Our thanks to Elizabeth for this video (15:20) from Sargon of Akkad.
Month: May 2018
Will Styles, MRA, student campaigner at Plymouth University, will be attending the conference
We’re delighted to report that Will Styles, an MRA and student campaigner at Plymouth University, will be attending the conference. We’ve posted a few pieces about Will, links to them all here. A list of conference attendees who aren’t going to be giving presentations, but who are well-known in the MRM, can he found at the end of the conference speakers’ page. Let us know if you think of anyone else who should be added to the list. Thanks.
Paulina Gancarz, 34, accountant who was five times over the limit when she was found slumped at the wheel of her Mini Cooper after downing a bottle of wine in a layby to escape her overbearing mother, avoids jail
Our thanks to Ken for this. The start of the piece:
An accountant who crashed her car while over the limit on the day she was due to appear in court over another drink drive charge has avoided a jail sentence.
Paulina Gancarz was found slumped at the wheel of her Mini Cooper in a layby last month and breath tests showed she was five times the legal alcohol limit.
But the day she was due to appear in court, she crashed her car [J4MB: Fortunately, she didn’t kill anyone.] outside a Marks and Spencer store near her £300,000 apartment in Wilmslow, Cheshire. This time she was found to be three times the limit.
The 34-year-old has now admitted drink driving and failing to provide a specimen of breath but avoided a jail term after telling magistrates of her troubled home life. [J4MB emphasis. We’ve never heard of men avoiding jail terms on account of “troubled home lives”.]
Lower payouts put wives off divorce as fewer get meal tickets for life
A piece by Nadeem Badshah in today’s Times:
More women are refraining from divorcing their husbands because of the smaller court settlements being awarded, according to lawyers.
Experts said that fewer wives were being awarded income for life and were increasingly having settlements restricted to a few years. The law firm Hall Brown has dealt with 380 divorce cases over the past year, 30 of which were later shelved because the couple decided not to go ahead.
James Brown, the managing partner at the Manchester firm, said that many divorcing couples “may have little genuine insight into their true financial circumstances, and might have second thoughts when told about the settlement which they may receive”.
Ministry of Justice figures showed last year that orders for payments had fallen by 5 per cent since 2011, and lump sum orders, which allow for a clean break, had risen by 10 per cent over the period.
Last month, Kim Waggott, 49, lost out on a lifetime of maintenance payments after going back to court to challenge her 2012 settlement, which included £175,000 a year for the rest of her life in addition to a £9.76 million lump sum.
The judge ruled that her maintenance payments from her ex-husband, William, 54, the former finance controller of UCI cinemas, should stop after three years, overturning the decision. The couple were married for 21 years and lived in a £4.3 million property near Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, before splitting in 2012.
Toby Hales, of the law firm Seddons, said it was “rare now to see a maintenance order that is to be paid for the rest of one’s life”.
“There is no doubt that the expected level of generosity of the courts has diminished significantly,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
The other factor putting people off was the cost of the process, he said. “If people are not able to agree the settlement . . . they can look forward to spending potentially tens of thousands of pounds on the process.”
You can subscribe to The Times here.
Laura Perrins: Fatherless culture behind the surge in violence
A new piece on TCW.
Richard Ned Lebow, 76, professor of political theory at King’s College London, made a joke in a lift. Predictably, Simona Sharoni, 57, “professor” of women’s and gender studies at the University of New York, didn’t laugh. Cue, uproar among scholars.
Our thanks to Elizabeth Hobson, our Director of Media Relations, who has to work on bank holidays such as today, like the rest of the team (our contracts are clear on this point – holidays and sleep are for wimps), for this. The start of the piece:
He says he was joking when he asked to be let off an elevator at the ladies’ lingerie department. A female scholar who was attending the same annual meeting of the International Studies Association was not amused, and neither was the association when she complained.
Now his refusal to formally apologize has touched off the latest skirmish in the #MeToo battles rocking academe. At issue is whether a comment made in jest rises to the level of a punishable offense, and what happens when a complaint some deem as trivial results in a vicious online backlash against the offended party.
