Rehman Chishti
Atta-Ur-Rehman Chishti is a British Conservative politician, elected MP for Gillingham and Rainham in the 2010 general election. He was the Vice Chair of the Conservative Party for Communities, appointed in the 2018 cabinet reshuffle. Chisthi served as the Prime Ministerial Trade Envoy to Pakistan. Chishti was born in Muzaffarabad, capital of Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, on 4 October 1978, his father Abdul Rehman Chishti had been appointed Federal Adviser on religious affairs to the Prime Minister of Azad Kashmir in 1976 by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan. He left Pakistan in 1978 to take up a post as an Imam in the UK, soon after Bhutto was overthrown by a military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq, who executed Bhutto. Rehman Chishti did not see his father for the first six years of his life, he along with his mother and elder sister joined his father in 1984 in the UK at the age of six, since has lived in Gillingham and Rainham. Chishti attended Richmond Infant School, Napier Primary School, Fort Luton High School for Boys, Rainham Mark Grammar School Sixth Form, Chatham Grammar School for Girls.
He was Head Boy at Fort Luton High School, captain of the school cricket team. He captained Hempstead Colts Cricket Club in Gillingham, in which he took his best bowling figures of 5 wickets for 7 runs against Lordswood Colts, which led him to play for Medway District and Kent Schools in the Pawson trophy, he played football with Royal Princes Park youth team where he was given the award for player of the year. Chishti read law at University of Wales Aberystwyth, followed by Inns of Court School of Law where he did his Barristers vocational course, he had to supplement his studies by working at Tesco main store in Gillingham, the Link Mobile phone shop in Hempstead Valley shopping centre in Gillingham. Chishti was called to the Bar of England and Wales by Lincoln's Inn in 2001, he was taken on as a tenant. Chishti defended cases in the Magistrates' and Crown courts, he has appeared in the Court of Appeal: R v R EWCA Crim 3312. He is an Honorary Door Tenant at Red Lion Chambers. Chishti served as a Political Adviser from 1999–2007 to Benazir Bhutto, after she had ceased being the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
In September 2004 in a meeting in Islamabad with Mark Lyall Grant, the High Commissioner to Pakistan, acting on behalf of Benazir Bhutto, committed Bhutto to talks with the Government of Pakistan for the transition to Democracy with the United Kingdom acting as the facilitators. Chishti followed this up by attending every meeting Bhutto had with British diplomats, both in Dubai and London, including the British Foreign Office in London accompanying Ms Bhutto and acting on her behalf; this included meetings with the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in 2005, David Miliband in 2007. In 2001, in a note to Rehman Chishti in her biography, she described him as her most brilliant assistant. At the 2005 General Election, Chishti stood as the Labour Party candidate for the Horsham constituency, he joined the Conservative Party, was selected as the candidate for the marginal seat of Gillingham and Rainham, whose predecessor seat of Gillingham had been held by Labour by less than 300 votes in 2005.
On 28 August 2007, Benazir Bhutto visited the constituency for a dinner in support of Chishti's campaign, where she told the audience, "Rehman being the Parliamentary candidate for Gillingham is my loss and Gillingham's gain". Chishti represented the Gillingham North Ward from 2003–2007 and the Rainham Central Ward since 2007 on Medway Council, he was appointed to the Medway Council's Cabinet in 2007 as the Member for Community Safety and Enforcement, becoming the youngest Cabinet Member in Medway's history. He served as an Adviser to Francis Maude on diversity when Maude was Chairman of the Conservative Party in 2006. Chishti was elected Member of Parliament for Gillingham and Rainham in 2010 at the age of 31; the New Statesman listed Chishti as among the 20 MPs under 40 who are the best of their generation, who have the potential to be the next Prime Minister. The Telegraph newspaper described him as a rising star of the party. In 2011, Chishti was listed by the BBC as one of the most frequent speakers in Parliament from the intake of 2010.
In 2013, Chishti was named parliamentarian of the year by the road safety charity Brake for his work in Parliament championing road safety issues, including persuading the government to adopt his private members bill to increase the sentence for those who cause death by driving, when the motorist had been banned from driving at the time of the offence. The government agreed to increase the maximum custodial sentence to 10 years from the previous two. Chishti has campaigned for the release of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, accused of blasphemy in Pakistan. In October 2014, Chishti authored a letter, signed by 54 MPs from across Parliament, sent to the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, the Chief Justice, Nasir-ul-Mulk, calling for an urgent review of her case. In June 2015, Rehman authored letters signed by more than 120 MPs to the Prime Minister and to the BBC asking them to refer to the so-called "Islamic State", ISIS/ISIL as "Daesh", a phrase adopted by many countries around the World, including France and Turkey, an issue which made front-page news.
