Search the Community

Sceptical of knife epidemic * Mark Easton * 7 Jul 08, 16:11 GMT After my post on Friday looking at the hospital admission figures for stab and gunshot victims in England, a story was widely reported that knife violence accounts for 14,000 people in Britain being admitted into hospital last year. You may have seen it in the Independent on Sunday which claimed an exclusive and then almost everywhere else, including the BBC. Well, I have checked out the story and discovered that the figure includes not only attacks but also accidental injuries from knives and other sharp implements. If one looks only at assaults with sharp objects (stabbings to you and me) the figure for the UK halves to about 7,000. I have now been able to lay my hands on the Scottish data for the same category which shows approximately 1,300 stab victims north of the border for 2006/7, which is actually a fall from 2002/3. The figures for Northern Ireland are small, but again the numbers of hospital admissions has fallen over the same period. The inflation of the figures seems unnecessary to make the point: injuries from stabbings have gone up in England - particularly in London. However, knives have become political weapons. No politician wants to be accused of complacency, so rhetoric trumps analysis. It wouldn't matter if exaggerating the scale of the problem didn't make it more likely youngsters will seek to protect themselves with knives and the wider population will needlessly worry about what is a tiny risk for all but a few. I was puzzled, having studied this data, why the Home Office should be suggesting that doctors need to report stab wounds in the same way they report gunshot wounds to the police since we have the figures already The reason, I understand, is that the hospital figures only apply to those admitted to hospital rather than treated and sent home. Ministers want police to have better information for their community crime mapping. What I suspect such an exercise would reveal is that knife crime is rising in some inner-city areas, fuelled by gang culture, drugs and alcohol. However, it may actually be falling in much of the UK and I remain sceptical that there is good evidence of a national "epidemic". PS: I have done a bit more number-crunching for a piece on tonight's BBC News at Ten and I think it is quite informative. By my calculations, knife crime has risen three times faster in London over the past five years than the rest of England. This, I think, demonstrates how the situation in the capital has driven the claims of an epidemic. BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Easton's UK

I was in a bad place last night. What I did was wrong. I in no way condone my actions, nor do I make excuses for them. Rigging vbookie gambling events is probably a daily occurance amongs the global forum fraternity. Not enough focus goes on the risk management areas, those compliance areas, those settlement areas that can ultimately save them vcash. I know I did wrong, ... but I've done my time and now I want to get on with my life. Please stop negging me. As soon as the donate buttons get activated I'll donate all my vcash to irat.

two lads settle their differences outside a cafe on lordship lane east dulwich (by me) under the guidence of their mates, gloves on and handshakes an all at the end.

Fuck me is anyone watching this?

I think this will be an easy poll, but I could be wrong...

Is what i am, i am 18 and can't use the oven, just trying to cook a pizza there, firstly i left all the pan things in there so no heat could get to the pizza then i sat there and watched it burn to death, im a shit cook.

Reading this BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran in warning to US and Israel made me think of this YouTube - NTNON "There's A Man In Iran" (Ayatollah Song) Comedy gold

That is how much your chances of winning a hand in Texas Hold'em Poker increase if you have a suited pair of cards as opposed to non-suited cards of the same value. Just found that out last night playing in a local tourny. Interesting though, would've thought it was higher than that!

:whistle:

