Downing Street aide John Woodcock has resoundingly won the contest to be Labour’s candidate for Barrow and Furness. Mr Woodcock, one of Gordon Brown’s media team, beat his nearest rival in the race to represent the seat to be vacated by former Cabinet minister John Hutton at the next general election at the selection meeting last weekend (October 24).
Archive for October, 2009
Tough-talking Bersani is Italian left’s new leader
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Pierluigi Bersani, a former communist, has been elected as the new leader of the centre-left Democratic Party, the main opposition to Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government in Italy.
London protest to tell US: cease and desist in Honduras
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009As the stand-off between the ousted President, Manuel Zelaya, and coup leader Roberto Micheletti continues in Honduras, the Emergency Committee Against the Coup in Honduras is organising a protest at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square on Wednesday (November 4).
Fuel poverty: Energy shock as number paying late soars
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009The number of people falling behind on their fuel bill payments has soared by nearly 50 per cent in the past six months, according to Citizens Advice.
RADIO: Surge of love
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009La Chanson De Serge – The Serge Gainsbourg Story
Radio 2
Poetry Please
Radio 4
Serge Gainsbourg, the creative French icon, is best remembered for his breathy, steamy hit “Je T’aime Moi Non Plus” with his long-time lover and muse, Jane Birkin. It gained notoriety in 1969 by being banned in several European countries and was denounced by the Pope. There was no better publicity, according to Birkin.
BOOKS: As Pinter said: it never happened, it didn’t matter, it was of no interest
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Constructive Bloodbath in Indonesia: The United States, Britain and the Mass Killings of 1965-66 by Nathaniel Mehr
Spokesman Books, £15
Despite the best efforts of dissident writers such as Mark Curtis, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, the involvement of the United States and United Kingdom in what the CIA called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century” remains largely unknown in the West. As Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel Prize-winning lecture, the horrific events that occurred in Indonesia in the mid-1960s “never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
BOOKS: The reign in Spain was plainly wrong for Bloody Mary
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen
by Anna Whitelock
Bloomsbury, £20
Mary Tudor has been used to personify all that is worst in Roman Catholicism. Intolerance in her burning of heretics. Lack of compassion in her execution of Lady Jane Grey. Treachery in her marriage to Philip of Spain. She is also seen as aloof from the public, kneeling in false piety while hypocritically harbouring deep resentment towards her half-sister Elizabeth. But historian Anna Whitelock wishes to present a different Mary, a courageous woman who overcame many setbacks to become a hard-working queen.
WORLD MUSIC: Super duper Cuban troopers still shine
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Buena Vista Social Club Orchestra
Royal Albert Hall, London
Many of the musicians who helped to launch the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon at the now legendary Carnegie Hall concert in 1998 are no longer with us. That’s unsurprising, given that some of them were well into their eighth and even ninth decades at the time. The loss of singers Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo, together with pianist Rubén González and guitarist Compay Segundo, certainly left a massive hole to be filled. Nevertheless, musical director and trombonist Jesús “Aguaje” Ramos set about the task confronting him with gusto, aided in no small part by Manual Galbán on piano and Guajiro Mirabal, who leads the four-strong trumpet section.
THEATRE: Shining a torch into Poland’s darkest corners
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Our Class
National Theatre, London
On July 10 1941, around 1,600 Jews were burnt alive in a barn in the small Polish town of Jedwabne. For years, this was condemned as just another Nazi atrocity. However, recent research – in particular, a 2001 study by Polish-born American sociologist and historian Jan T Gross – has suggested that the war crime was actually committed by the local Polish community.
BOOKS: Now this is top gear
By Tribune Web Editor /Thursday, October 29th, 2009Driving Like Crazy by PJ O’Rourke
Atlantic, £17.99
Think about writers on cars and Jeremy Clarkson probably springs to mind with his ability to combine informed opinion about motor vehicles with entertaining jokes and a talent to incite venom. He has the Marmite factor – you either love him or hate him. But I cannot think of anyone better to cite as an example of exemplary writing on automobiles (pause, in that pre-punchline Clarkson fashion) – until now.