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Day: 11 October 2012

Manchester Uni Facebook page for ‘hilarious confessions’ launched

Written by Jonathan Breen on . Posted in News.

A Facebook page for students to write about the deepest secrets and most outrageous stories was created last week.

‘University of Manchester Confessions’ was started on Wednesday October 10 and within a day obtained 1,151 likes. It is linked with a similar Manchester Metropolitan page.

The creator of the pages, who preferred to stay anonymous, said, “I got the idea from my friends over at Leeds Met and saw how it had taken off there and thought it would have the same – if not a greater reaction in Manchester.

“Some of the stories we are getting sent are genuinely hilarious and it’s a page that shouldn’t fizzle out, as every week people will have new stories and experiences to share with us.

“The page was only launched yesterday and has taken off dramatically.”

Students are invited to anonymously message “hilarious, embarrassing confessions,” to then be posted.

Among the submissions are tales of sexual debacles, alcohol-infused blunders and halls of residence pranks.

One story on the University of Manchester page said, “After telling halls of residence floor mates, if they use my George Foreman grill they HAVE to clean it. One decided he had a special privilege to not do so. I went in his room and pissed on his bed in ‘respect’ of his privilege.

“After turning his light on to admire my mess, his apple mac was sitting [there]. I tried to rescue it with his tracksuit bottoms that were tossed on the floor, however the contracted illness was terminal!”

The first post on the Manchester Metropolitan Confessions page said, “I got onto a lecture theatre computer today, and edited one of the lecturer’s powerpoints. It now has #YOLO on every single slide in massive letters. Sorry to the lecture this affects.”

There are similar pages for other universities around the country, including for Exeter and Nottingham.

Shisha as dangerous as cigarettes, say NHS

Written by Jonathan Breen on . Posted in News.

Manchester City Council and the NHS launched a campaign publicising the dangers of shisha last week.

The drive aims to make people aware of the health risks associated with smoking shisha and that, as with cigarettes, it is illegal to smoke shisha in an enclosed space.

“First and foremost we want to make people aware that smoking shisha is as dangerous as smoking cigarettes and is harmful to people’s health,” Councillor Glynn Evans, Manchester City Council’s executive member for Adults’ Health and Wellbeing said.

The campaign, which kicked off on Monday 8 October, runs for eight weeks and is focused around Rusholme, because of the concentration of shisha bars in the area.

As a part of the effort, council enforcement officers will be handing out a £50 fine to anyone caught smoking shisha in an area that does not have three sides open to the outside.

In shisha bars, flavoured tobacco is smoked through pipes, a Middle Eastern tradition.

There are a number of common myths associated with smoking shisha, one being that because the tobacco is flavoured and passes through water before it is inhaled it is not as dangerous as cigarettes. But with shisha there is an added risk because more smoke is inhaled.

“Many people are still unaware that shisha pipes actually contain tobacco as the use of herbs or fruit as flavourings masks the tobacco, so we want to give them the facts,” said Councillor Evans.

Health experts have said shisha smokers are at risk of similar health problems associated with cigarette smoking, such as heart disease and cancer. Users can also become addicted just as with other tobacco products.

David Regan, Director of Public Health, said, “There has been an alarming rise in the number of shisha bars and the number of young people taking up smoking through this route.

“It is important that we educate young people so that it prevents the next generation from joining what seems to be a growing trend.”

In the last three years there has been a large increase in the number of shisha bars on the curry mile, with around 30 opening in the area since 2009.

“They can spring up quite readily because they don’t actually have to have a license apart from to sell food and play music,” a council spokesperson told The Mancunion.

Many shisha bars in Rusholme allow smoking indoors, and over the last year nine establishments in Manchester have been prosecuted for violations of the smoking ban.

“Since December 2011 we’ve had eight different bars prosecuted [in Rusholme] and the total fines for those were nearly £15,000 in total, plus another bar in Chorlton,” said the spokesperson. “All were for allowing smoking inside.”

“You can technically allow smoking outside if you’ve got outside premises but obviously some of them don’t. Shisha bars that have no outside space are automatically flouting the law.

“If someone is found smoking shisha inside, then like smoking a cigarette in a café, they could be fined.”

Rusholme Business Association Chair Mr Shabir Mughal felt it was unfair for shisha bars not to obey law as other businesses in the area do.

“They’re allowing people to smoke inside the premises. If someone comes to my restaurant and wants to smoke they have to go outside,” he said. “It is not fair-trading.”

