed them to complete
an unlikely comeback and continue their Varsity preparation.
My significant other, not sharing my enthusiasm for the great
sporting narrative, was significantly other than pleased when
I informed her of the exciting
sporting schedule that would be
coming our way last weekend.
“Christ!” she demurred “Can’t
you get through a single weekend
without boring me to within an
inch of my life about sport? After all it is Valentine’s Weekend.”
(Note the subtle shift from Valentine’s ‘day’ to ‘weekend’ – when
did this happen?)
“What…” I countered quickly,
sensing an onslaught “…could be
more fitting then the life-affirming romance of the fifth round of
the FA Cup?” Apparently that was
a non-starter and the prospect of
another weekend watching me
shouting at the telly did not fill
the lady with desire. So I duly
committed to a weekend bereft of
sport; not to speak, read or even
think about it. This, you’ll know
if it’s ever happened to you, has a
sort of pink elephant effect; filling your every waking moment
with thoughts of chaps in shorts
charging around a muddy pitch.
“Another
weekend with
me watching
telly did not
fill the lady
with desire”
In fact, my Valentine’s Weekend
started well. Waking early I managed to place a sneaky online bet
(Chelsea to crumble to a scoring
draw at lowly yet resilient Watford) under the pretence of fetching breakfast in bed. Yet better
news on consulting the morning
papers; Cambridge United’s crucial
tie with Kidderminster has been
postponed due to a waterlogged
pitch. With a bit of luck and a
couple of natural disasters the
Photo: photostream,
entire country’s sporting activity
would be knocked back to midweek and we could all breathe
easy.
I made it through the rest of
the morning without so much as
a squeak about Beckham’s delayed transfer or Italy’s problems
at scrum half, and was feeling
pretty virtuous for it. Roses were
handed out without a murmur of
the national jerseys they would
soon emblazon. I even managed
to play with her dog without
pointing out its resemblance to a
young Carlos Tevez.
But it was on our romantic
stroll into the heart of London
that the torture really began. In
a moodily lit restaurant, I discovered that if I shifted slightly in
my chair I could, via reflection in
a considerately positioned photo
of Southern Champagne, follow
the rudimentaries of Portsmouth
beating City through the window
of the pub two doors down. Until, that was, I was asked what on
earth was wrong with my neck
and told to sit up straight.
“Ze special today Monsieur, is
prime Scottish beef zat ‘as been
pulverised in Garlic” the waiter
taunted with a sneer. He knew
derby on iPlayer (Football on iPlayer! Something of a coup d’état
for the Beeb and a return to the
heady days of Football Italia that
I felt deserved not to be missed).
“I knew you couldn’t bloody manage it” she shouted; then called
me a word I wasn’t aware she
knew. The follow up tirade ran
along similar semantic principals
to the chant ‘You’re crap and you
know you are’, popular with football crowds across the country,
and was no less vociferous in its
delivery.
The row resulted in my volunteering to take the pooch round
the block and to pick up an appeasing bottle of wine. Leaving
wee-Carlos tied to the bumper of
a car parked outside the shop, I
nipped in. There are moments in
life when your stomach back flips
and you go wobbly and suddenly
cold with realisation that you
have done something completely
inexorably stupid, and you are
about to be in big trouble. As I
stepped out of Oddbins the sense
that all was not well with the
world was palpable. Where was
the car? And more importantly
where was Carlos?
Now I’m not saying that I was
blameless in the Tevez affair but
some key points need to be considered. After all, animal health
and safety is pretty much bottom
of the cerebral heap when one is
placed under the intense mental strain of reconciling love and
sport. Would it be too much to
ask that the schedulers of these
arbitrary celebrations consult with
the organisers of major sporting
clashes thus avoiding such potentially ruinous differences of opinion?
And, people, can we please
unite against card companies
who encourage these festivities
to spill over their allotted twenty four hours. Personally I’d be
happy with Valentine’s afternoon,
Mother’s hour and a Very Happy
Birthminute. In the meantime,
your questions of whether Carlos
eventually managed sixty in the
outside lane of the M1 are best
left unaddressed.
“I’m being
shown photos
of family
members I’ve
never met”
Sport in Brief
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 761 685
30|Sport
England chase the dragon
Comment
James Dibble
An English Rugby performance
to be proud of (at last)? A display of heart and character from
the men in saintly white (for
once)? The pundits point to a
markedly improved England performance in the game against
the mortal enemy from across
Offa’s Dyke on Saturday, but a
marked improvement on near
incompetence should not be applauded at all.
