Briefsfromshittu

Saturday, August 6, 2016

MPs To Move Out Of Houses Of Parliament

MPs will move out of the Houses of Parliament for the first time since the Blitz, while the building has a £4bn facelift, it is claimed.

Politicians are set to be relocated for six years while urgent renovation work is carried out at the 19th century Palace of Westminster, according to a leaked report.

Papers seen by The Times reveal a committee looking at options for the work has ruled out doing it while the MPs are still working there - which would take five times as long.

Instead, they will relocate to the Department of Health where staff have already been told to vacate their offices. The building could even contain a makeshift chamber, the newspaper reports.

:: Bill For Crumbling Parliament Could Hit £7.1bn

But MPs may be dismayed to learn that Richmond House, where health officials are based, is leased in an Islamic bond scheme which forbids the sale of alcohol under Sharia law.

House Of Commons Speaker Warns Of Extensive Renovations Needed At Houses Of Parliament

The Houses of Parliament needs extensive repairs

It is reported that MPs - who have an array of subsidised watering holes to choose from in Parliament - considered nationalising the Red Lion pub, a stone's throw from Parliament, but the owner Fuller's Inns opposed the move.

The bond scheme was agreed two years ago by the Treasury, during a drive by George Osborne to make Britain "the Western hub of Islamic finance" and attract investment from the Gulf.

Parliament's renovation has been a running sore for years, with the crumbling buildings suffering from leaky roofs, corrosion of pipes and guttering which has damaged the stonework, antiquated systems for water, drainage and electricity and periodic infestations of mice.

The former clerk of the Commons Lord Lisvane once called the palace a "cathedral of horrors", and a report last summer warned that a fire could spread rapidly through the building's corridors.

A cross-party committee on restoration and renewal was asked to assess three options. The first, a full move-out while radical works are carried out at a cost of £3.9bn, or more limited works for £3.5bn.

The second choice is a partial move-out, which would take 11 years and cost £4.4bn. The third option would allow the MPs to stay put - which would cost £5.7bn and the work would last 32 years.

Both Houses would have to vote on the option the committee chooses after the summer break, and if they back a full move-out, it is expected to happen in four years' time.

MPs have not worked outside the House of Commons since it was bombed by the Nazi Luftwaffe in 1941, forcing them to move to Church House near Westminster Abbey.

David Cameron and the former Leader of the Commons Chris Grayling were said to back the MPs staying put despite the higher costs, but new Prime Minister Theresa May's views are not known.

While MPs relocate to the Department of Health - the committee is said to have rejected suggestions to move them out of London - peers would move to the nearby QEII conference centre.

A restoration and renewal committee spokesman said the process had "not been been finalised", and could not say what would happen if the renovation plans were rejected in Parliament.

Railing Collapses At Snoop Dogg Gig: 10 Hurt

At least 10 people have been injured when a railing collapsed during a Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa concert in New Jersey.

The railing was separating concertgoers from the stage during the event at the BB&T Pavilion in Camden.

Several people fell on to a concrete walkway when the barrier collapsed around 10.30pm local time on Friday.

Between 10 and 15 people were hurt, according to Camden County officials cited by WCAU-TV.

Their condition is not known.

The concert was halted following the collapse

World Wide Web Celebrates 25th Anniversary

It's the place where we can communicate without speaking, where we can meet people we might never have crossed paths with, where we can shop and bank and watch movies.

It's an easily accessible repository of mankind's knowledge. It's almost hard to believe what the World Wide Web has become in just 25 years.

British computer scientist and inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee

It was made publicly available on the 6th August 1991 and was the vision of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who first came up with the idea in 1989 and successfully tested it in 1990.

Using a NeXT Computer, which can currently be seen at the Science Museum, he developed the world's first website and first web browser, as well as the mechanisms that now power the web such as URLs, HTML and HTTP.

The flow of information was so fast and so easy that within a decade the world had been transformed.

One of the key factors in that astonishing growth was the decision by CERN - and Tim Berners-Lee - to make the World Wide Web free for everyone to use and dabble with.

"Initially, what was wonderful about the web was that anyone could take information that they thought everyone in the world would be interested in and put up a website and the information would be out there," says Brad Karp, Professor of Computer Systems and Networks at University College London.

But the problem was, how would people find that information?

"So one of the first solutions was from one of the earliest internet companies - Yahoo - where a Stanford graduate Jerry Yang and his technical collaborator David Filo, started making a human-curated list of websites.

"They just manually put together webpages that said 'if you're interested in music, here are categories of music' and within that category they would list websites about that type of music.

"And so word spread about Yahoo as a sort of directory of the web.

"Then the Digital Equipment Corporation - DEC - created a search engine called Alta Vista. There were others like Hotbot. Today we are very familiar with Google.

"What these search engines did was take all the information on the World Wide Web, pull it in to a big farm of servers and make it possible for people to type just a few words and then just search through this local copy of the entire web.

"They could find all the web pages that had those terms in them and give back to the user that list of relevant pages. And that really changed the way people used the web."

The web and the internet are not the same thing. The latter is the infrastructure that supports the web. It is the network of cables, computers, and servers. The network of networks.

The internet is widely accepted to have been invented in 1969 when a message was sent from an IBM System 360 computer at UCLA to a machine based at the Stanford Research Institute via the ARPANET, which evolved into the internet we know today.

There are now approximately 1.1bn websites on the internet and 3.4bn internet users in the world.