jiexi34

David Will was a country solicitor who was for 17 years the most powerful football administrator in Britain when he served as vice-president of Fifa, the game¡¯s world governing body. He was also elected president of the Scottish Football Association, and was chairman of his local club, Brechin City, for 25 years.

He was born in 1936 in Glasgow but raised in the village of Edzell in Angus, the youngest son of a local solicitor. He was educated at Brechin High School and the University of Edinburgh, where he read law. His National Service in the Royal Air Force was cut short by the death of his father and he was given a compassionate discharge to take over the family firm of Ferguson & Will.

He settled down to the life of a country solicitor, but continued to play amateur football and to take advantage of the recently opened skiing facilities in the nearby Cairngorm mountains. However, a skiing accident ended his playing career and he had to settle for watching Brechin City; he was invited on to the board of the club as chairman in 1966. Four years later he was elected to the Scottish Football Association (SFA) as the representative of Forfarshire FA, serving on the national body¡¯s executive and general purposes committees and on the referees committee, of which he became chairman in 1973.

Using his legal training he overhauled the pearl jewelry disciplinary system; his reforms are still in place today. In 1980 he was elected the SFA¡¯s treasurer, becoming first vice-president in 1984. His term in this post was short, however. Tommy Younger, the former Hibernian and Scotland goalkeeper who had been elected president of the SFA, died just weeks into his five-year term of office and Will had to step up to the presidency. That same year he had been nominated as the SFA¡¯s representative on the Union of European Football Associations (Uefa), the governing body of football in Europe, and this sudden increase in the workload meant changes for his partners in the family firm and for his wife, Margaret, a New Zealander whom he had met on the Cairngorm ski slopes in 1969 and married in 1971.

Will was elected a Uefa vice-president in 1986 and in 1990 he transferred to the F¨¦d¨¦ration Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), succeeding Harry Cavan as the association¡¯s vice-president. He held this position for biwa pearl 17 years before ill-health forced him to stand down. He relinquished this Fifa role at the 2007 Fifa Congress in Zurich, where he was, along with the former president of Uefa, Lennart Johansson, elected one of the first two honorary vice-presidents of Fifa.

During his years at Fifa, Will served on the board of appeal. After his promotion to the executive committee in 1990 he chaired the referees committee, the players status committee and committee for legal matters and the ticketing sub-committee. He was also on the bureau for the 2006 Fifa World Cup in Germany.

He was now one of the most powerful men in world football, with guaranteed access to the best seats for the biggest games. However, even though he had resigned from the Brechin City board in 1991, he was far happier watching his home team struggle in the lower reaches of the Scottish League than among the ¡°prawn sandwich¡± brigade in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or even the SPL. His wife recalls: ¡°He only got nervous watching two teams, Brechin City and Scotland. Football was his life but these were the two teams he loved.¡±

Gordon Smith, chief executive of the SFA, described him as ¡°a giant of the game¡±, adding that he was one of the most influential, yet humble, figures in football. Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, said that Will¡¯s wisdom, diplomacy and integrity had made an extraordinary contribution to the game. Ernie Walker, a former secretary of the SFA, said that Will was ¡°quite simply the best ambassador that Scottish football ever had. He was an outstanding legislator and a man of the highest moral principles¡±.

Will was appointed CBE in 2002. He is survived by his akoya pearl wife and their two daughters.

David Will, CBE, football administrator and solicitor, was born on November 22, 1936. He died of cancer on September 25, 2009, aged 72 

If the public are losing confidence in the Government’s ability to deal with crime and antisocial behaviour, they are right to do so. The system is an arbitrary and illogical shambles.

As this newspaper reports today sentences are being slashed by prison governors, thanks to chronic overcrowding. To take one example, a criminal facing 42 days, sentenced on a Friday, could find himself heading home immediately. His sentence would be automatically cut in half, he could lose another 18 days due to an early release scheme, and then lose the final three because prisons do not release inmates at weekends. Six weeks in jail would instead become a trip home, with a resettlement grant as an added bonus. Were this not so terribly unfunny, it would be very funny indeed.

Why are criminals not being sent to pearl jewelry jail? The prime reason is that there are simply not enough jails. There are not enough jails because the Government has not stumped up enough cash to build them. The collapse of Britain’s economy is not the only way that Gordon Brown’s tenure as Chancellor has returned to haunt him since he moved next door.

To be fair, this is a problem inherited from the Conservatives. The last Conservative Home Secretary, Michael Howard, was of the view that “prison works”, but his Government was far more keen on sending people to jail than it was on building jails to house them.
Related Links

Tony Blair pledged to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, but his Government was equally ineffective when it came to providing the infrastructure.

