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In the early Nineties the largest child abuse investigation in Britain centred on Bryn Estyn, a care home for adolescent boys on the outskirts of Wrexham. Richard Webster has written about it in a forthcoming book:

The Secret of Bryn Estyn tells the story of the greatest series of miscarriages of justice in recent British history – how innocent lives have been destroyed, the public deceived and millions of pounds wasted in a witch-hunt against innocent people.

Early in the morning of 15 March 1992, 40 police officers took up positions in streets in and around Wrexham in North Wales. As dawn broke they swooped down on their suspects and arrested sixteen men and one woman. All but one had worked at Bryn Estyn…. According to reports which began to appear in the press in 1991, Bryn Estyn had lain at the centre of a network of evil – a conspiracy which supposedly involved the extensive homosexual abuse of adolescent boys by a paedophile ring, whose members terrorised their victims and subjected them to a regime of violence and brutality.

The paedophile ring turned out to be a figment of the investigators’ imagination. Yet rumours of its existence led to the largest child abuse investigation in Britain. The police trawled allegations from 650 witnesses, who accused 365 people of abusing them at homes throughout North Wales. When only six prosecutions followed, with only two new convictions for sexual abuse, the police and the authorities were accused of mounting a cover-up. Police officers themselves were said to belong to the very paedophile ring they were supposed to be investigating. The story became a national scandal.

A senior police officer, publicly accused of raping adolescent boys at Bryn Estyn, sued for libel and won. Still, rumours of a cover-up persisted. In 1996 the government set up the largest Tribunal of Inquiry in British history, under Sir Ronald Waterhouse. In February 2000, the Tribunal made damning findings of extensive abuse in North Wales. By then, the police trawling operation which had begun there had spread to whole of Britain. Police forces collected allegations against 5,000 former care workers and teachers, and hundreds were arrested.

But was Waterhouse right to find there had been wholesale abuse in North Wales? Or did his inquiry, and the investigations that led up to it, form part of a modern witch-hunt?

Here’s a look at the Waterhouse Report from the British False Memory Society website, from March 2000. And here’s Webster pulling apart a BBC documentary aired in 1999.

In the spirit of M.C. Escher, Hungarian Istvan Orosz is a graphic artist who specialises in visual paradox (via Metafilter):

There are loads more artists at the Marlena Agency site: just click on the name, and after a brief portrait of the artist (as a young man, or not, as the case may be) you get a selection of their work.

This interview (via Butterflies and Wheels) with documentary filmmaker Nahid Persson about her film “Prostitution Behind the Veil” provides an insight into a side of modern Iran you don’t normally hear about:

“When I left Iran years ago, it was a country in chaos. When I returned after 17 years of exile in Sweden, I was shocked by the state of affairs. That people have a hard time is well known, but it was very depressing and upsetting to see how bad it really was. The most obvious problems I saw were widespread prostitution and a huge drug problem. Most people in the western world have no idea what it is like. Despite severe punishments, drugs are almost everywhere. When the Islamic government took power, alcohol was banned, but drugs took its place.

“The authorities have lost control of the situation. Maybe they act this way knowingly. Drug addicts are passive. They do not protest social injustice.

“Prostitution Behind the Veil” won first prize at Marseille Festival International du Documentaire. It showed last night, repeat on Wednesday, on CBC.

“It is my hope that this film will make the world respond to the situation in Iran. Human rights are nonexistent there. People don’t matter in Iran. They have no hope left.

“More than half the population are children and young people who have never known what freedom or a normal life is like.

“My film should not just show how Iran changed after the revolution. The film will be shown in a number of countries and I hope the world will respond, not just watch.

Here’s a sophisticated analysis: an assistant professor at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, argues that the real anti-semites are the Israelis (via Solomonia):

Mr. Massad in his writings and teaching has articulated the view that Zionists have adopted the identity of the anti-Semite and Palestinians have taken on a Jewish identity. In one of his latest essays, in the Winter 2005 issue of the scholarly journal Cultural Critique, Mr. Massad argues that Palestinian resistance is a struggle against anti-Semitism and that Israel as a Jewish state represents the most vicious form of anti-Semitism.

“The irony of an anti-Semitic Zionism depicting the Palestinians as the real anti-Semites is not a simply rhetorical move, but instead is crucial to Zionism’s fashioning of Jewish public opinion, both in Israel and on a global scale,” Mr. Massad writes in the essay, “The Persistence of the Palestinian Question.”.

Or rather: an anti-Zionist academic depicting the Israelis as the real anti-Semites is not in any way ironic, but is simply a crude rhetorical move, reflecting a cheapening of discourse in certain fashionable sections of Western public opinion.

In the essay, Mr. Massad also compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. After Israel’s founding, he writes, Zionism “transformed those who remained inside Israel into foreigners in their own land and, from 1948 until 1966, subjected them to life under a military, racialist system of rule that was reminiscent of the life of European Jews under the worst types of anti-Semitic rule.” The Nazis, he argues, serve as “pedagogical model” for the Israeli army.

I suppose it’s a familiar theme: Israelis as the new Nazis. It’s such an easy thing to say – and so ironic.

h links, including contact details for Iranian embassies throughout the world. The London embassy is listed under England – e-mail: info@iran_embassy.org.uk

Livingstone responds to demands that he apologise:

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, today issued the following statement following Associated Newspapers failure to deny stories appearing in the newspapers this morning:

‘Associated Newspapers is attempting to avoid answering the very serious allegations made in newspapers this morning regarding a party in Nazi dress held by its most senior management. A continued failure to make any statement on such a serious matter could only be taken as an admission that the allegations are true. If so this issue is directly relevant to the demand that I apologise for remarks made to an Evening Standard reporter after a party.

