[food and drink] join me for afternoon tea

Couple of days old but still ...

More money is spent on eating out than eating at home in Britain, official figures showed on Friday.

Spending on food and drink consumed outside the home doubled between 1992 and 2004 to 87.5 billion pounds, nearly two billion more than spending on food and drink for the home.

Many Brits now pride themselves on their exotic diet, yet the British still do eat in - it being the cheaper alternative. Spending on food and drink at home still rose by more than 50 percent between 1992 and 2004.

[far-east] latest in the lead up to the poll

Old stereotypes come out in the Japanese electoral race.

[latest news] darkness comes to reykjavík

What I adore about this latest front page news from Iceland is that the text below was the leader and then when I clicked – it was the article as well. I love Iceland:

The Reykjavík city council yesterday approved a request from the organizers of the Reykjavík International Film Festival to turn off all city lights for 30 minutes in the evening of 28 September this year, the Festival’s opening day, including all street lights. This is reported in all the main media.

Hrönn Marinósdóttir, Director of the Festival, told Morgunbladid that city residents would be able to see the world’s largest movie screen: “The sky itself. It’s very apt that it should be on the opening night of the Reykjavík International Film Festival.”

[good news] makes a change from the doom and gloom

The press trust of India reports that Pakistan has detained members of banned terror groups. Islamabad has put over 400 members of banned terrorist groups on a 'watch list' and proceeded to detain them.

The Inter-Provincial Coordination Committee (IPCC), which met on Saturday, has put 400 'alleged extremists' on a watch list. They would be proceeded against under the Anti-Terrorist Act and detained for a year. However, their cases would be reviewed every three months, local daily The News quoted officials as saying.

Besides JuD and LeT, the names of other banned outfits like Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) figured prominently in the local and foreign media. While JuD was accused of using the funds for the earthquake relief to finance the plot, the key suspect, Rashid Rauf arrested for the plot was closely connected with JEM. Rauf is married to JeM chief Masood Azhar's close relative and was arrested from Bahawalpur, the headquarters of JeM.

Well, that makes it all much clearer.

[in brief] thoughts for the day

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds; and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of birdsong. [Rachel Carson 1962]

And that will be England gone – the shadows, the meadows, the lanes, the guildhalls, the carved choirs. There’ll be books; it will linger on in galleries but all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres. [Philip Larkin 1974]

If you drive in the Australian outback as well, you’ll see dead animals and the remains of tyres. I’ve seen garbage on the roadside in Vancouver and in Reykyavik. Despite the best efforts of the minority, the desolation proceeds, with little check.

I count myself a conservative – certainly in society and relationships – and conservative, to me, means not so much wanting the status to remain quo but striving for a higher level of responsibility.

[spy v spy] russia’s kgb and the clairvoyants – grasping at straws?

Would you fear an international intelligence service which employed clairvoyants?

Correspondents of the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said that not long before he passed away, Professor Alexander Spirkin, well-known scholar and co-author of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, admitted in an interview that the Soviet KGB employed clairvoyants to spy on their enemies.

Alexander Spirkin used to head a secret lab under the Soviet government and worked closely with clairvoyants hired to carry out special missions for the Kremlin.

“I used to work closely with hundreds of all sorts of extrasensory individuals,” Mr. Spirkin recalled in a conversation with Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondents.

Full text here.