England were helped by a
Welsh side not playing the rugby they are capable of, lacking
their creative maestro Shane
Williams and perhaps feeling the
pressure from a packed Millennium Stadium baying for English blood (along with anybody
else who possess a drop of the
Gaelic red stuff (or a penchant
for partners of the rather more
woolly variety for that matter).
However, England could not capitalise. At the end of the game
one couldn’t help the conclusion
that England should have beaten
Wales – they just didn’t.
Yet, typical of all English
sports, we come out clutching
in the Ether for positives we can
take from yet another poor English performance on the international stage. It is our national
obsession (admittedly not yet as
bad as the Scots) to cling to the
false hope that, despite loosing,
there was a glimmer of quality,
a sparkle of hope that can be
‘built upon’ for the next time.
We lost. We lost and we should
have won.
“A marked
improvement
on near
incompetance
should not be
applauded”
As much as it pains me, I have
to admit that Wales are a better
rugby side than England – of this
there is currently little doubt.
However, they did not hit their
straps on Saturday, yet the English invaders floundered. Playing a bruising style of defensive
rugby which, for the most part
kept the likes of Jones, Powell,
Roberts and Byrne at bay, England lacked ideas and were unable to generate any continuous
forward momentum. At times
they looked like a man wondering how to satisfy his partner on
Valentines’ day – in other words:
clueless, frustrated and impatient.
As for English discipline…the
less said the better, two yellow
cards are not acceptable in such
a tight game at that level. Although the referee, Mr. Kaplan,
will be happy that he was able,
in his customary manner, to have
an influence on the outcome of
the game. Not something other
whistle bearers with jumped up
ideas of self importance should
be aiming to do.
Speaking after the game, Martin Johnson – who had just seen
his unbeaten in Wales record
broken - said England could have
beaten Wales if they had ‘more
belief in their own abilities’. If
you don’t believe in yourself
when you’ve got an England
shirt on – when will you? The
belief wasn’t lacking, but the
abilities sure were.
After loosing the battle which
no Englishman (or Welshman)
wants to come out of second
best, Brian Moore (the BBC’s
‘hardman with a mic.’) decided
to award Man of the Match to
Joe Worsley of England. I accept, the man played bloody
well (within his limitations),
but England had just lost. How
can a man who had just lost in
his national colours be worthy
of an award? Yes he made more
tackles than a Welshman eats
leeks, but he was on the loosing
side. Give the award to a man in
red, accept defeat and get out of
Cardiff while the going’s good.
Congratulations to Wales on
yet another 6 Nations victory.
England’s attention must now
turn to another away fixture
and an equally tough opponent
in Ireland in a fortnight’s time,
a fixture guaranteed to be as
addictive as Matt Steven’s drug
habit. One only hopes the excuses and unjustifiable attempts to
draw out positives are replaced
by celebrations and pats on the
back for all concerned.
COMING UP
Varsity Kickboxing
Friday 20th
Union members can see Oxford get battered and bruised
absolutely free, for everyone
else the privilege costs a mere
£5, as Cambridge take Oxford
into the ring at the Union from
7pm this friday.
Varsity Netball
Saturday 21st
The Ley’s School this Saturday
is the venue for the annual
confrontation this year, seconds kick-off at 1:30pm, the
Blues 3:30 pm
Varsity Basketball
Saturday 21st
The Blues will enter the game
as underdogs, having lost twice
this year to Oxford, who claimed
the league title last month.
Varsity Fencing
Saturday 21st
The Blues will be expecting
a win in their annual Varsity
match on the back of a strong
season in which they won their
BUCS league. Women’s 1st start
at 11am, Men at 2pm in the
Exam Halls, New Meseums Site.
Thirteen nations wrestle for world cup rights
John Savage investigates which of the 2018 World Cup candidates stand a chance of securing the prize
MAIN CONTENDERS
England are still licking their
wounds from being overlooked
as hosts of 2006. But having recently secured the Olympics from
under the noses of the French,
they have valuable up-to-date
experience in the field of successful campaigning.
The motherland of football
boasts an array of fine stadia,
and when you combine this
with the fact that the World Cup
hasn’t revisited England for over
60 years, an English tournament
looks rather likely.
Accompanying Becks and his
Midas touch on the bid team,
Sebastian Coe has recently been
appointed as a non-executive
board member. He joins another
member of the successful London
2012 Olympic bid team, Sir Keith
Mills.
