There was a lot of rockn' going on that night Cruising time for the young bright lights Just down past the gasworks, by the meat factory door The five lamp boys were coming on strong The Saturday night city beat had already started and The pulse of the corner boys sprang into action And young Billy watched it all under the yellow street light And said "tonight, of all nights, there's gonna be a fight"
Billy don't like it living here in this town He says the traps have been sprung long before he was born He says "hope bites the dust behind all the closed doors And puss and grime ooze from its scab crusted sores There's screaming and crying in the high rise blocks" It's a rat trap, Billy, but you're already caught But you can make it if you wanna or you need it bad enough You're young and good looking and you're acting kind of tough Anyway, it's Saturday night, time to see what's going down Put on the bright suit, Billy, head for the right side of town It's only 8 o'clock, but you're already bored You don't know what it is, but there's got to be more You'd better find a way out, hey, kick down the door It's a rat trap and you've been caught
In this town, Billy says, "everybody's tryin' to tell you what to do" In this town, Billy says, "everybody says you gotta follow rules" You walk up to the traffic lights, Switch from your left to right You push in that button, and that button comes alight It tells you "Walk, don't walk Talk, don't talk"
Hey Billy take a walk...with me Do you want that misery Sweethearts run free
Little Judy's trying to watch "Top of the Pops" But mum and dad are fighting don't they ever stop She takes off her coat and walks out to the street It's cold on that road, but it's got that home beat Deep down in her pockets she finds 50p Hey, is that any way for a young girl to be "I'm gonna get out of school, work in a silk factory Work all the hours God gave me, get myself a little easy money now, now, now"
Her mind's made up, she walks down the road Her hands in her pockets, coat buttoned 'gainst the cold She finally finds Billy down at the Italian cafe And when he's drunk it's hard to understand what Billy says But then he mumbles in his coffee and suddenly roars "It's a rat trap Judy, and we've been caught"
Henry Joy McCracken was born in Belfast into two of the city's most prominent industrial families. He was the son of shipowner Captain John McCracken and Ann Joy, daughter of Francis Joy. The Joy family made their money in linen manufacture and founded the Belfast News Letter. Henry was the elder brother of political activist and social reformer Mary Ann McCracken, with whom he shared an interest in Irish traditional culture. In 1792, he helped organise the Belfast Harp Festival which gathered aged harpists from around Ireland, and helped preserve the Irish airs by having them transcribed by Edward Bunting. Bunting, who lodged in the McCracken's Rosemary Lane home, was a classically trained musician.
McCracken became interested in radical politics from an early age and joined the Society of the United Irishmen in 1795 which quickly made him a target of the authorities. He regularly travelled throughout the country using his business as a cover for organising other United Irish societies, but was arrested in October 1796 and lodged in Kilmainham Jail in Dublin. While imprisoned with other leaders of the United Irishmen, McCracken fell seriously ill and was released on bail in December 1797.[1]
Following the outbreak of the United Irishmen-led Rebellion in Leinster in May 1798, theAntrim organisation met on 3 June to decide on their response. The meeting ended inconclusively with a vote to wait for French aid being passed by a narrow margin. A new meeting of delegates was held in Templepatrick on 5 June where McCracken was elected general for Antrim and he quickly began planning military operations.
McCracken formulated a plan for all small towns in Antrim to be seized after which rebels would converge upon Antrim town on 7 June where the county's magistrates were to hold a crisis meeting. Although the plan met initial success and McCracken led the rebels in theattack on Antrim, they were defeated and his army melted away. Although McCracken initially escaped, a chance encounter with men who recognized him from his cotton business led to his arrest. Although offered clemency if he testified against other United Irishmen leaders, McCracken refused to turn on his compatriots. He was court-martialledand hanged at Corn Market, Belfast, on land his grandfather had donated to the city, on 17 July 1798, aged 30.[1]
McCracken's remains are believed to have been reinterred by Francis Joseph Biggar in 1909 at Clifton Street Cemetery, Belfast, alongside his sister Mary Ann. His illegitimate daughter Maria (whose mother is speculated to have been Mary Bodell), was raised by her aunt Mary Ann McCracken.
"The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing." - Martha Graham
BILLY ELLIOT is the coming-of-age story of a young boy, Billy, who through his unexpected love of dance, embarks on a journey of self-discovery in the world of picket lines, cultural stereotypes, a family in crisis and a headstrong ballet teacher.
