The Voice is Britain’s best established black newspaper.  It has much to commend it, no doubt.  For example, there’s a culture page and a fascinating page of international news:-

TUPAC’S CULT KILLER - Member of Tupac cult “chops off daughter’s head and tosses decapitated body into local river”.
HIV ACTIVIST SLAMS COPS - A HIV/Aids activist in Swaziland has called on the police to stop arresting prostitutes.
COURTS CALL FOR GOVT BAN ON DEATH PENALTY - THE Ugandan courts have ordered the government to amend laws that impose the death penalty for certain serious crimes.

All good stuff ... or stuff anyway.  But it was really the careers page that caught my interest.  I thought I might check out what kind of businesses are hungrily searching out ambitious, young, go-getting readers of The Voice.  After all, one has grown mightily suspicious of all those super-smart black men and women that wander nightly across our TV screens - you know, the ones with the indispensable leadership qualities, cutting-edge techie skills and smooth moves no white member of the opposite sex can resist.  Time to find out whether we are being unfair, even prejudiced and just plain ignorant in writing off such “positive images” as all bloody lies, frankly, and social engineering so blatent the liberal media should be seconded en masse for 10 years to Congo TV.

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The “longitudinal data researchers” at Essex University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research have claimed (PDF) that married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework.

These extraordinary and, if you are a lazy buzzard around the house like me, extraordinarily welcome findings are reported by Reuters like this:-

Academics Elena Bardasi and Mark Taylor found that a married man whose wife does not go out to work but is primarily responsible for the cooking and cleaning earns about 3 percent more than comparably employed single men.

But that wage premium disappears if wives go out to work themselves or don’t do most of the housework.

“It has been fairly well documented that married men earn more than single men,” Taylor, a labour economist, told Reuters.

“However, our research established the wage premium is related to the wife doing the chores,” said the academic who teaches at the University of Essex.

He said analysis suggests there could be two explanations for the results:

A marriage might allow a husband and wife to focus their activities on tasks to which they are most suited. Traditionally, this would result in the man concentrating on paid work enabling him to increase productivity and in consequence his wages.

Taylor said another explanation could be that marriage may increase the amount of time a man has to hone work-related skills which could trigger higher wages.

Taylor and Bardasi analysed the hourly wages of 3,500 men who have been interviewed annually since 1991 as part of the British Household Panel Survey.

“We looked at all types of jobs from unskilled up to managers and professionals,” Taylor said.

Bliss.  Best excuse I’ve come across in damned nearly thirty years of married life.

Having little IQ myself, of course, I tend these days to leave the subject to those MR bloggers better informed about it than I.  However, this story caught my interest and concerns something - IVF treatment - about which I do know a little.

Children whose mothers underwent a new form of IVF treatment introduced in the 1990s appear to be brighter than those conceived naturally, it was claimed today.

There had been fears that the procedure, known as Intra-Cellular Sperm Injection (ICSI), may increase the risk of slow development and behavioural problems.

But a new study suggests that, far from being disadvantaged, ICSI children develop higher IQs than children born as a result of natural conception.

The reason is thought to be psychological rather than biological.

... Those in the ICSI group had an average IQ level of 112, compared with 107 for the children not conceived through IVF.

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A mixed bag from this morning’s British press, national and local ...

First up, probably literally, is the fiesty Sabina Arthurs of Brighouse, Yorkshire.  She is planning to run with the bull in Pamplona next month.  But ... she’s going to do it stark naked.  It’s her way of protesting, of course.  Naked protesters against animal cruelty did the same thing last year.  We are not told whether they left any little things behind afterwards.

Now alright, this display of bovine solidarity may bring the eponymous, testosterone-soaked Spanish male to the realisation that bullfighting is very cruel.  Very, very cruel.  But there again it may not.  Indeed, he may, on hearing Sabina’s uplifting news, ask himself not “Is she right about the bulls?” but “Is she a looker?”  My guess: he will and she is.  Or the local paper wouldn’t be interviewing her.  Alas, there is no picture on-line by which we may judge this important issue.

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Today’s Sunday Telegraph reports upon the corruption race politics have wrought to London’s Metropolitan Police Service.

