Have you ever wondered why your train is running late?
The National Rail Enquiries Twitter feed is very useful for providing answers, as per the typical tweet below.
I can hear those of you with an acute sense of English already asking whether “running normally” on the UK rail network usually involves “following a broken down train” (because that’s what travelling by rail normally feels like? Ed.). 😉
There’s a debate on criminal legal aid reforms and price competitive tendering taking place in Westminster Hall on 4 September 2013. The debate has been secured by Labour’s Karl Turner MP and will centre on the Ministry of Justice’s proposed changes to criminal legal aid contained in the consultation paper “Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a More Credible and Efficient System”.
Ahead of the debate, Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL), a 2,000-strong group of lawyers committed to practising in areas of law traditionally funded by legal aid, has very helpfully prepared a briefing note (PDF) ahead of this debate.
The briefing note is not very complementary about the MoJ’s experience with the outsourcing of interpreting services for courts and tribunals to ALS/Capita T&I (posts passim) and makes the following point about this ongoing fiasco.
Short term “savings” cannot justify the long term cost to the justice system, one which Mr Grayling is correct to describe as “a justice system of which we can be proud and which justly deserves its world-wide recognition for impartiality and fairness”. We should learn the lessons of outsourcing to the lowest bidder and how this leads to the state picking up the tab when providers fail to deliver, for example, the contracting of interpreting services for the court and tribunal system.
What’s the betting Justice Minister ‘Failing’ Grayling – the first non-lawyer to be appointed Lord Chancellor since 1673 – completely ignores all advice and pushes ahead regardless with his disastrous plans?
The release schedule for Ubuntu 14.04 – the next long term support (LTS) release of this popular Linux distribution – has been published on the Ubuntu wiki.
According to the schedule, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS should be released in mid-April 2014.
This blog has before drawn attention to the difficulty of devising an apposite newspaper headline (posts passim).
No such troubles beset the Bristol Post as shown by the following headlines from today’s News section of the online version.
One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?
Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂
Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:
I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.
The courts and tribunals interpreting contract being implemented by Capita Translation & Interpreting continues its disastrous course if one listens to anyone except Ministry of Justice civil servants or ministers (posts passim).
Below is a tweet from yesterday posted by London-based barrister Mary Prior.
No further comment is necessary.
This weekend marks the start of the competition for the FA Cup, the most prestigious trophy in English football, with the start of the preliminary round, when all the amateur teams in the local leagues around the country have their chance of a cup run for glory, i.e. it’s the round where all the Davids battle it out for a chance to challenge Goliath.
By way of an example, Market Drayton Town, the team from the town of my birth, has a home tie today against Kidsgrove Athletic, which kicks off at 3 pm.
The FA website has a list of fixtures for the preliminary round, which runs to many pages, a screenshot of which is shown below.
However, if – as many people do – you relied on the BBC as a source of sports news, you’d be completely unaware of the existence of the FA Cup preliminary round, as proven by the following screenshot taken today at the same time as the above FA screenshot.
That’s right! According to Auntie, there are no FA Cup fixtures for the next 7 days.
The BBC likes to base its reputation on its reliable and accurate coverage of news and events.
Is this reputation undeserved? Answers in the comments below please.
The Bristol Post website carries an initial report today of a fire last night at Ashton Court, a 17th century mansion house in north Somerset owned by Bristol City Council.
Allegedly penned by someone called DanielEvans1, the third paragraph of the piece reads as follows:
A total of six Avon Fire and Rescue pumps and an aerial appliance were need to extinguish the fire in the early hours.
An inability to conjugate the verb ‘to need’ correctly is evidently no barrier to employment as a journalist at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. 😉
I’ve seen this fruit van a few times on Cumberland Road in recent weeks. At the foot of the offside door is a message to the light-fingered with a penchant for bananas.
Only in Bristol… 🙂
So far this blog has recorded a dearth of Capita T&I interpreters for the jobs they’re supposed to be doing in the country’s courts (posts passim).
Now just for a change we’re pleased to report a surfeit, as shown in this tweet (screenshot below).
Are Capita T&I interpreters like buses – one waits for ages and then 3 turn up at once? Or do Capita’s finest believe in safety in numbers? Is any comment on this amazing development forthcoming from Helen Grant MP, the Minister for Victims and the Courts?
I think we should be told.
The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.1, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the first minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.
According to the developers, the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. However, for enterprise adoptions and production environments, The Document Foundation recommends LibreOffice 4.0.5.
LibreOffice 4.1.1 is available for immediate download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC1 (for bugs fixed in 4.1.1.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.1/RC2 (for bug fixes in 4.1.1.2).