When eleven-year-old Billy (Jamie Bell) stumbles across a local ballet class that comes to share the village hall with his boxing club, something in the magic of the movements captures his imagination, and he's soon ditching his boxing gloves to sneak in at the back of Mrs. Wilkinson's (Julie Walters) lessons. With a sharp eye for talent, Mrs. Wilkinson's zest for teaching is revived when she sees Billy's potential. Rather forgetting the other ballerinas, she's drawn into teaching her raw new protégé
Meanwhile, Billy's father (Gary Lewis) and older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) both on strike - struggle to put food on the table. Their pent up frustrations finally explode when they discover Billy has been squandering his boxing money on less than manly pursuits. Banned from ballet, troubled by the escalating senile behaviour of his grandma (Jean Heywood), and missing his recently dead Mam more than ever, Billy's relationship, with school friend Michael (Stuart Wells) deepens into a touching friendship, while new pal Debbie, daughter of Mrs. Wilkinson, awakens frightening, but not unpleasant, feelings in Billy.
Mrs. Wilkinson eventually persuades Billy to accept private training, for free, telling him she wants him to audition for the Ballet School. The emotions released in their intensive routines nearly break the both of them, but when the day of the audition comes, Billy is tragically forced to miss it as a result of Tony's scuffle with the police. Taking matters into her own hands, Mrs. Wilkinson calls on Billy's father to explain the extraordinary chance his son is missing, but is thrown out by an irate Tony, much to Billy's humiliation.
Distraught by his family's lack of understanding, Billy unleashes his feelings in a dance meant only for Michael to see, but is caught mid-routine by his father. Rooted to the spot by the power and animation of his son's talent, he solemnly agrees to ensure Billy gets another chance by auditioning in London. With support from the other miners, Billy and his Dad finally make it to London for the gruelling audition, returning home to anxiously await the ballet school's decision.
Fifteen years later, Dad, Tony and Michael watch with pride as the curtain rises on Billy's premiere leading role in London's West End.
The mysterious and sordid Diego Garcia island, south of where the islanders sighted a jumbo, is a military base that ABC reported Wednesday as having a notable landing strip, with US military personnel. It is one of the black sites where the US has transported and detained so-called terrorists.
The Maldive’s civilian airport is also notable for a secret drug dealers’ flight exit, exposed in 2013 by a reporter in Vanuatu, BJ Skane.
Those considerations, added to facts that: 1) Malaysia officials based their sighting dismissal on the military, Maldives Chief of the Defence Force, 2) the Maldives was excluded from countries participating in the search and rescue (SAR) countries, and 3) the United States military base Diego Garcia south of the Maldives - more strongly suggest a U.S. military operation, coverup and false flag event, as Dupré detailed in a report Monday.
Malaysian acting transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters Wednesday in Kuala Lumpur that authorities in the Maldives told Malaysia the reports are “not true,” reports Farah Ahmed of Haveeru newspaper, who originally reported the islanders’ accounts of seeing the odd, low-flying plane with Malaysia Airlines’ stripe emblem and colors.
“I can confirm that the Malaysian Chief of the Defence Force has contacted his counterpart in the Maldives, who has confirmed that these reports are not true,” Hishammuddin said, accusing the islanders and/or Maldives’ reporters of lying.
Major General Ahmed Shiyam ndc, psc is serving as Chief of Defence Force of the Maldives National Defence Force.
Malaysian government’s transport ministry excluded Maldives from their SAR operation, one heavily domintaed by United States agencies. This is despite pings showing it in the vicinity of the Maldives.
In a statement released Sunday, the Malaysian government listed countries it appealed for assistance in their SAR regarding the missing flight: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia and France.
Several residents of Kuda Huvadhoo in the Maldives on Tuesday told Haveeru newspaper reporters that they saw a “low flying jumbo jet” at around 6:15am on March 8. They said that it was a white aircraft, with red stripes across it – “what the Malaysia Airlines flights typically look like,” the paper reaffirmed Wednseday. They noted the incredibly loud noise the flight made when it flew over houses in the island.
Eyewitnesses from Kuda Huvadhoo concurred that the airplane travelled from the North to South-East, toward the Southern tip of the Maldives – Addu. South is where Diego Garcia black site is and where Malaysia Airlines 370 had enough fuel to reach.
“A local aviation expert told Haveeru that it is ‘likely’ for MH370 to have flown over the Maldives. The possibility of any aircraft flying over the island at the reported time is extremely low, the expert added,” the paper said.
Maldives police have launched an investigation into the reported sightings of the low-flying aircraft, according to Haveeru newspaper.
