Checkered Lounge Pants

Malaysia and Indonesia will soon be dealing with an influx of migrants, as search and rescue operations get under way. About 7,000 migrants - Rohingya and Bangladeshi Muslims - are stranded in the Andaman Sea. Governments in the region were unwilling to bring them ashore until now, afraid of encouraging more to arrive at a later date. Under international pressure Malaysia and Indonesia have agreed to give them temporary shelter. The US and others have offered to help resettle the migrants. But how do ordinary people in countries around the region see the Rohingya, and the current crisis? BBC correspondents have been finding out. seeing the suffering of the migrants who had been stranded at sea, the majority in Malaysia feel it was the right decision to offer them temporary shelter.  One local newspaper, The Malaysia Star says: "We've accepted refugees from Bosnia and Vietnam, why not Rohingya?"  But there is also fear that this decision will open the floodga...

House of Secrets: Who owns London’s most expensive mansion? BY  ED CAESAR Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned by Arthur Crosfield, an English soap magnate, the mansion was designed in the Queen Anne style and contained twenty-five bedrooms, a seventy-foot-long ballroom, and a glass rotunda; the views from its gardens, over Hampstead Heath and across the capital, were among the loveliest in London. For decades, parties at Witanhurst attracted potentates and royals—including, in 1951, Elizabeth, the future Queen. In May, 2008, I toured Witanhurst with a real-estate agent. There had been no parties there for half a century, and the house had not been occupied regularly since the seventies. The interiors were ravaged: water had leaked through holes in the roof, and, upstairs, the brittle floorboards cracked under our footst...

Well Well Well...hello there. I have not done a composition on CLP for some time. In fact its been so long my editorial list of posts wont scroll to my last composition. This blog began almost 10 years ago to keep in touch with my personal interests while my career as a Union leader committed me to labour business interests. What can I say....these days my counter shows there is spiked frequency views to my blog when I post media bylines with high profile characters. That tells me that alerts for those individuals are monitoring the internet for the specific references to their clients which is customary in this day and age according to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (gad-ding gad-ding goes the counter). The highest spike was a post regarding the war mongering murderous administration of Cheney and Bush (gad-ding gad-ding). I was going to give the CLP an update of my plans but I think, with all the a-lerts watching, I will just say I had hoped to see Katmandu this year but the...

Handout Molly Hannon facebook tweet post CAST OUT 05.08.15 5:15 AM ET Snowden and Assange Are Bronze Gods in Berlin Sculptor David Dormino says  Dead Poets Society  inspired him to make statues of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning. Statues are typically erected in honor of individuals who have significantly contributed to humanity—whether these statues are cast in gold or bronze, they serve as public reminders of heroic deeds, lofty ideals, or both. Sometimes they commemorate heroes, often soldiers, who have sacrificed themselves for a higher cause. Sometimes, they are artists, thinkers, or scientists whose contribution to humanity is widely known. But never have they been government whistleblowers—or traitors as they are seen in the eyes of many. First came that  bust of Edward Snowden  that appeared in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park last month. Then on May 1, on a much grander scale, a group of activists, artists, ...

Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast 11:20 AM ET Top Pollster YouGov: How We Got the British Election So Wrong One of Britain’s leading polling firms apologizes for its awful performance in the British election and welcomes a full industry-wide inquiry into their failings. LONDON — Britain woke up to its very own  “Dewey Defeats Truman”  moment Friday when Prime Minister David Cameron did what the pollsters said was impossible and won an outright parliamentary majority. The shock result  had been virtually discounted by polling companies who carried out surveys in Britain on an unprecedented scale in the leadup to the general election.  The CEO of YouGov, which published daily polls in the weeks before Thursday’s vote, apologized and said the entire polling industry must now hold a joint inquiry into how they had called the result so drastically wrong. Stephan Shakespeare said it was too soon to say for sure why they had underestimated t...