Teenager has stomach removed after 18th birthday celebrations

Written by Ellen Conlon on . Posted in News.

A teenager has had her stomach removed in an emergency operation after celebrating her 18th birthday a with a liquid-nitrogen laced cocktail at a wine bar.

Gaby Scanlon, from Lancashire, was out with her friends at Oscar’s wine bar on the 4th October, when she became breathless and developed a severe stomach pain.

She was then taken to the Royal Lancaster Infirmary where she was diagnosed with a perforated stomach. She was immediately operated on.

“Medical opinion is that this would have proved fatal had the operation not been carried out urgently,” said the Lancashire police.

Oscar’s wine bar has said that they are “tremendously concerned” about Gaby and their “heartfelt best wishes” go out to her family “at this distressing time.”

Police say that the bar has ceased selling all liquid nitrogen cocktails following the incident and had cooperated with all the agencies

“The investigation is still in its early stages and we are still interviewing witnesses to establish the full facts,” they said.

Gaby is now in a stable but serious condition.

Liquid nitrogen has become common as a method for flash freezing food or drinks and creating a vapour cloud.

Oscar’s wine bar posted a photograph on its Facebook page last month of one of its liquid nitrogen cocktails. It contained champagne and was sold for £8.95.

If swallowed, liquid nitrogen can cause cold burns to the throat, mouth and stomach, killing the tissue.

As the vapour hits the stomach it warms quickly, releasing large volumes of air which burst the stomach.

“New Labour: it’s really a Tory Party”

Written by Eve Fensome on . Posted in Opinion.

“The world is run now by the big multinational business corporations.” Is Tony Benn’s unwavering response when I ask him how much power politicians really hold. “We don’t elect them, we can’t defeat them, they don’t have to listen to us. And our whole democracy has been challenged and to some extent undermined by the way that multinational global finance operates.” Adding determinedly; “that’s something we’ve got to think about.”

I meet Tony Benn after an event run by the Stop the War Coalition (of which Mr Benn is President) at Methodist Central Hall in the Northern Quarter. Earlier he’d delivered an impassioned anti-war polemic with a level of vigour and energy which would be unexpected in most 87 year-olds. His speech is peppered throughout with personal anecdotes, including one recalling his memory of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and his first-hand account of the devastation it left behind.

He’s been a cabinet minister in the governments of both Wilson and Callaghan and is the only surviving Labour member who witnessed Aneurin Bevan’s famous speech of 1951 in which he resigned from the Cabinet over the introduction of means testing for free dentistry and opticians.

Tony Benn was elected as a Member of Parliament in 1950 and had served more than 50 years as an MP when he retired in 2001 for which he holds the title of the longest serving Labour MP.

With this in mind, as ask him what is the biggest change he has seen in the Labour Party during his lifetime?

“Well, I think that the Blairite counter-revolution to set up New Labour – which is not Labour at all; it’s really a Tory Party, I think that was one of the greatest changes.” He continues, musing: “Of course there have been other examples in the past, since Ramsay MacDonald even, but we recover from these things and I think we are recovering from the Blair period.”

I ask if he felt that the Labour Party was currently moving to the left?

“The Labour Party is a coalition,” I’m slightly surprised to hear him say, but he explains: “there are different forces, there’s the left and there’s other people who are not socialist at all. So our first job in the Labour Party is to persuade the party to adopt the policy we want and then if that becomes party policy then to persuade the public that that’s what we need.”

What do you think individuals can do to try to change things?

“There’s the trade union movement and there’s the Labour Party, they’re all socialist and social organisations. Put them all together and they represent a very very powerful body of opinion.

“If you have a Labour government then push that Labour government to do what you want, if you don’t have a Labour government push to get a Labour government that does do what you want. And if you elect a government that understands and takes the correct action, then I think you have to support that government.”

“Having said that, I’m Labour and I have been all my life but I don’t think that joining the Labour Party is the only thing to do. The thing to do is to stand up for the causes you believe in and campaign for them.”

As a campaigner against an unelected Lords and a republican, it’s an irony that Tony Benn’s career was launched by the accident of his aristocracy.

Upon the death of his farther in 1960; the rules of the establishment required him to take a seat in the House of Lords. He was determined to remain in the House of Commons, refusing to take up the peerage, instead asking his constituents to return him to parliament in repeated bi-elections, until the powers that be surrendered in 1963 when they passed The Peerage act, allowing the renunciation of peerages, of which Benn became the first to do so.

I ask him what if we elect governments on the promises that they’ve made in their manifestos, which they then go on to break?