In December 2015, the Prime Minister announced in Parliament that, after the strong representations made by Chishti, the Government would be using the terminolo
The London Gazette
The London Gazette is one of the official journals of record of the British government, the most important among such official journals in the United Kingdom, in which certain statutory notices are required to be published. The London Gazette claims to be the oldest surviving English newspaper and the oldest continuously published newspaper in the UK, having been first published on 7 November 1665 as The Oxford Gazette; this claim is made by the Stamford Mercury and Berrow's Worcester Journal, because The Gazette is not a conventional newspaper offering general news coverage. It does not have a large circulation. Other official newspapers of the UK government are The Edinburgh Gazette and The Belfast Gazette, apart from reproducing certain materials of nationwide interest published in The London Gazette contain publications specific to Scotland and Northern Ireland, respectively. In turn, The London Gazette carries not only notices of UK-wide interest, but those relating to entities or people in England and Wales.
However, certain notices that are only of specific interest to Scotland or Northern Ireland are required to be published in The London Gazette. The London and Belfast Gazettes are published by TSO on behalf of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, they are subject to Crown copyright. The London Gazette is published each weekday, except for bank holidays. Notices for the following, among others, are published: Granting of royal assent to bills of the Parliament of the United Kingdom or of the Scottish Parliament The issuance of writs of election when a vacancy occurs in the House of Commons Appointments to certain public offices Commissions in the Armed Forces and subsequent promotion of officers Corporate and personal insolvency Granting of awards of honours and military medals Changes of names or of coats of arms Royal Proclamations and other DeclarationsHer Majesty's Stationery Office has digitised all issues of the Gazette, these are available online; the official Gazettes are published by The Stationery Office.
The content, apart from insolvency notices, is available in a number of machine-readable formats, including XML and XML/RDFa via Atom feed. The London Gazette was first published as The Oxford Gazette on 7 November 1665. Charles II and the Royal Court had moved to Oxford to escape the Great Plague of London, courtiers were unwilling to touch London newspapers for fear of contagion; the Gazette was "Published by Authority" by Henry Muddiman, its first publication is noted by Samuel Pepys in his diary. The King returned to London as the plague dissipated, the Gazette moved too, with the first issue of The London Gazette being published on 5 February 1666; the Gazette was not a newspaper in the modern sense: it was sent by post to subscribers, not printed for sale to the general public. Her Majesty's Stationery Office took over the publication of the Gazette in 1889. Publication of the Gazette was transferred to the private sector, under government supervision, in the 1990s, when HMSO was sold and renamed The Stationery Office.
In time of war, despatches from the various conflicts are published in The London Gazette. People referred to are said to have been mentioned in despatches; when members of the armed forces are promoted, these promotions are published here, the person is said to have been "gazetted". Being "gazetted" sometimes meant having official notice of one's bankruptcy published, as in the classic ten-line poem comparing the stolid tenant farmer of 1722 to the lavishly spending faux-genteel farmers of 1822: Notices of engagement and marriage were formerly published in the Gazette. Gazettes, modelled on The London Gazette, were issued for most British colonial possessions. History of British newspapers Iris Oifigiúil The Dublin Gazette – in Ireland London Gazette index Official Journal of the European Union List of government gazettes London and Belfast Gazettes official site Great Fire of London 1666 – Facsimile and transcript of London Gazette report
European Union
The European Union is a political and economic union of 28 member states that are located in Europe. It has an area of an estimated population of about 513 million; the EU has developed an internal single market through a standardised system of laws that apply in all member states in those matters, only those matters, where members have agreed to act as one. EU policies aim to ensure the free movement of people, goods and capital within the internal market, enact legislation in justice and home affairs and maintain common policies on trade, agriculture and regional development. For travel within the Schengen Area, passport controls have been abolished. A monetary union was established in 1999 and came into full force in 2002 and is composed of 19 EU member states which use the euro currency; the EU and European citizenship were established when the Maastricht Treaty came into force in 1993. The EU traces its origins to the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, established by the 1951 Treaty of Paris and 1957 Treaty of Rome.
