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And they decided she had suffered enough for charging the costs of pay-per-view pornographic movies watched by her husband-the taxpayer.
Miss Smith told MPs she apologised 'unreservedly' for wrongly claiming for the cost of films watched at her family home.
She has already insisted she did not know they were included in the claim and has repaid £400.
But in a brief statement in the Commons, she defiantly said she had received 'written advice from the Parliamentary authorities' saying her decision to designate the London room as her main home was reasonable.
'On the issue of second-home allowances, the commissioner and the committee recognise that my London home is indeed a home,' she declared.
'They dismiss the most usually repeated newspaper descriptions of my living arrangements and I welcome this judgment.
In evidence to the inquiry, the former Home Secretary, who left the Government in June, said she was 'disappointed' that the investigation into her conduct had not led to 'a fairer set of conclusions'.
Yesterday's report noted that when she became an MP in 1997 she nominated her Redditch property as her main home, but switched it to London when she joined the government in 1999.
In 2007, Miss Smith consulted the Commons authorities, who agreed it was 'reasonable' for her to continue to claim secondhome allowance on her family house.
But checks on her diaries, as well as police protection records, showed that while she spent more nights in London before becoming Home Secretary, once she was promoted to the post in June 2007 she began spending the majority of nights in Redditch.
Miss Smith's evidence, based on her ministerial diary supported by her 'personal recollections', was that she spent 152 nights in London and 151 nights in her constituency in 2007/8.
She spent 143 nights in London and 161 nights in her constituency in 2008/9.
Police records revealed significant discrepancies with Miss Smith's version of events. For 2008/9, the police figures suggested that Miss Smith had spent 37 more nights in Redditch than she had in London.
Universal Drops Paul Greengrass' 'Memphis'; Did MLK Estate Pressure Influence Decision?
EXCLUSIVE: Universal Pictures has dropped plans to finance and distribute Memphis, the Paul Greengrass-directed film about the final days and assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The studio has halted progress on a film scripted by Greengrass and produced by Scott Rudin. Universal picked it up last month, with plan...
I’ve heard another factor put pressure on the picture: the MLK estate was highly critical of the project, and exerted pressure on the studio to call it off. I’ve heard that Andrew Young, former confidante of the civil rights leader, reached out to Universal personally to register his objections. Now, I’d heard similar ...
Blacks and English-speaking Hispanics are rapidly closing the gap, even among lower-income poeple. new studies report. Should we now speak of a broadband divide?
A funny thing happened on the way to the digital divide. Computers got cheap, schools got technology, and the Internet became a pervasive force. The result, according to the New York Times, is that the so-called digitla divide has largely closed for African- and Hispanic-Americans.
According to a Pew national survey of people 18 and older, completed in February, 74 percent of whites go online, 61 percent of African-Americans do and 80 percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans report using the Internet. The survey did not look at non-English-speaking Hispanics, who some experts believe are no...
In a similar Pew survey in 1998, just 42 percent of white American adults said they used the Internet while only 23 percent of African-American adults did so. Forty percent of English-speaking Hispanic-Americans said they used the Internet.
But many say that "digital divide" is an awfully broad brush with which to understand the disparities. How people use the Internet, with what equipment and what speed are also critical divides.
[S]ome groups like the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, which introduces digital technologies to young people, say the digital divide is still vast in more subtle ways. Instant messaging and downloading music is one thing, said Marlon Orozco, program manager at the network's Boston clubhouse, but he would like to see ...
Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which has studied Internet use by race, ethnicity and age, cautioned that a new dimension of the digital divide might be opening because groups that were newer to the Internet tended to use less-advanced hardware and had slower connection speeds.
"The type and meaningful quality of access is, in some ways, a more challenging divide that remains," Ms. Rideout said. "This has an impact on things like homework."
In addition, Internet access solely at institutions can put students at a disadvantage. Schools and other institutions seldom operate round the clock, seven days a week, which is especially an issue for students, said Andy Carvin, coordinator for the Digital Divide Network, an international group that seeks to close th...
