Moved Permanently

   As British soldiers prepare to leave Iraq, Laura Miller asks what is it about the conflict that has led so many soldiers to take their own lives? 

Youtube has banned music videos to UK users. Free downloading sites such as Spiral Frog and Ruckus are being forced to close down due to collapse in advertising revenue. With only free listening sites such as Spotify surviving, CDs and legal download sales are finally on the increase.

Breaking into the job market after university can be daunting at any time. This year, securing a graduate job is an even tougher challenge given the current economic crisis.  Students are faced with decisions to start earning now and take on non-graduate jobs or take the risk of working unpaid with the hope of breaking into their chosen profession. The Government’s solution is to offer graduates three-month minimum wage internships, which have been met with mixed reactions by Kingston students. Is a degree today worth the time, effort and money or is work experience the key to an employer’s heart?

There is an unexplained force in the darkness. It's changing our universe and forcing galaxies farther and farther apart, stretching the very fabric of outer space and dragging planets farther away.  

Smoking makes your skin grey, your teeth yellow, gives you bad breath, not to mention the huge amount of diseases it can give you, and what’s more it causes a huge dent to your bank account.

Alistair Darling recently called the Isle of Man “a tax haven sitting in the Irish sea”, and it used to be a common joke that Athol Street, home to the offshore branches of many international banks, “was the only street that was shady on both sides”.  But both jibes appear past their sell-by date. 

There’s no doubt about it, going to university is a life changing experience. There can be a lot to phone home and tell loved ones about, from the endless nights of partying to some of the new challenges faced by many new students, such as learning how to use a washing machine.

   Forget the London Eye, it may offer great views but it will never take off. Envisage instead the 'Flying Eye', a mobile operating theatre providing the latest sight-saving procedures to the developing world. Only a few have experienced it, including one lucky Kingston alumnus, but a local  17 year-old student will soon join ophthalmologists on September 21 for ten days aboard the world’s only flying hospital.

Is a culture clash preventing women from obtaining the morning-after pill?

Scottish Nudists say getting naked could be the solution to the British teenage pregnancy problem that is worrying Kingston University students.  

The year is 2017. In America, criminals have a choice. They can serve their sentences  in prison or they can take part in The Running Man (1987), a government owned violent game-show where contestants running for freedom are pursued by professional "Stalkers", whose objective is to kill them. 

Are you un-happy? Psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy, prescription drugs, alternative therapies and herbal remedies all profess to offer an answer, but which one is right for you? Emily Craven, daughter of a professional psychotherapist and final year undergraduate student explores the routes into having a healthy mind…  

‘Experienced cyclists needed to take front position on a tandem to enable visually impaired people to enjoy the pleasure of cycling. Cyclists need not have experience of tandem riding as training will be provided.’   