Australia pose the biggest threat.
That the tournament has never
set foot Down Under works very
much in their favour and you can
bet that the classic lament, “our
continent has never been blessed
with the World Cup”, has already
been penned by the PR officials.
Two of their available stadia are
phenomenally big: the Melbourne
Cricket Ground seats 100,008 and
the ANZ Stadium holds 83,500.
However, they were not purposebuilt for football and the wisdom
of giving the tournament to a
country in which football is only
the 5th most popular sport appears to be questionable. FIFA are
said to be seeking assurances that
a concerted effort will be made to
improve the domestic game before the tournament is given to
them.
Russia is a strange one. On the
one hand, it sounds very promising. It has never held the event,
it’s in Europe and its stadia are of
true quality. On the other hand,
its nine different time zones
would cause a logistical nightmare. The FA are said to be seeking a deal to get Russia to back
out in exchange for English support for Russia’s Euro 2016 bid.
Additionally, the ongoing trouble with Euro 2012 hosts, Ukraine
and Poland, might put FIFA off. A
successful bid would be the worst
result for England on two counts.
Firstly, it would put England categorically out of contention for
the 2022 World Cup and secondly,
we’d be subjected to the inevitable
sight of Abramovich’s vague expression on our television screens
for four whole weeks.
IN WITH A SHOT
NO HOPERS
Joint bids have been frowned
upon by FIFA, which leads me
to believe that Spain and Portugal won’t persuade many, particularly since England and Russia, both European candidates,
are putting up strong individual
bids.
With Beckham seemingly on
his way out, football in the US
needs a welcome boost. The 1994
tournament was a hit and there
is no doubting that America
will have the required stadia and
facilities, even if refurbishments
and enlargements are necessary.
Time zone issues yield negative points but if it happened in
1994, there’s nothing to say that
it couldn’t repeat itself in 2018.
The first Arabian World Cup is an
intriguing prospect.
Qatar already plays host to
various international sporting
events such as MotoGP, Tennis
and Golf. However, the country
seriously lacks the stadia.
Mexico, the first country to
hold the tournament twice, has
applied again; high temperatures
are a disadvantage though.
If Japan or Korea were to receive the World Cup, it would be
a travesty.
Their competence at staging
the event is not under question, but the tournament simply should not return to either
country considering they cohosted it in 2002. Full stop.
The
Netherlands/Belgium
bid has “doomed to fail” written
all over it. FIFA dislikes jointbids and in the event that they
do consider co-hosts, Spain and
Portugal are much more likely to
seal the deal.
Indonesia would require a
huge amount of work, not only
in creating stadia but in creating the infrastructure to stand
up to the demanding task of a
World Cup.
It would be a real coup for Indonesia to poach the 2018 tournament and would undoubtedly
benefit the country immensely.
However, the risk factor is
great and in the light of the
continuing headaches caused by
South Africa, you’d forgive FIFA
for playing safe.
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Sport|31
Strauss leads by example
Comment
Robert Newman
L
ast week it was a case
not knowing where to
begin. The second innings batting collapse
in the first test in Jamaica represented the
most abject display by an English
cricket team in recent memory. Only
Andrew Flintoff reached double
figures, and the side were bowled
out for the pitiful score of 51 and
slumped to defeat by an innings
and 23 runs against a suddenly rejuvenated West Indian team.
The litany of difficulties facing
the test side could probably have
filled a book, and what was being
seen as a nice gentle warm-up series to this summer’s Ashes looked
as though it could turn into a lame
relinquishing of the Wisden Trophy.
It was hardly the start Andrew
Strauss was hoping for as he began
his reign as England captain. Yet,
in no time at all, England appear
to have turned things around, and
most importantly of all Strauss is at
the forefront of the fightback. His
first innings knock of 169 in the
re-started second test in Antigua
was a stylish as it was significant
and hopefully represents a turning
point for this much maligned England team.
Most importantly of all,
Strauss is at
the forefront
of the England
fightback
No captain can confidently lead
their team if they cannot justify
their own place in the side. It was
beginning to look as if only Kevin
Pietersen amongst the English batters was interested in scoring any
runs on this tour, but thankfully
England’s 1st innings in Antigua
saw a healthy all round contribution. The selection of Owais Shah
and Graeme Swann, at the expense
of Ian Bell and Monty Panesar, has
also proved to be an excellent move,
and not before time.