And with more minorities online, new opportunities appear to reach out to them. The article focuses on nonprofit outreach but obviously the commercial marketing possibilities are not far behind.
With so many more members of minorities online, some Web sites are trying to capitalize on their new access. For example, the New York/New Jersey region of the State of the African American Male, a national initiative to improve conditions for black men, is encouraging men to use digital equipment to "empower themselve...
"What we're doing is playing against the popular notion of a digital divide," Mr. Fields said. "I always felt that it was a misnomer."
1976 tourism promotion film shows a diverse city, without the diverse people.
But while it’s cool to see the skyline, landmarks, and activities as they were back in the day, something is amiss. The subjects are overwhelmingly white. Non-white people appear as a backdrop, a source of entertainment for everyone else — and in Chinatown. Why are there so few non-white subjects in the film? Why aren’...
The Blue Ridge BBQ Festival in Tryon, N.C. made the unranked list. It takes place June 12 and 13 in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and features food, music, games and more.
“We have music on two stages all for the $8 price of admission,” said publicist Brenda Bradshaw.
Although Paul McCartney became, in 1964, the last Beatle to move away from his home town, lately he doesn’t seem to be able to keep away from the place. Last month he played an impromptu gig at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms pub on Hope Street, where he entertained disbelieving drinkers with Fab Four and Wings classics....
This isn’t – quite – the building that triggered the start of Beatlemania, and thus effectively the birthplace of the most famous rock’n’roll quartet in history. The original Cavern was flattened to make a car park before being rebuilt in the 1980s. But nobody here is splitting hairs. Beatle Paul is back on Mathew Stre...
“Liverpool! Cavern! Two words that go together,” he begins, although some things have changed. He’s halfway through Eddie Cochran’s Twenty Flight Rock (the song with which he auditioned for John Lennon in 1957) when he stops it to admonish people filming on mobile phones. “It’s purrin’ me off,” he says, sounding more C...
Beatles songs come along like buses – an All My Loving here or Lady Madonna there. Things We Said Today is beautifully, magically reflective. Get Back sees him being told, “Get back to where you once belonged” by 10 rows of vocal scousers. Love Me Do and I Saw Her Standing There offer an authentic Cavern-in-the-60s exp...
The UK leg of Paul McCartney’s Freshen Up tour starts at Liverpool Echo Arena on 12 December.
Twinkle, the female porcupine who escaped from an animal sanctuary near Penrith, has been found safe and well.
The three-year-old was spotted at a nearby equestrian centre where staff managed to lure her into a stable.
The three-year-old female, who is as big as a sheep dog, dug her way out of her pen at Eden Ostrich World yesterday. She has been on the loose ever since.
Those who live in Langwathby, near Penrith, had been warned not to go near her.
If she feelt threatened, Twinkle could have attacked - and a prang with one of her hundreds of detachable quills could have unpleasant consequences.
Porcupines are nocturnal and are most likely to emerge in early morning or late evening when scavenging for food.
Poland is putting pressure on the European Commission (EC) to rule whether a new Russian gas pipeline conforms with EU law.
Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo told press after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday (21 October) that “more and more countries are highlighting the role of the commission in Nord Stream [the pipeline]”.
“We expect the commission to fulfil its duties, to defend the directives that we passed, to check whether all the norms, conditions for such an investment are being respected. Our strong voice was supported by the the Visegrad Group [a club containing Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia], Baltic, and Balk...
Konrad Szymanski, Poland’s EU affairs minister, said that Nordic states are also “in favour of a clear stance of the commission on the legal situation of Nord Stream”.
He said EU institutions and member states should take “shared responsibility” for deciding on the pipeline.
Poland has so far taken the lead in trying to block Nord Stream II.
The Russian pipeline is to ship huge volumes of gas to Germany from 2019, bypassing Poland and Ukraine, and making Germany more secure and central Europe less secure in energy supply terms.
The Polish anti-trust regulator recently raised a red flag on Nord Stream II, spooking some of the Western investors involved.