Geoffrey Macnab on the demise of Tartan Films | | guardian.co.uk Arts Its a fucking shocker, I have so mnay Tartan. Death of a salesman Led by the maverick Hamish McAlpine, Tartan Films was the UK's most influential indie film distributor - but now it's gone bust. Geoffrey Macnab finds out why Friday July 4, 2008 The Guardian For once, Hamish McAlpine was lost for words. "I really can't comment," the flamboyant and normally loquacious UK film distributor told me earlier this week when asked what had pushed his film distribution company Tartan Films into administration. "I am not allowed to comment on the situation at this moment. I've been gagged. I just can't help you at all." He wasn't, he added, even allowed to comment on why he couldn't comment. Last Thursday, Tartan staff turned up at its central London offices to discover that the doors were locked and that the company had ceased trading. By the beginning of this week, administrators Chantrey Vellacott DFK were already scrambling to find buyers for the company's vast back catalogue. There was no shortage of interest. ("You're picking off the bones of the dead as if it was carrion," one distributor was reprimanded by an old friend of McAlpine for the haste with which he inquired as to which films might now be on offer.) There are obvious reasons for Tartan's woes. Only a month ago, in May, Tartan Films USA (Tartan's American offshoot, which had been set up in 2004) hit the reefs with the announcement of a "public foreclosure sale" of all its assets. The UK market for Asian horror films, for so long Tartan's staple, had bottomed out. Recent releases such as Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely and Park Chan-wook's I'm a Cyborg did only patchy business. McAlpine's long-cherished plans to get more involved in film production hit a massive roadblock when Michael Haneke's English-language remake of Funny Games (Tartan's highest-profile production) performed poorly at the box office, despite a cast headlined by Naomi Watts. Some say McAlpine simply bought too many films, and Tartan's rivals have long known the company was seeking investment or a sale. Eccentric and flamboyant, McAlpine was an adventurous distributor with a taste that ranged from the best US independent cinema to turn-of-the-century pornography (The Good Old Naughty Days) to films about serial killers (Ed Gein, Bundy) and classic European arthouse cinema (Tartan has released far more Ingmar Bergman titles on DVD than any Swedish distributor). He championed free speech, constantly jousting with the BBFC over ratings for films such as The Pornographer and The Isle. He was pioneering in introducing British cinemagoers to the work of Asian directors like Park Chan-wook, Wong Kar-wai and Kim Ki-duk. Some former staff members are understandably bitter about the demise of the distribution company and the loss of their jobs. However, producers and fellow distributors have rallied to defend McAlpine, pointing out that Tartan has been among the most adventurous independent companies in the UK for more than 20 years - and one of the few with a recognisable brand name. "It is so easy to bash iconoclastic entrepreneurs like Hamish," says producer Don Boyd, who founded Tartan in 1984 with McAlpine and veteran Scottish distributor Alan Kean. Boyd soon left Tartan to pursue his career as a producer and director, but maintained close ties with McAlpine. "Hamish is a brilliant, creative distributor with passion for what he does. Those aspects of his personality are inevitably the ones that cause ups and downs in creative careers." Boyd suggests that McAlpine ran Tartan like "a creative tsar. He was like a Diaghilev of the film industry." Sometimes, he was erratic, but many of his decisions were brilliant. Boyd also takes issue with the idea that the company was a rich man's plaything. "Even in the very early days, people used to say it's the McAlpine family getting into film. We would say, 'It's not.' We put our own money there. We backed Tartan collectively. This was no vanity exercise." "I've known Hamish McAlpine for many years. He is a friend of mine. I have admired and respected him from a distance over many years," says Philip Knatchbull, CEO of the Curzon Artificial Eye Group, which co-owns a DVD sales company with Tartan. Knatchbull confirms that his company is looking over the Tartan library. "Our team here is having a look at the detail of what is available to see if we can rescue the catalogue in its entirety to see that it isn't broken up." There are plenty of anecdotes about McAlpine: some apocryphal, some true. He is supposed to have once dressed himself up as Béatrice Dalle and presented himself for interview to journalists when the French actress failed to turn up to a press junket. Once, he freaked out a senior US executive by holding a flickknife to his neck (he was trying to demonstrate that film is a cut-throat business, but the American didn't see the joke). Everyone in the industry knows about his scrap with US director Larry Clark. (After a heated discussion about Middle Eastern politics during the London film festival, the two men came to blows, and McAlpine refused to release Clark's film, Ken Park.) Whatever the personal implications for McAlpine and his staff, Tartan's demise is sad and worrying for the UK independent sector. "It underscores the market polarisation that we are seeing," says Mark Batey, chief executive of the Film