Barclays workers will be lobbying the bank’s shareholders on Thursday as part of a serious dispute over pensions. The meeting has been called to get agreement to sell Barclays Global Investors to BlackRock, but Unite members will be carrying placards saying “Hands off our pensions” to highlight their anger at proposals by the firm to close their final salary pension scheme.
Archive for August, 2009
Iranian dissidents targeted in ‘safe haven’
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009The Iran Liberty Association, which promotes democracy and human rights in Iran, has organised a sit-in in front of the American embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest at coalition forces standing by while Iranian dissidents are killed and beaten up at a “safe haven” in Iraq.
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009
Should we negotiate with the Taliban? You said: Yes – 64% No – 36%
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009
David Cameron has apologised for using a four-letter word in the course of radio interview about Twitter, the social networking website. He’s very sorry for any offence caused. But that word wasn’t “cuts”. He’s not all apologetic about what he’s got planned in that department.
ROCK: Eno’s Apollo creed still fizzes and fascinates
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009Brian Eno’s Apollo
Science Museum, London
Sound has a unique power to enhance and enrich the visual experience. One only has to think of the epic slide guitar soundscapes created by Ry Cooder which have so defined the films of Wim Wenders. And who can forget Miles Davis’s haunting trumpet score for Louis Malle’s L’Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud in 1958?
BOOKS: The Reformation and representation – Spin City in Tudor times
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth Century England by Kevin Sharpe
Yale University Press, £30
Spin, as we know it, began in the 1990s. Between John Major atop a soapbox and Tony Blair’s cheesy little grin. Now go back hundreds of years. Minus television and focus groups, Henry VIII was up to a bit of media manipulation yet, supposedly, Henry V post-Agincourt was not.
ROCK: It’s crystal clear who’s really on song
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009Blur
Hyde Park, London
Damon Albarn, Alex James, Graham Coxon and Dave Rowntree have always been blessed with impeccable timing. An earlier incarnation of their band, Seymour, metamorphosed into chartbusters Blur just as the art school Britpop of Brett Anderson’s Suede and Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp threatened to be, well, pulped, by the juggernaut “wonderwall” of sound produced by “Beatles tribute band” Oasis.
BOOKS: Fratricidal struggles and the pain in Spain
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009To Bury the Dead
by Ignacio Martínez De Pisón
Parthian, £8.99
No war or conflict in modern times has inflamed the passions of both ordinary people and intellectuals more than the Spanish Civil War. It was of enormous international as well as national significance. In this compelling account, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón investigates how the conflict between Franco’s Fascists and the Republicans was just one of the battles. He reveals the bitter faction fighting behind the lines and unlocks the hidden experiences and rivalries of writers and activists such as Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and José Robles.
VISUAL ARTS: Emblematic of liberation and equality
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009Gay Icons
National Portrait Gallery, London
When a national institution suddenly recognises aspects of society that it has, hitherto, quietly ignored, it is either jumping on a well-oiled bandwagon or, occasionally, in the van of public opinion. In Gay Icons, the National Portrait Gallery is trying to do both, but lacks the courage of its convictions in raising awareness of the central part gay people play – and have played – in our society.
BOOKS: Rumsfeld versus reality – troops and civilians who died for Donald SecDef’s towering hubris
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, August 6th, 2009By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld
by Bradley Graham
PublicAffairs, £16.99
Thomas E Ricks’ account of the American military adventure in Iraq, Fiasco, contained a brief section entitled “Rumsfeld vs Reality”. As if the heading hadn’t said it all, the following four pages identified the SecDef’s many shortcomings as the occupation floundered and the insurgency gathered momentum: “cognitive dissonance”, “self-confident stubbornness” and “towering hubris”. Now Bradley Graham, the former Pentagon correspondent of the Washington Post, has devoted some 700 pages to the subject. Will such a detailed enquiry challenge our preconceptions?