If the commission were to rule that its offshore parts must fully comply with EU energy laws, reducing Russia’s control over the infrastructure, the project could be put in doubt.
Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said in June that EU lawyers were in talks with German regulators to find the right “legal framework” for the scheme, but he has not yet said what that might be.
Denmark, Finland, and Sweden also have to give permits for Nord Stream II to use their maritime zones.
The chief of the Swedish armed forces, last week, said Sweden should say No because the Russian military would reserve the right to access the structures.
The pipeline talks come during a nadir in EU-Russia relations due to its bombing of civilians in Syria and its invasion of Ukraine.
Russia still has friends in the European Council, however.
Italy on Thursday blocked a proposal by France, Germany, Poland, and the UK to threaten to blacklist Russian officials over the Syria air strikes.
German chancellor Angela Merkel, despite her tough stance on Syria and Ukraine, has declined to speak out on Nord Stream II, while the second power in Germany, the centre-left SPD party, is strongly in favour of it.
Szydlo said on Friday it was “wrong” of Italy to have blocked the Syria sanctions threat.
Szymanski said the same in an opinion article in the Financial Times newspaper, adding that Nord Stream II would make a mockery of the EU existing Russia sanctions, imposed over Ukraine.
It would mean “the EU in effect gives succour to a regime whose aggression it seeks to punish through sanctions” he said.
Symanski told press on Friday that Poland had also highlighted Russia’s anti-EU propaganda campaign and its influence operations in Europe as points of concern during the summit.
He added that EU states “still need to find a common denominator, because countries far from the Russian border don't see it as a problem”.
The European Commission has indicated that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline could face similar legal hurdles to South Stream, a defunct Russian project.
Deputy US envoy said Nord Stream was one of Russia's tools to “create division” in Europe, amid calls for the Commission to intervene.
I hesitate to write this post, but not talking about it is not helping either. Deeper learning has a race problem.
If you travel in deeper learning circles--go to conferences, teach classes, visit schools--you will notice that many of the faces, among both the teachers and the learners, are white. Sometimes this is directly acknowledged, and sometimes it is only implicit, but the reality is the reality--deeper learning in the U.S. ...
In one sense, this is a story of exclusion. Deeper learning has historically been the province of the advantaged--those who could afford to send their children to the best private schools and to live in the most desirable school districts. Research on both inequality across schools and tracking within schools has sugge...
This part of the story is well-accepted among deeper learning advocates. The founding of schools like the High Tech High and Envision networks of schools, along with many others, are explicitly intended to try to break these historical patterns and bring what had been the province of the elite to all students, particul...
"Deeper learning is for the privileged." There are several variants of this point. One argument is that the kind of open-ended exploration and play that is prized in inquiry-oriented instruction is fine for students who come with a significant background in "basic" or "core" knowledge and skills, but to pursue that app...
"Certainty, hierarchy, and deeper learning." Deeper learning, at least the progressive variant that is popular in the contemporary U.S., entails a kind of appreciation of uncertainty and ambiguity, which, to its proponents, is one of the cardinal virtues of this approach. Deeper learning also assumes strongly that stud...
"Maslow's hierarchy of needs." At least within the advocacy community, many civil rights organizations are focused on what they see as the most basic problems--assuring that the most deprived students can read and do basic math, creating the out-of-school conditions that are needed for any kind of learning, and protect...
"We are not Finland." I was at a meeting last week in which the agenda of deeper learning and teacher professionalization came head to head with the concerns of civil rights advocates. Deeper learning advocates tend to make arguments associated with professionalization: If learning is to be complex, teachers need to be...
"We are prisoners of our own educational experiences." Dan Lortie famously pointed out that teachers' teach the way they were taught; twelve years of apprencticeship of observation far outweighs a short period in teacher prep. The same goes for parents, legislators, and everyone else. So, if deeper learning experiences...
We need to think hard about how to integrate core content and open-ended inquiry. Those who are skeptical of deeper learning are not wrong to think that there is certain basic knowledge and skill which serves as a foundation for much of what is to follow. But, at the same time, deeper learning proponents are right in t...