“Well you have to go on and on campaigning.” He pauses then, sounding a little world weary, adds: “I mean it’s a terrible thing to say but there is no short cut. Demonstrations, letters to the papers, letters to MPs and to ministers and campaigns and broadcasts and all the things that people do when they have a cause they believe in. Because to get a really big change takes a lot of time.”

And really it’s this determination and extreme willingness to take up a fight that has made Tony Benn so well known.

Urban Dictionary says of the term Bennite ‘Implies outlandishly left-wing views, thoroughly at odds with any sensible establishment.’ I’m sure he would be amused and feel slightly validated to hear this because he in turn believes the establishment to be very rarely sensible, except when they are corruptly perusing their own interests.

He may be outlandish in one way; requiring of himself and calling others to a path of perseverance, which makes for an uncomfortable prospect in a world driven by emotional gestures and instant gratification. However, as the gestures become ever more fraudulent and feeble, and gratification endlessly postponed by austerity, it might be, that his charming but unbending principles might not seem so outlandish after all.

Manchester unveils first British memorial for ‘A Clockwork Orange’ author

Written by Ellen Conlon on . Posted in News.

‘A Clockwork Orange’ author and former Manchester student has been honoured by the unveiling of a blue plaque outside the Samuel Alexander Building.

Anthony Burgess grew up in Harpurhey and Moss Side, graduated from the University of Manchester in 1940 and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the institute in 1987.

The ceremony on October 10, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and was proceeded by a trumpet fanfare Burgess wrote as a birthday present to his son.

Other than a plaque outside his flat in Monaco, his home for 17 years, no other monument exists to Burgess, who died in 1993.

Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, attended the ceremony and said, “Although Burgess was one of the great English-language writers of the 20th century, he has always been neglected by his country of birth.

“So I am delighted that the university has decided to install the first British public monument to Burgess, 50 years after ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was first published.”

After graduating with an English Literature degree Burgess went on to write 33 novels, 25 works of non-fiction, two volumes of autobiography, three symphonies and more than 250 other musical works.

The ceremony began with a discussion on Burgess chaired by Dr Howard Booth, lecturer in English and American literature, with Dr Biswell and Dr Kaye Mitchell from the English and American Studies department.

“It’s a great opportunity for all of us in the new School to celebrate a former English literature student,” Dr Booth said. “Burgess is a major novelist who deeply loved literature and language – he wrote so well about other writers.

“I’m eager to celebrate a distinguished former literature student for the benefit of the present cohort.

“Who knows, in fifty years’ time there may be a blue plaque for one of our current students.

Professor Jeremy Gregor, head of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures then unveiled the plaque.

Stressed academics face ‘increasingly intolerable pressure’

Written by Anthony Organ on . Posted in News.

Academics face above average stress levels and a “long-hours culture” according to a report published by the University and College Union (UCU).

The report, part of UCU’s Workload Campaign, surveyed over 14,000 academic staff at nearly 100 institutions about stress relating to workload demands and hours of work and found that stress levels were worse than comparable data from 2008.

Sally Hunt, UCU’s general secretary, said: “The result of all this pressure can only drive down standards for students.

“The problem has got worse over the past four years and with funding cuts, increased workloads and rising expectations from students and parents paying much more for their education, the situation is likely to become even worse.

“We call on institutions to hear this collective cry for help and take action to mitigate the increasingly intolerable pressure on stressed-out staff.”

Stress levels were given a value from 1.00 to 5.00, where 1.00 is the highest stress. Academics scored 2.51, considerably lower than the British working population’s average which was 3.65 in 2008.

Academics from Manchester Metropolitan and the University of Salford had above average stress levels and over 30 per cent of respondents from the University of Manchester and MMU regularly work over 50 hours a week.

Martyn Moss, UCU’s regional official in the North West, said: “We can take some comfort that staff at Manchester’s biggest three universities did not report the highest stress levels of those that took part in the UCU survey. But we can’t be pleased with their results as staff at all three Manchester universities reported higher levels of stress than the average for the general British working population.

“We are urging these institutions to consider these results carefully and take steps to protect the health and well-being of university staff in Manchester.”

Stephen Court, a senior research officer at UCU, who compiled the report, said: “There is pressure to win research funding under the new Research Excellence Framework (REF), while lecturers feel they need to raise their game in teaching with the introduction of higher tuition fees. There is also pressure to do well in the National Student Survey.”

The REF will assess the quality of research at each university and be completed in 2014. The results will be used to decide how much research funding each institution receives, with effect from 2015-16.

