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‘Future of Cyprus’ to be discussed at a webinar in the UK
‘Future of Cyprus’ to be discussed at a webinar in the UK
‘The Future of Cyprus’ will be discussed at a webinar in the UK. The Council of Turkish Cypriot Associations in UK (CTCA) and British Turkish Cypriot Association (BTCA) will be organising a webinar in coordination with the London School of Economics Turkish Think Tank Circle Foundation and hosted by the former United Kingdom (UK) Government Minister Brooks Newmark on Wednesday 24 February…
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Lets see a real change
Lets see a real change - we need the Charity Commission to learn from the FA
It seems hard to consider medium term planning at a national level when there is still no clarity on the Brexit arrangements, even though Article 50 is due to be enacted in the next 6 weeks and with the constant change emanating from the Whitehouse as Donald Trump and his team try to understand the world into which they have been elected. However life must go on. Over the next year there will be…
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UK Parliament member displays brutal honesty after switching parties
UK Parliament member displays brutal honesty after switching parties
http://twitter.com/#!/TraceyAReid/status/515866316088291328 Mark Reckless is a member of the UK Parliament who switched from the Conservative Party to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) earlier today. In response to a tweeter’s flashback to earlier this month when Reckless told him he would not switch parties, there was this display of honesty: @TraceyAReid I am sorry to have misled you before but…
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UK Parliament member displays brutal honesty after switching parties
UK Parliament member displays brutal honesty after switching parties
. @BBCBreaking interesting u-turn from conversation I had with him on 05 September. pic.twitter.com/ymwpblRaoW
— Tracey Reid (@TraceyAReid) September 27, 2014
Mark Reckless is a member of the UK Parliament who switched from the Conservative Party to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) earlier today.
In response to a tweeter’s flashback to earlier this month when Reckless told him he would not…
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A new article has been published on www.brianbrown.net
New Post has been published on http://www.brianbrown.net/2014/10/12/tory-mp-newmark-is-battling-demons/
Tory MP Newmark is 'battling demons'
12 October 2014 Last updated at 09:32
Tory MP Brooks Newmark has said he is seeking psychiatric help after new claims of him sending explicit photos.
The Braintree MP, who is married with five children, also said he would stand down at the next election as the Sun on Sunday published fresh allegations.
He wrote in the Mail on Sunday he had been “battling demons – and losing to them. I craved adrenaline and risk.”
He resigned as a minister last month after sending risque pictures to a reporter he thought was a young woman.
That story was published in the Sunday Mirror.
In the latest claims, the Sun on Sunday said it had discovered that Mr Newmark had sent “X-rated” pictures of himself to a second person.
The newspaper claimed the 56-year-old sent explicit pictures to a “young mum”.
‘Text-and-tell’
In the Mail on Sunday, the American-born MP said: “In response to what seems to be a new text-and-tell story I am standing down as an MP at the next election.”
He said he was a man “who had everything”, but said his political career was now in “ruins”, writing that he will go into residential psychiatric care for the next few weeks.
“I have traumatised my family and let down my constituents and my colleagues,” he wrote.
“Many will regard me as a failure and it is true.”
He said “stress at work drove me to increasingly erratic behaviour” and that friends warned him he was “cracking up”, but said he had ignored them.
“Late at night, I began a series of flirtations in response to approaches from women on social media. Deep inside, I knew I was playing with fire. Now it has consumed me and my family,” he said.
He said he hoped professional help “will enable me to salvage my life and my family”.
‘PR girl’
Mr Newmark outlined his intention to leave Parliament in a letter to David Cameron, saying stories about his personal life had been placing “an intolerable burden on my family”.
“I again appeal to the media to respect my family’s privacy and to give me a chance to try to heal the hurt I have caused them,” he wrote.
“I have no-one to blame but myself and take full responsibility for my own actions.”
Mr Newmark had entered Parliament in 2005 and was re-elected in 2010 with a majority of more than 16,000.
He resigned as minister for civil society after it emerged he had sent sent pictures to a freelance reporter, who adopted the false identity of “Ms Wittams” and described himself on Twitter as a “twenty-something Tory PR girl”.
