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The subject of agricultural subsidies is one of the key topics in discussion of international trade justice. While rich countries have, through the WTO, insisted that poor countries remove trade barriers such as tariffs on agricultural products and subsidies to their farmers, the European Union and the USA heavily subsidise their farmers. In the UK, a variety of campaign groups have worked hard to make their calls for reform of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) heard. We are assured that the discussion of reform is now very much on the table. ...

The BBC recently picked up on the fair trade theme with this article (thanks to SupraDeluxe for the heads up) picking up the responses to Fair Trade of Alex Singleton (Adam Smith Institute) and Paul Ettinger (commercial director of Caffe Nero). In many ways their comments are reminiscent of many opponents of the fair trade movement, with nods of the head to the apparent ideals of free markets, but the thing that really struck me was a major discrepancy between their two comments. While Singleton comments that: ...

When people have asked me what I’ll most miss–friend and family aside–when I move to the USA later this year, my usual response has been the news media. One of the things I most notice is the absence of local shops carrying newspapers with an international scope. Thankfully, it seems that Schulers Books and Music pick up The Observer each Sunday, so between that weekly pilgrimage and plenty of time online, I should just about be covered. ...

Some may have noticed that I am tinkering with the links in the right-hand bar. In any sensible web browser, clicking on one of the category names will open a list (these lists will be further developed shortly). In various versions of Internet Explorer, however, there are one or two display hitches. Internet Explorer has many bugs and Microsoft don’t plan to bring out an updated version for quite some time. While I seek ways round IE’s shortcomings, I recommend wherever possible switching to a superior, regularly developed web browser such as Mozilla Firefox. ...

It was good to see last Sunday’s Observer praising Rowan Williams for his appreciation of Philip Pullman’s excellent His Dark Materials trilogy. The lecture in which the endorsement was made is also well worth some time. It seems that some people have been doing projections based on recent trends which suggest that Islam will surpass Christianity as the most practiced religion in the UK within the next twenty years. The reasons for this are many, and certainly too complex for a simple blog entry. Somehow I doubt it’s to do with their Alpha Courses. ...

For those of us who take note of the Iranian New Year, today is the first day of 1383. We’ve noted Noruz (’new day’, the name for New Year) throughout my life, celebrating with my mother’s family the key celebration in the calendar of her homeland. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed having, partly, I’ll admit, for the presents and sweets we receive from our parents, but also as a connection to a culture which isn’t very well known amongst those around me. ...

Moving money between bank accounts should be easy. Even internationally, it should be easy. The last estimate I heard (and this was a couple of years ago) was that two trillion dollars are exchanged on the international currency markets each and every day. So I don’t quite understand why it should have taken over a month for money to not transfer between my accounts at HSBC and Fifth Third Bank. Well, maybe I do understand to some degree. Technically it’s because the transfer request between HSBC and Fifth Third didn’t come with a Swift Code. The banks seem to differ on who’s to blame for the mix-up. ...

The biggest issue we’ve been facing at work of late is the ‘action short of a strike’ which the Association of Union Teachers has called to last indefinitely. The AUT action consists of a refusal to cover for absent staff and a boycott of all assessment work. With finals fast approaching, higher education is potentially facing some months of serious disruption. The dispute is chiefly over pay and conditions, but is also an expression of concern at the proposed ending of national pay bargaining (letting each university set pay levels for its lecturers) and frustration that the union has been thrown out of pay negotiations. When levels of pay for academics have been falling in real terms for such a long time, the prospect of losing what little bargaining muscle they retain is an understandable concern. ...

Since I mentioned it on Tuesday, it seemed appropriate to share some thoughts I jotted down after watching Roma last weekend. It was my first Fellini, an experience I’d been awaiting for some time but since his films aren’t a regular feature of the local Blockbuster I had to wait till Movietrak appeared, and then so manipulated my DVD queue as to send me this title (it’s a great service, but the ranking of films in the queue appears to bear little correlation with the order of despatch). ...

Last week I wrote on the question of plagiarism and blogging, a topic my mind returned to while watching Fellini’s Roma on Saturday. It would have been while the young Fellini’s family jostle for seats in a cinema that I wondered about the influences that previous filmmakers and other visual artists have on the visual language of a film. Sadly the DVD I was watching didn’t include the credits so I wasn’t able to see how Fellini referenced his included material. When filmmakers use other films within their own they usually do credit them. The same is not true, however, when elements from other films are utilised in more implicit ways, such as the way the photography in The Passion Of The Christ is said to move to capture views of classic paintings. ...