Despite the University of Manchester being very research-intensive, stress levels were average for a university. A University spokesperson said: “The University of Manchester puts a high priority on the wellbeing of our staff and students.

“We have a team of professional counsellors and psychotherapists on campus, offering confidential help with any personal issues affecting work, self-esteem, relationships, mental health or general well-being.  They are available to all University of Manchester staff and students.”

Police link sex attacks in student area

Written by Eloise Marsh on . Posted in News.

Two sexual assaults in Fallowfield and Withington may be connected, according to police.

The attacks are said to have been carried out by a young Asian man.

The most recent incident took place on Egerton Road, Fallowfield on September 20, when a 22-year-old woman was stopped and asked for directions. The same man later followed and sexually assaulted her.

This attack is being linked to an assault on July 14, where a man approached and assaulted  a 20-year-old woman on Mauldeth Road West near the Ladybarn Lane junction in Withington.

The culprit in both incidents is described as a man of Asian descent in his 20s, around 5ft 8 and of chubby build.

Police have increased patrols in the areas.

Inspector Andy Smith from Greater Manchester Police’s Student Safe Team said, “If anyone sees any suspicious behaviour in the area, they should call the police immediately. We are well placed to respond to these calls within a matter of minutes.

“If young women are genuinely concerned about their safety, they can contact the police to pick up a panic alarm which they could carry on their keys.”

The Student Safe Team, who were on campus during Freshers’ Week, advise students to stay in groups while out and stick to well-lit areas.

The Students’ Union has launched a Safe Taxi Scheme this year in conjunction with local taxi firm Union Cars.

The project allows students to use their student ID as a deposit for the fare, which will be returned to the Union the following day to be collected by the student who will then pay the outstanding fare.

Should the smoking ban apply to shisha cafes?

Written by Mancunion on . Posted in Opinion.

Yes:

The government has decided to ban smoking indoors, and has failed to follow this through. The law bans all smoking indoors, with no clause to excuse shisha. All the justifications used for passing this law in the first place apply to the smoking of shisha. If anything, they apply more than cigarettes. Being a passive smoker is not something one consents to, and being a passive shisha smoker is similarly damaging. Moreover, there should be uniformity of the law. A law is a law, and should have the same weight and purpose everywhere.

The cafes which offer shisha are also cafes in themselves. Many serve snacks, drinks and host live entertainment. It’s possible, and indeed probable, that many people want to visit these cafes and not smoke shisha. Why should they be forced to passively smoke? Excusing the cafes from the smoking ban can make them very alienating and unwelcoming places for these people. If shisha was banned indoors, the cafes could arguably benefit from the extra business from new, non-smoking customers. If you’re still not convinced, think about the fact that these cafes don’t serve alcohol, making them popular family destinations. Even if grown adults enter these cafes in the knowledge they will passively smoke, children most certainly do not.

I am not arguing for the banning of shisha. Shisha can be a fun, sociable and relaxing activity for many people. However, there is no reason for people to smoke shisha indoors. Many shisha cafes have outdoor smoking gardens, with heaters and parasols to protect smokers from the elements. It would be simple and easy to move all their shisha pipes outside. The UK has adjusted to the banning of smoking cigarettes with ease, and should do the same for shisha.

 

No:

To say that shisha cafes should be regulated by the same laws that make smoking indoors illegal is to entirely misunderstand the culture behind the two different ways of ingesting smoke.

Shisha cafes operate under a culture where everybody clearly knows what to expect when they enter them. It’s not correct to compare them to the situation in pubs before the smoking ban, as the primary aim of a pub is to drink and have a sociable time. The primary aim of a shisha cafe, as the name suggests, is to smoke shisha with refreshments on offer secondary to this. Whilst it is problematic that in some cafes children are to be found passively smoking, the answer to this is to ban children from them, much like we ban children from pubs, not to remove people’s free choice to enjoy shisha in a warm environment.

This is the key difference between cigarettes and shisha: whereas with cigarettes within pubs and clubs, lots of people who didn’t want smoke in their face had to put up with it, with shisha cafes the culture is such that there aren’t people there apart from those who wish to smoke, and the people who work there are almost exclusively shisha smokers. To work at a shisha serving establishment you would need to ingest smoke whether it is served inside or out; to set one up and serve your customers you need to smoke it both actively and passively. People who do this make an active choice to learn the skill, whereas to sell cigarettes you do not need to do this, much like people smoking outside of an establishment don’t need to be served by anyone – they are entirely different things.