Revealed: The language map of England which shows where up to 40% of people say English is not their mother tongue

Daily Mail
"This is the language map of England which reveals the parts of the country where as many as two in five people do not have English as their mother tongue. New data shows the proportion of people across who say English is not their main language ranging from 0.7 per cent in Redcar and Cleveland to 41.4 per cent in Newham in London. The breakdown from the 2011 national census also revealed the second most commonly spoken language in the country is now Polish."

Zimbabwe finance minister admits: 'We've only got £138.34 in the bank'

Daily Mail
"The stunning confession about the country's poor financial state is the culmination of years of ruinous economic policy by Zimbabwe's despotic President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the southern African country since independence from Britain in 1980
ED:The rest is safe in Switzerland.

Polish is Britain's second language and nearly one in five people in London only speak English as a second tongue

Daily Mail
"Polish is the now the second language in England and Wales with more than half a million speakers. New figures from the 2011 Census also revealed 140,000 could not speak English at all. More than one in five people in London said English was not their first language and in all but three London boroughs in the capital more than 100 main languages were listed."
ED:Step forward Tony Blair for all this....

Barack Obama looks bitter, arrogant and partisan as he begins his second term

Telegraph
"There is nothing in this interview that suggests the president is in any way serious about reining in federal spending, introducing entitlement reform, or rolling back the frontiers of the government. For a country with more than $16 trillion of debt, this is a catastrophic approach. It is very clear from this interview that President Obama sees his re-election as a mandate to continue the very policies that will eventually bankrupt the country unless they are reversed, regardless of huge opposition on Capitol Hill. It chimes closely with the president’s second inaugural address last week, which offered absolutely no olive branches to the nearly 61 million Americans who voted for his opponent in November.
Significantly, a major Gallup poll released on Inauguration Day showed that most Americans don’t feel positive about the direction their country is taking: ....."

Shock: Aborigines don’t like being patronised by white woman

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Prominent Territory indigenous figure and Labor Party member Tracker Tilmouth said the Territory election had taught Aborigines their votes mattered. “Unfortunately, this hasn’t been able to be properly read by the Prime Minister,” he scornfully declared. ”Probably the last time she saw a real Aborigine was when she was licking a postage stamp.”

Happy Race Riot Day from Labor

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)

" In the aftermath, the junior staffer most directly involved lost his job. But John McTernan, the former aide to Tony Blair who was recruited as Julia Gillard’s director of communications, remains her chief spinmeister. He is widely credited with having authorised inciting the crowd at Canberra’s Tent Embassy. It was done by wantonly misrepresenting Tony Abbott’s remarks on the role of the embassy in a radio interview that morning.

McTernan makes no apology for his approach to politics. He’s on the record saying: “If you get to senior positions, you have to be able to kill your opponent. It’s not pretty; it’s not pleasant, but if those at the top can’t kill, then those at the bottom certainly cannot. High politics demands very low political skills too.”

Australians drive bored Muslim men to violence

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"An astonishing spate of shootings in Sydney seems largely the work of one ethnic group, identified only deep in this Sydney Morning Herald report. Yet the only culture blamed is the Australian one: ...."

Obama doesn’t tell Sth Korea to be part of China... so why should we be a bit of the EU?

The Sun
" America broke away from British rule in 1776 because the American colonists had grown fed up with us Brits telling them what to do. They had had enough of a remote elite making their laws. They resented being told who they could trade with, and on what terms. We eurosceptic Brits know the feeling. The US Declaration Of Independence complained about how King George III had “combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution”. Why, then, is an American President today combining with others to do much the same to Britain?"

Barack Obama: Britain should stay in the EU

Telegraph
"After discussing the situation in Algeria with the Prime Minister, Mr Obama gave his clearest indication yet that he believes the UK must remain in the EU."

A new Gold Standard is being born

Telegraph
"The world is moving step by step towards a de facto Gold Standard, without any meetings of G20 leaders to announce the idea or bless the project. Some readers will already have seen the GFMS Gold Survey for 2012 which reported that central banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century. They added a net 536 tonnes in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen. ........It is no secret that China is buying the dips, seeking to raise the gold share of its reserves well above 2pc. Russia has openly targeted a 10pc share. Variants of this are occurring from the Pacific region to the Gulf and Latin America. And now the Bundesbank has chosen to pull part of its gold from New York and Paris."

The Germans don't trust Obama with their gold – and can you blame them?

Telegraph
" One of the most spectacular con tricks of the last twelve months, pulled off by our political class with the connivance of much of the media, is that we've escaped the global economic armageddon which looked till quite recently as if it was going to engulf us. The Euro didn't collapse; Europe isn't in flames; QE hasn't led to Weimar-style hyperinflation; the fiscal cliff has been dodged; Britain hasn't yet lost its triple A credit rating; the bond markets haven't gone postal…
Well it may look calm on the surface, but this latest move by the Bundesbank gives us a pretty good indication that beneath the surface that serene-seeming swan is paddling for dear life."

