Andy Worthington joins us this week to discuss a recent documentary he had a hand in called Concrete Soldiers: Never in the last 3 decades has it been more important to take a stand and stay united. Our communities are being ripped apart and our cities taken over by greed. When I started looking at the problem of regeneration and gentrification it was just a dirty word. Now 5 years later, itâs on everyoneâs lips and no one feels secure in their homes. I saw the problem from the inside, as I followed people around - normal people like you and I, trying to fight the wave of developers buying swathes land, public land which should stay in public hands not sold off to the highest bidder. People are fighting for their right to a decent home and a community. Its a basic right. The injustices I saw and keep seeing are inhuman and in many cases criminal, but no one takes responsibility. So I realised the only way to change the status quo is by creating a film which could inspire and calvanise more people to join the battle. http://www.concretesoldiers.uk/
Matthew Williams of Devizes, Wiltshire, remembers the life of one of the original circlemakers, Doug Bower, who died this summer aged 94 Beginning in the late 1970s, simple crop circles began to appear regularly in the fields of Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, and Gloucestershire in southern England. They were made at night, and over the years they became more complex, growing into large patterns of geometric forms hundreds of feet across. Some people who studied crop circles were convinced that their intricacy and the fact that the plants seemed to be bent but not broken precluded a human creator, which meant that they were being produced either by some unknown natural phenomenon or by extraterrestrials. In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, of Southampton, England, confessed to having made more than 200 crop circles since the late 1970s with nothing more complex than ropes and boards. They had initially been inspired by a 1966 account of a UFO sighting near Tully, Queensland, Australia, in which a flying saucer supposedly landed in a lagoon and left behind a depressed area of reeds. As crop circles became more prominent in the media, Bower and Chorleyâs patterns became more complex, and they delighted in confounding the expectations of those who studied the circles. http://thecroppie.co.uk/2018/07/23/doug-bower-25-june-1924-21-july-2018/ Original 1970s crop circle hoaxer Doug Bower dies aged 84 - ITV West (2018) HTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RCH4MytgA
Fran Mier was disabled a decade ago as a result of an assault and explains how shes now coping, despite the DWP assessing that she is not entitled to claim for Disability Living Allowance because although she finds walking very difficult she is not, apparently, disabled Disabled People Against the Cuts https://dpac.uk.net/