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It’s six weeks since the Northerner lamented the lack of finalists from our three regions in Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s ‘English Heritage Angel’ awards which celebrate local people’s work in protecting historic, interesting or beautiful buildings or landscape.

The fanfare is just that; it doesn’t come with funding or the chance to perform in one of the Lord’s stage productions, like Connie Fisher who triumphed in How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?

But it draws attention to the project as well as the work of those responsible for the transformation, and that encourages others with money or help in kind to pitch in. And the good news is that our solitary representative among the 16 finalists has…WON!

Plain but handy for all sorts oif local uses. The exterior of the former church. Photograph: English Heritage

Yay! Well done the 120 volunteers who are returning the abandoned church of St Margaret of Antioch in Leeds to communal and imaginative use. We ran their prospectus back in September and you can read it here. Better still, get down there and see why they won earlier funding of £700,000 from English Heritage. Maybe you will be volunteer number 121.

The context of these awards is an alarming total of 5,828 buildings on English Heritage’s At Risk Register. They include such wonders as Temple Mill in Leeds, which the Northerner also highlighted recently. Places such these simply cannot be lost.

English Heritage goes on to warn that:

Nationally, 3% of grade I and II* listed buildings are at risk

284 listed places of worship are among them

16.9% of England’s 19,748 scheduled monuments are also at risk

The number of registered parks and gardens at risk increased from 99 (6.2%) in 2010 to 104 (6.4%) this year

Four of the six registered battlefields at risk are in Yorkshire and the Humber

Of the 7,481 conservation areas that have been surveyed, 516 (6.6%) are at risk.

St Margaret’s team got their gong for the best restoration of a place of worship at a ceremony in London this morning, Monday 31 October, featuring the Lord and assorted celebs – Clare Balding, Graham Norton, Michael Winner and Danielle Hope. The other five winners are::
 

The Smythe Barn at Westenhanger, Hythe, Kent for the best craftsmanship on a heritage rescue
 
Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol, and St Stephen’s, Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead, London, jointly for the best rescue of any other entry from the Heritage at Risk register.

Pleasley Colliery, Mansfield, Derbyshire (nearly northern…) for the best rescue of an industrial building or site
 
Tyntesfield Orangery in Somerset for the favourite award voted for by English Heritage members and readers of the Daily Telegraph, the awards’ media partner.

Lloyd Webber signalled his future support at the award ceremony, saying:

All 16 shortlisted groups were exceptional and the judges had a hard time deciding between them. But in the end the winners stood out for their passion, perseverance and imagination, for the scale of the challenges they had taken on and for the legacy they leave behind – a secure future for beautiful historic buildings which without them could so easily have simply disappeared. I look forward to many others joining their ranks in the years to come.

 
Another of the judges, the classicist and TV presenter Bettany Hughes says:

The real joy of these awards is that we are recognising the value of the human spirit; our Angels are all men and women who have battled against the odds and who with flair, tenacity, sympathy, and sometimes wild inspiration have never taken ‘no’ for an answer and have instead laboured to make the world around them richer and better. If I wore hats, I would be in a perpetual state of taking my hat off to them all. We owe them much.

You can watch highlights from the awards ceremony on BBC 2′s Culture Show at 6pm this coming Saturday 5 November.
 

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2011/oct/31/st-margaret-of-antioch-english-heritage-leeds-andrew-lloyd-webber

The former girlfriend of an internet stalker jailed on Monday for posting sexual images of her online in a year-long campaign of harassment said his sentence “will never make up for the hurt he has put me through”.

Shane Webber, 23, from Nottingham, was jailed for four months at Southampton magistrates’ court after admitting he harassed Ruth Jeffery by posting the images on social networking sites and tagging the photos to draw them to the attention of her family and friends, including her parents, unbeknown to her.

He also tried to implicate one of his friends, Lee Evans, by putting the posts in an email address bearingEvans’s name, leading to his arrest.

He was only found out when Jeffery’s family made their own inquiries and the emails were traced back to him.

In passing sentence, district judge Anthony Callaway said the offence was a “gross violation of Miss Jeffery’s privacy”.

Outside the court Jeffery, 22, said that even if Webber had got the maximum jail sentence magistrates can give – six months – it would not have made up for the hurt she had been caused.

She added: “I am extremely pleased with the outcome. I am pleased I can now put it behind me. I was absolutely devastated when I found out it was him. I could not believe it was Shane. I did not want to believe it.” Jeffery said her family suspected it was Webber but she could not comprehend how he could do such a thing.

Webber started the campaign in April 2010 when Jeffery aborted their child and he became angry. He posted 10-12 images of a nude or sexual nature of his girlfriend and also of himself with her on to sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr and Google Picasa, the court heard.

One batch in April 2011 was called Nude Jeffery and was sent to many close friends and family of the computing science student at Loughborough University.