‘According to the statements in the newspapers this morning: “when David [English] retired as editor of the Daily Mail in order to take over as chairman of Associated Newspapers, he gave a party wherein he and all his editorial staff dressed up like Hitler and various members of the Third Reich. A memorable appearance of the newspaper’s drama critic Jack Tinker as Goebbels brought the house down.” This is contained in the book An Unlikely Hero, a history of the Daily Mail, on p171, whose author was assisted in its preparation by the most senior members of the Associated Newspaper group.

‘This has been repeated in public, including by Private Eye, the Daily Express, and the Guardian, with no rebuttal action being issued by Associated Newspapers.

This was ages ago. David English retired as editor of the Daily Mail in 1992. He died in 1998. This is schoolboy stuff from Ken. The Mayor of London, for God’s sake.

More on the arms-to-China row, as Bush arrives in Europe:

A row over European arms sales to China threatens to overshadow George Bush’s “peacemaking” trip to Europe this week – with Tony Blair caught in the middle.

The United States president arrived in Brussels last night for a five-day visit that has been billed by both European and US diplomats as a chance for the two sides to put the bitter dispute over Iraq behind them.

The president today will offer limited concessions over global warming and tonight he will dine with Jacques Chirac, the French president.

Meanwhile, the EU will announce an office in Baghdad to train Iraqi judges.

Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former US ambassador, predicted amicable talks over Iran even though the US has expressed impatience with EU diplomatic efforts to talk Tehran out of developing nuclear weapons. “The Americans are prepared to give diplomacy a chance,” he said.

The issue of military sales to China will be much harder to fudge. The EU, pushed by France, is set to lift an embargo imposed in 1989. US officials including Karl Rove, Mr Bush’s chief of staff, see the EU move as a fundamental challenge to US interests. Mr Bush has promised to defend democratic Taiwan from China.

China claims Taiwan is a renegade province, and Beijing yesterday condemned US support for Taiwan. America’s stance on Taiwan “concerns China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity and national security, and the Chinese government and people firmly oppose it,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

Richard Fisher, a prominent Washington analyst and commentator on Chinese affairs, said the EU move was a serious provocation to the president’s pro-democracy agenda.

“As both Japan and the US begin to seriously prepare for a real war on the Taiwan Strait, it is simply sickening that European leaders are proposing to take any steps that would help to enable a dictatorship to kill democracy,” said Mr Fisher.

d from the music, such numbers as “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Idiot Wind” are prose. They are driven by their narratives, and their imagery is determined by its function.

That seems right to me. After The Basement Tapes, the easy unconscious genius of early Dylan had gone. I’m just not so sure it came back with Time out of Mind.

ill working.

‘The hardest thing was going into a witness box and defending myself. But how do I defend myself when I don’t know why my babies died. What do I say?’

The Cannings’ case has been turned into a BBC drama, starring Timothy Spall and Sarah Lancashire, to be screened on Tuesday 22 February on BBC1 at 9pm. Which is all well and good, but, while we may have learned our lesson here, elsewhere, when medical science is unable to supply the answers for infant death, courts are still deferring to Professor Sir Roy Meadow’s dubious authority, and convicting parents of murder.

s to a considerable extent due to his photogenic good looks, and that his pre-eminence has tended to overshadow other in many ways more powerful artists. So, purely as a public service, and without a hint of self-indulgence, I present my top fifteen (it was going to be ten) reggae albums by vocal groups from the mid to late seventies: the golden age of reggae.

“Marcus Garvey” – Burning Spear
“Two Sevens Clash” – Culture
“The Heart of the Congos” – The Congos
“Conquering Lion” – Vivian Jackson (Yabby U) and the Prophets
“Message from the Meditations” – The Meditations
“Slave Call” – The Ethiopians
“Rasta Pon Top” – The Twinkle Brothers
“The Wailing Souls” – The Wailing Souls
“The Same Song” – Israel Vibration
“Rastafari” – Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus
“Right Time” – The Mighty Diamonds
“Madness” – Mighty Maytones
“Pick Up The Pieces” – The Royals
“Jezebel” – Justin Hinds and the Dominoes
“Party Time” – The Heptones

No reggae library would be complete, etc. etc..

I checked at allmusic, maybe the best web source for (non-classical) music information (if you can get their home page to appear). The Royals album is only shown as a recent release: I don’t believe it ever came out in the UK (I have a Jamaican “pre-release”). Ditto for the Wailing Souls (it seems that their eponymous debut on Studio One – the one I list here – is earlier than I’d thought). The Mighty Maytones are missing altogether: they list the Maytones – clearly the same group – but with nothing released before 1995. Nearly all of this stuff is still available, though not necessarily under the same title.

These are all vocal groups in the same “roots” area as the Wailers, and so could be regarded as rivals. In my opinion they’re all at least as good as the Wailers. I haven’t even mentioned the toasters/DJs, the direct precursors of New York’s early eighties rappers and hip-hoppers, or the dub cuts and other innovations by stoned genius producers like Lee Perry. Phew, what a period. For a while inspired music was just pouring out of Jamaica. Well….no mystery about what they were smoking.