parliament

The exhibit Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul has been on at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Ottawa Canada, since October 24. For that entire time nearly 400 workers (including education staff and tour guides) have been on strike.

The news only gets worse.

As Heritage Key has previously reported talks broke down nearly two weeks ago with the union believing a settlement to be “impossible.” The union wants the museum to agree to binding arbitration. So far the museum has said no.

People who want to see the exhibit have had to cross picket lines to do so and the attendance numbers so far have not been pretty.

404 years ago a group of Catholic rebels were caught trying to blow up Parliament. Their failure, subsequent torture and gruesome deaths, have become the focus for one of the year's highlights, when millions of Brits will venture outside to light bonfires, burn effigies and set off around 30,000 tons of gunpowder in firework displays great and small.

Yet while most of those marvelling at rockets, firecrackers and Catherine Wheels will know about Guy Fawkes and his ill-advised plotters, not many will know fireworks go back thousands of years before, in ancient China.

They weren’t asking for the costs of duck houses, moat-cleaning, helicopter landing pad-maintenance or even dry rot-treatment, but Roman officials in Britain made their own inflated expenses claims on the taxpayers’ pound, 2,000 years before The Telegraph newspaper sparked the scandal currently gripping the United Kingdom over MPs’ perceived fleecing of the public purse.

A handful of the 400 tablets found in 1973 at Vindolanda – a Roman encampment on Hadrian’s Wall – detail the hundreds of items chiefs at the settlement expected to be reimbursed for. They include exciting things like ears of grain, hobnails for boots, bread, cereals, hides and pigs.