Just picked this up from this article on the BBC News Politics section.

As at 19:08

It said the government has promised funding for two pupils from every sixth form and college in the country to visit the Nazi concentration camp where millions of Jews were murdered during the World War I.

(Emphasis mine)

Close, but no cigar.

Update: They fixed it by 19:30

…and everybody legs it home from work early!

Just an observation; the weather was pretty mild today and I took some exercise at about 2:30pm. As I walked around my 4 mile course of residential roads, I noticed that the traffic was abnormally dense, the faint whiff of nitrogen dioxide making the air hard to breathe.

Towards the end of my journey I noticed that the traffic wasn’t easing and that the already poor standard of driving was decreasing with more and more motorists displaying the classic British ‘me-first’ attitude in apparent attempts at automotive suicide.

It could, of course, also be the case that it’s the start of the school half-term holidays but I just wish people would calm it down. I recall that ‘holidays’ used to be something to do with ‘relaxation’.

…or in other words, the probability of a religious leader saying something mind-numbingly stupid is always close to a value of 1.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (principal leader of the Church of England) has stated in an interview for the BBC World at One programme that the adoption of Sharia Law in the UK is unavoidable. [warning: link contains inexcusably daft view-points]

He bases his view on the idea that some British citizens (in this case Muslims) do not relate to the the British legal system. Therefore, he argues, they should be given a choice of which law they would like to be tried under ie: British Law or Sharia law.

He seems to think this is a sensible idea.

Well, perhaps I feel that I don’t relate to British law too easily either. Perhaps the courts would give me the option of being tried under the laws of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

If you are a British citizen, you should be expected to be a part of British culture and abide by British laws. If you dislike an element of British law, you have the right to protest against that rule and lobby for it’s change. You do not have the right to mix and match or choose between different sets of laws to suit yourself.

Update: Rowan Williams has apparently received death threats as a result of this interview. Presumably some slightly less loony Bishop has offered to bat him over the head with a scepter.

Photo Credit: bribriTO cc-by-sa-2.0

RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 will depart from Southampton on her final trans-Atlantic crossing which will be followed by her final round the world cruise. She will depart amid fireworks and fanfare this evening along with her replacement, MS Queen Victoria who will accompany her to New York.

For those interested, QE2 was laid down at the John Brown Shipyard in Clydebank, Scotland on July 5th 1965 and she was launched on September 20th 1967 by HM The Queen. In the 1980s she saw service as a troop ship during the Falklands conflict during which time she was painted grey for camouflage purposes. In her service life, she made in excess of 800 trans-Altlantic crossings.

After completion of her final voyage, she will be decommissioned and taken to Dubai where she will become a floating hotel, much of her 1960s decor being restored. Personally, I almost feel that I’d rather see her scuttled or broken up than be moored as a permanent reminder of Great British industry and engineering which no-longer exists. It’s worth noting that the new MS Queen Victoria is an Italian-built ship.

You can view the Bridge webcam of the QE2 during her final voyage.

Okay, so I don’t really believe this to be an intentional dark conspiracy but the fact remains that the BBC did provably edit an interview between David Frost and Benazir Bhutto to remove a reference made by Bhutto to the murder of Osama Bin Laden by Omar Sheikh.

The original interview was broadcast in full on al Jazeera TV in November with the Bin Laden reference but when the interview was rebroadcast on the BBC, the reference was edited out rather crudely by the insertion of a still image of Frost to cover the audio join in Bhutto’s response.

A youtube user has uploaded both versions of the video (unfortunately, I can’t find one neatly edited together to demonstrate the cut quickly)

The original is first, the reference to the murder is just after the 6:00 minute mark:

In the next clip, we see the BBC’s edited version with the dodgey still of Frost turning up at 5:00 minutes

A Czech lecturer at the University of Glasgow enquired with the BBC about the apparent censorship*:

The video of David Frost’s interview with Bhutto on your website HERE contains a cut shortly after minute 5 where a still photograph of David Frost is inserted.

The uncensored version of the interview is available on YouTube and elsewhere.

In the cut out sequence, Bhutto says that bin Laden is dead.

Can you please advise who has cut out this sequence and what was the reason for this act of censorship?

You may be aware that among other places, this act of censorship is being energetically discussed on the discussion forum of Spiegel Online (in German).

Thank you very much

Dr Jan Culik
Senior Lecturer
University of Glasgow

The BBC sent back the following response.

The BBC has an agreement with al-Jazeera which enables both broadcasters to share certain news material including pictures and interviews. It was on this basis that we offered an extract of Sir David Frost’s interview with Benazir Bhutto to users of the BBC News website.

During the interview Ms Bhutto made an allegation that Osama Bin Laden had been murdered by Omar Sheikh. A claim which was unchallenged and so unexpected that it seemed most likely that she had mis-spoken.

Under time pressure the item producer responsible for publishing the video edited out the comment with the intention of avoiding confusion. On reflection this was clearly a mistake and should not have happened. There was no intention on our part to distort the meaning of the interview, and we will endeavour to replace the edited version currently available via the BBC News website with the original interview as broadcast by Al-Jazeera.

I would like to take the opportunity to apologise for what was an error of judgement and the confusion that this has caused.

Adam Batstone

Editor BBC News Website Audio Video

Which, to my mind is actually a pretty good explanation. Frost seemed to miss the reference (he looked pretty comatose in fact) so Bhutto was never challenged on the statement and she did not expand on it herself which suggests it was uttered as a statement of accepted fact. I’m actually surprised that al Jazeera didn’t make the same cut to avoid confusion too.

I believe she did not intend to name ‘Osama Bin Laden’, rather she intended to say “Omar Sheikh, the man who murdered Daniel Pearl“. Omar Sheikh was found guilty of the videotaped 2002 murder of the journalist. It’s possible that she just had Bin Laden on her mind at that moment in the interview and confused his name for Pearl’s without even realising the mistake.

The conspiracy theorists are very excited about this and of course, from their point of view, it really is golden. Now that Bhutto has been assasinated, it is impossible to ask her whether she actually intended to say ‘Osama Bin Laden’ or not.

Update: Steve Herrmann, the Editor of the BBC News Website has put his view forward too. I remain of the opinion that the whole hoo-ha was David Frost’s fault when he didn’t pick up on Benazir Bhutto’s mistake. If Frost had just asked her if she meant what she said (and I’m nearly certain now that she meant to say Daniel Pearl) the conspiracy nuts would still be bleating but wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

*Please note, the letters quoted were ‘collected on the internet’, I’ve not found the primary source

Well, here’s to 2008.

I wish everyone the very best prosperity for this year despite our shaky looking economy and the UK credit crunch.

I also wish that our politicians should make more moves towards domestic energy security so we don’t have to send our boys and girls to fight over dusty strips of land with oil underneath.

I wonder if we will see a correction or crash in house prices this year as so many hard working people in the UK are unable to afford to live in even the most decrepit of places. I fear that the situation will once again be engineered to protect the interests of ‘buy to let’ and property developers to the detriment of the already massively-overstretched normal mortgagees and to the exclusion of the ‘first-time-buyer’.

Finally, I’d like to remind everyone that in 2008, we can look forward to the first introduction of UK National Identity Cards giving the government never before seen powers of authoritarian control over the population and a unique opportunity to lose practically every piece of information known about an individual in one go. This as other nations have a sudden outbreak of common sense and scrap their ID Card programmes. If any politician should wheel out the damned lie that ‘biometrics’ is in any way useful for preventing the wholesale physical loss/theft of identity data this year, I’ll be inclined to swing for them.

Try to have a good year. Wherever you may find one.