If you haven't already read it I highly recommend "The Poor Had No Lawyers" by Andy Wightman [1]. It can be a struggle to convince people to read a book on the history of Scots property law but it is a really fantastic book. Manages to balance detail without ending up stultified and provides a lot of context behind the current state of land reform in Scotland.
2L of green tea can have as much caffeine as 1L of coffee, although exact amounts can vary massively depending on various brewing methods for each and the exact coffee or tea.
It isn't a charity as far as I can tell (or at least does not have UK charitable status):
the only registered charity with Chagos in the name is the Chagos Conservation Trust[1].
This means that UK Chagos Support Association does not have to follow charity law (i.e. be open about their work among other things), have a purpose considered as "charitable" [2], be run my trustees that don't personally benefit and/or be run independently. However, they could still be doing these things but be unable to register as a charity due wanting to do things that are prohibited as a charity e.g. "benefiting interests of a narrow closed group" or "campaigning for a change of government" among others [3]
(Of course it is open to debate whether many actual charities properly fulfil the stated requirements)
Hi all, my name's Stefan Donnelly and I am the Committee Chair of UK Chagos Support Association. Firstly, thanks for the donations for those who have chipped in!
To answer some of the questions raised about our group, we are not a registered charity. We did attempt to register but were told our aims were too overtly political to qualify as a charity. So yes we are a non-profit, entirely voluntary I should add, we have no paid staff and committee members get nothing for their work.
On where the money goes, its pretty evenly split between supporting Chagossian community projects (including training classes and Chagos Islands football team), supporting impoverished Chagossians in times of hardship and campaigning for Chagossian right to return.
Over the past year we have done a lot on the latter as the previous Government committed to 'resolving the issue,' though then did not do so. This is everything from paying for transport to protests and printing materials to promoted posts of Facebook.
For reasons of scale we haven't in the past arranged to be audited or published full accounts as it just wouldn't have been worth it for the small amount of money and limited donor base we had. As we look to fundraise more online, however, I appreciate it is reassuring to have that bit of extra detail and I think our next AGM will publish much more substantial reports on our income and spending, which we'll be happy to make public.
The point has been made before to me that the Gmail address looks at bit dodgy and transferring it over to the @chagossuport address (which we do actually hold) is certainly on the to-do list.
Hope that's answered some of the, very legitimate, concerns raised. If anyone has any further questions, on this or anything else about the campaign, feel free to ask
I don't know how it works in the UK, but they could be a non-profit that's not (yet) registered as a charity. The rules for being registered as a charity in Canada preclude political advocacy like this; I wouldn't be surprised if this is similar in the UK. There is a public registry of charities, but not of non-profits.
There was recently an online mini-conference mostly about the MinIon (involving the CTO of Oxford Nanopore and a few of the researchers involved in the MinIon Access Program).
People may be specifically interested in the first and second talks with the corollary of both being likely biased towards the MinIon:
Not sure that is totally fair, especially as Oyster allows you to go into negative balance over a journey as long as you have enough for the minimum fare on your card when you touch in.
I'm getting flashbacks to a long project where we had 4 centers testing different versions of a certain bit of kit (all 4 for TRL3-5, then a review selecting one for TRL6+).
Feel like I could write a book on the bullshit that occurred and that was just one fairly minor project. Suffice to say, lots of disingenuous 'helping' that was really just working out where exactly in the back to place the knife.
Even if you remove build versioning and all transitive dependencies from your env (making it less reproducible...) they will break pretty damn quick.