Spilling All Sorts of Beans

 Here is a link to download the Common Purpose membership list as an Excel File: CPmasterDB.xls NB: it is best to "download all" which takes a few moments to turn the .xls file in a zipfile; many browsers will give errors if you try to download a .xls file from so far in the past! KEEP the zipfile even when you have EXTRACTed the .xls file to where you want it, as it's all too easy to "edit" the original and accidentally save a corrupted copy. It opens okay with an up to date Open Office suite; I cannot vouch for newer Microsoft products, even though this was clearly prepared on Microsoft Office (2000?), as Bill Gates habitually punishes people who fail to transition all their historical files to his bright-new formats! Once you've opened it, you need to NOT type anything in, but use the bar at the bottom (scroll arrows to your left) to find and select which "output" you want. It will probably default to showing you the "leeds_output" but...

High Court The judge in the case of the Duke of Sussex et al versus Associated Newspapers has warned the litigants to "adjust their expectations" of the "new and compelling evidence" on which their case is based. When he did so, and I read the details, it took me all Friday night and most of Saturday to work out why the name "Jonathan Rees" was jangling such a huge and noisy alarm bell in my mind. Now the penny has dropped, I can assure you that the judge is not exaggerating and this is why: Jonathan Rees was, is and always will be, the recurring non-convictable suspect in the murder of Daniel Morgan in the car-park of the Golden Lion Pub in Sydenham on the 10th of April 1987. This case involved corrupt relationships between former and serving officers of the Metropolitan Police Service and tabloid newspapers including the Sun and News of the World (both Murdoch titles) and others including the Daily Mirror. AFAIK, Associated Newspapers were the ONLY tablo...

This is a link to a copy of the (somewhat redacted) *.pdf document of the FISA memo that some people have been getting excited about. Just in case they are right that it will be removed from the internet very soon, a copy is at the link. Whispering Bluegrass suspects that since it's been released, in redacted form, it will not actually be removed from the internet, but there's no harm in having another copy.

Recently there has been a great fuss, across the United States, United Kingdom and the European Union, about the discovery that diesel cars can pollute more than was thought, and that some models were designed to work differently under test conditions as opposed to normal use, leading the authorities (and the car owners) to a false understanding of how polluting a given car was. The reaction to these discoveries, has been a movement to ban (or prohibitively tax) diesel cars from city centres, and politicians are now demanding a wholesale move to petrol engined cars. Before we do this, however, there needs to be a proper investigation into whether or not all the petrol engined models are actually any cleaner than the diesels. They are supposed to be, and when tested most petrol engined cars will appear to be clean, but that was also what was supposed to be true about the diesels. In the case of petrol engined cars, the comfortable assumptions about their low emissions needs to be chec...

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