The loss of Queen Elizabeth II is a very sad time for so many in Britain. But Leigh and Rodney examine how the traditional pomp and ceremony – and news coverage – plays out against our rapidly changing society and world.
Click inside to see video
#RoyalFamily #QueenElizabeth11 #BLM #TheQueenisdead
Mark David Chapman, aged 67, has again been turned down by a parole board, according to the state Department of Corrections.
The man who shot and killed John Lennon outside his Manhattan apartment because he was ‘jealous of him’ in 1980 has been denied parole for a 12th time, New York corrections officials said.
Chapman shot and killed Lennon on the night of December 8, 1980, as Lennon and Yoko Ono were returning to their Upper West Side apartment. Lennon had signed an autograph for Chapman on a copy of his recently released album, ‘Double Fantasy,’ earlier on.
There are no transcripts of Chapman’s latest board interview, but he has repeatedly expressed remorse in previous parole hearings.
Chapman called his actions “despicable” during his hearing in 2020, and said he would have “no complaint whatsoever” if they chose to leave him in prison for the rest of his life.
“I assassinated him … because he was very, very, very famous and that’s the only reason and I was very, very, very, very much seeking self-glory. Very selfish,” Chapman said then.
Chapman is serving a 20-years-to-life sentence at Green Haven Correctional Facility, north of New York City, according to online state corrections records.
He is next due to appear before the parole board in February 2024.
#lennon #manhattan #newyork #imagine #markdavidchapman #yoko #beatles
The timetable of events are beginning to be shared following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s longest ever reigning monarch.
This is what is expected to happen in the days ahead, including the journey of the Queen’s coffin from Scotland, her lying in state next week and her state funeral on Monday 19 September.
The Queen’s coffin will depart Balmoral estate on Sunday at 10:00BST for the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.
It will go by hearse through Aberdeen, Dundee and by Perth before lying in the palace’s Throne Room until Monday afternoon.
Her son Charles, the former Prince of Wales, is now King. He addressed the nation. All her children had gone to Balmoral after doctors became ‘concerned’ for her health. Hours later she died, surrounded by her family.
At 6.30pm her death was confirmed.
Earlier, the Queen’s family members were all told about her health downturn.
Prince Andrew, Princess Anne and Prince Edward and his wife Sophie were on their way.
Prime Minister Liz Truss was handed a note in the Commons informing her of the development as she was revealing her plans to cap energy bills for the next two years.
#truss #queen #balmoral #PrinceAndrew #PrincessAnne #PrinceEdward #thequeenisdead
Leigh is freezing in the UK, Rodney is hot under the collar in Spain and Liz joins the power struggle that might end up in real hunger games
Click inside to watch video
#LizTruss #Boris #Biden #Trump #Spain #UK #Putin #Power #Crisis #Ukraine #Eon-next
FROM THE ARCHIVES: AFTER THE INTEREST SHOWN IN OUR ‘CALL TO ARMS’ OVER HOUGH HALL, MOSTON, WE THOUGHT YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED IN THIS ARTICLE ABOUT THE FASCINATING LIFE OF THE LAST MAN TO OWN IT…
LAST YEAR, the sister of the missing artist who apparently changed the face of modern film, contacted us to say that she had found him after a decade.
She had originally called us because she feared for her brother, Roger Barnard, after it was revealed his historic home, Hough Hall in Moston, North Manchester, had become a ‘Marie Celeste’ mansion.
It has been abandoned for almost 20 years.
Martine Barnard-Delaroche saw an internet video on the website showing the interior of Hough Hall, her brother’s ancient Grade 11 listed home in a down-trodden suburb.
She was devastated to see his belongings, including art works and his library of books, rotting away.
And she was ‘heart-broken’ when she spotted treasured family heirlooms overturned and her brothers out-of-date passport on a kitchen table.
Martine said: “I couldn’t believe it at first, but I realised that if he had left everything, even his passport, then he had to have left in a hurry.
“We haven’t spoken for many years and I feared something awful has happened to him.”
Then an address for Roger which had been passed to us proved to be right and Martine, from Tyne and Wyre, rang us.
Roger, in his late 60s, had moved to a terraced house very near to the hall he bought in 2005 shortly after his wife, Heather, became seriously ill.
The couple left much of their furniture in the hall because their new home was too small to accommodate it.
Martine’s brother, Roger Barnard, born in 1951, became one of the prime movers of the burgeoning mid-70s video explosion, rubbing shoulders with the likes of controversial film-maker Roger Corman and video guru David Hall.
And in 1976 he helped found the influential London Video Arts organisation.