The Malaysia airlines jet disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board after departing Kuala Lumpur International Airport bound for Beijing. Investigators say it was deliberately diverted off course, what most reporters and some officials have viewed as a hijacking, while many have viewed it as a false flag.
Black Site Diego Garcia Home to Decades of Military Human Rights Abuses
Twenty-six countries are reportedly involved in the SAR after satellite and military radar data projected two huge corridors through which it might have flown – but for some reason excluded the Maldives, despite satellite data suggests that the last “ping” was received by a satellite somewhere close to the Maldives and the US naval base on Diego Garcia.
“The island atoll is a British territory in the central Indian Ocean and is home to a United States Navy support facility — not exactly a U.S. base, but home for 1700 military personnel, 1,500 civilian contractors, and various Naval equipment,” ABC reports Wednseday. ”The island — named after 16th century Spanish explorer Diego Garcia de Moguer — gained some notoriety in the past 10 years after reports claimed that the U.S. used Diego Garcia to transport and detain alleged terrorists.”
“Time published allegations by a former senior US official that at least one terror suspect was imprisoned on the island in a secret jail, known as a “black site”. The island had already been implicated as a “staging post” in secret flights transporting suspects from one country to another, as part of so-called extraordinary rendition measures.” (Metro)
ACLU executive director Anthony Romero stated at that time: “The ACLU is proud to join Liberty in the effort to uncover the truth about what happened at Diego Garcia.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity organization Reprieve (that unearthed flight logs recording arrivals and departures of a CIA rendition plane at Diego Garcia), wrote in the Guardian in 2008:
British denials are difficult to square with the words of U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey … recently retired from running Southcom, the military command that oversees Guantanamo.
He was asked in May 2004 where the thousands of ghost prisoners were being held. “You know, Bagram Air Field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” he replied.
MH370 carried passengers who were possibly persons of interest to the U.S. It had over 20 employees of military-linked employees, some working for companies Congress has deemed national security risks.
‘Stealing A Nation’ (2004), an extraordinary John Pilger film, shows the plight of Chagos Islands, whose indigenous population was secretly and brutally expelled by British Governments in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for an American military base. This tragedy, falling within remit of the International Criminal Court as “a crime against humanity”, is told by Islanders dumped in slums of Mauritius and by British officials, who left a damning trail of Foreign Office documents.
Before Americans went to the Malives, over 2,000 people lived on those islands in the Indian Ocean, many with roots back to the late 18th century. There were thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a railway and an undisturbed way of life.
The islands were, and still are, a British crown colony. In the 1960s, the Harold Wilson government struck a secret deal with the United States to hand over the main island of Diego Garcia. The Americans demanded that the surrounding islands be “swept” and “sanitized”. Unknown to Parliament and to the US Congress and in breach of the United Nations Charter, the British Government plotted with Washington to expel the entire population.
LONDON - Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has accused the government of hiding information on missing flight MH370, telling Britain's Daily Telegraph that the country's radar system would have detected any change of course.
Anwar, who recently had his acquittal on sodomy charges overturned in what he claims is a political smear, said he was "baffled" why the sophisticated Marconi radar system that he authorised as finance minister in 1994 had failed to immediately detect the plane's deviation.
Anwar: "We have the capacity to protect our borders."
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 went missing in the early hours of March 8 during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, carrying 239 people on board.
In an interview carried by the Friday edition of the newspaper, he described it as "not only unacceptable but not possible, not feasible" that it could travel across "at least four" Malaysian states undetected, adding: "I believe the government knows more than us".
"We don't have the sophistication of the United States or Britain but still we have the capacity to protect our borders," he stressed.
The radar system, based near the South China Sea, covers mainland Malaysia.
Anwar defended the aircraft's pilot, 53-year-old Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who is also a personal friend and a member of his political party.
"If you say or suggest that the pilot may have been involved, what about the concealing (of information)?" he told the Telegraph.
"He could not have concealed the radar readings. He could not have instructed the air force to remain completely silent."
Anwar was sentenced to five years in jail just hours before MH370 took off after a Court of Appeals panel sided with a government challenge to his 2012 acquittal on charges he sodomised a male former aide. He is currently on bail.
He leads a pro-democracy coalition of parties that shocked the government by claiming over half of the popular vote in last year's general election, though it was not enough to secure victory. Crisis of credibility in Malaysian plane search By Anil Netto
PENANG - It has been a sight that Malaysians are unaccustomed to - senior ministers and officials shifting uncomfortably and bristling in delivering curt responses to journalists trying to extract more information about the still unresolved March 8 disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner destined for China.
