sandgrinder 's Profile

I could go on and on, but the bonfire is now burning brightly. On the other hand, should we not be mature enough to acknowledge that Hollywood was (is?) part of an ideological superstructure determined by the capitalist economic system and, since its inception, it has projected a largely conservative white middle-class view of the world? Perhaps we should be grateful that we have now reached a time in film history where we have constructed a less passive acceptance of the mores of the dominant film culture, and have a wider critical perspective in relation to the "real" and its misrepresentation in the cinema.

As I argued previously, the denial phrase allows them to claim that the debate around global warming is a purely political argument. It isn't and it is dangerous for that notion to gain any traction. Plus I've seen the phrase "eco-Nazi" repeated too many times on blogs to want to sink to that level of debate.

Overall sales in English and Welsh pubs are down 7.3 per cent since the introduction of the smoking ban, a survey has revealed.

Eurotunnel's long-suffering shareholders will soon receive their first dividend in 22 years. This morning the Channel tunnel operator announced that it made a net profit of €40m (£35.6m) last year – only the second in its history – meaning investors will receive €0.04 per share.

Sheriff's deputies fined 20-year-old Schomaker for animal cruelty after responding to a domestic disturbance. Officers caught him smoking from a box-like contraption with Shadow inside the 30cm x 15cm base.

The gang were defeated, however, by relatively elementary errors in filling out electronic forms on the SWIFT international transfer payment system. They had acquired account details and matching passwords by installing key-logging software on the bank's computers.

The wide-ranging package of measures to curb supermarket dominance comes after a decade of investigation into the industry. As this timeline shows, regulators have often struggled to find concrete proof that small suppliers are suffering.

The Competition Appeals Tribunal backed the UK's biggest grocer and opposed a plan put forward by the Competition Commission to make new supermarket developments subject to a "competition test". The test would have forced local planners to take into account the variety of grocery outlets available in an area before giving the go-ahead for a new store. The test was designed to prevent any grocer becoming too dominant in any town, but its impact would have fallen mainly on Tesco.

Switzerland is now an international whipping boy. This year it suffered the indignity of being refused an invitation to the international G20 conference to be held in London in April to discuss reforms to the global financial system - despite a plea by president Merz, who doubles as his country's finance minister, to Gordon Brown at the World Economic (WEF) meeting in the Swiss ski resort of Davos at the end of January. For the world's seventh largest financial centre, the snub is more than an embarrassment. It means the country has become neutered, unable to influence events that could shape globalisation for decades to come.