Roger, the son of a Battle of Britain survivor, Martine says, and was brought up on the idyllic Sussex coast minutes from the sea.
Things seemed to bode well for him and after university he was exhibiting his work at the Tate, Air Gallery and in Glasgow and other major cities.
The early 17 century hall is listed because of its wood wall panels, its gables and its wattle and daub construction.
The couple had grand plans for it, immersing themselves in the local community and holding open days at their ancient home.
Heather was a member of the Friends of Boggart Hole Clough, a sprawling park ten minutes walk from the farmhouse in Hough Hall Road, next to a local school.
A report in the Manchester Evening News in 2005 said; “Hough Hall in Moston opened its doors to the public on Saturday, welcoming visitors of all ages to see inside its Tudor interior and grounds for themselves.”
Roger said at the time: “We had lots of lovely comments in the visitors’ book afterwards with one person describing it as a ‘perfect autumn evening’ and another wrote ‘so enjoyable we had to come back’.”
Then personal tragedy struck and Roger and Heather to all intents and purposes vanished and the hall was abandoned. Later it went up for sale for £200,000 but there were no takers.
“Hyacinth House”
What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?
What are they doing in the Hyacinth House?
To please the lions this day
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t bother me
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t trouble me
I need someone, yeah, who doesn’t need me
I see the bathroom is clear
I think that somebody’s near
I’m sure that someone is following me, oh yeah
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play
And I’ll say it again, I need a brand new friend
And I’ll say it again, I need a brand new friend
And I’ll say it again, I need a brand new friend, the end
TAGS: Manchester, history, hall, art, artist, derelict, shame, Roger Barnard, Manchester City Council, Moston, Hough Hall, Ben Brierley , the Doors, Hyacinth House, Roger Corman, David Hall, London Video Arts, Boggart Hole Clough, Tudor
Bob Dylan is coming to Manchester as demand for his live shows remains never ending.
His Rough and Rowdy world tour is being seen as a new pinnacle in his climb back to glory.
At 81 Bob is painting, writing a book on top songs, welding iron art, creating artful stage performances, playing piano like Les Dawson, mugging to his audiences like a Cheshire cat and singing like he’s never sung before.
He has also added a new show in Oxford and Bournemouth after the original end dates due to “popular demand”.
Bob will now play 12 dates in the UK October and November 2022 as part of the tour which began in December in Milwaukee.
In July, he announced his first UK tour in more than five years.
He is playing four nights at the London Palladium before visiting Cardiff, Hull and Nottingham for arena shows, as well as two nights in Glasgow.
He will now also be performing at Manchester Apollo, Oxford New Theatre and closing at Bournemouth BIC.
All the shows are “non-phone events”, with the audience required to lock their phones in a Yondr bag for the duration of the performance.
Tickets for the new shows going on sale on Monday September 5.
#bobdylan #roughandrowdy #neverending #rollingthunder #manchester #appollo #freetradehall #bobdylantour
Volunteer medic in the Ukraine Craig Stanley Mackintosh, aged 48, has been killed in an ambush.
Craig, a landscape gardener, from Thetford Norfolk, is said by witnesses to have been shot in the neck outside the city of Kharkiv as he tried to save a Ukrainian fighter.
He had been refused entry to the armed forces because of an inoperable cist near his brain. But he decided to go to the ‘front line’ anyway.
Craig had two daughters and two step-daughters.
His sister said he had “died in action saving lives as a true hero”.
“It had always been his dream to serve in the armed forces, and watching the conflict unfold and seeing the devastation, he decided he wanted to go out to help people.”
#ukraine #armedforces #craig #putin #norfolk
In an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published memoir, Boy in the Ravine, Leigh looks back on the horror, tragedy, mystery and confusion surrounding the death of Diana
News was my lifeblood and because of stress I’d started taking it subliminally.
I had the radio tuned to the World Service throughout the night taking it all in as I half slept. It worked too, I knew about everything in the morning like a vast old fashioned ticker tape machine playing in my brain, ticker tape behind my eyes.
And that’s how the next big story of my career percolated into my head. The news of Diana’s death in a dirty dank Paris underpass broke around 01.15am.
And of course I missed it. Slept through it.
It was actually about 5.30am, four hours after the event, that the news jolted my brain awake and I opened my eyes. All I knew at that moment was that a member of the Royal Family was dead – the Queen or Philip? It couldn’t be any of the younger ones – but any member of the Royals dying was the news of the decade.
Then I heard that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been trapped in the back of a black Mercedes after the crash … she opened her eyes as she lay in the wreckage and watched her lover Dodi Fayed die. A policeman swore he heard th Princess whisper:”My God”.