Frank Richardson, prosecuting, said: “She had no knowledge that Shane Webber was sending these images to her friends.”

Webber told Jeffery that Evans, who knew nothing about what his friend was doing, had stolen the explicit images from his computer. To make the deception even more elaborate he pretended to be Evans online when Jeffery contacted him about the harassment and he even told her that he, Webber, was having affairs.

Richardson told the court: “That was manipulation, that was control, that was mind control.”

In a victim impact statement which was read out, Jeffery said: “I have been absolutely devastated by the fact the person I shared everything with caused me so much hurt and harm.”

The court was told that the pair had met at school and got together at an early age before Jeffery moved with her family to Southampton. The relationship with Webber continued when she started at Loughborough University. The court heard that Jeffery’s family suspected that Webber was behind the harassment but Ms Jeffery did not believe them, causing friction in the family as she defended him.

Eventually her father, Gordon, made his own investigation and traced the postings to a site registered to Webber and he was arrested and interviewed by police.

“He could not give a reason why he did this,” Richardson said: “He was more angry with her [Ms Jeffery's] mother and father for telling her to abort his child.”

In mitigation, Janet Grey said that Webber had Asperger’s syndrome and he and his family had suffered from abuse, including his parents’ house having the words “sicko” and “psycho” daubed on it.

“He has been having a nasty time since this hit the tabloid press,” she said. “He seems to have realised he has received a dose of his own medicine. He realises, for the first time, the devastating impact this has had on Ruth and her family.”

Callaway said the offence and its breach of trust and privacy was so serious that only jail would be appropriate. He also imposed a five-year restraining order on Webber not to contact his former girlfriend or post images of her online.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/31/internet-stalker-explicit-pictures-girlfriend

The education secretary, Michael Gove, has told headteachers and council education bosses to stop “whingeing” about diminishing budgets.

At a breakfast meeting organised by the Ark academy chain, Gove accused heads of “reaching for excuses” instead of getting on with improving their schools.

His comments come days after the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank calculated that the coalition was making the biggest cut to education budgets since the 1950s.

Gove claimed there was a “haunting question” for many heads and council education bosses: “Why aren’t we doing better?”

He said some schools in deprived parts of the country, such as Hackney, in east London, and White City, in the west of the capital, were out-performing those in affluent areas like Hampshire, Oxfordshire and West Sussex.

Pupils in richer areas often come from supportive and loving homes and their teachers will have benefited from top universities, Gove said, adding: “Yet these children are not performing as well as those in some inner-city schools – why? We can’t escape asking that question.

“Every time that the headteacher, or the director of children’s services, or the minister reaches for excuses, such as ‘we’re under-resourced’ or ‘I’m afraid the capital this year hasn’t been so good’ or ‘it’s very difficult to fire teachers’ … they’re spending time justifying under-performance when they should be spending time challenging under-performance and looking for reasons to perform better.”

Successful schools “do not spend their time whingeing about resources or complaining about ministers’ particular priorities because they know they are masters or mistresses of their own destiny”, he said. “They can make a little go a surprisingly long way.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/31/gove-tells-heads-stop-whingeing-resources

Police fired a Taser at a 72-year-old man suspected of causing criminal damage in a Cornish village.

Devon and Cornwall police said officers discharged the Taser at the man in the bedroom of a house in St Day, near Redruth.

They had been called to the village after a 999 caller on Sunday afternoon alleged a man armed with a knife and hammer had threatened to “smash up” a car.

A police spokesman said: “A 72-year-old man within the property, who is believed to have had access to a number of weapons and firearms, refused to come out of the property.

“Firearms officers and a negotiator attended the property. Taser was deployed and the man was arrested at the scene for criminal damage. No one was injured during the incident.”

It is understood that though the Taser was fired, the shot missed. The man remained in police custody on Monday.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/31/police-fire-taser-at-72-year-old

Is it true that short words wreck our brains? So says Ralph Fiennes. Can we say that if we spend our lives not using long words, we will end up not being as clever as Fiennes?

First off: no one knows, no one can know. It might be fun or it might be a tease to make a guess like this, but in truth, no one knows what words do, because words don’t “do” or “act”. It’s our minds and bodies that “do” things and words and texts are a part of the doing, woven into the doing. This may be seamless, but that’s no excuse to say that words act. Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world. I think Fiennes has lapsed into that old error of thinking that the real world is made by words.

Has he got a point about Shakespeare? I would guess not. When I was a boy, Shakespeare was no more a mass art form than it is now. In fact, a case could be made that with film, TV and mass schooling till 16, Shakespeare is more read, more known than before. I’ve worked with young people doing Shakespeare and I find that after a short while they get it. As one drama teacher working in schools told me: “When we do Shakespeare, it seems like it’s the quickest way to get to the ‘big stuff’ – love, death, hate, power, rich, poor – all that.”

