One Thousand Shades of Grey

Footage of Val Swain and Emily Apple being arrested by surveillance officers last year after asking for their badge numbers at Kingsnorth climate camp. Fit Watch activists are opposed to police forward intelligence teams (Fits), the surveillance teams that Record and monitor campaigners at demonstrations and meetings. Attempts by these teams to take pictures are recorded and posted on a website along with the officers' badge numbers Click here for Fitwatch website .

Leigh Dyer" 's new blog Metal Art is now up and running it features some background information about the talented sculptor and also some pictures of his previous works, contact details and pictures of his latest work the fantastic "Run" which includes the extremely life like depiction of a wolf, ram, sheep and lamb made entirely of metal. The wolf which has been installed in Denmark hill is disturbingly realistic, appearing to stalk the area quite convincingly. Leigh Dyer's blog Metal Art .

I recently made the effort to revisit the 1978 film Midnight Express. The film depicts the apparently true story of Billy Hayes incarceration in a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country in 1970, his experiences in prison and his subsequent escape. The film is reviled by the Turks and as I sat there watching it with my Turkish wife I could understand why, the film wheels out grotesque caricature after grotesque caricature of hideously distorted Turkish stereotypes and insulting attacks on Turkish identity. One of the reasons the film is so hated by Turks is that they feel that the movie has done lasting damage to their image abroad, with its extremely negative portrayals of Turkish personalities and not one single portrayal of even a positive character trait let alone a good Turk. Truth & Fiction In Turkey the film is often written off as being a film designed to make the Turks look bad and based on lies. This is largely due to the sensationalist depi

1986 was a strange year for me I was eleven; my best friend was a ten year old haemophiliac. 1986 was the year my great grandmother died at the age of 89, my cat that I’d known all my life got run over and my best friend got injected with HIV contaminated blood by the National Health Service at the local children’s hospital. Haemophilia is a condition that restricts your blood from clotting; put simply a small cut would without medication continue to bleed indefinitely, where as in an average human the blood would coagulate and a scab would form. That year we had been riding our skateboards together and my friend had accidently hit a parked car, if it had been me there would have just been some minor bruising but for him this meant a visit to the hospital to stop any internal bleeding. The treatment he received (factor8) was to be ultimately fatal to him. I remember being told by the adults that my friend had AIDS, this turned out to be not entirely correct, but HIV/AIDS was at the ti

So like many people I opened my paper yesterday to be confronted by pictures of the three dead children of the Samouni family in Gaza, like most people it sickened me to my stomach so I was both surprised and disgruntled that the first person I heard mention it when I went into town was sticking to the same old line of “its justifiable, Israel are just defending themselves”. I have tried to understand this ideology but it just doesn’t really hold any water, in a purely statistical sense it is recorded that only 13 Israelis have been killed by rocket attacks from Gaza since the attacks started in 2001, so how can that justify the continuous years of massacres and brutality perpetrated on a people forcefully evicted from their homes in what is now part of the state of Israel and pushed into the Gaza strip by a foreign aggressor? The Gaza strip is only 25 miles long and at its widest about seven miles wide, so not dissimilar to the Isle of Wight except it has a population of approximate

I find myself wondering what is the point to make new year resolutions, after all they only ever last until the second of January then you find yourself stuffing yourself full of McDonalds,’ getting shitfaced and chain smoking in one all out binge! But that I realise is the problem, the onset of age has slowly ground all the idealism I suffered from in my twenties into so much emotional dust and been replace with a form of cynicism so aggressive that it borders on out and out nihilism. Therein lies the problem with cynicism it actually has me at a point where I just can’t be bothered. I used to like the George Bernard Shaw quote “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” But now I think I prefer Peggy Noonans’ “Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.” That’s my new year’s resolution to resurrect that little bit of my youth known as idealism, if there ha