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A more pressing charity status story remains in my view the status of The British Council whose St Petersburg office Director Stephen Kinnock was
pulled over by Russian police last night and questioned about traffic violations. This follows earlier complaints over tax 'irregularity'
and alleged illegal trading by BC.

But with claims of diplomatic immunity flying around the FCO,
what is the position of Charity
Commissioners in England? There
is supposed to be a fundamental
principle of charity law that a proper charity is independent of government. Indeed, in Scotland
where charity law is separate, a
local authority college in the
east end of Glasgow was suspended
from the Scottish Charity register
pending changes to its constitution precisely on this point of charities having to be independent of the state. Interestingly, one of the other charities subjected at the
same time by Oscar (the Scottish
Charity Regulator in Dundee) as
part of their first 'rolling review' was an independent fee-paying school
(Dundee High School). Dundee High passed the new public benefit test.

Full details are available on the website of the Office of the Scottish
Charity Regulator - along with the list of those charities that were deregistered recently for not being in compliance with reporting rules.

These included several packs of Brownies but as yet no Hainites!

Yes I agree there should be something about Russia- it's ridiculous that the Russians are responding in this way- we want one of their citizens to come here to face murder charges- they seem to be forgetting this.

Perhaps you should look more widely at public sector pay- who decides who gets what- perhaps one body should decide it all- and that shouldn't be parliament.

if newsnight covered the diana story i think they would have to be careful to avoid doing what all other media outlets do. Far too many of the news programmes speculate ridiculously instead of looking at the facts- have we really learned anything from the past few days of the inquest?

Did Mystic Crick's crystal ball predict he would be poorly ??

'Strong story'?

Evidently the Policy Exchange fiasco wasn't enough to keep Newsnight's
critical/sceptical faculties running. Given that one needs to be highly sceptical when one encounters the sort of material shown last night, Newsnight could, I think, have done fasr better than just say that it didn't make a habit of
following up anonymous threats whilst doing exactly that. Your guest added nothing of value in my
view, she just repeated what your film asserted.

Why didn't you begin by highlighting if only to doscount some of the possible beneficiaries of this continuation of 'the war on terror'? That's all that these periodic media bomblettes achieve, i.e. they just reinforce earlier events
(which also have to be looked upon in the darker scheme of things
alas, cf WMDs, the 'Iranian' suicide speedboats etc etc).

Who exactly are the current 'terrorists'? Anyone with a pro-Israel bent COULD be
pumping out this sort of stuff, or is there some reason why that's
totally inconceivable or highly improbable?

The effect of all of this will be to make at least some religious Muslims more inclined to take on debts like the rest of us or feel unwelcome in the UK. From that perspective, who and what benefits given Muslims' Qu'ranic strictures? There's a
dilemma here given the different birth rates between the secular and the religious.

In passing, was it not a clever ruse to get the Catholic clergy
(and hence intelligentsia) to be celibate? It must have contributed to
differential fertility/IQ in the Catholics at their hegemonic expense. Think of Spain, Ireland, Poland. Again, who benefited (who
funded our Civil War and what did the Levellers try to do, and how did their (ultimate) leader repay their benefactors)?

Airing findings like last night's is certainly likely to reinforce fear induced by the 'war on terror', and tereby serve all who benefit from that.

The 'defining story of our age' - now who decided that and how is it reiinforced?

/blogs/newsnight/2007/09/reporting_the_defining_story_of_our_age.html

something fun?

the best lines from the commons and PMQs ever?

something fun?

the best lines from the commons and PMQs ever?

Russia is I think quite strict about drink and driving these days. Wasn't
that one of the great achievements of 'the Gorbachev era'? I am also still waiting to see the British
Council staff guidelines about the use of hand-held mobile phones in
cars. I was promised these back in
February 2000 after lodging a formal
health and safety at work complaint
against a British Council official
who insisted on going paragraph by
paragraph through a document while
driving us at speed with one hand
down an Israeli transit motorway
towards Gaza! The guy on the other end was a senior manager in Cairo
who was also reported. Complaints
were ignored despite this being a
criminal offence under Israeli traffic law (according to the
Head of British Council Gaza's
office who was the only person
in the organisation to take this
matter of staff safety seriously.)

On the return journey the same British Council vehicle had a
tyre blowout while carrying a
team of Palestinian officials.

Actually number 6's idea sounds good- or a collection of things that are not allowed to be said in the house- such as bob ainsworth's comment the other day:

On the blog sites, they are now saying P Hain's SPADS were responsible for issuing press releases saying the Tories intend to 'destroy final salary pension schemes' and 'Don't ever vote Tory'. These people are supposed to behave impartially and are not allowed to engage in party politics, let alone use public money to do it. Will that be on your programme? No. Thought not. Shame a Tory/Lib/SNP/Welsh Nat or Nelson Mandela's dog has not broken wind in public, then you would have something to report.

The comment on Sark's government is interesting to some of us but we cannot fail to question why the UK government feels it essential for all of Sark's government to be democratically elected and yet has struggled to remove hereditary peers from it's own government!! The House of Lords seems to be an OK system for the UK but nothing similar, however harmless (and let's face it the population of Sark is not expected to ake many decisions which will affect the outside world) in another island is wrong!!
Please do not belittle the effect of such a momentous change unless you know the facts.

Cyber-terrorist 007.

I note you're all sooo underwhelmed. Or just plain bored with terrorism?

The Canadian connection on the Mohammad Atif Siddique case is now revealed. For those of you south of the border this was Scotland's first home-grown terror suspect, jailed last October for his hand in setting up jihadi websites connected to a plot to kill the Canadian PM.

I predict the terrorists biggest coup will come via the internet, and cause some kind of massive systems failure in the west. This is why the loss of IR data is so scary. Just think, all those UK credit cards financing Bin Liner.

But heh, no worries, eh? Just go back to worrying about Peter Hain dodgy donations and the Northern Rock fiasco.

We like your world news on nightly tv very much, but we can't stand that repetitive, nervewracking, annoying drumming sound you keep using in the background where you're giving the headlines. They're a form of cruel and unusual punishment directed at your viewers!Please get rid of that!