Plaid Cymru MEP Jill Evans was today due to address a rally in Cardiff and call for a ceasefire in the Middle East.
She visited Lebanon in March invitation of CYTÛN, the Welsh churches group, and has been horrified by recent events.
“There must be an immediate ceasefire – the killing must stop,” she said. “We must stand up for the innocent victims of war.
“When I visited Lebanon in March I saw a country which had succeeded in rebuilding itself. I found that the old images of devastation belonged to history. But now, the clock has been turned back to such an extent that the country has been virtually destroyed.
“In addition to what is happening in Lebanon, deaths in Gaza continue nearly unnoticed with at least 100 Palestinians killed in the last month.”
::Source, Plaid Cymru press release
PC Blog and the weather
Been slow going here on the blog. When you are doing things, you don’t always have time to write about them.
That’s why I have so much admiration for Britain’s first blogging chief constable, Richard Brunstrom, of North Wales Police.
Richard not only holds down what must be a very busy job, he is writing a blog AND working on his weekends.
On Saturday, for instance, which “should have been my day off, but my wife’s away, so I can sneak off to have some fun”, he did indeed sneak off to have some fun.
Where did he go? The beach, perhaps? The pub? The North Wales branch of the Sons of the Desert/Laurel and Hardy fan club?
No, he went out with the force’s Automatic Number Plate Recognition team.
“We did a twelve hour stint on the A497 in the outskirts of Pwllheli, in baking sunshine…The camera read 5891 number-plates, from which we had 321 ‘hits’, resulting in us stopping 109 cars.
“During the course of the day the team arrested 22 people, mostly for possession of relatively small amounts of cannabis.”
That’s dedication, isn’t it?
But I have a concern about blogging coppers on stakeouts, computer on lap. Doesn’t all that jam and sugar from the doughnuts make the keyboard all sticky?
Our obsession with the weather has soared to breaking point this week.
TV journalists have been sent out all over with little digital thermometers and national newspapers have devoted front pages to how to apply suncream.
Weather in Beirut today, I see, is 31C. And miserable.
Salud, Alun (update)
The Western Mail ran my tribute to Alun this week. It is here .
Salud, Alun
Alun Menai-Williams, one of the last remaining British veterans of the Spanish Civil War, died yesterday.
He was 93.
Alun lived a remarkable life. As a medic in Spain, as an RAF policeman in World War 2, as a loving family man who rarely talked about his experiences.
And then after his wife died in 1998 he wrote a wonderful book of his early life in the Rhondda and his travels to Spain. It made him new friends around the world.
He had close friends here in Wales, like Alan Warren and Mary Greening, friends in Spain, like Anna Marti, and received emails and letters from around the world.
I met him once or twice a week for a cup of tea and a biscuit during the last year of his life.
We chatted about all sorts, every topic under the sun. Even this blog.
Sat in his favourite chair, Alun would say to me: “Thank you for talking to me, Greg.”
No, Alun. Thank you for talking to me.
Greg Lewis 