To be fair, though, Fiennes’s comments come after meeting young people in the context of his work – which I greatly respect, by the way. (The English Patient is in my top 10, and much of that is down to him.) Sorry, I digress. Let us return to our sheep, as Voltaire put it. Fiennes’s comments are a response to what he has seen and heard. What we should ask here, though, is if he embarked on his work with a bias against young people and the way they talk, or if this was really something he learned about them on the day and over time as he worked with them.

We can’t rid ourselves of bias, but we can build into our minds a crap spotter, a kind of third eye that checks what we do, how we think and what we say on matters such as this. Put it this way, it’s so easy to make big statements about the decline and fall of the human race, to bemoan the state of youth, and this fits neatly into a wider story of a downward rush to chaos, which can only be checked by a return to old values. The odd thing here is that the appeal to go backwards nearly always means a plea for staying put, a vote for the status quo. There are plenty of ways to resist change and this is just one of them.

My hunch is that such talk is a way of hiding the fact that some older people think that the world isn’t in a good state, yet they had some part in making it. This proves, they think, that the status quo is good and nothing must change.

(Written with words of one or two syllables, apart from the word “syllable” used here.)

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/ralph-fiennes-short-words-language

The former defence secretary Liam Fox has revealed that he hopes to return to government after taking “personal responsibility” for his mistakes.

In his first interview since resigning earlier this month, the North Somerset MP told BBC Radio Bristol that sitting on the backbenches would be interesting because he would be “freer to say what I want”.

But Fox made it clear that he does not believe the damage to his political career will prove fatal.

“I would certainly like to get back to the frontbench – how quickly is another matter and, for the moment, I will enjoy having a little bit of extra time,” he said.

“There are one or two projects that I want to get involved in on the charitable side, and to devote some time to things that I have wanted to do and been unable to.”

But Downing Street appeared to play down speculation of a Fox return to government. A spokeswoman said: “It is perhaps unsurprising that he has aspirations to return to the frontbench. He did good work while he was defence secretary, but he resigned only a few days ago.”

Fox quit after revelations about his links to close friend Adam Werritty and prior to the publication of a report from the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, which found he had breached the ministerial code.

The report revealed that Fox had blocked civil servants from attending key meetings alongside Werritty, had failed to tell his permanent secretary that he had solicited funds to bankroll Werritty, and had ignored private office requests to distance himself from him.

Asked about the events that led to his resignation, Fox said he had taken responsibility for what had happened.

He admitted it had been a mistake to meet a defence supplier in Dubai without a Ministry of Defence official present, even though someone from his private office had offered to attend.

“We were sitting in a coffee lounge in a hotel – it was hardly a high-security meeting,” he said.

“But nonetheless, given this was a potential defence supplier – not, as it turns out, an actual defence supplier – it still should have had somebody there. It’s very easy to be careless, but you pay a price for it.”

And he acknowledged that allowing Werritty, whom he met 40 times in the MoD and on trips abroad, to function as an independent adviser was a breach of the ministerial code, saying: “I should have kept a better separation there – with hindsight, it seems easy.”

He added: “You should be able to be at the highest level of government and say you have made a mistake.

“I take responsibility for it and I have always been very keen, all my political life, that people should shoulder personal responsibility. That is key to a decent society. If you say it, you should also be able to do it.”

Fox reiterated his criticism of elements of the media coverage of his situation, which he said had been “quite disconcerting” and had made it difficult for him to do his ministerial job.

“One of my nephews, who is aged 14, was being doorstepped – and that was unacceptable,” he said. “I do think that we need to understand that we have to have a free press … but a free press doesn’t mean the press can do what they want.”

He said he felt there was no rumour or innuendo that had not been written about him, but stressed he was only going to comment on “substantive issues”, explaining: “Gossip is for gossipers.”

He defended his practice of arranging “downtime” with Werritty and other friends during official visits overseas, saying: “I would finish ministerial work and then we would very regularly, in places like Dubai, meet up with friends in the region. So there wasn’t any lack of separation between ministerial and private time.

“Some of this coverage, you would think ministers weren’t allowed to have private time which is, of course, absurd.”

Asked whether he had embarrassed the government, Fox said: “Under this government, ministers make a mistake, ministers admit a mistake and ministers resign. That is quite different from clinging to office at all cost, which was what we saw under the previous government.”

Jim Murphy, shadow defence secretary, said important questions relating to Werritty remain “unanswered”.

“There’s no-one to blame for Liam Fox’s downfall but Liam Fox,” said Muprhy.

“There remain many unanswered questions about this murky business. Before this case can be considered closed the government must reveal the full facts.”