The original members of what came to be known as the European Communities were the Inner Six: Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany. The Communities and its successors have grown in size by the accession of new member states and in power by the addition of policy areas to its remit; the latest major amendment to the constitutional basis of the EU, the Treaty of Lisbon, came into force in 2009. While no member state has left the EU or its antecedent organisations, the United Kingdom signified the intention to leave after a membership referendum in June 2016 and is negotiating its withdrawal. Covering 7.3% of the world population, the EU in 2017 generated a nominal gross domestic product of 19.670 trillion US dollars, constituting 24.6% of global nominal GDP. Additionally, all 28 EU countries have a high Human Development Index, according to the United Nations Development Programme. In 2012, the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Through the Common Foreign and Security Policy, the EU has developed a role in external relations and defence.
The union maintains permanent diplomatic missions throughout the world and represents itself at the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the G7 and the G20. Because of its global influence, the European Union has been described as an emerging superpower. During the centuries following the fall of Rome in 476, several European States viewed themselves as translatio imperii of the defunct Roman Empire: the Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire were thereby attempts to resurrect Rome in the West; this political philosophy of a supra-national rule over the continent, similar to the example of the ancient Roman Empire, resulted in the early Middle Ages in the concept of a renovatio imperii, either in the forms of the Reichsidee or the religiously inspired Imperium Christianum. Medieval Christendom and the political power of the Papacy are cited as conducive to European integration and unity. In the oriental parts of the continent, the Russian Tsardom, the Empire, declared Moscow to be Third Rome and inheritor of the Eastern tradition after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
The gap between Greek East and Latin West had been widened by the political scission of the Roman Empire in the 4th century and the Great Schism of 1054. Pan-European political thought emerged during the 19th century, inspired by the liberal ideas of the French and American Revolutions after the demise of Napoléon's Empire. In the decades following the outcomes of the Congress of Vienna, ideals of European unity flourished across the continent in the writings of Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Giuseppe Mazzini or Theodore de Korwin Szymanowski; the term United States of Europe was used at that time by Victor Hugo during a speech at the International Peace Congress held in Paris in 1849: A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas. During the interwar period, the consciousness that national markets in Europe were interdependent though confrontational, along with the observation of a larger and growing US market on the other side of the ocean, nourished the urge for the economic integration of the continent.
In 1920, advocating the creation of a European economic union, British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that "a Free Trade Union should be established... to impose no protectionist tariffs whatever against the produce of other members of the Union." During the same decade, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, one of the first to imagine of a modern political union of Europe, founded the Pan-Europa Movement. His ideas influenced his contemporaries, among which Prime Minister of France Aristide Briand. In 1929, the latter gave a speech in favour of a European Union before the assembly of the League of Nations, precursor of the United Nations. In a radio address in March 1943, with war still raging, Britain's leader Sir Winston Churchill spoke warmly of "restoring the true greatness of Europe" once victory had been achieved, mused on the post-war creation of a "Council of Europe" which would bring the European nations together to build peace. After World War II, European integration was seen as an antidote to the extreme nationalism which had devastated the continent.
In a speech delivered on 19
Office of the Secretary of State for Wales
The Office of the Secretary of State for Wales, informally known as the Wales Office, is a United Kingdom government department. It replaced the former Welsh Office, which had extensive responsibility for governing Wales prior to Welsh devolution in 1999. In the past it has been called "Wales' voice in Westminster and Westminster's voice in Wales". However, it is less powerful since the Government of Wales Act 2006: it is responsible for carrying out the few functions remaining with the Secretary of State for Wales that have not been transferred to the National Assembly for Wales; the Secretary of State for Wales has overall responsibility for the office but it is located administratively within the Ministry of Justice. The ministers in the Office of the Secretary of State for Wales are as follows: Unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales does not have its own Law Officers of the Crown; the Attorney General for England and Wales therefore advises the United Kingdom Government on its law. His deputy is the Solicitor General for Wales.
