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Siberian woman discovered living in metal barrel for more than
3 decades with no heating or power given new home by bloggers
22 Oct, 2021 15:25
A group of bloggers have bought a home for a Russian woman who lost her job at a Soviet military factory and took to living in a rusty barrel for 35 years, refusing to move into care despite having no electricity or running water.
Svetlana Chernova, from the Siberian city of Omsk, had been living in the dilapidated cistern for over three decades when her story came to light earlier this week. The electricity was cut off two years ago and there is neither running water nor gas. Instead, Chernova must walk hundreds of meters to collect water from a pump and warm her home with a woodfired stove.
With no relatives and a pension of 14,000 rubles (around $200), she says she was unable to rent an apartment after her job as a crane operator was scrapped when the plant she worked in closed down.
After Russian officials were made aware of Chernova’s living situation, they requested documents that proved she was legally allowed to live in the barrel, including details about the property, so they could provide her with appropriate housing. However, the forms she lodged at the time are said to have been lost and are irretrievable.
Chernova worked at a factory not far from the barrel she has called home for more than three decades, until it was shuttered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There was insufficient housing to accommodate all of the factory’s workers, so some employees were given barrel-like structures to live in temporarily whilst they waited to be designated proper homes. In wintertime, those living in the make-shift accommodation had to sleep in their clothes due to heating problems with the structures. In summer, residents had no respite from the heat.
“They were building a nine-story building nearby, they promised I could have a two-room apartment in it,” she says. “When they were distributing them, I was working on the crane, and another woman, who was seventieth in the queue, jumped in. Later she sold her home and left for Germany. I complained to the director. He shrugged his shoulders and said business was already going badly, and it was not up to him.”
“For some reason, other people received housing. I went to the administration many times, but to no avail,” Chernova continued.
Chernova did previously refuse outright officials’ offers to move her to a comfortable nursing home, saying "they almost forced me to do it. But I think I deserve my own house. I hope they will find an apartment.”
“I wanted to agree. But I looked and realized it won't do. One house is too far from the city. And the second…I just didn't like it. And the owner is there without a wife – maybe he called me for a reason,” she says.
However, media coverage of Chernova’s living conditions sparked outrage among community activists, with volunteers bringing her food, and bloggers raising over two million rubles (around $28,420) to buy her a new home, RIA Novosti reports.
Give our tax back, citizens say as London mayor launches
funding scheme for renaming streets in the name of diversity
22 Oct, 2021 09:35
The mayor of London has unveiled his latest scheme aimed at making the capital more diverse. A £1 million fund will grant community-led organizations up to £25,000 to improve their public places, including changing street names.
In a press release on Thursday, the office of Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, announced the creation of a £1 million Untold Stories fund which aims to “champion diversity and improve representation in the capital’s public spaces.”
The fund will be made available to community-led groups, who can receive up to £25,000, as a grant. The mayor’s office highlights that the money could be used for new ideas such as “murals, street art, street names and other projects to ensure we are told a fuller version of our capital’s story.”
"London’s diversity is its greatest strength but for far too long our capital’s statues, street names and buildings have only shown a limited perspective on our city’s complex history," Khan said in a statement.
"London’s diversity is its greatest strength" - where does that come from, and how is it determined?
When you consider the hundreds of Pakistanis who have raped, drugged, and trafficked thousands of young British girls around the country - how is that considered a strength? When police and councils ignore and enable this grooming to go on, how is that considered a strength? When the vast majority of terrorist events are performed by Muslims, how is that a strength? When these things provoke the formation of far-right groups, how is that a strength?
The announcement followed a City Hall-funded study into the capital’s 1,500 monuments. It found that only 4% of statues were dedicated to named women, and only three of them depicted women of colour. There are also twice as many statues depicting animals as women.
4% of 1,500 is 60! Considering that mostly all government, business people and military heroes were men for over a thousand years, that seems pretty reasonable to me. I have no doubt that women of colour are underrepresented, but I suspect by not very much.