I felt sick.
****
It was 6.45 when I reached the office at the heart of Birmingham after a 37 mile drive in torrential rain. Most people were there already, many had arrived before 2am and had been putting out special editions through the night and were already preparing early background pages for the first main edition which had been rescheduled for 11am. The place was buzzing and hung heavy in a fug of cigarette and cigar smoke.
The front page headline was already written DIANA DEAD. It was enough. It’s funny isn’t it how two words with just three syllables between them could shock the whole world.
At about 5.30am Buckingham Palace lifted their own news blackout and issued their confirmation. As the story unfolded we all got it stuck in where we could, rewriting PA and Reuters copy, subbing and editing, putting up headline ideas and sifting the wires for photographs. The presses were parked for a couple of hours but the whole building was buzzing, filling the void left after their rolling and thundering had stopped.
We came across what came to be known as The Last Photo, a heart-rending moment captured by a relentless pap.
One of those interminable newsroom rows about the correctness of publishing certain pictures broke out. The pap had taken it moments after the crash and it showed the Princess being given oxygen crunched in the well between the front and back seats.
I argued vociferously for it to be published but the opposition was massive. In fact that particular photo wasn’t published anywhere until nine years later when it appeared in a French magazine called Chi under the headline “World Exclusive: The Last Photo”. The world was furious – but I maintain until this day that it should have been published immediately… this was the horrifying and graphic truth of what had just happened to somebody of immense political and social importance, the most beautiful woman in the world. That picture was real life and it was our job to present real life to the world no matter how shocking or unpalatable.
We are such stuff as news is made on…
****
Diana’s butler Paul Burrell and another member of her household were asked to go to the Ritz to collect her personal belongings – particularly a dress which could be used for ;the preparation of her body’. But, when they got to the Ritz, they were told all her belongings had already been packed and returned to the UK. It was actually Ambassador’s wife Sylvia Jay who gave one of her own dresses and a pair of shoes for the body of Diana to be laid to rest in.
Later that morning Prince Charles, it was announced, was preparing to fly out to bring his wife’s body home. The wires were bouncing off the walls and the first edition was about to hit the streets.
We took a break. That’s when Joyce called. I walked to the underground car park while I listened to her, she was devastated like it was one of her own family who’d died. She asked me if I would call round to see her on my way home from work. I said yes.
Then it was back to work. 14.00 one of Diana’s friends, the minister of health Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the Medicins Sans Frontières charity, was photographed visiting the hospital. He was weeping.
The big news rolled again as, at 17.00, Charles arrived at the hospital with Diana’s s sisters Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. They were given a guard of honour on the steps. The paps did a good job and snatched a lot of film of his arrival but we used only one, the Prince looking devastated in the back of a limousine. The official line was that he was ‘clearly very upset’. However, when he was introduced to hospital staff he spent more than 40 minutes talking them before spending only a matter of minutes with his dead wife.
At 18.15 the Royals left with police outriders for Villacoublay airport. At 18.45 ‘the coffin was taken from the hearse by Royal Air Force bearer party and was marched to the aircraft in the presence of Charles and a small party of other dignitaries’ and by 19.00 They Royal party flew home’.
I was about to set off for home finally when it was announced that if they wanted to, key members of staff – I was secretly pleased that I was numbered amongst them again – were offered the chance of moving into a nearby hotel until Diana’s funeral was held five days later at Westminster Abbey.
I drove back to the Village of the Damned explaining that I had to ‘nip home’ to make arrangements for my dog. My boss Mike Hughes was a dog lover and agreed.
****
The days in the newsroom became interminably long, copy and pictures, copy and pictures, change pages, features, picture specials, biogs of the Royals, analysis, it never stopped. Food and drink was being constantly delivered into the office. We were all imprisoned by the biggest story most of them had ever worked on.
More than 2.5billion people across the world watched as Prince Charles, William, Harry and Diana’s brother Earl Spencer walked behind the coffin on the four-mile journey from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Diana’s casket was simple.
At the service Lord Spencer delivered an address that praised Diana and then turned this tragic emotional world event into a platform for his belief that it was the media that was resposible for her death.
****
It wasn’t until sixteen years later that the concerns most journalists expressed as Diana’s final drama unfolded began to be officially confirmed. The Sunday People – my old happy hunting ground – was handed an official log detailing the hours after Princess Diana died in Paris – but only after Whitehall had massively censored it.
The log, typewritten on three tatty foolscap pages, had 65 deletions including any reference to the names Charles, Diana’s sisters Sarah and Jane and France’s then-president Jacques Chirac. And amazingly civil servants had deleted “his” and “her”, claiming they had no choice because they had to protect all individuals’ rights to privacy.