Civil rights advocates and teacher professionalization proponents need to have a hard talk about deeper learning. It's on deeper learning proponents to argue the civil rights case for deeper learning--that joining the culture of power means doing one's own experiments and not just reading about experiments that others ...
Deeper learning proponents need to respect the pluralism of different approaches to learning deeply. In the United States at this moment, deeper learning in K-12 schools tends to be associated with progressive schooling--deeper learning schools are said to be project-based, use portfolios to judge work, and so forth. B...
Finally, the only way to increase the stock of people clamoring for deeper learning is to have people actually experience what it is like to learn deeply. Thus for those who believe in deeper learning, they need to think not only about students, but also parents, legislators, and others who influence the schooling proc...
South Korea on Tuesday decided to offer about 200,000 doses of Tamiflu antiviral medication to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in humanitarian aid.
According to Seoul’s unification ministry, the Inter-Korean Exchange and Cooperation Council made the decision, setting aside 3.56 billion won (3.2 million dollars) for transport cost and purchasing the medication that treats influenza.
The council, composed of government officials and civilian experts, is tasked with reviewing and deciding on policies relevant to inter-Korean exchange and cooperation.
In addition to the drugs, about 50,000 early medical detection kits, which were donated by a private entity, would be delivered to the DPRK.
An unnamed unification ministry official was quoted by local media as saying that 10 government officials would visit the DPRK’s border town of Kaesong as early as this week by a land route to deliver the medication.
It was part of efforts to implement the Pyongyang Declaration, signed by South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un after their third summit in Pyongyang in September.
The two Koreas held working-level talks in November and December to discuss health and medical cooperation.
It would mark the first time since Moon took office in May 2017 that Seoul sends such medication to Pyongyang.
In 2009, South Korea offered about 400,000 doses of Tamiflu and 100,000 doses of Relenza antiviral medication to the DPRK.
Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, Mike Mussina and Tom Glavine all made Rosenthal's ballot in their first year of HOF eligibility.
I’ve always been flexible with my Hall of Fame ballot, adjusting as warranted. This year, I’m making two significant changes, the first because one of my old methods was ill-conceived, the second because certain exclusions were necessary due to the much-discussed crowded ballot.
Some fans criticize voters who change their minds, pointing out that, “a Hall of Famer is a Hall of Famer,” and that a player’s candidacy does not vary over time. That is true. But circumstances change. Perspectives change. And I’d rather be open-minded than rigid, particularly when staying open-minded occasionally lea...
I didn’t vote for Bert Blyleven and then I did, influenced by compelling arguments from sabermetricians who made his case. I didn’t vote for Jim Rice and then I did, eventually concluding – though not without some reservation – that his offensive dominance was enough to overcome his defensive and baserunning flaws.
This year, for the first time, I am voting for the maximum 10 players – Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio and Tom Glavine; Greg Maddux, Edgar Martinez and Mike Mussina; Mike Piazza, Tim Raines, Curt Schilling and Frank Thomas.
Allow me to explain . . .
In recent years, I have not voted for any first-timers, using my ballot as a form of protest, a way to distinguish players from the Steroid Era (however undefined it might be) from the greats of the past.
My method was unfair to certain, untainted candidates, but I reasoned that they, too, were part of a players’ union that had resisted testing for performance-enhancing drugs. The players had a choice, and for the longest time, they collectively chose to do nothing.
Some readers expressed frustration that I did not vote for a player such as Biggio on the first ballot, but I thought my protest had sensible limits. I would vote for a Biggio the second time he was eligible and from that point forward. And I cannot remember a single case where I feared a worthy candidate might drop of...
The flaw in my approach – well, one flaw – was that I could not reasonably apply it to a slam-dunk candidate such as Maddux without looking completely foolish and stubborn. I knew all along that I eventually would need to face that reality. So now I’m facing it.
If Maddux is not unanimous, it won’t be because of me.
The greater problem these days, as I’ve detailed in past columns, is that every vote (or non-vote) is a trap door, producing no right answers, prompting legitimate differences of opinion.

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