An extremely pressing issue for
this England team has been the indulgence which certain members of
the squad have been afforded. Too
many members of the side have appeared far too secure of their place
within the team, and have been
allowed dips in form which should
normally cost them their place. Ian
Bell has forever been seen as a batsman with enormous potential, and
he is certainly fantastic to watch,
but he has never really come up
with the goods. His test match average may be above 40, but he has
often cashed in against the weaker
test sides.
The most telling statistic, however, is that every single one of his
eight test hundreds has come only
after another England batsman has
scored a century first. He does well
when the going is good – never
has he come in, whether batting
at three, or lower down the order
as he used to, and ground out a
century in difficult circumstances.
This is a shame, for he has wonderful technique and should be a great
addition to any test side, but for
now, it is right that he is out on
the sidelines.
It worked for Andrew Strauss,
who after being omitted from last
winter’s tour to Sri Lanka, has come
back into the side and showed improved form. Bell could return for
the Ashes – but for now he must
be punished. Owais Shah deserves a
chance for the time being, and his
57 in Antigua will have done him
no harm. Robert Key could come
into consideration for the summer
tests.
It was not Bell’s fault that there
is hardly a queue of top quality
batsman waiting to take his place
– but many in this England team
have been too comfortable for too
long, and the selectors have finally
and mercifully demonstrated that
they have the courage to make
changes where necessary.
Steve Harmison is another one
whose potential remains tragically
unfulfilled. The biggest criticism
of Harmison is simply that he does
not care enough. He has all the attributes required of a top-class fast
bowler, and yet the effort required
to sustain the performances he
showed four years ago in the West
Indies and during the 2005 Ashes
series appears beyond him.
He doesn’t even seem to particularly like cricket – it is a chore
rather than a pleasure, something
he does to earn a living rather than
for the thrill of it. He hates touring,
quit one-day cricket for a while,
only to come back conveniently in
time to play in the money-spinning
Stanford Series, and after 60 tests
still averages over 30 with the ball.
Again, as with Bell, the lack of
potential replacements is one reason he has continued to keep his
place in the team, but how do England except to win test series’ with
players not even fully committed
to their sport? Would Harmison
have ever been indulged to this
extent if he were in an Australian
side led by a Mark Taylor or a Steve
Waugh? He’d have been shown the
door long ago.
Panesar is another underachiever, who after 36 tests shows no
signs of improving, and he may
be out of the side for a while after
Swann’s heroics this week. England
always seem to be playing a waiting
game with their players, assuming
that their talent signifies that one
day they will come to make really
telling contributions. The time has
surely come to give up on Harmison – at least play someone who
cares and will give every last ounce
of energy for the cause.
Then there remains the issue of
Kevin Pietersen. A brilliant player,
of course, but not a team player,
evidently unpopular with his team
mates, and clearly incapable of controlling his ever-expanding ego. It
almost makes you wonder whether
it’s worth all the hassle, whether,
despite his talent and the runs he
brings, any England team with him
in it can ever function harmoniously.
We must give
up on Harmison: he simply
does not care
enough
He took a spectacularly reckless gamble in trying to oust Peter
Moores, the now departed head
coach, and was demanding more
power for himself than any cricket
captain has ever had. It was as if
he was so far removed from reality,
and thought so highly of himself,
that he could simply demand of
the ECB anything he wanted, and
that they would meekly acquiesce.
Thankfully this proved not to be
the case, and in the long run England may have got a lucky escape,
as the whole episode means they
won’t now be led into the Ashes by
a deluded ego-maniac. Pietersen’s
still here though, still unapologetic, and still a problem. His reaction
on getting out to an idiotic shot
when on 97 in the first innings at
Kingston was simply: ‘‘That’s how I
play.’’ Well fair enough, but a century would have boosted England
enormously, and taking some care
to cross the landmark would have
been the sensible thing to do. But
when did Pietersen ever choose the
sensible route?
Pietersen could also do with
keeping his mouth shut for a while,
letting Strauss and new Vice-Captain Alastair Cook stamp their own
authority on the side. It may take
a while, but hopefully the current
upheaval will serve as an appropriate wake up call and underline the
fact that radical change is needed,
and hopefully, come the first test
against the Aussies this summer,
England will have a settled and
focused side. If the Antigua test is
anything to go by, the green shoots
of a recovery may just be emerging.