All this proved in fact was that authorities had been desperate to maintain a shroud of secrecy over Diana’s death. A six-month inquest into the tragedy ruled only that the princess had been unlawfully killed due to the gross negligence of chauffeur Henri Paul and pursuing paparazzi.
For decades Dodi’s father Mohammad Al-Fayed claimed his son and Diana were killed by the British military at the behest of the Royal Family because they wanted to ensure the couple would never be married. Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, alleged that Prince Philip had instructed MI6 to carry out the hit.
The sad thing is that once again the Press had been muzzled by news black outs, political pressure on editors, the rewriting of history and once again nobody has ever been able to uncover the real truth.
#Diana #Charles #Royals #Buckinghampalace #harry #PrincePhilip #thequeen #Harrods #Paris
They’re at it again – fascinating conversations and opposing points of view! CLICK INSIDE TO SEE
OPINION:
I have known the drunks, the cheats, the liars, the corrupt, the womanisers, the thugs, the racists and the downright dishonest.
And I have known good coppers too.
But good, bad or just plain ugly, these people are put on this earth to protect us.
And in a real crisis they do it very well indeed.
In fact, at the police bravery awards earlier this year there was a Lincolnshire officer who arrested a double murder suspect despite being stabbed himself,
There were four Merseyside Police officers who disarmed armed and violent young men.
A North Yorkshire officer had been nominated after she risked her own life to rescue both her colleague and a member of the public from a river.
Bravery Award Nominees 2022 (polfed.org)
Yep, hero cops still walk our streets at night and jump headlong into the mire of our lives to pull us back to shore.
And they do it for an average wage which wouldn’t make a McDonald’s manager look twice… better to toss burgers than people in jail for that kind of money.
The average for a copper is around £36,000 a year.
Burgers or b*st*rds then? Which would you choose to put in a little box?
So, let’s compare coppers to hacks!
Over the decades I have known many drunks, cheats, liars and womanisers within my own profession. However, not many thugs, racists and liars.
I have also known many good hacks.
We are put here to protect people, just like coppers. And we go out on a limb, go to war zones, riots, protests, boardrooms – and we go undercover to tell people what is going on.
The average pay for a journalist in the UK is around £26,000 a year…
Journalist salary in United Kingdom (indeed.com)
What price security and truth heh?
At least us coppers and hacks work together for the betterment of our society don’t we?
I worked closely with them on everything from the Yorkshire Ripper to Fred West. And those dogs from hell got what they deserved by law.
The law took them to court, they were sentenced and they were EXPOSED.
Yes, the media told the world what they’d done.
But now the police have decided that people like me should be treated like dissidents.
A police guidance has been found telling officers to look on journalists as criminals and extremists.
This edict can only serve to undermine police-press relations and obliterate the public’s right to know about crimes and how they are being investigated.
Look at Merseyside Police, they held briefings to escalate the hunt for the killer of nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel.
Yet this advice to forces says officers should regard professional journalists as a potential ‘corrupting’ influence.
The College of Policing advises that officers must declare whether they have friendships or associations with people such as criminals.
Today this includes recommendations about journalists. HM Inspectorate of Constabulary has recommended police officers disclose associations with ‘journalists and extremist groups’.
Because of complaints the inspectorate has agreed to change the wording. But that doesn’t change the sentiment.
It is clear that the dogs of law are attacking the pack that roams the streets day and night looking for the bits of lives that make people happy, sad and angry. We write about everything from Golden Weddings to twisted prime ministers and the horrors of war.
The police are deliberately undermining the freedom of the Press in the UK at a time when, because of the size of the job and the lack of people to do it, their backs are up against the wall and they are seen on the streets less and less, unless they are nipping across a car park into MacDonalds or Gregg’s. .
Earlier this year, this was reported: “HUNDREDS of serving police officers have been convicted of criminal offences – including assault and robbery, an investigation has revealed.
More than 300 cops currently serving in forces across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are guilty of crimes, according to data released under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Ruth Smeeth, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, said “The tendency to see reporters as a threat rather than an asset is something we are more used to seeing in authoritarian regimes than advanced democracies.”
The Society of Editors said: “ A successful working relationship between the police service and journalists is vital to policing legitimacy in the UK.”
So, there we have it … the police authorities – our government – want to treat people like me as if we are politically motivated activists. And they are advising a powerful organisation, the police, to ‘snitch’ on us and enforce it…
So, dog eats dog and the very bones of the truth are turned into nothing more than sh*t.
#police #policedog #news #newshounds #journalists #society #truth #honesty #thugs #lairs #cheats