The UK sold off its family silver long ago!
Now it seems, they are happy to sell the rug from beneath their feet too .  Talk of globalisation is great when we are all happy with each other.. take Russia over the past 6 years for instance, yet when things get tricky nations think inwardly and look after themselves.  Great Britain, like Egypt - was once a great nation in the world yet look at Egypt in the world arena now !!  Selling British Energy to the French government is just another short sighted nail in the UK’s coffin.

I question the panic and sensationalist headlines spread around the world as XL Leisure Group’s grasp for short term lending fails and the third largest UK airline stops its services at the drop of a hat. I am sad for the thousands of travellers caught up in the latest of travel companies to close their doors.
   What did impress me is the integrity of XL’s chief executive in his admission and visible dismay/remorse in announcing the XL collapse. An humbling example to all those CEO’s who put their own interests before that of the company and its customers ! I didn’t see any openness when Farepak’s chief William Rollason knowingly wrecked Christmas for thousands. No, in the case of XL travellers the Civil Aviation Authority have the responsibility of ensuring all package holiday travellers get repatriated, and as expected - those with a tiny bit of patience and calm will all be only slightly delayed by a day or so for those actually stuck in an airport or not affected at all if they are due to fly home next week for example.
   There’s always some who over react and clamber for any return flight vacancies complaining of profiteering on flight tickets..rush rush !! A $100 hotel room for a day whilst things are smoothed out sounds more like it… the jobs etc will still be there when they finally get home.

Gordon Brown’s attempt at saving his and Darlings career with their latest house rescue plan to stimulate/save the housing industry disaster is irresponsible. There’s no surprise that they are panicking! The UK is now a population of property owners thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s policies of home ownership. The governments since have all continually relied on various taxations relating to property development and house purchasing. With the whole housing industry stalled - natural revenues from the sector for the UK Treasury have quickly dried up and in reality the collapse of the whole property sector has caused an estimated 12Billion pounds hole in The Treasury’s budget.

I feel sorry for those who take advantage of the House Rescue cash on offer over the next 12months… undoubtedly, the property market will continue down as the wider economy continues to fail and core living costs continue to rise. Values in the property industry need to adjust a lot further yet ! The governments action basically encourages folk to increase debt and high chance of negative equity as prices continue to fall, whilst at the same time falsely inflating the prices of repossessed housing at auction by passing finance through to housing associations to bid on property - the last place and sanctuary for people struggling to raise sufficient funds to get on the housing ladder.

As Microsoft roles out the new Internet Explorer 8 with its InPrivate button, the advertising world holds it breath in fear! Why? The button clearly marked in the browser, when clicked, allows the web surfer to visit websites without the advertising tracking cookies catching any browser behaviour. Such information is used by Google, Yahoo and MSN to serve up targeted advertisements. Session cookies etc are clearly still used and Googles data gathering systems do not rely on just browser side cookies - but targeting ads InPrivate mode is a problem.

This clearly poses a problem for the search engines and advertisers alike. Privacy campaigners will undoubtedly be happy…but I can’t help wonder why such a move by Microsoft has been adopted for “Privacy” and yet the international child protection agencies such as CEOP have been pushing for a “Report Button” for unsuitable content/behaviour in all browsers and nothing has happened !!! How about re prioritising civil responsibility ahead of financial positioning for a change?

Today I came across a post on the subject of the Chinese using digital CGI to trick television viewers of the Beijing Olympics 2008 into thinking the giant footprints created by fireworks in the Beijing sky were real !!!

I personally find this remarkable and quite funny not only are the Chinese renowned for flaunting copyright and intellectual property rights with cheaply copying pretty much anything ! but their desire towards portraying a great public image during the games and focus on everything great about China - only cheapens their ‘image’ in my view if such a claim of cgi fireworks being passed off as the real thing is actually true ! Has anybody got a copy of the Beijing Times article they would like to scan and send me ?