Unsurprisingly, the mayor’s latest woke escapade hasn’t gone down well on social media, where many Britons demanded Khan stop wasting taxpayers’ money. One Twitter user labelled the move as an “unnecessary gesture” and called on Khan to focus on more important issues, such as homelessness and affordable housing.
Others concurred: “How about he spends it on fighting knife crime instead. How anyone votes for him is beyond me,” another social media user wrote. “That’ll stop all the stabbing,” one person chimed in ironically.
Some people even asked for their council tax back, noting that the mayor’s office clearly had spare money to throw away on diversity projects such as this.
Others were more concerned about aspects of the city’s history being continually cancelled. One person argued that the capital’s history was now being “systematically stripped away,” while another asked why the mayor was so intent on cancelling Britain’s heritage and way of life; “if people are offended by such simple things, then they know where the exit is,” they added.
One person pleaded with the mayor to accept the city’s history. “Accept the bad along with the good, it’s what made us, gives us our identity. We might not be perfect but we’re as good as most,” they wrote, adding that even black nations were involved in the capture and trade of slaves.
Some were more cynical, suggesting the mayor’s aim of telling the capital’s “fuller” story would be achieved by renaming Knightsbridge as Knifesbridge, and Elephant and Castle as Bomb and Bus. “Yea why not, Taliban road, jihad way, kaffir Avenue,” another jibed.
While the mayor’s announcement may have received the support of his Labour colleagues at City Hall, his latest diversity drive certainly didn’t have many fans on the Twittersphere.
The UK is currently celebrating Black History Month. Earlier in October, Transport for London (TfL), the government body responsible for the capital’s transport, unveiled a novelty Tube map in which the names of 272 stations were replaced with the names of black people.
“This reimagination of the iconic tube map celebrates the enormous contribution black people have made,” the mayor told the BBC.
One week earlier, a TfL-funded project released a tour guide of south London in which the authors claimed some plants have racist origins and that botanical terms like ‘native’ and ‘invasive’ are offensive.
Time to stock up on dung? Ukrainian MP tells citizens to collect
& store manure for energy as country awaits possible fuel crisis
27 Oct, 2021 10:47
Ukrainian citizens can’t rely on the government in Kiev for energy and should take matters into their own hands by collecting manure and drying it out before the bitterly cold winter comes, a long-serving opposition MP has warned.
The bizarre suggestion comes as the Ukrainian authorities struggle to deal with both gas and coal shortages.
Speaking to the Nash TV channel on Tuesday, Mikhail Volynets suggested the country’s shortage of energy resources could leave citizens fighting for themselves.
Volynets is a veteran MP, having served in four convocations of the country’s parliament since 2002. He is currently a member of the Fatherland party, a conservative pro-European faction headed by Yulia Tymoshenko.
“It’s necessary to warn people in rural areas to collect dung and dry it,” Volynets said. We have to rely only on ourselves and not on the government.’
The MP expressly referred to ‘kiziaks,’ the dried animal-feces discs used by Kazakhs on the steppe. The dung is cut into small squares, then left in the sun for several weeks or months. Once dried out, it acts in a similar way to coal and is, therefore, a way to warm the home.
On Sunday, it was revealed that a lack of coal supplies had caused the shutdown of the Slavyansk thermal power plant, in the country’s Donetsk region. At the same time, several other plants reported that they had less than 10 days of supply left. This announcement came just four days after the Federation of Employers of Ukraine dubbed the current situation as “disastrous,” noting issues with both coal and gas supply.
Last week, Tymoshenko described the energy crisis as the result of “corruption” and the authorities’ incompetence, and demanded that a national state of emergency be called.
However, despite the growing crisis, many parliamentarians remain steadfast in refusing to cooperate with Gazprom, despite the country’s reliance on the Russian energy giant for gas supplies. Last week, independent MP Lyudmila Buymister claimed any agreement would cause Kiev to be “brought to its knees” before Moscow.
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