Word: britishisms
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...British prisons ban inmates from accessing the Internet except for educational purposes, and then only under staff supervision. But prisoners are still finding ways to update their Facebook pages from behind bars, sometimes using smart phones they've smuggled into jail. More than 3,800 illicit cell phones were seized in British prisons in 2008, prompting authorities to start using mobile-phone signal blockers and body-orifice security scanners in some jails. Nevertheless, officials admit there's not much they can do to stop prisoners from having friends or family update their Facebook pages for them...
...video art to LED installations. There are occasional poetry readings and talks by artists too. "People are often intimidated by art in old-fashioned galleries," says owner Tushar Jiwarajka. "We wanted a friendly space with nontraditional art." Showing from Feb. 27 to March 25 is work from the young British-Indian video and performance artist Kiran Kaur Brar. "Gallery culture will take a while to catch on, but we are in this for the long run," says Jiwarajka. Let's hope another market crash doesn't curtail their plans...
...tribes that comprise an ethnic group known as the Great Andamanese people. Like some other indigenous groups on this archipelago 745 miles (1,200 km) east of the Indian mainland, the Great Andamanese evolved in isolation for millenniums until the 1850s, when the colonial British began to settle the Andamans. Since then, the population has plummeted, from at least 5,000 to just 52 people now lumped together in a sprawl of cottages on one island. For most of those left, especially children, specific tribal tongues have given way to a pidgin Andamani dialect of Hindi...
...life of the Great Andamanese (whom the Bo belonged to) was dramatically disrupted once the British set up a penal colony in the archipelago in 1858. Punitive raids as well as the spread of diseases brought in by settlers decimated their ranks. After Indian independence, New Delhi attempted to save the Greater Andamanese by forcibly relocating all the tribes' remaining members to one isle, but that led to the gradual loss of distinct hereditary tribal customs and lore. Today, says Abbi, alcoholism is rife among the men, and there is no infrastructure to teach children the language of their forefathers...
Gosling, an award-winning journalist whose rumpled persona has endeared him to generations of viewers, went on to recount "a hot afternoon" when he smothered the unidentified man in his hospital bed. In some accounts - Gosling retold the story in a number of interviews with British news organizations - a doctor helpfully absented himself so Gosling could do the deed. "Sometimes you have to do brave things and you have to say - to use Nottingham language - bugger the law," the presenter declared in one interview. (See a brief history of assisted suicide...