Archive: December, 2010
One of the iconic films of the twenty century was released in 1942, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergamn (In the original postcard I said Lauren Bacall – well, as I have said before … we all make mistakes!) – Casablanca. At the time, nobody really expected the film to amount to much – it [...]
Yesterday, December 9th, was designated by the United Nations as “International Anti-corruption Day”, as long ago as in October, 2003, when it passed the United Nations Convention against Corruption. I don’t think it has been well advertised and, to be honest, I almost missed it this year. The first I knew was when I saw [...]
An ombudsman is an official charged with representing the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints reported by individual citizens. The word comes originally from the Old Swedish “umbudsmann” meaning representative, and the first official use of the term seems to date from a 1241 Danish Law. The modern use of the term began in Sweden, with the [...]
For the record – here is the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
On December 10th, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at its meeting in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, and called upon all member states to publicize the text of the Declaration and “to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools [...]
Wednesday morning I had a meeting in the offices of KATO, (the Kyrgyz Association of Tour Operators). Just down the corridor from their office is that of the company that prints the stamps for the Kyrgyz office. A short while the executive Director of KATO took me into their office and we spent about 30 [...]
When I first came to Kyrgyzstan, back in 1995, people often quoted, almost as a mantra, that Kyrgyzstan was a multicultural society with over 80 nationalities represented in the population. It was so often quoted that it was easy to accept, remembering that the territory of the Kyrgyz Republic spanned the ancient trade route known [...]
There is a fair amount of discussion (in the business press – and ironically, on the internet) about the amount of time spent by workers surfing the net – the cost to business is supposed to run into hours and hours of lost production and millions of pounds, dollars, Euro or som. It’s not just [...]
It looks as if 2010 is going to end, at least in some respects, as it began. Back in January, “Siberian air gripped Britain” as unusual High Pressure systems massed over the Atlantic from November 2009 onwards, blocking the customary Westerly winds that would normally bring mild weather to Western Europe. The result was that [...]
I was listening to a podcast from the BBC last September which referred to an article in a British newspaper which announced that there were some 10 million people who were disabled in Britain, and yet more than 90% of people had never invited a disabled person into their home for a social occasion. Apparently, [...]
