Tamil protests in Westminster: pictures & video
Demonstrations by ethnic Tamils outside of the Houses of Parliament have this morning grown considerably in size and energy, with protesters bringing traffic to a stand-still in the Parliament Square area.
Whilst it is hard to estimate numbers, from the upper offices in Parliament Street it would appear that 1,500-2,000 protestors have convened this morning. The protesters are demonstrating against continued non-action by the UK regarding alleged human rights abuses of ethnic Tamils by the Sri Lankan authorities. The size of this morning’s protest contrasts sharply with the numbers of protesters present last week, which consistently numbered somewhere in the low hundreds.
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Humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka
The following statement was issued by the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group meeting over the weekend in Washington, DC. Your help in circulating it would be appreciated. I spent part of February and March in Sri Lanka and it is undoubtedly the worst humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world at the moment.
A humanitarian tragedy is unfolding in Sri Lanka involving the possible deaths of tens of thousands of civilians trapped between government and insurgent LTTE (Tamil Tiger) forces in a tiny strip of land not much bigger than Central Park in Manhattan.
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Building citizen journalism bit by bit
I think there’s more to Adrian Short’s Mash the State project (which he wrote of yesterday) that deserves exploring. I played a part in the project when I first laid eyes on this post by Adrian on how he’d managed to build a local news ‘mashup’ using Twitter, del.icio.us, RSS and other feeds. I thought to myself: hang on, if people wanted to build their own websites which featured a whole range of local news sources, including local council news, then this was the template they needed. I contacted Adrian about it, we talked about its potential and he ran with the project entirely by himself.
I think this is the future of local and citizen journalism: people building their own hyper-local portals with whatever news they want (from councils, local police forces, national organisations etc). Then it becomes a lot easier to learn what government authorities are doing and hold them to account. But for that we need easily accessible information. Adrian’s had some coverage in Guardian Technology already, and even been mentioned on the official Tory blog.
You can help by either contributing to the project, or contacting your council to ask why they don’t have an RSS feed for their news if they don’t already.
Statement: Our ethic of progressive blogging
This post speaks for those who have signed it, and not every contributor to Liberal Conspiracy.
We are a group of Labour party members and supporters who believe that blogging can make an increasingly important contribution to progressive politics. We are seeking, in different ways, to make our own individual contributions to that, and wish to set out the ethic which informs our blogging and the broader politics we are working for within the Labour Party and beyond it.
Many of these are truths which should be self-evident. We are well aware that the broad spirit which we seek to articulate has long informed what most Labour bloggers do, as it also does most of those who blog in other parties and in non-partisan civic activism.
So we do not claim any particular originality; still less do we seek to impose our views as a new regulatory code, or to attempt to police others.
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Top Stories & Blog Review – Monday 20th April
Nationwide
Google accused of UK tax avoidance
Labour warned: supporters sick of ‘venom’
G20 officer ‘pointed Taser at protesters’
‘Markets must make way for interventionism’
International
Obama defends reaching out to Chávez
Boycotts hit U.N. racism conference
Suspected U.S. drone kills 3 in Pakistan
Red Cross ‘worn out’ in Sri Lanka
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Sarah Ismail
Aqoul Iraqis now feel Secure Enough To Sin.
Bartholomew’s Notes Why Obama’s Kenyan grandmother didn’t convert to Christianity.
Blood And Treasure Jackie Chan doesn’t want freedom in China.
Charles Shaw/Our Kingdom On the history of ‘kettling’ in America.
Desi Pundit On racial stereotyping in children’s literature.
Liberal England Yesterday’s Sunday Times claims that Ed Balls ‘ran Labour’s smear unit.’
Natalie Bennett Recommends a book on feminism.
Still want more links? previous netcasts are full of them.
Hidden tiger – the Tamil protests in London
A few thoughts on the ongoing Tamil protest in London that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Here’s a report written over the last week:
Tuesday 14 April, 6pm:
Down at parliament square, a small marquee has been pitched – probably less than 300m from the place where our mighty prime minister and his various hangers-on bitch about the consequences of hiring Derek Draper and other vital matters of state, etc.