The feet of a young Briton are planted in a pair of pristine white shoes, stood in a small town called Reason. Laid out before them is a foggy crossroad.  The view to the right presents a well-worn and narrow dirt track; blood, armour and bullets shape its long path. A sharp pang of sound can be heard in the distance followed by a faint but familiar roar, a crowd chanting a mantra.To the left the road is wide, well-paved and unused. It winds aimlessly and confused, splitting off into many directions. There is a sound there too, but it is muted and incomprehensible.The sounds the young person hears are of crowds; congregations of people pushing or pulling in a political direction, eager for ‘change’. Which way does he go? How does he come to make such an important decision? Law student, Joseph Lappin says: “If someone is personally affected by a particular event in an adverse way, they may become politicised to the right or left. But, generally the economy will be the main reason for a shift in one’s political views. If people are comfortable financially they are less likely to become radicalised.”It is the case that a large number of young people today are concerned with issues that primarily affect how much weight is in their pocket, rather than how many dead bodies are in the ground. Contending with top-up fees, rent and an active social life puts stress on every student’s mind to the point where the survival of their way of life comes under threat.  Although these are the conditions students live in today, they may be changing. Peter McLaren of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, a socialist movement attracting more and more young people, says: “I think money will become increasingly irrelevant. If people haven’t got any money they’ll be looking for solutions that can actually provide answers to why they haven’t got any.” Although it has been the case in the past that the student is continually worried about how he or she looks, the gadgets in their hands and their private property, McLaren suggests the culture is changing: “I know that at present it is very much the Thatcherite culture, that is hard to change, which is precisely focused on the value of money and materialism and what you have. But it’s an ideal opportunity for the Left to get it back together to challenge that.”It starts with education: ‘To learn is to change’. The Morning Star, Britain’s only socialist daily newspaper, is dedicated to this cause. Not ‘education’ in the traditional sense of the National Curriculum but instead a spreading of new ideas. “What we’ve found is that most people consider socialism, or communism, to be dead,” says writer and circulation manager, Ivan Beavis, of the Morning Star, “but that is the only viable alternative to what is going on. What we want to inform people is that a form of socialism is achievable, that the multinationals and the people who tell us it isn’t, are really only saying so because it’s not in their interests.”But what also exists, apart from the explanation that people are not ready for it, is a view that the Left is in disarray. Without a unification of existing socialist groups, splintered because of ideological differences, the cause can never succeed in voicing a coherent message that people can neither understand nor get behind.  As it is, the war for the minds of young people is being won on a vast plain of illusion, including television, Hollywood, computer games and, in a large number of cases, the historically championed escape from the insulated self; alcohol. Amongst young people this culture dulls the brain’s ability to understand a different concept of existence. It is with scientific thoroughness that the capitalist idea and mainstream media have exploited the individual to the point where people are now beginning to ‘wake up’. It is with a look to history, recent and not so recent, that we can see a pattern emerging. Germany in the 1930s was a time of great upheaval opportunistically seized upon by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. The economy was in ruins and the memory of a war, where vast crowds of disaffected young and old were whipped into a frothing frenzy by being told what they wanted to hear: that there will be ‘change’. Deputy leader of the 10,000-strong and growing British National Party (BNP), Simon Darby, believes conditions are ripening. Referring to the increasing recruitment of young people, he explains: “People put up with a lot of things if you can give them money to buy electrical goods and gadgets and have a good standard of life. But when that goes I’m afraid it’s the old adage; ‘the crowd is fickle’ and indeed they are and they’ll look for something else.”  But perhaps they are not so fickle, as student, Joseph Lappin, comments: “The BNP has been able to manipulate the working classes into believing and adopting the view that the Labour Party, the traditional party of the working classes, is unable to cater for their needs.” Even so, their planning of an upcoming rally in Liverpool has forced Everton Football Club to re-schedule one of their games because not enough Merseyside police are available to cover both events.    Growing pains such as these were seen not as far back, in 1968 – a year of revolution and disaffection – when people were taking to the streets in protest, students and workers fighting not just for their rights and their liberty, but everyone’s. Although today’s discontent has not quite reached the cusp of direct action, during 1968 another group began to organise: the British National Front, (http://www.natfront.com/) a party currently experiencing a significant, if unsubstantial, period of success by achieving their best election results in thirty years. The party, single-issue in its approach and preoccupied with its obsession of a white Britain, is as outdated and irrelevant as the words of its leader, Tom Holmes, when he says: “The whole thing is a plot. It’s only the white people that do anything. We say race and nation. Race is the priority. Once the race is gone, that’s it.”But people are waking up, as Darby says, but it seems more have awoken to the rise of the divisive policies of the BNP, realising a reaction must come to quell their appetite for power. Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”But now, presented to the young person, there was a parting of the mist; a third path straight ahead. It led upward, a steep climb beset on all sides by loose and jagged rock. But thousands of familiar faces surrounded the void. They were climbing too.Educator, linguist, philosopher and anarchist, Noam Chomsky, believes that every system you can imagine infringes on personal liberty and we agree to that infringement if we accept it as reasonable, as part of our choice of how a reasonable society should be run. He says choose your oppression.A writer and member of the Anarchist Federation, pseudonymously known as Odessa Steps, says: “People thinking and acting for themselves, people organising without boundaries, going where they like, confronting who they want, challenging, fighting, resisting, together. This is what anarchism is, getting to a place where their laws and rules, their way of thinking, their boundaries and walls no longer have meaning and are never again allowed to stop us doing what we like and what we must. A world of freedom and co-operation.” The young person looks again and realises: there was no Left or Right. Only Up and Down:“There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They has got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.” – Bob Dylan, 1963

I felt the needle inject black ink into the skin on my back and a familiar thought drifted into my mind – this is permanent. This wasn’t the first time I had decided to scar my skin of my own free will.  

  I felt a mixture of shame, fear and loathing from the looks I received and at one point felt like crying out “I'm not a tramp I'm just doing someone a favour.”  John Silcox goes down and out in Kingston and discovers the "whitewash" from a different perspective.

So, what goes on at speed dating events?  For many, the very utterance of the words conjures up images of desperate middle-aged women meeting up in a dark room with equally desperate, inebriated men who have been unable to procure a date by any other means. Intrigued, although a little apprehensive, our intrepid reporters Andy and Georgie went down to a local speed dating event to find out what speed dating is really like.  Here for your delight are the boy’s and girl’s perspectives on speed dating.

The recent death of literary rebel John Updike is just another example of time prematurely snatching from us a genius… 

These days we feel the need to communicate with everyone around us.  In the past long distance communication was expensive and only used for sending messages that others actually needed to hear.  Even posting a letter requires thought and effort.   Services like Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, can seem a little pointless sometimes, recording every moment in some nobody's boring life.

It is the week before Christmas, and Nigel Brooks is sitting in his north Kingston church thumbing through his Bible as he explains his plans for Christmas Day.  But his church does not have a single Christmas decoration, and his plan is to escape the Christmas festivities by going to his cottage in the country.

Your family told you what they wanted weeks ago, surely you haven’t waited until now to go and buy your Christmas gifts?

With Christmas only days away now, the yearly frenzy for buying the ‘must have’ games is almost over.

The Kingston graduate whose 'misunderstood' art has drawn considerable interest from the art community and the press.

 “I found myself not wanting to get out of bed and crying for no reason. Social situations became really hard because I seemed to be rapidly losing all my confidence.”

As designers team up with high-street stores to create high quality clothing at affordable prices, Hazel Swain asks who really rules the world of fashion?

Barack Obama has Conquered America, so Rahul Odedra takes a light hearted look at what his Victory means for us...   

A third year live arts student is bringing his art home with him as he makes a statement against relying on the Government.