Yesterday, 5th February, was National Voter Registration Day.
Many political parties, civil society organisations and others were yesterday encouraging the disenfranchised to register to vote for the forthcoming local council and general elections on 7th May.
One of those parties campaigning was UKIP, which doubtless was ignorant of the hypocrisy of its message in the tweet shown in the following screenshot.
That’s right! A party actively opposing immigration to the UK is actively encouraging UK citizens who’ve become immigrants in other countries to register to vote in elections in the old mother country.
The last TidyBS5 post mentioned that a community litter pick would be taking place (posts passim).
Billed as Tidy BS5 Up, this event will be held on Saturday, 28th March from 11am to 1pm and the initial assembly point will be Lawrence Hill roundabout before volunteers disperse to clean up the grotty bits of BS5 that have been identified.
Inner city grit bin transformed into grot bin
If there’s a particular grotty bit of BS5 that you believe needs a good litter pick, then send it in as a suggestion to Lorena (email: lorena (at) eastonandlawrencehill.org.uk) at Up Our Street by Friday, 20th February.
Capita Translating & Interpreting has been ordered to pay costs of £16,000 by judge Sir James Munby, president of the family division, over its failure to provide interpreters seven times in the course of a single adoption case, The Guardian reports.
The case in question was initiated in the family court in 2012. On six occasions at Dover Family Proceedings Court and Canterbury County Court, Capita T&I’s interpreters failed to appear or arrived too late, forcing the abandonment of hearings at which the Slovak-speaking parents were contesting the removal of their children. When the case was transferred to the High Court in London in May 2014 to be heard by Sir James, Capita T&I’s interpreters once again failed to appear. He was forced to adjourn the proceedings and ordered that HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) should provide interpreters instead.
There have been serial failures by Capita in this case against a background of wider systemic problems… [These were] not minor but extensive, and, at two different stages of the litigation, they had a profound effect on the conduct of the proceedings.
Sir James ordered Capita to pay Kent County Council £15,927.36.
Not only does the solar park itself not exist, neither does the domain shown on the sign, as a simple whois search reveals.
I wonder how much money has been wasted on the publicity for a non-existent solar park and its accompanying (and equally non-existent) website.
Would anyone from Bristol City Council care to comment?
Update 02/02/2015: a subsequent whois search today revealed that the domain in question was registered by a PR person working for Bristol City Council this morning and that the registrant contact details are currently awaiting validation.
A catkin or ament is a slim, cylindrical flower cluster, with inconspicuous or no petals, usually wind-pollinated (anemophilous) but sometimes insect-pollinated (as in Salix). They contain many, usually unisexual flowers, arranged closely along a central stem which is often drooping.
Hazel catkins are the male flowers of the plant.
The female flowers – as shown in the photo below – are much smaller and harder to spot.
The change from winter to spring was admirably encapsulated by the final couplet of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s 1819 Ode to the West Wind.
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
TidyBS5 campaigners met the Mayor at the junction of Stapleton Road and Milsom Street – a notorious fly-tipping hotspot – to express their concerns about litter and fly-tipping locally, as reported by Bristol 24/7 (bit different from North Street, isn’t it, George? Ed.).
The Bristol Post also reported on George’s visit to Stapleton Road, managing in its own inimitable, cock-eyed way to describe TidyBS as a “street-cleaning community group“.
Although your ‘umble scribe was unable to attend due to other commitments, feedback has been positive. Witnesses report that George seemed genuinely shocked by the stinky bin by which he was confronted/ambushed. In addition, he gave a commitment to bring one of the Make Sunday Special events to Stapleton Road.
On Tuesday this week, local councillors Marg Hickman and Afzal Shah, together with local residents and Lorena from Up Our Street took Bristol’s Assistant Mayor for Neighbourhoods Daniella Radice on a walk around the Stapleton Road area to acquaint her with our local litter and fly-tipping difficulties.
One thing that shocked Daniella was the way the council’s contractors May Gurney dump the plastic liner bags from litter bins on the pavement for later collection (sometimes the next day. Ed.), which also contributes to making the BS5 area look grotty; this was a practice Daniella undertook to investigate and/or change. We also drew her attention to concerns in reporting street cleansing problems via Twitter, the council’s online reporting system and by telephone (0117 922 2100 if you’d care to give it a go. Ed.).
Daniella was also alerted to the totally inadequate – if any – recycling facilities provided for residents of the city’s tower blocks. For instance, Twinnell House in Easton houses hundreds of people. Their recycling “facilities” are illustrated below.
That’s right, a mere 6 wheelie bins!
Marg Hickman also pointed out that millions of pounds are and have been spent in refurbishing the city’s council-owned high-rise blocks. However, the refurbishment plans include no provision for recycling facilities. This is incredible for a city that allegedly prides itself on its green credentials and is the current European Green Capital!
Another item raised with Daniella was the lack of recycling collections for residents living on the lower part of Stapleton Road above the shops. They’re being charged for recycling collections in their council tax, but these collections are not provided. If I lived on Stapleton Road, I’d report Bristol City Council to the police for fraud and/or obtaining pecuniary advantage! 🙂
On Wednesday evening this week Up Our Street hosted a TidyBS5 task force meeting, which attracted about a dozen local residents from across the BS5 area, as well as councillor Marg Hickman and representatives from the local ACORN branch. Various priorities from the Residents’ Rubbish Summit (posts passim), planned forthcoming activities (e.g. consultations, litter picks, etc.) and discovered what skills attendees could provide to benefit TidyBS5.
Afterwards, we had the compulsory campaign photo taken.
The latest French anti-radicalisation publicity in the wake of France’s recent mass murders (posts passim) at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Parisian kosher supermarket has now been released.
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.4, billed as “the most beautiful LibreOffice ever“.
This is the ninth major release of this leading free and open source office suite, with a significant number of design and user experience improvements.
LibreOffice 4.4 infographic. Click on the image for the full-sized version.
“LibreOffice 4.4 has got a lot of UX and design love, and in my opinion is the most beautiful ever,” says design team leader Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky. “We have completed the dialog conversion, redesigned menu bars, context menus, toolbars, status bars and rulers to make them much more useful. The Sifr monochrome icon theme is extended and now the default on OS X. We also developed a new Color Selector, improved the Sidebar to integrate more smoothly with menus, and reworked many user interface details to follow today’s UX trends.”
LibreOffice 4.4 likewise offers several significant improvements in other areas, such as:
Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows and improved implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
Digital signing of PDF files during the export process;
Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace the proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related problems while opening Microsoft’s proprietary format OOXML files;
The addition of several new default templates designed by volunteers;
Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering and toggling bullet points on or off;
Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
Improved import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher and AbiWord files, as well as Microsoft Works spreadsheets;
New import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw, MacDraw II and RagTime for Mac;
Greatly expanded support for media capabilities on each platform.
A complete list of new and improved features is available in the release notes.
Capita Translating & Interpreting has been ordered to pay costs of £16,000 by judge 