In part, this was due to the ideological schism at the heart of new Labour. As Chancellor, Gordon Brown considered the former part of Mr Blair’s slogan to be questionably right-wing and preferred to spend money on the biwa pearl latter. Thus, even as Mr Blair’s policies caused custodial sentences to increase, long-term rehabilitation rather than short-term punishment remained Mr Brown’s financial focus. Prison numbers continued to grow, but prisons did not.

Louise Casey, the Government’s neighbourhood crime adviser, believes that people working within the criminal justice system are often too sympathetic towards offenders. Perhaps her criticisms could go right to the top. When Mr Brown became Prime Minister, responsibility for Mr Blair’s flagship respect agenda (principally antisocial behaviour) shifted from the Home Office to the new department of Children, Schools and Families, under Ed Balls. Again, there was more emphasis on prevention, rather than enforcement. At this year’s Labour Party Conference, Mr Brown outlined his own plans to crack down on antisocial behaviour. In his tone, at least, the Prime Minister appeared to be belatedly accepting that justice sometimes requires not just carrots, but also sticks.

Obviously, rehabilitation is important over the longer term. Britain has a high prison population because it has a high number of crimes. Too many criminals reoffend, and too many of their children join them (see page 8). In the short term, we still have too few cells, with sentences rendered farcical. What can be done?

There are foreign prisoners in our jails, who could be repatriated. There are minor criminals, mental health patients and drug addicts, who could be better dealt with elsewhere. In this, however, sentencing should not have a major role. We need to work out the appropriate sentence and then akoya pearl plan prison places accordingly, not the other way round. Judges should not be deciding punishments on the basis of what we can afford. Most importantly, when a sentence is passed, it must be carried out. If somebody is jailed, to jail they must go. Public confidence demands it.

Postal workers today pleaded for independent negotiators to help end a dispute with mail bosses after an apparently leaked document indicated that Royal Mail was preparing to tough-out the industrial action with Government backing.

Royal Mail is bracing for two 24-hour national strikes next week, which will cripple Britain’s mail network.

Billy Hayes, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), said he hoped Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, had not rubber-stamped anti-union tactics in revenge for his failure to part-privatise the organisation.

“We are quite happy to go to Acas (the independent conciliation service),” he said. “We are interested in compromise, but we seem to have a management that does not seem to want to compromise or go to Acas. I find that incredible.”
Related Links

Last night, BBC’s Newsnight programme claimed to pearl jewelry have a leaked document outlining Royal Mail’s aggressive approach to negotiations over modernisation.

The PowerPoint presentation dated September 24 said that if the CWU refused to agree a deal on Royal Mail’s terms the company had “positioned things in such a way as there is shareholder, customer and internal support for implementation of changes without agreement”.

The only shareholder in Royal Mail is the Government, whose support for sidelining the union would be controversial.

On Wednesday more than 60 MPs signed an early day motion urging the Government “to do all in its power to ensure that Royal Mail responds positively to the union’s proposal”.

A spokesman for Royal Mail today claimed that the policy plan headed Dispute: Strategic Overview had not been drafted by the organisation. “We absolutely do not accept that as a genuine Royal Mail document,” he said. “For the avoidance of any doubt Royal Mail has never had any strategy to derecognise the CWU and nor would we seek to do so.”

But Mr Hayes repeated today that he believed the document was genuine, adding it was “more worrying” that Lord Mandelson seemed to know what was in it.

“I hope Peter Mandelson is not sitting there thinking: 'This is my revenge because I could not persuade my parliamentary colleagues to part-privatise the Royal Mail,'” Mr Hayes said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Mr Hayes said Lord Mandelson had ruled out the biwa pearl involvement of Acas in trying to break the deadlocked dispute. “It seems like a cynical attempt to sideline the union.”

The CWU said that the Royal Mail’s refusal to negotiate over its modernisation plans and proposals to reform pay and working conditions had left it little choice but to call a strike for next week.

About 42,000 network drivers and mail centre staff are due to hold a 24-hour strike on Thursday, while on Friday 78,000 delivery and collection staff will walk out for 24 hours.

Many Labour MPs are nervous about a long-running postal strike creating a “winter of discontent” atmosphere before next year’s general election.

Lord Mandelson hinted that Royal Mail might target the union’s finances by abolishing paid time off to do union work and retracting free use of premises for meetings.

If talks between the CWU and Royal Mail do not produce a settlement next week’s strike, which follows a series of regional walkouts, would be the first national stoppage since 2007. An estimated backlog of 30 million letters and parcels has already built up in Royal Mail sorting offices as a result of the akoya pearl regional strikes.

An increasing number of companies are considering using other delivery services, although they were warned yesterday that rival providers were running at close to capacity.

Hermes, one of Royal Mail’s rivals, said that it had seen post volume rise by 25 per cent during the past week and warned that a prolonged strike could force it to close its services to new customers.