Producers' Association, pointing to the gulf between the blockbuster end of the market and the indie world. "The middle ground is incredibly treacherous. It is really difficult to sustain viable life. Everything is very risky indeed." These are paradoxical times for UK distribution. On the one hand, there are dozens of companies handling what might loosely be referred to as arthouse fare. On the other, there is the sense of a contracting market. Distributors feel they are caught in a transitional period between old-style theatrical releasing and a brave new world of digital distribution and video on demand that doesn't seem to have arrived. Hundreds of films are released every year, and the competition is ferocious. "It definitely feels like there are more players at the moment fighting over fewer good films," says Justin Marciano, managing director of Revolver. Whereas in the past, a small arthouse gem might be given a chance to build up word of mouth and find an audience, now every film is judged instantly. If the opening weekend figures are disappointing, the film will be yanked out of cinemas. Meanwhile, when a small distributor does go all out to give a film a big push, the risks can be daunting. If the film flops, the distributor is lumbered with huge bills that it will struggle to pay. Some suggest there is a growing conservatism: the exhibitors are no longer ready to take a chance on the kind of films Tartan prided itself in releasing. There are signs that the industry is moving more and more toward the mainstream. DVD profits are falling. TV no longer buys arthouse films in the way it once did. "It is a total and utter disgrace that the television industry has marginalised independent and arthouse cinema, knowing that was a vital part of the way that films were distributed," says Boyd. He also lays blame on "New Labour apparatchiks who have marginalised cinema in its purer forms. People have been willing to back rather silly romcoms." Boyd bemoans the public money that has been "put into bureaucracy and shockingly bad British films" when that money could have been used "much more intelligently to help out people like Tartan and perhaps encourage them to be more involved in European and British film production". Despite Tartan's travails and the struggles facing the independent sector in general, not every UK indie distributor is downcast about current prospects. Marciano points out that Revolver made £1.2m with Guillaume Canet's French thriller Tell No One, which suggests the market isn't as averse to foreign-language fare as the naysayers suggest. Knatchbull highlights the current success that Artificial Eye is enjoying with Abdellatif Kechiche's Couscous, about an elderly shipyard worker who founds a restaurant. Meanwhile, Optimum Releasing - now backed by French major Studio Canal - is releasing 300 DVDs a year and recently announced plans to move into production, remaking old classics like Brighton Rock. "It's an ultra-competitive and tough market to be in," says Marciano as he contemplates Tartan's woes - but then adds: "in our experience, it has always been that way." Hail the Tartan army ... Six films that put the distributor ahead of the game Man Bites Dog (1992) This Belgian mockumentary about a philosophical serial killer broke new ground with its mix of ultra-brutal murder and mordant humour. It heralded a new mood in early 90s cinema - which it shared with Reservoir Dogs, released virtually simultaneously in the UK - but avoided the kerfuffle surrounding the Tarantino video release. Audition (1999) Unbelievably nasty Japanese fetish-horror epic (the first Takashi Miike film to get a serious UK release, in 2001) that, in many ways, was an indicator of the psychotic depths the terror cinema of the far east would plumb. A year earlier, Tartan hadn't gambled on the true J-horror pioneer, Ringu, but quickly snapped it up for DVD release; together, they ballasted Tartan's identity as the place for skin-crawling bodyshock. Irréversible (2002) Gaspar Noé's deeply distasteful revenge fable tested audience endurance to the extreme with its nine-minute rape scene, though the ferocious brutality of a key murder was just as disturbing. Arguably the most gruellingly graphic film ever released in the UK - though Tartan tested the censors with the authentically hardcore The Idiots and 9 Songs. Oldboy (2003) In the early part of the decade, Korean cinema roared past all comers in the far east ordeal-horror stakes, with this implacably violent parable leading the way. The middle section of Park Chan-wook's "vengeance" trilogy paved the way for Hollywood's wretched exercises in torture porn - but at least Park avoided the overt misogyny that infested the films that followed in its wake. DiG! (2004) Proving that Tartan wasn't just about sex and violence ... or maybe not. There's quite a bit of both in this stunning documentary about two bands' rivalry in the US west coast retro scene, and DiG! led a whole spate of music films into cinemas. Tartan also put out two other wonderful examples: The Devil and Daniel Johnston and the Ramones biog, End of the Century. Super Size Me (2004) Tartan's most commercially successful cinema release, which made an instant global star out of activist film-maker Morgan Spurlock as he chomped his way through a month of burgers. Proved that protest docs didn't have to be worthy and boring, and triggered the environmental-issue film virtually singlehandedly. Andrew Pulver