The good (American) professor’s Wiki page is here, the pompous mirthless passive-aggressive “professor” of women’s and gender studies page is here.
I’m about to email Professor Lebow to show our support for him (richard.lebow@kcl.ac.uk). I urge you to do likewise, if you can spare a minute or two. Thanks.
New data protection legislation – the J4MB Privacy Notice
Changes to EU data protection legislation are coming into force 25 May, 2018, and we want to make sure that if you’re a subscriber, you’re happy to receive blog updates after then. If you visit this site and interact with us in any way (e.g. commenting on blog pieces, donating etc.), and would like to understand your rights, and what we do with your personal data, please read our Privacy Notice. Thanks.
Abi Morgan: Harvey Weinstein’s parties ‘seduced and corrupted’
A piece by Richard Brooks, Arts Editor, in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
The award-winning British screenwriter Abi Morgan has described Harvey Weinstein’s “incredibly corrupting and seductive” parties in a recording for today’s Desert Island Discs.
Morgan got to know the now disgraced Hollywood mogul in 2011 when he was the US distributor of The Iron Lady, a film she wrote about Margaret Thatcher. She met Weinstein again in 2016, the year before he became engulfed by allegations of non-consensual sex.
“What did I think about him?” asks Morgan on the BBC Radio 4 programme. “He threw great parties and I think that was incredibly corrupting and seductive. I had heard he’d been called a rapist and I look back now and think: why did I never challenge that?”
She says Weinstein seemed interested in female, feminist work: “You think: OK, this is good. He must have an appreciation and a respect for women — and you realise how deceptive that is.”
Morgan says she does not want to excuse her behaviour “because I have shocked myself in . . . the way you don’t listen to yourself and go: this doesn’t feel entirely right.” The writer, whose series about divorce lawyers, The Split, is now on BBC1, often works with female producers and directors. But she tells the presenter, Kirsty Young: “I also recognise that at 50 and as a feminist . . . I need to . . . maybe think more like a man.”
Weinstein denies claims of non-consensual sex.
You can subscribe to The Times here.
First sexist madness, then racist madness. Boards struggling to hit ethnic targets.
A piece by Gurpreet Narwan in today’s Times:
Most directors sit on boards with only white members and many believe that their companies will struggle to meet the government’s commitment to ending all-white boards within six years.
Britain’s biggest public companies should have at least one non-white director within three years, according to the Parker Review, a government-backed report, which says that corporate decision-making will improve if boards are more diverse.
To hit this target companies still have “considerable work to do”, research by Ridgeway Partners, an executive headhunter, found. Its survey of FTSE 350 directors found that 64 per cent are on all-white boards and 79 per cent of those say that their company is not on track to recruit a non-white board member by the Parker Review’s deadline, which is 2021 for FTSE 100 companies and 2024 for each FTSE 250 board.
Companies are making progress with increasing the number of women on boards. More than two thirds of FTSE 350 board members said that their employers were on track to meet a government objective for 33 per cent of board members to be women by 2020. Almost three quarters of FTSE 100 board members felt they were on track.
Louise Angel, of Ridgeway Partners, said that achieving greater ethnic diversity among board members was “still a relatively new agenda topic for a lot of companies” but predicted “progress over the next few years, in the same way that we have seen a big improvement in gender diversity since 2011”.
Of those surveyed, half said that they would like more ethnic diversity on boards, while 43 per cent said they would welcome more gender diversity. Only 18 per cent listed boardroom diversity as one of their most important considerations.
The report also found that 26 per cent thought their board’s level of engagement with community stakeholders was “insufficient”. Customer engagement was also described as insufficient by 20 per cent of respondents.
Ms Angel said that community engagement needed improving but that in recent years boardrooms had “consistently adapted and evolved to absorb new responsibilities”.
You can subscribe to The Times here.
Daniel Hannan: Why would anyone be a Marxist now?
Our thanks to Mike P for this.
Justice for Men & Boys 