Upcoming national strike

Students going to university this year will be left as much as £1,200 worse off in the coming academic year after Government forecasting blunders left maintenance loan increases trailing inflation. The cash value of maintenance loans will increase just 2.3pc this year, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, despite expectations inflation will be running at around 8pc by the start of the academic year in September. Students from the poorest families will be able to borrow £9,706 for living costs during the upcoming academic year. That is the lowest loan in real terms since 2016/17, when a “substantial proportion” of the support was provided through grants rather than loans. Ben Waltmann, a senior research economist at the IFS, said the shortfall occurred because of inaccurate forecasting. The Government pegs annual increases in maintenance loans on predictions from the Office for Budget Responsibility for retail price index inflation, excluding mortgage costs (RPIX). … [Read more...] about Forecast blunder leaves students £1,200 worse off

II THE first characteristics which the book of Grotius revealed were faith and foresight. Great as it was, — the most beneficent among all volumes not claiming divine inspiration, — yet more wonderful than the book itself was the faith of its author. In none of the years during which he meditated it, and least of all during the years when it was written, could any other human being see in the anarchic darkness of the time any tribunal which could recognize a plea for right reason in international affairs, or enforce a decision upon it. The greatness of Grotius lies first of all in the fact that he saw in all this darkness one court sitting supreme to which he might make appeal, and that court—the heart and mind of man. What the darkness was which his eye alone could pierce was stated in his preface. He says: “I saw many and grave causes why I should write a work on that subject. I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even barbarous nations might blush. … [Read more...] about The Warfare of Humanity With Unreason: Hugo Grotius

A series of hard-right rallies planned for the coming weeks are under threat of being shut down after a violent white nationalist event in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend left one counterprotester dead. In San Francisco, the U.S. National Park Service said it is deciding whether to pull the permit of a group called Patriot Prayer , which has organized a "Freedom Rally" in the city's Crissy Park below Golden Gate Bridge on August 26. The federal agency, which is responsible for the park, said in a statement Wednesday that it will make its decision within the next seven days based on a "thorough public safety review." The agency said it is receiving a "large volume" of comments from the public about the event, but these must be weighed against "our obligation to uphold one of our nation's most cherished constitutional rights, the First Amendment right to freedom of speech." Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and California Senator Dianne Feinstein, … [Read more...] about Even President Trump’s Arizona rally has been caught up in efforts to shut down hard-right events

WHENE’ER I take my walks abroad, I am fain to remark, not how many poor I see, for in that respect the cities of the United States do not appear unduly freighted, but rather how many and how potent are the street influences that tend to pauperize the soul. The school, the home; on these two foundations, we constantly are told, the welfare of this great republic rests; and that the assertion is far from being so much barren rhetoric is amply proved by the enormous sums spent on public education to a luxurious degree, and by the pure ideal of domesticity to which the private lives of candidates for high office at the people’s hands are required to testify. Many and admirable, also, are the schemes of public and private enterprise that seek to carry humanizing influences into the crowded tenement, bridging so far as they may the gap between the standards of the classroom and the illiterate or alien homes in which such vast numbers of the commonwealth’s schoolchildren dwell. But there … [Read more...] about Ethics of the Street: A Protest