I do

...if you hate Fiona Phillips. I've just heard her voice on the TV in the other room and decided that she destroying society. NB: I don't really know what this list will acheive, apart from making me feel that other people recognise this woman's demonic qualities. westderbian

The sharleen spiterri or whatever thread made me think of this little rat bag, an outspoken, ugly, female, lesbian comedian AS.BAD.AS.IT.GETS. Shaft called he said your suit was "jive".

like them.? :thumbdown. Judy is always shaking(just like bo selecter sketch).

"You're obviously a hippie because you're not wearing a bra" nJmvarTv0Tw

YouTube - Die Hard 2 - Safe for TV Version

I've just spent the weekend on a stag doo in swansea. fuck me it's a cross between iraq and ibiza. never see so many hen doos and flesh hanging out. top marks went to laura croft and the group of girls done up caveman style. we got knocked back from a club for wearing trainers even though they'd just let colonel sanders, batman and a whoopie cushion in.

Warning! The following content is NOT WORK SAFE. Click the Show button to reveal. I knew you had to see this one Monty.

I'm trying to find out if there is a link between two companies. To cut a long story short, a firm tried to get planning permission for something and was refused, and now another firm - which only came into existance in January - has applied for the same planning permission for the SAME project. I've done a search on companies house and it has no contact info other than c/o a solicitors. This is a £10m project though! I've tried doing directors searches but those websites are all after payment. Any ideas of resources I could use?

Get your Tommy Cooper/ Eric Morcambe here [YOUTUBE]9nNGlaiVypU[/YOUTUBE] [YOUTUBE]KHYnahPkJI8[/YOUTUBE] ALL YOU CHILDREN. THIS IS THE FUNNIEST THING EVER. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE YOU ARE CUNTS. SIMPLE AS/END OF [YOUTUBE]vP8TUe993uo[/YOUTUBE]

Ok, I was never a massive Pixies fan and I admit all I really know of the Breeders is Cannonball. They any good though? Suggested choons / albums to get my mits on? I reckon they must be ok. Can't imagine the Dandies writing a song about how cool Kim Deal is if the Breeders were shite. Ta muchly.

In the new JD sports in Liverpool One .Really long legs and a tight pair of pink hot pants .Great arse . Can't even remember if she had a head I think I need help .

[YOUTUBE]Xaeopola8eA[/YOUTUBE]

Latest instalment in the ongoing saga of Purps. It's the headline that made me giggle. icLiverpool - Muscle squeezer Aki loses appeal A LIVERPOOL man has failed in his bid to get an order banning him from squeezing young men’s muscles lifted. Akinwale Arobieke is notorious across Merseyside for his "obsession" with groping and measuring boys muscles and seeing young men squat. His behaviour led to police hitting him with a restrictive sexual offenders prevention order (SOPO) the day he was released from a six-year prison sentence for harassment and witness intimidation in 2006. All this week the 20-stone body-building obsessive has been bidding to get the magistrates order quashed – despite allegations he has continued to grope and intimidate men in prison. The 46-year-old, who admitted he was "infamous, notorious, everything from a bogeyman to whatever", claimed the order had been made illegally and was far too punitive. But yesterday Judge William George, sitting with two magistrates, rejected the appeal. Judge George told 6ft 5in Arobieke, who has never been convicted of a sexual offence, the order was valid. It will remain in full until July 21 when he will give his formal judgement. Judge George added he would be "amenable" to relaxing some of the conditions on that day, such as giving asthma sufferer Arobieke permission to travel through areas he is currently banned from, including St Helens, Widnes and Warrington. Judge George said Arobieke’s breach of the SOPO on April 24, 2007, when he squeezed a man’s arm in a Preston shopping centre, revealed his continuing fascination with muscles. He said: "It does show he is out of control. He is out of his own control according to his own evidence." He was jailed for a further 21 months following the breach. Judge George added: "At the end of the day, Akinwale Arobieke, we are not going to allow this appeal." Liverpool Crown Court heard Arobieke, formerly of Cavendish Gardens, Toxteth, kept a "stalker’s manual" packed with personal details about his victims. Kenderik (corr) Horne, prosecuting, said he would become sexually excited as he groped athletic young boys, performed bear hugs and jumped on their backs. But Arobieke insisted he had never got any sexual pleasure from the touching and had only been motivated by his desire to find the world’s next body-building champion. Robert Wynn-Jones, defending, said: "He was achieving infamy in Liverpool and surrounding areas and he was engaging in – in his own words – eccentric behaviour. "His reputation grew as a local bogeyman. Stories about him grew wilder and wilder."