Austerity 'could last for ten more years as Government struggles to bring spending under control'

Daily Mail
"Britain faces another 10 years of austerity as the government struggles to repair the country’s battered finances, a hard-hitting report warns today. The vast deficit racked up by Labour will not be eliminated until after 2020 and possibly not until 2023, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. The report also warns that Britain will be stripped of its coveted AAA credit rating as the national debt spirals further out of control. ......The last Labour government borrowed a record £159 billion in 2009-10 as the financial crisis struck and the economic boom gave way to the biggest bust in living memory. .....The national debt was just £200 billion 20 years ago and around £300 billion 10 years ago. But it spiralled to £800 billion under Labour and is set to hit more than £1.5 trillion in the next five years - or £60,000 per household in Britain. Ruth Lea, economic advisor to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, said: ‘The public finances are truly dire. Public sector net debt is continuing to increase at an alarming rate. Britain’s AAA rating must be regarded as vulnerable.’

We need a bloodbath to tame these arrogant officials

Daily Mail
"But the most worrying assertion by Mr Hilton is that perhaps 40 per cent of Whitehall activity takes place on the direct order of Brussels, by-passing our representatives in Parliament altogether. This touches on the increasingly heated debate about our future in the EU, on which Mr Cameron is scheduled to make a landmark speech in the next ten days. Eurosceptics – and those such as Ukip who are far beyond scepticism – have long claimed that one of the main reasons for us to renegotiate our relationship with the EU or to leave it altogether is the amount of sovereignty we have surrendered. That our own civil servants spend nearly half their time implementing Brussels regulations demonstrates this loss of sovereignty in stark terms. It is a wake-up call to the Prime Minister over Europe and the unchecked power of bureaucrats not only in Brussels but also here in Whitehall."

British foreign secretary to visit

StuffNZ
" One of Britain's most senior politicians will visit New Zealand next week for bilateral talks, it has been announced. Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully will hold formal talks with Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague in Auckland on Tuesday. "This is an excellent opportunity to address critical foreign policy issues with a close and valued partner, and explore new ways to work together on bilateral and global issues," McCully said. "I expect the situation in Iran and Syria, the Middle East peace process, and developments in Afghanistan will feature in our discussions, as will regional issues such as Fiji and Myanmar." Hague last visited New Zealand in January 2011, with Defence Secretary Liam Fox. During his stay in Auckland Hague is due to meet business leaders and entrepreneurs before travelling to Christchurch for a tour of the Red Zone and to lay a wreath at HMNZS Pegasus naval base in Canterbury."

Gun laws shouldn’t be written by ghosts

Spiked
"Should facts about gun violence in America matter to federal courts when they consider the constitutionality of gun-control laws? That is not a rhetorical question. The US Supreme Court paid scant attention to the facts when it affirmed a constitutional right to bear arms in District of Columbia v Heller, a 5-4, 2008 decision authored by Justice Scalia. Relying almost exclusively on history, Heller struck down the DC ban on handguns in the home."

Can anyone explain this?

Catallaxy Files,(Australia)
"Icebergs on the horizon, full speed ahead. This is Niles Gardner looking at welfare spending in the US:
I have just read a staggering report written by my colleagues Patrick D. Tyrell and William W. Beach for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis (I direct the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at Heritage.) It is a real eye-opener for anyone who cares about America’s future as the world’s superpower, on either side of the Atlantic. Ironically, Britain, through the tremendous determination of Iain Duncan Smith and his team at the Department of Work and Pensions, is starting to roll back the welfare state, precisely at the same time the current US administration is expanding it.
The United States isn’t just gliding towards a continental European-style future of vast welfare systems, economic decline, and massive debts – it is accelerating towards it at full speed. Or as Acton Institute research director Samuel Gregg puts it in his excellent new book published today by Encounter, America is already ‘becoming Europe,’ with the United States moving far closer to a European-style welfare state than most Americans realize. "

Will big data change the 2013 election?

ABC (Australia)
"At the 2008 and 2012 elections, the Obama campaign created fine-grained statistical models predicting both the likelihood of any single voter turning out to the polls, and their likelihood of casting a vote for their candidate.
As a ProPublica investigation found, these voter profiles were created using public voting records, consumer data, and canvassing by the campaign itself. Upwards of 1,000 different points of data may have been collected about a voter depending on their significance to the campaign, with the profiles naturally being more detailed in key battleground states.
This meant that campaign operatives knew, for example, if an individual Floridian or Ohioan had voted in 2008 but not 2004, where they shopped and what their purchasing habits were, and how they felt about a huge range of social and political issues.
Specially-created algorithms then trawled through this data looking for patterns that would identify voters as Republicans or Democrats, strong or weak party supporters, and voters or non-voters.
This allowed Obama's team to tailor their election pitch to individuals; in some states the campaign even went so far as to buy set-top box information from cable TV companies so that it could track the viewing habits of key voters and target its advertising spend accordingly."