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/31/liam-fox-hopes-return-government

Pregnant women are capable of influencing the timing of their babies’ births, according to a study that shows fewer children are born on Halloween.

The results of an analysis of almost 2.5 million births in the US over 11 years contradicts the current medical orthodoxy that expectant mothers have no control over the timing of the delivery of their babies.

Dr Rebecca Levy of Yale School of Public Health, who led the study, said Halloween’s associations with death, evil and skeletons might subconsciously put women off giving birth.

“The study raises the possibility that the assumption underlying the term ‘spontaneous birth’, namely, that births are outside the control of pregnant women, is erroneous,” Dr Levy told New Scientist magazine.

She added that a connection between the state of mind of pregnant women and hormone levels could explain the link.

“We know that hormones control birth timing, and mothers do often express a desire to give birth on a certain day,” she says. “But the process that allows those thoughts to potentially impact the timing, we don’t know.”

Dr Levy and colleagues analysed data from birth certificates for all births in the US that took place within one week on either side of Valentine’s Day and Halloween between 1996 and 2006. They found the likelihood of women giving birth on Valentine’s Day was on average 5% higher than on other days during the week before or the week after.

It was 3.6% higher for natural, non-induced births and 12.1% higher for Caesarean section births.

The chance of deliveries occurring on Halloween was on average 11.3% lower than during the days in the week before and after. This broke down to 5.3% lower for natural, non-induced births, and 16.9% lower for Caesareans. The results are published in the journal Social Science Medicine.

Dr Levy said more research was needed to characterise precisely how particular states of mind affected physiology to speed up or delay birth.

There has been anecdotal evidence from partners of members of the military suggesting that when fathers are due to return from postings away from home close to the date of birth, their babies sometimes “wait” until their return before being born.

A 2003 study carried out in Taiwan showed increases in Caesarean births on auspicious days and decreases on inauspicious days of the Chinese lunar calendar.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/oct/31/curse-halloween-baby-women-birth

The Church of England is facing an escalating crisis after a third senior cleric resigned over the Occupy movement‘s protest camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, the dean of St Paul’s, announced he was resigning with immediate effect, saying that the row over the Occupy London site had made his position “untenable”.

Knowles said he was “no longer the right person to lead the chapter of this great cathedral” and that his departure could provide the opportunity for a “fresh approach” to the crisis. On Friday, he took the first service at the cathedral after it reopened its doors after a week-long closure.

Last week, Giles Fraser, the cathedral’s canon chancellor, and Fraser Dyer, the cathedral chaplain resigned.

The first step in what is likely to be a lengthy legal battle to remove the anti-capitalist camp from outside St Paul’s was beginning later on Monday afternoon when officials were due to formally hand activists a letter requesting that they pack up their tents and other belongings.

A Corporation of London spokesman said the letter, which was still being drafted, was likely to ask that the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protesters move within 24 or 48 hours. Activists have been camping outside St Paul’s for several weeks in protest at the perceived excesses of bankers and the global finance system.

Occupy London, a street level view: ‘How clear are we all on what consensus actually is?’ Link to this video

Legal officials from the corporation, which owns some of the land around St Paul’s, said they would distribute several copies of the letter in the camp.

If the activists do not comply, which appears almost inevitable, then the corporation’s lawyers will most likely start court proceedings on Wednesday under the Highways Act, seeking an eviction. This process could take several months, lawyers have warned.

The letter will point out that there is no objection to a 24-hour protest at the site, on the western edge of the cathedral, but that the presence of more than 200 tents plus assorted marquees providing food, information and other facilities means the thoroughfare was blocked.

Announcing the plan to take court action after a meeting on Friday, Michael Welbank, the councillor who chaired the meeting, said: “Protest is an essential right in a democracy – but camping on the highway is not.”

The Occupy camp ended up on the site, which is part owned by St Paul’s, on 16 October after an initial plan to base itself at nearby Paternoster Square, the private business and retail development housing the London Stock Exchange, was thwarted by police action.

The cathedral has backed many of the camp’s aims, but on Friday said it supported legal action. The decision prompted the canon chancellor, Giles Fraser, to step down, a move mirrored later by a part-time chaplain. St Paul’s was closed for a week due to what officials said were health and safety issues with the camp’s size and proximity.

A protester at the camp, Spyro van Leemnen, said any response to the letter would be decided at a general assembly later in the day. The movement makes decisions democratically, through mass meetings.

The group has promised to remain at St Paul’s in the long term and spread to other areas in the City. A “spillover” camp at Finsbury Square, further east, set up a week ago, is now thought to be near capacity. It is believed that protesters will target a third site later this week.

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/31/dean-st-pauls-resigns-occupy

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_world/~3/n8T2weSkSGA/index.html

Article source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/edition_world/~3/jN0jkwSt2mo/index.html