A series of false leads and apparent withheld information about the airliner's known pathway has resulted in a wild goose chase involving dozens of countries. Today, Australia's Air Force said it sighted two objects in the southern Indian Ocean that may be related to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
The Malaysian government's unexplained delay in disclosing the
plane's turn back from its scheduled route toward an area near Penang in the west coast of the peninsula has exposed Prime Minister Najib Razak's government to global criticism of its perceived as inept crisis management.
The government in general and air force in particular have faced uncomfortable questions over how its three radar locations in the north of the peninsula failed to detect the plane in the early hours of March 8 - an apparent failure that prevented fighter jets stationed at the air force base in Butterworth on mainland Penang from scrambling to intercept the jetliner and guide it to a safe landing.
Contradictions and dithering over the findings of primary radar records meant precious time was lost searching for the Boeing 777 aircraft over the South China Sea instead of the Straits of Malacca and Indian Ocean. The costly delay in disclosure of crucial information to the global community, however, is symptomatic of Malaysia's wider governance problem.
Whatever the outcome into the investigations of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, "this could prove be a turning point for Malaysia," said an economics lecturer in Penang who requested anonymity.
The confusion on a global scale has laid bare the poor performance of senior ministers and raised new concerns about the competence of the upper echelons of Malaysia's civil service. That has included a glaring lack of proficiency in English in the early days of the crisis, before Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein, cousin of premier Najib, took over as main government spokesperson.
That it took nearly a week for the government to admit that the global search including naval ships, surveillance planes and satellites for the massive jetliner should focus in areas other than the South China Sea has also raised questions about the military's basic operating procedures and surveillance capabilities.
Its apparent initial refusal to accept international assistance from countries with superior surveillance capacities have simultaneously revealed an obdurate nationalism, analysts say. On March 19, 11 days after the plane disappeared, Malaysian authorities made their first high-level request for American assistance in recovering data deleted from a flight simulator installed in one of the pilot's homes.
(Malaysian officials insist they have been sharing information and cooperating with global partners from the start.)
"What I would like to know is, with all our defense expenditure, why did our military not detect immediately the plane was flying back? That is the most crucial point," said a Penang-based business analyst who declined to be identified. "Based on our misinformation, we sent so many nations to the South China Sea in the first week, which was a major error."
To be sure, the bewildering circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the aircraft, including the apparent switching off or malfunctioning of the plane's communication devices, would have tested any government's mettle. But bumbling officials, conflicting accounts of what the primary radar actually showed, and lack of intra-agency coordination in the first week of the crisis has exposed the country's top leadership to unprecedented and unflattering global scrutiny.
It has since been learned that fisher folk situated on the east coast of the Malaysian peninsula had lodged police reports of a low-flying aircraft on March 8. A news portal in the Maldives, about 3,000 kilometers west of the Malaysian peninsula in the Indian Ocean, reported on Tuesday that residents on a remote island witnessed a "low-flying jumbo jet." If accurate, the report would seem to confirm the plane's westward trajectory.
Other theories discounting possible hijacking or pilot sabotage scenarios have gained in currency in on-line forums. An "old pilot" writing on one Internet chat room played down the official theory of deliberate intervention and instead suggested that the westward turn back was consistent with a captain trying to head towards the nearest safe runway - perhaps Malaysia's northern Langkawi island, after a possible malfunction or fire on board the plane.
According to earlier reports, radar in Aceh, Indonesia and Hat Yai, Thailand failed to detect the plane, but ten days after the disappearance the Thai air force said its radar in southern Surat Thani province detected a plane over Butterworth on mainland Penang that had diverted from its original route.
China, which is known to have significant surveillance capabilities in the Indian Ocean region, has not yet indicated whether its satellites trained on the area detected the wayward plane. The majority of the passengers on the flight were Chinese nationals. The Chinese media and relatives of those onboard have been especially strident in their criticism of Malaysia's perceived incoherent response to the crisis.
Malaysian government officials have for decades faced a pliant domestic media that dutifully spin flattering reports about their policies and performance. Mainstream media journalists have often been content to publish government statements at face value and rarely probed deeper, especially if such investigations would potentially put the government in a poor light.
Now, official incoherence and obfuscation is being revealed in the press conference grillings of a more probing and persistent global media. Following that cute, the upstart domestic on-line media has grown more emboldened in reporting on the government's crisis management, while Malaysian netizens have liberally posted their own criticism of the government's performance.
"Our [former premier] Mahathir-inspired mediocrity for decades set us up for something like this," wrote one such critical commenter on a blog. "What you have is basically a national system in denial about excellence [for] meeting the demand of global standards - and it failed."