Sterling crisis looms as UK current account deficit balloons

Telegraph
"Low growth has undermined attempts to reduce the fiscal deficit, which remains one of the highest in the OECD. This in turn is likely to lead to the loss of Britain’s prized triple A credit rating this year, making the UK comparatively less attractive to overseas investors. What’s more, capital flows from the eurozone to perceived “safe havens” such as the UK are slowing as the crisis eases. There is also evidence of elevated concern among investors about Bank of England money printing.
But some of the other reasons are less well appreciated, possibly because we’ve become so accustomed to them. Almost unbelievably, Britain has not enjoyed a trade surplus in goods since 1981, or more than 30 years ago. This long-standing weakness has been partially compensated for by a relatively large surplus on services, and on overseas income, but even so, Britain has been in overall current account deficit ever since the mid-1980s."

The Fiscal-Cliff Mirage

National Review Online
"We’re already broker than anyone has ever been ever. But this is America, where we can always do better — or anyway bigger, and broker: Under the “deal,” the federal debt of the United States in 2022 is officially projected to be $23.9 trillion. That’s in today’s dollars, as opposed to whatever we’ll be loading up the wheelbarrow with in 2022. With “deals” like this, who needs total societal collapse? By 2050, the federal debt will be $58 trillion. But you won’t have to worry about a United States of America by then: It’ll just be one big abandoned Chevy Algaerado plant."

America could still go over the cliff — and take the rest of us with it

Daily Mail
"After America postponed its jump off the fiscal cliff in the small hours of Tuesday night, world stock markets soared. Anyone listening to the BBC yesterday with its headlines praising Barack Obama would think something quite profound had changed in the world’s greatest — if battered — economy. However, it has not. Intractable problems — chief among them chronic over-spending and weak consumer demand — have still not been solved. The tackling of those issues has merely been postponed until the end of next month, when America’s legally enforceable ‘debt ceiling’ will probably be reached. That will be the moment that U.S. debt passes a pre-determined point — north of $16 trillion — and a raft of dramatic public spending cuts will be triggered. However, America’s politicians — especially its weak-willed President — may lack the guts to act even then to reduce the debt. .......America more closely resembles Europe in living beyond its means and in the President’s determination to build a massive welfare state. The danger is that none of his political opponents is powerful enough to force through the decisions that would draw the U.S. back from its economic precipice. They need to find massive spending cuts, and they won’t. The problem is that the Democrats — who hold the Presidency and control the Senate — bribed their way to victory two months ago. ........If Mr Obama had not promised to look after all his client groups, especially among minorities, he would be back home in Chicago. Now he has to pay out on those promises. That is pretty much the way New Labour operated in Britain, by creating a vast state sector funded by the public purse that would, in return, vote for Tony Blair and later Gordon Brown. The long-term legacy of that self-serving policy can be seen today in our disastrous national debt. The problem for America is that its per capita debt is worse even than ours. .....What America is doing is the equivalent of putting a bill behind the clock on the mantelpiece and hoping that it will go away. But it won’t, it will only get bigger — and if it isn’t paid, the effects will be felt far beyond American shores."

Foreign aid? It's simply a cynical ruthless and self-indulgent con job says scathing study

Daily Mail
"David Cameron’s controversial foreign aid target is a costly ‘con job’ designed to make the Conservative Party seem more caring, a study warns today. In a scathing assessment, the respected centre-Right think tank Civitas accuses the Prime Minister of using billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to ‘rebrand his party and cement the coalition with the Liberal Democrats’. The study warns that the wasteful Department for International Development is almost beyond reform and suggests it should be effectively shut down. It says future aid spending should be handled by the Foreign Office, which takes a broader view of Britain’s interests, including trade"

Monumental deceit: How our politicians have lied and lied about the true purpose of the European behemoth

Daily Mail
"As we see from Cabinet papers and other documents of the early Sixties, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and his ‘Europe Minister’ Edward Heath were put completely in the picture about the secret ‘grand plan’. But in June 1961 the Cabinet formally agreed that it must not be revealed to the British people. In Macmillan’s words, to admit ‘the political objectives’ of the Rome Treaty would raise ‘problems of public relations’ so ‘considerable’ that they should be kept under wraps. It was vital to emphasise only the economic advantages of British entry."