Following the'yes' vote in the 2011 referendum on giving the Assembly direct law-making powers, some politicians in Wales from Plaid Cymru, have called for the abolition of the Wales Office. Lord Elis-Thomas, Presiding Officer of the National Assembly for Wales said: I think it would be useful to before we start the next Assembly; the relationship would be inter-governmental and inter-parliamentary. In other words it would be between the National Assembly and the Parliament at Westminster, where there are issues on laws which are made in Westminster which impinge on Wales and vice versa. However, Lord Elis-Thomas was accused of following a "separatist agenda" by the Conservative Cheryl Gillan Secretary of State for Wales, she was supported by her Labour predecessor Peter Hain, who declared that Wales "still needs a voice around the Cabinet in Westminster". Official website
Minister for Sport and Civil Society
The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Sport and Civil Society is a junior minister in the Department for Culture and Sport of the United Kingdom government, with responsibility for sport and Civil Society in England. The current postholder is Mims Davies; the post is at Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State level covering sport and Heritage. The position of Minister for Sport was at the more senior Minister of State level in the previous government; the sports minister has at various times reported to the Department of National Heritage, the Department of Education and Science and the Department of the Environment. Sport is a devolved matter in Scotland and Northern Ireland resting with the corresponding ministers in the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, although when the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended, responsibility went to the Northern Ireland Office. Sport Gambling Horse racing Office for Civil Society The National Lottery and society lotteries Cross government work on loneliness Past Ministers for Sport, Department for Culture and Sport
Nigel Adams
Nigel Adams is a British Conservative Party politician, elected at the 2010 general election as the Member of Parliament for Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire. Born in Goole, raised in Selby, he is the son of a school caretaker and school cleaner. Adams attended Camblesforth Primary School and won a place at Selby Grammar School in 1978, Adams left school in 1984, aged 17 and did not attend University. Having left school with few formal qualifications, Adams started his career with a number of sales roles in the advertising industry and latterly in the telecommunications sector, he started his first business in 1993, Advanced Digital Telecom Limited, aged 26 with a £20 a week grant via the Enterprise Allowance Scheme under the John Major Conservative Government. The company grew until it was acquired by York-based JWE Telecom PLC in In 2006, Adams acquired NGC Networks Limited a telecommunications equipment and services provider, of which he continues to be a shareholder. In 2016, genealogy research reaching as far back as the 1600s by the Selby branch of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discovered that Adams is descended from the well known Staffordshire industrialist William Adams Other ancestors uncovered include Members of Parliament including Sir Thomas Adams, 1st Baronet a close ally of Charles I of England a former Lord Mayor of the City of London and MP for London, William Adams a wealthy 17th-century businessman who founded Adams Grammar School in 1656.
Former pupils of the selective grammar school include Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Further research has indicated that Adams heritage includes two former President of the United States namely the second and sixth Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams in addition to revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Adams joined the Conservative Party in 1992, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government in May 2018. Following the Government reshuffle in January 2018, Adams was promoted to Lord Commissioner to HM Treasury in the Government Whips Office, a role he undertakes alongside his ministerial duties. Adams was first appointed to the Government following his successful re-election in June 2017 where he became Assistant Government Whip, his departmental responsibilities included Department for Environment and rural Affairs and Northern Ireland Office In 2016, Adams was one of the key figures in the unsuccessful Conservative Party leadership bid by Boris Johnson and still remains a close ally.
Adams appeared in the 2017 BBC docudrama Theresa vs Boris, How May became PM He contested the marginal Rossendale and Darwen seat at the 2005 general election, coming second with a swing to the Conservatives of 1.9% compared to the 3.1% average they achieved nationally. Adams was selected as the candidate for the Conservative Party in the newly created seat of Selby and Ainsty in 2006. Four years at the 2010 general election, Adams was elected with a 23.71% majority. Following his election to Parliament, Adams was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to curr the Leader of the House of Lords and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, The Lord Strathclyde, subsequently to his successor, The Lord Hill of Oareford until his resignation in August 2014. In September 2014 Adams was appointed to the Number 10 Policy Board with responsibility for economic affairs. Adams was re-elected as Member of Parliament for Selby and Ainsty at the 2015 general election with 27,725 votes, a majority of 13,557 votes and 52.5% of the total votes cast, a swing from Labour of 1.0% compared to a negative national swing of 0.4%.