In three weeks’ time there will be a new occupant of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. He will not dress up as a movie monster, or ask for a job, or take off his clothes, or any of the other strange and fanciful ways people have chosen to pass an hour on the plinth.

For the next six months Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, the RAF commander in the South East during the Battle of Britain, will just stand there, immobile, in the way that statues used to before Antony Gormley came along — and one might feel that the square will be a duller place for it pearl jewelry.

Gormley’s 100-day artwork One & Other ended yesterday as the last of 2,400 participants — Emma Burns, a medical photographer — spent her 60 minutes in the limelight and the rest of us started to address the question: what was that all about? What does it tell us about Britain in 2009? And why were so many people keen to get naked in front of strangers?

In the closing hours of the performance, an art student celebrated Christmas at 3am with a tree and a snow machine, a project engineer read Treasure Island naked on a beach towel and a man wrapped in a Union Jack with a rubber duck on his cap and a lipstick kiss on his cheek dedicated 200 roses to Diana, Princess of Wales.
Related Links

Over the past three months, connoisseurs of the show have had their favourite, from the artist who created a lifesize model of Gormley himself, using Duplo building blocks and 2,400 photographs of the plinthers, to the man who dressed up as Godzilla before destroying a cardboard model of London. What most people will remember, however — apart from the man who paraded a giant CV and ended up landing a job — is the naked plinthers, the handful of exhibitionists who made their bid for artistic immortality (films of their contributions will be donated to the biwa pearl Wellcome Library) by taking their kit off.

One male nudist early in the event was told by police to cover up after a complaint. Another naked plinther prompted a further complaint from a passer-by. By the time two weeks ago that Lady Godiva spent her hour naked apart from a pair of knee-high boots, riding a rocking horse and lecturing the 5am crowd on the joys of nudity, the world — or at least that bit of it in Trafalgar Square before dawn — had given up complaining.

What did it all mean? Gormley was unsure. He said: “It is a complex and confused legacy. For me, irrespective of the stories that have emerged, the fact that there has been a totally unbroken sequence of 2,400 individual lives and the fact that we have never failed, that in itself is a testimony to people’s idea of what it is. Bearing witness to how we live now.”

Agnès Poirier, the London-based author of Touché: A French Woman’s Take on the English, said it reflected the English lack of self-consciousness. “You can be ridiculous, but it does not matter. You never think before you do something, ‘I’m going to look ridiculous’. This would never happen in France.” Ekow Eshun, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, said: “What it says is that people have the desire to speak about things that excite them. The headline is that there is a bunch of exhibitionists on a plinth, but beneath that what you have is people talking about the things that move them in a significant way.”

So have we really shed our inhibitions? Peter Mandler, Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of akoya pearl Cambridge, warned against glib conclusions about the demise of the stiff upper lip. He said: “The idea that there is some core Victorian in all of us — that’s pretty old news. I wouldn’t say this represents new frontiers of behaviour. But it shows that people are more interested in publicising their lives.”

Twenty-five years ago the only reason that Patrick Magee would have gone near the House of Commons would have been to blow it up.

Last night, a quarter of a century after the IRA bomb that he planted killed five people at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, he was a guest speaker alongside one victim’s daughter. It was, inevitably, an emotional meeting. Before a largely sympathetic audience he spoke of sorrow and regret, and how he had become a friend of Jo Berry. Her father, Sir Anthony, a Conservative MP, was one of pearl jewelry those killed.

The journey of reconciliation that Mr Magee has travelled may have been a long one but it has only gone so far. And the fundamental truth remained: given the same options, he said, he would do the same again.

Ms Berry has shared platforms before with cultured pearl jewelry Mr Magee, released from prison in 1999 under the Good Friday Agreement. But the meeting in the Grand Committee Room — organised jointly by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues and the Forgiveness Project — was more painful than most. “I feel like I’ve come home,” she said. “This is where I came with my beloved dad when I was little. I can almost see him sitting here.”
Related Links

She spoke of how she had learnt that behind every terrorist there was a human being. Last night it was Mr Magee, a softly spoken man who weighed his every word and spoke with obvious sincerity. But a man who, on biwa pearl fundamental issues, would not yield.

He deeply regretted the loss of life and “was sorry I killed Jo’s father”. But knowing what he does now, would he have planted that bomb? “I do not think that I would have made another choice,” he said. The politics of the time made it inevitable. “I wish there had been another way.”

Few of the questions were overtly hostile. Those most opposed to his presence at Westminster, such as Lord Tebbit, whose wife was crippled by the blast, steered well clear of the meeting.

Lord Donoughue, the former policy adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan who said he had some sympathy with the akoya pearl nationalist cause, asked Mr Magee if he would express any sorrow for the other victims of the IRA. Not until there had been a similar expression of regret “from others”: from the British, in other words. “The bigger picture is political,” he said.