Scotland Yard failed to investigate fully an allegation by a white woman of a rape involving an officer from an ethnic minority because of concerns that it would be accused of racism ...

At an industrial tribunal last week, the Commissioner Sir Ian Blair faced accusations of “politically correct meddling” in a disciplinary case involving white officers. He was said to have been keen to make examples of the officers, who faced charges of racist behaviour, even though an inquiry had already cleared them.

That charge is overshadowed by the latest unprecedented revelation, however, which demonstrates the extraordinary lengths to which the Metropolitan Police is prepared to go to accommodate officers from ethnic minorities.

The rape complaint, which the force has attempted to keep secret for four years, was considered so sensitive that Sir Ian, then Deputy Commissioner, oversaw the inquiry himself ...

The failure to question the officer because of the sensitivity over his race was confirmed by several sources. One said: “Scotland Yard was treading on eggshells with this and the feeling at the top level was that even putting the rape to this man would be too much.”

The woman, who cannot be identified, said: “Due process has not been served. This man, who is now a serving officer, was party to my rape.”

Scotland Yard said that the allegation had been “thoroughly investigated”. While awaiting their response, a man identifying himself as the officer’s solicitor called the offices of The Sunday Telegraph in a state of agitation. Attempts to contact him subsequently failed, but Scotland Yard admitted that after this newspaper’s inquiry, it contacted the officer. “We have a duty of care to him,” said a spokesman, who declined to comment on the duty of care to the alleged rape victim.

This repellant situation is a child of The Lawrence Enquiry.  Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair denies he is only there to drive political correctness into his white officers.  But who believes that?  Not the un-named (alleged) victim in this case.  Not many of Sir Ian’s white officers, I suspect.

But there are at least some green shoots in the actions of the Sunday Telegraph, specifically its reversion to normal reporting standards.  This is a mighty step forward from its, of course, intentional silence on the racist murder of young Kriss Donald in Glasgow by a group of local Muslims.

There is still a gap to close here.  Justice is not “justice for the racially oppressed”, even if Sir Ian thinks so, and should never be reported as such.

“This business requires a certain amount of finesse,” is one of many memorable lines spoken by Jack Nicholson’s P.I. character, Jake Gittes, in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film noire, Chinatown.

This classic film was undoubtedly the pinnacle of Polanski’s cinematic career.  The “noire” epithet isn’t in the least disqualified by the film having been shot in colour.  Nor is it solely the product of skilful atmospherics, though Polanski’s vision of 1930’s Los Angeles does convince.  No, this is a film with the darkest of hearts.  It offers a detective yarn of Chandleresque style and power but, some distance beneath that, the gnawing, unanswerable comprehension that life is only the choice between a small, selfish, unknowing existence or … hopelessness.  Chinatown is a world in which evil has placed itself above public reproach and so does what it wants.  Chinatown is a state of being in which, however much or however little the good and the innocent resist their fate, no amelioration is possible.  One can investigate “fate” from without – for which a certain amount of finesse is required – but one cannot change it.

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Censorship by the self-removal of key words from internet discussion is being forced upon users of a new Microsoft blogging service in China.  The blog tool developed for MSN Spaces, launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, aims at preventing government-sensitive issues from being raised online.

So type a “subversive” word or term on your keyboard and up pops an instruction to delete it.  Offenders include:-

freedom, democracy, human rights, communism, socialism, capitalism, Taiwanese independence, Tibet, Dalai Lama, Falun Gong, terrorism, massacre, Tiananmen, demonstration

The names of senior Chinese politicians will also trigger the deletion order.

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At the weekend two extraordinary reports of the discovery of very ancient timber and earth temples in the heart of continental Europe appeared in the Independent.  One set the scene thus:-

Archaeologists have discovered Europe’s oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

... Excavations have been taking place over the past few years - and have triggered a re-evaluation of similar, though hitherto mostly undated, complexes identified from aerial photographs throughout central Europe.

Archaeologists are now beginning to suspect that hundreds of these very early monumental religious centres, each up to 150 metres across, were constructed across a 400-mile swath of land.

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