Sport
Varsity honours shared
INSIDE:
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Photo: James Appleton
Zach Brown’s disastrous love life
CAMBRIDGE
1
OXFORD
1
Robert Newman
Deputy Sports ediitor
On Monday, Oxford came to town
for Hockey Varsity. It proved to
be a fairly successful day for the
Blues, the Men’s 1sts retaining
the trophy with a 1-1 draw, whilst
the Men’s 2nds and Women’s 3rds
both won. The day also saw a defeat for the Women’s 2nds, whilst
the Women’s Blues play their
match at a later date.
The Men’s 1st team, the Squanderers, after a slow five minutes,
placed the Oxford team under
constant pressure for much of
the first half. Despite repeated
penalty corners for the Cambridge Blue-clad players, against
only two firmly defended ones,
the scoreline at the break was remained 0-0.
The close scoreline reflected
the tension of the game - and
though both teams had chances,
it was the Squanderers who really applied the pressure. Eventually, the breakthrough came
with Man of the Match, Ed Hyde,
slotting a straight-strike from
one of the hard-won corners. A
well-taken goal by Oxford shortly
after served only to heighten the
pressure. Green cards proliferated, with Matt Chorlton spending a few minutes off the pitch
for a yellow card. Some dubious
decisions from the umpires got to
both teams, but the hockey remained of a high standard.
At 1-1 with seconds to go,
James Hindson dribbled into the
D and unleased a shot as the
whistle blew for full-time. As
the ball slotted into the goal,the
umpires declared that the goal
would not count. Although this
took away a win, the Squanderers at least retained the title.
In the Men’s 2nds match, Cambridge started the brighter, attacking with pace and purpose.
This was rewarded with an early
short corner, converted when the
keeper’s save gave Constantin
Boye a second chance to convert
with which he made no mistake,
expertly lifting the ball over the
keeper and last defender.
Oxford then came into the ascendancy, equalising through a
reverse sweep that agonisingly
defeated Fuller and Barclay’s
dives to stop it crossing the line,
before taking the lead from a
short corner. Cambridge came
out with renewed vigour in the
second half, and were rewarded
when a flowing passing move
that culminated with the Reverend Chris Lee scoring a wonder
goal, plucking Boye’s lifted strike
from the air and volleying it into
the net. Jez Hulse, unlucky not
to have scored earlier from a
textbook short corner routine,
put the Light Blues ahead, before Rob Mahen’s deflected goal
doubled the lead, and sparked
scenes of wild celebration around
Wilberforce Road. 4-2 up, there
was a final twist in the tale. A
mazy Oxford run culminated
with a strong strike to reduce the
deficit, but the final exchanges
were played out with a minimum
of drama to earn the Wanderers
victory in an exhilarating Varsity
match. Man of the Match was the
keeper, Graeme Morrison, for a
string of fantastic saves.
In the Women’s 2nds game,
the Nomads were confident that
they could dominate. However,
an early goal by Oxford saw the
Nomads go 1-0 down within the
first 10 minutes of the game. An
unfortunate injury to left-back
Eleanor Wiseman, who up until
this point was having an awesome
game, unsettled the Nomads and
despite some short corner opportunities, the scoreline remained
1-0 at half time.
The second half saw the Nomads play some excellent defensive hockey. Lucy Stapleton made
some spectacular saves and Sarah
Donaldson cleared a well struck
ball to the left post on one of
many Oxford penalty corner opportunities. When they managed to move the ball out of defence, centre midfield Clare Ross
was ready to distribute the ball
through to the forwards. In spite
of some excellent runs up front
by Nuala Tumelty and Rachel
Quick, the Nomads could not find
an equaliser. Instead, an excellent individual piece of attacking
skill saw an Oxford attacker slip
the ball into the goal to make the
scoreline 2-0.
As for the Women’s 3rds, The
Bedouins dominated the Hos (yes
that is the name of the Oxford
3rds!) from the start, holding all
the possession and playing some
beautiful hockey. This soon resulted in a flair goal when Catie
Mackenzie sent a perfectly timed
ball into the circle, which Rhiannon Evans was able to skillfully
deflect into the back of the net.
This goal was shortly followed
by a second, as a run from Livvy Crellin allowed Emma Withycombe to touch over the goal
line. Ten minutes later, and a
third followed as Hannah Wilson
constructed a beautiful finish after some tenacious attacking play
from Jess Sturgeon and captain
Lorna Utley, who dominated the
right hand side of the pitch.The
score perhaps should have been
a bit higher as there was such
a significant difference in standard between the two teams.

Investments attacked by students

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