He was re-elected again at the snap election on 8 June 2017 with 32,921 votes and an increased majority and vote share of 13,772 and 58.7% respectively. In January 2016, the Labour Party unsuccessfully proposed an amendment in Parliament that would have required private landlords to make their homes "fit for human habitation". According to Parliament's register of interests, Adams was one of 72 Conservative MPs who voted against the amendment who derived an income from renting out property; the Conservative Government had responded to the amendment that they believed homes should be fit for human habitation but did not want to pass the new law that would explicitly require it. Until June 2017, Adams was Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Biomass Group and in 2013 he wrote an article describing the benefits of biomass, he regards wind and solar generation as expensive and inflexible methods of renewable energy. Whilst coal is reliable and available, it is not renewable and converts inactive carbon stored underground into carbon dioxide thus increasing CO2 levels.
Drax and Eggborough power stations are major UK electricity producers in his constituency. Both power stations are capable of burning biomass. In January 2015, Adams introduced the Onshore wind subsidies bill to Parliament which passed to the next stage following a close vote; the Conservative government has announced new onshore wind subsidies will end on 1 April 2016. He has however faced criticism for accepting more than £50,000 in political donations and hospitality from companies in the biomass sector; until June 2017, Adams was Chairman of the All Party Group for Music and in November 2015 he instigated several Parliamentary debates on the difficulties facing UK musicians accessing visas for touring the US. The group has additionally held a session on the State of Access report aimed at improving access to live music for deaf and disabled people. Adams has campaigned to change the law on Secondary Ticketing and he persuaded the government to outlaw the use of bots f
Alma mater
Alma mater is an allegorical Latin phrase for a university, school, or college that one attended. In US usage it can mean the school from which one graduated; the phrase is variously translated as "nourishing mother", "nursing mother", or "fostering mother", suggesting that a school provides intellectual nourishment to its students. Fine arts will depict educational institutions using a robed woman as a visual metaphor. Before its current usage, alma mater was an honorific title for various Latin mother goddesses Ceres or Cybele, in Catholicism for the Virgin Mary, it entered academic usage when the University of Bologna adopted the motto Alma Mater Studiorum, which describes its heritage as the oldest operating university in the Western world. It is related to alumnus, a term used for a university graduate that means a "nursling" or "one, nourished". Although alma was a common epithet for Ceres, Cybele and other mother goddesses, it was not used in conjunction with mater in classical Latin. In the Oxford Latin Dictionary, the phrase is attributed to Lucretius' De rerum natura, where it is used as an epithet to describe an earth goddess: After the fall of Rome, the term came into Christian liturgical usage in association with the Virgin Mary.
"Alma Redemptoris Mater" is a well-known 11th century antiphon devoted to Mary. The earliest documented use of the term to refer to a university in an English-speaking country is in 1600, when the University of Cambridge printer, John Legate, began using an emblem for the university's press; the device's first-known appearance is on the title-page of William Perkins' A Golden Chain, where the Latin phrase Alma Mater Cantabrigia is inscribed on a pedestal bearing a nude, lactating woman wearing a mural crown. In English etymological reference works, the first university-related usage is cited in 1710, when an academic mother figure is mentioned in a remembrance of Henry More by Richard Ward. Many historic European universities have adopted Alma Mater as part of the Latin translation of their official name; the University of Bologna Latin name, Alma Mater Studiorum, refers to its status as the oldest continuously operating university in the world. Other European universities, such as the Alma Mater Lipsiensis in Leipzig, Germany, or Alma Mater Jagiellonica, have used the expression in conjunction with geographical or foundational characteristics.
At least one, the Alma Mater Europaea in Salzburg, Austria, an international university founded by the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2010, uses the term as its official name. In the United States, the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, has been called the "Alma Mater of the Nation" because of its ties to the country's founding. At Queen's University in Kingston and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, the main student government is known as the Alma Mater Society; the ancient Roman world had many statues of the Alma Mater, some still extant. Modern sculptures are found in prominent locations on several American university campuses. For example, in the United States: there is a well-known bronze statue of Alma Mater by Daniel Chester French situated on the steps of Columbia University's Low Library. An altarpiece mural in Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library, painted in 1932 by Eugene Savage, depicts the Alma Mater as a bearer of light and truth, standing in the midst of the personified arts and sciences.
Outside the United States, there is an Alma Mater sculpture on the steps of the monumental entrance to the Universidad de La Habana, in Havana, Cuba. The statue was cast in 1919 by Mario Korbel, with Feliciana Villalón Wilson as the inspiration for Alma Mater, it was installed in its current location in 1927, at the direction of architect Raul Otero. Media related to Alma mater at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of alma mater at Wiktionary Alma Mater Europaea website