Others have drawn connections to a sharp drop in the country's rankings in international education assessments for mathematics and science - a decline that has persisted in recent years. Still others have pointed to endemic corruption and crony capitalism as the root of top level incompetence. The Economist magazine recently ranked Malaysia as number three in its crony-capitalism index, trailing only Hong Kong and Russia.
Ironically, the jumbo jet disappeared just hours after opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim was again convicted of sodomy (a crime in Muslim majority Malaysia) and sentenced to five years in prison. Anwar said he would appeal the decision, but it effectively disqualified him as a candidate for a crucial by-election on March 23, which would probably have seen him score a thumping win in Kajang in the central state of Selangor.
When Anwar was first arrested in 1998 under Mahathir Mohamad and later charged with alleged sodomy and corruption, it spawned a reform movement (reformasi) calling for political change and greater accountability in government. The Barisan Nasional-led government's mishandling of the plane's disappearance has demonstrated to many Malaysians just how little progress has since been made in those regards.
The government's perceived mismanagement of the crisis has exposed Najib's administration to waves of unflattering global scrutiny and raised questions of official competence that will endure long after the mystery of the missing jetliner is resolved. The political fallout could be immense and will only further erode the government's sinking credibility both at home and now also abroad.
Could the next one languishing, shoeless, in a Garda cell be you?
Why accountability matters
Photograph: Brenda Fitzsimons
Kathy Sheridan
No rational being believes that operational gardaí have an easy job. But they have awesome powers. They can deprive you of your freedom. That’s why accountability is the bottom line.
In all the furore about whether Garda commissioner Martin Callinan was fired or retired, his real legacy is clear: it is the virtual war between what he called “My force. My officers” and the Garda Ombudsman, the citizens’ watchdog.
Take the story of a young woman, unremarkable in jeans and trainers, walking alone across town at 6.30am. A Garda car pulls up and two men jump out. They accuse her of assaulting a male a few streets back, and demand her name and address. Confused and shocked, she asks repeatedly to see the “victim”. They repeat that if she refuses to give her details, they will arrest her. But she committed no offence, she protests, so why should she give her name and address. That’s the offence, they say, clapping her in handcuffs and taking her to a station. She is ordered to remove her shoes and is left in a cell for about 20 minutes before being told to sign an adult caution form.
The options are simple, they tell her. If she fails to sign, she will be taken to court, will likely get a conviction and will not be allowed into the United States. If she signs, she can go home.
Distress In great distress, she signs. A senior officer enters the room, bringing the number of gardaí to five. Only now is she read her rights. Soon after, her shoes are returned to her and she is allowed to leave. Unlike many young recipients of rough Garda treatment, this young woman is lucky enough to have a line to experts willing to pursue answers.
Although she is terrified of exposing herself to the threat of some purported offence being “reactivated” (it happens), she is anxious to know what lies in her police record. So over many months, a solicitor specialising in criminal law writes repeatedly to the station superintendent requesting copy documents to which every citizen is entitled – her custody record and the adult caution form.
It takes a full year of writing before they are finally received. They disclose no offence. There is no reference to the alleged assault, the alleged pre-condition for the stop. The form she signed states she was “extremely aggressive” to the gardaí (an image so unlikely it makes her and those who know her laugh hysterically).
Meaningless It seems she was arrested simply for not giving her name and address, says her solicitor. Mandatory later sections of the form have been left blank, indicating her case went no further than the circle of gardaí on duty that night. But such a caution is meaningless unless it is sent upwards to the district office, which it wasn’t. Despite that, the form shows a Pulse identity number, which suggests she is now in the “system”. Should that worry her? Or you?
So what was the point of it all? What price the ripple effect of this story on her wide, overlapping circle of friends, from someone brought up to see the guards as protectors?
Though a tiny incident in the great scheme of things, it illuminates a greater truth. It tells us that despite the much- touted cuts, five gardaí had the time and facilities to generate and pursue a non-incident. It tells us that it takes a highly respected firm of solicitors a full year to extract two simple documents from a superintendent, which means the ordinary citizen hasn’t a hope. It tells us that short-fused gardaí believe they have little to fear from within. And also have little to fear from without, because like many before her, the young woman is too fearful of Garda reach to go public.
This is why the Garda Síochána obstruction of the Garda Síochána Ombudsman Commission matters. And why the next commissioner’s CV must contain a proven, demonstrable passion for police accountability. Because the next one languishing in that Garda cell, shoe-less, could be you.
.jpg)