A young man called Prarameswaran Subramaniyam sits at the back of the marquee, wrapped in a pile of blankets. Subramaniyam is 28 and a Tamil. He’s in the eighth day of a hunger strike that he hopes will draw world attention to the plight of Tamil civilians being slaughtered by the Sri Lankan government in northern Sri Lanka – the latest awful chapter in the famously horrific 60-year-old conflict between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority.
Anyway – the publicity returns of Subramaniyam’s hunger strike remained disappointing at the time of writing. The protestors have yet to be offered a substantive UK government statement on the conflict, and – apart from a handful of reports last week when Tamil protestors occupied Westminster bridge at rush hour and started chucking themselves into the Thames – mainstream journalism has managed to ignore the fact of this loud eight-day-old protest almost entirely. Alas for UK Tamils, journalism has been at full stretch on important topics such as measuring the gap between Susan Boyle’s looks and talent, and probing Dolly and Damian McBride.
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Why I’m throwing the gauntlet down to our councils
Last week I launched Mash the State, a national campaign to get government data to the people. It’s not a new idea but our method is. We’ll be setting up a series of challenges to the public sector, asking one group of public bodies at a time to release one specific set of data.
Our first challenge asks all local councils to serve up an RSS news feed by Christmas. I wouldn’t have bet good money in 2003 that by 2009 370 councils would still be without RSS, but here we are. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down and I’m pleased to see that a couple of hundred people have signed up to our website or followed us on Twitter to help make this happen.
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Top Stories and Blog Review Sunday 19th April
Nationwide
Five killed in head-on M1 crash
Government Apologises to Binyam Mohammed.
Labour’s climate measures mainly hot air
Lib Dem donor accused on Israeli arms deal
International
Revolt stirs among China’s nuclear ghosts
Far-right Geert Wilders plans sequel to Fitna
Iran sentences U.S. journalist to eight years
Google avoids £100m UK tax
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / by Jennie Rigg
Slim pickings today, since the whole internet is awash with the shocking news
that dumpy middle-aged Scottish ladies can sing better than airbrushed pouty debs (the bits of it that aren’t still giving publicity to that cock Staines, anyway) so apologies for the paucity of links.
Stephen Tall at Lib Dem Voice makes the best post I have seen on the resignation of Alice Mahon (I also made a small post about it).
The Digger adds to the torrent of new evidence of police violence at the G20 protests.
The Lay Scientist rips into Christian Voice.
Sarah Ismail wants a discussion on disAbility and parenting.
And speaking of parenting, Mr Quist has no truck with Change4Life’s parenting messages.
Alex Wilcock has had a visitation from his local MP.
Tom Griffin thinks there might be an Irish lesson for the middle east.
And, as usual, Septicisle has more, or you can browse through previous Netcasts
Westminster Gravy Train (C4 tonight)
In May 2008, freedom-of-information campaigner Heather Brooke won a court battle that should have prompted the release of all politicians’ expense claims. A year later, with those expenses still to be published and the flow of leaked information ever increasing, Heather studies the information that is available to piece together a forensic insight into how public money is being spent.
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Top Stories – Sunday 19th April
Nationwide
Five killed in head-on M1 crash
Susan Boyle is YouTube sensation
Labour’s climate measures mainly hot air
Lib Dem donor accused on Israeli arms deal
International
Revolt stirs among China’s nuclear ghosts
Far-right Geert Wilders plans sequel to Fitna
Iran sentences U.S. journalist to eight years
Google avoids £100m UK tax
DAILY BLOG REVIEW / coming later
You can read articles through the front page, via Twitter or RSS feed. You can also get them by email and through our Facebook group.
» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
» To win London, Ken Livingstone has to step outside his comfort zone
» This trade agreement with India will destroy thousands of lives
» UK debt hasn’t hit £1 trillion – mostly because of QE
» The benefits of being a “burden” on society
» Today’s economic figures will simply confirm UK’s “lost decade”
» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
» Want a more responsible capitalism? Reform how pensions work
» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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