Issue 16-03-2012
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Causes for celebration
Last Thursday was a big day for Leicester. The Diamond Jubilee tour started in our city and, more particularly, on the campus of De Montfort University where I am a speech and language therapy student.
Top stories
Shipwrecks and renewal
Somewhere between their mid-forties and late seventies all men will face a series of major or minor shipwrecks: redundancy, retirement, divorce, kids leaving home, health problems. Every shipwreck contains a heartbreak and a gift: there is a loss to grieve and the freedom of being cast up on an unknown...
Deep Field
The first edition of the latest collection by our Friend Philip Gross sold out so fast that there were no copies left for the book launch and the publishers had to organise a hasty reprinting. What was it about a slim volume of modern poetry that, far from intimidating people,...
Woodbrooke expansion
Building is well under way for a new lounge extension at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham. It is expected to be in use by May.
Meeting in Malta
It was with great joy, and even more faith, that we held our first official Quaker Meeting in Malta recently. Before visiting the island, I checked in case they happened to have a Quaker Meeting and was not too surprised by the answer: the last recorded English Quaker visitors, Sarah...
The Heron
The heron fishes in the tide With cans and crisp bags at his side I watched him fishing in the place where tide and river interface Midst mud and oil and salt and slime Patiently he takes his time
All articles
Olympic partner pays poverty wages
The ‘official sportswear partner’ of the London Olympics has been accused of paying poverty wages. Adidas factories in Bangladesh employ people paid just nine pence an hour, according to a report by War on Want. This is below the legal minimum wage in the country.
Friends nominate Hawa Abdi for the Nobel Peace Prize
The American Friends Service Committee has nominated the Somali physician Hawa Abdi for her provision of medical care and refuge to all – regardless of their clan, religious or political affiliation.
Fothergill remembered
An eighteenth-century Quaker physician has been remembered in a series of events at the school he founded. A celebration on 8 March marked three hundred years since the birth of John Fothergill, who founded Ackworth School near Pontefract in 1779. He died the following year.
Leaping for 25 years
LEAP Confronting Conflict has celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. The charity works with young people and adults to manage conflict and prevent violence in young people’s lives, schools and community.
Women suffer from food speculation
Worldwide 555 million women go hungry – making up sixty per cent of the world’s hungry people. That’s the estimate of the World Development Movement (WDM), who published the statistics on International Women’s Day last week.
Reform Jews back same-sex marriage
Reform Jews have become the largest religious group in Britain to give their support to same-sex marriage – a role previously occupied by Quakers.
But what can I do?
Each of us has distinctive gifts and talents, but every day we are faced with bad news about the world, bad news concerning our local communities, our country or the international community. It can seem overwhelming. We hear about endless initiatives, charities, Friends’ concerns – but where do we start? How...
The cycle of bikes
A bicycle-recycling project run by Hull Quakers is raising funds for a cash-strapped charity for the homeless in that northern town.
Eye - 16 March 2012
Zip sliding at 80 ‘Scary’ news from Middlesbrough Meeting where the treasurer, Kitty Grove-Stephensen, is about to celebrate her eightieth birthday. Kitty will do a zip slide off the roof of the former Baltic Exchange building, which is forty metres high, to land across the river in Newcastle. The aim is...
Letters - 16 March 2012
Energy tariffs The current pricing technique of a standing charge plus unit rate (or a high rate for x units followed by a lower rate for subsequent units) is designed to prevent price comparison and competition. There is no reason why domestic energy suppliers cannot include their overheads in the...