“Sophie” then contacted and interacted with a number of Conservative MPs via the social networking site.
Mr Newmark’s resignation as minister came on the eve of last month’s Conservative party conference and just hours after Tory MP Mark Reckless said he was quitting the party to join UKIP.
The Sunday Mirror, which published the original story, has apologised to two women after photographs they posted online were used by the fictional Ms Wittams.
The methods used in the investigation have also been questioned by former judge Sir Alan Moses, the chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), who said the matter was of “urgent public concern”.
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Risky business
It won’t come to it but imagine this scene in court... Judge: “Brooks Newmark, you were the Minister for Civil Society in David Cameron’s government, a multi-millionaire with a wife, five children, a mansion in Essex and a house in Belgravia yet you sent pictures of your naked self to some unfortunate women, one of whom was an undercover male reporter posing as a female. What have you to say?” Newmark: “That I am very sorry for my abhorrent behaviour, M’lord.” Judge: “And for your stupidity?” Newmark: “Yes, M’lord but you see, my problem is that I’m addicted to taking risks.” As Mandy Rice-Davies observed at the Profumo trial, “...he would say that, wouldn’t he?” But grubby though Newmark’s actions were, there’s a pinch of truth in his mitigation. In my limited experience, taking risks can become acutely habit-forming. However, distinction must be drawn between sexual risks run by men with, or close to, power and those seemingly unable to stop confronting danger - but for far more honourable motives. Brooks Newmark, who now intends checking in to a psychiatric clinic and out of Westminster, is just the latest politician to let his brain relocate to his boxers. Think of David Mellor and his extra-marital affair with a kiss-and-tell actress, Cecil Parkinson and his love child and that most unlikely Lothario, John (now Lord) Prescott and a secretary. Henry Kissinger said power is a great aphrodisiac. Maybe this causes the judgement of those with it to get so clouded they believe nothing is forbidden them and embark on “moments of madness”, ignoring the possibility of getting caught. I have known addiction to risk. I remember the buzz of driving across land-mined desert tracks in Namibia with a SWAPO activist for a Channel 4 film about torture, of meeting terrorists in dark country lanes in Northern Ireland for Panorama and sitting in a helicopter gun ship flying in to destroy a cocaine lab in the jungles of Colombia during another investigation for the same programme. Below us were the heavily armed forces of communist guerillas and the narco-terrorists whose day we were about to spoil. More than twenty years later, I still confess to an exquisite sense of fear, knowing that we - veteran BBC reporter, Tom Mangold, and the then Home Secretary, Ken Clarke, whose mission we were filming - could be shot out of the sky at any moment. We weren’t but afterwards, I wanted only to strap myself in by the gunner again, spin high into the Andes and for him to open up on some cartel’s barrels of chemicals and see them explode in a vivid crimson cloud of smoke and flame. But all my Boy’s Own stuff is as nothing when set by the bomb-blast of a memoir I’ve just finished. It’s by Angus Shaw, an ex-Rhodesian soldier turned war correspondent. Shaw obviously relates the sweating, stinking anticipation of ambush, of atrocities, of eviscerated remains moving with maggots and men going insane at the waste and wickedness of it all. More tellingly, he covers his own moral, physical and spiritual decline during the course of reporting seven African wars from the front line, ending in the genocide in Rwanda. God alone knows what he sees when he closes his eyes. Was he addicted to risk? It’s possible, maybe probable. He doesn’t say. But the reader is left in no doubt about the personal price he and other journalists paid for not being risk-averse. A mutual friend, Patrick Prentice, the former foreign desk editor of the Times and Daily Telegraph, says Shaw now drinks in a Harare bar with some of Mugabe’s men who would once have killed him. With so little to believe in - and so few to trust - in this corrupt and cynical world, how interesting that old enemies can look back without anger. “Mutoko Madness” is published by Boundary Books, P.O. Box 785, Harare, Zimbabwe and is a must-read for any hack who’s ever felt they were pushing their luck on a story.
Tory Whips issue new guidelines on texting photos to the press