The Electric Pitchfork

Slaves of the Caliphate The kidnapping, rape and murder of the Yazidi women of Iraq drew the world’s attention to the brutality of Isis. Mariane Pearl is now working with the women as they tell their chilling stories. Some of those who managed to escape were photographed in traditional dress and interviewed by Seivan M Salim       Seivan M Salim Published: 13 December 2015   (all photographs by Seivan M. Salim/Metrography) Mariane Pearl, interviewed by Christina Lamb , was in London earlier this month to launch a short film of interviews with Yazidi women, the ancient religious minority targeted by Isis last year. It was the plight of these women, trapped in the mountains of northwest Iraq after their husbands, sons and brothers had been slaughtered in their thousands in August last year, that alerted the world to the horrors of Isis. Forced out of their homes in the city of Sinjar, tens of...

Don't Go Far... The Boys Who Ran Away To New York. Don't Go Far...Your dinner's nearly ready! The adventure of two Dublin children in August 1985 who chanced a free ride on the DART and ended up in New York *************************************************** In 1985 two boys from Darndale in Dublin, Keith Byrne (10) and Noel Murray (13), both made headlines around the world when they hopped on a Dart and ended up in New York escaping authorities in three countries.Keith Byrne said that he and his friend went to the United States because he wanted to see his favourite television star, B A Barbs, of The A-Team. Their adventure started when they went out to play before dinner time, Keith said in an RTÉ Radio documentary broadcast last month: “My mum said: ‘don’t go far, your dinner’s nearly ready,’ ”he recalled. “I said: ‘I won’t.” But they did. They took the Dart to Dún Laoghaire and snuck on to a ferry to Holyhead. Emboldened by their suc...

Michael Nicholson: Famine novel changed my mind on England’s guilt Britain’s most decorated reporter set out to write a Famine novel to restore England’s reputation but the facts confounded him. He tells how Trevelyan earned his scorn. “A million dead. A million fled.”   It was those few words that had such an impact on me. Think of it. Try to visualise. Try putting it into a modern context, something happening today, something you are watching on television news, an apocalyptic disaster on an unheard-of scale, something that dwarfs Hiroshima. A million dying because a foreign blight had turned a potato crop into rotten, stinking, putrefying mush. Try to picture families of living skeletons whispering their last prayer in the shelter of a ditch as they watch others turning black with the fever that spread like a summer fire across bracken from Skibbereen to Donegal, from Wicklow to Clare. Imagine another million, still untouc...

'A tortured heap of towers': the London skyline of tomorrow  Excerpt from excellent interactive article in today's "Guardian"   'A tortured heap of towers': the London skyline of tomorrow The ley lines, the hallowed dome of St Paul’s, packs of hungry dogs – and a tipsy surveyor in the 1930s ... these are the invisible forces shaping the City’s skyline by Oliver Wainwright and Monica Ulmanu Link to Original Article : 'A tortured heap of towers': the London skyline of tomorrow   ‘T he last piece in the jigsaw” is how architect Eric Parry described his design for 1 Undershaft, the tallest building in the City of London, when it was unveiled this week . It will crown the planned “cluster” of towers, standing right between the Cheesegrater and the Gherkin . But it’s far from the final piece – in fact, it’s only the beginning of another building boom. In an anonymous basement a few streets from...

2016 Triumph Bonneville Street Twin   Triumph Street Twin  Engine 900cc liquid-cooled parallel twin Power 54bhp @ 5900rpm Torque 59 lb ft @ 3200rpm Fuel 75mpg Price £7,300 Release date On sale February 2016 Verdict The discerning biker’s fashion statement           CRITIC'S RATING The new base Bonneville is called the Street Twin. It looks smaller than the current one and just a hint more modern with a more waisted look where the narrower back of the new fuel tank meets a narrower front of a new seat. Sargent (the renowned seat maker) confirmed that the seat is marginally lower than the outgoing model as well.     The new engine is a 900cc parallel twin with the signature 270° firing order. It makes 80Nm of peak torque at 3,200rpm. That is not only about 20 per cent more but the outgoing model also peaked at 5,500 rpm whereas the torque peak is significantly early now. ...

The End of Tax - Except For You & Me   The jeweller Mappin & Webb has joined the global giants running rings round HMRC to slash their bills. Are taxes only for ‘little people’ ????  Tax paid by average UK worker: £5,393 It was the 17th-century French minister of finance Jean-Baptiste Colbert who said the art of taxation consisted of plucking the goose to obtain the largest possible number of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing. A letter from HM Revenue & Customs that has either just arrived or is about to arrive on your doormat might make you want to hiss. “This is your annual tax summary,” it begins. About 23m such letters are being sent to people, detailing on a simple, double-sided sheet of A4 exactly how much tax each of us is paying every year and how our money has been spent. In one example, a Mrs Collins earning £50,000, roughly double the average annual full-time salary, is shown to have paid £9,627 i...