There’s been a lot of scaremongering from the Westminster establishment about Jeremy Corbyn proposing to move away from the neoliberal economic consensus that has ruled the roost in British politics since 1979 – a consensus which has failed ordinary people in relation to housing, education, jobs, wages and the gap between the super-rich and the rest of us.
In the current climate of suspicion about the sexual activities of all sorts of public figures of the past 30 years, and particularly politicians, it was practically inevitable that Ted Heath’s name would come up sooner or later.
No visitor to Nairobi’s State House, a sprawling Palladian mansion designed by the Kent-born architect Herbert Baker more than a century ago, could be in any doubt about the symbolic power of ivory in this, the powerhouse of East Africa.
There is a war going on in Africa. It is not a war that always reaches the headlines, but it is a brutal and bloody one nevertheless. It is a struggle that is being fought across numerous African countries, from Gabon to Kenya, Tanzania to Botswana. The battle is on to save the continent’s rapidly diminishing elephant population from extinction in the wild.
What should our disappearing wildlife really be like? Let me tell you. Last Friday, in a disused limestone quarry on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, I saw the most breathtaking combined display of butterflies and wild flowers that I have seen in England for years.
Talk about memory is currently much in the air – getting it, improving it, losing it – and Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra entered this debate with their bold decision to join those musicians who play without the assistance of sheet music, by delivering Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony without that support.
Often when we feel oddly upset about the death of a celebrity we’ve never met, it takes days to pinpoint the roots of the sadness. I’m getting closer now. It’s not that I thought Cilla – no second name required, like Cher, Elvis or Madonna – would live forever, but in her 70s, her aura as a showbiz force of nature was still strong. I was hoping she’d give immortality a good go.
Bras = hilarious, am I right? The Sun, normally a bastion of Tory support, greeted the news of Michelle Mone’s peerage today under the banner, ‘Lady Bra-Bra’. Inside, a spread on the underwear tycoon asked the question: ‘How do you make a Lady Mone? Give her a peerage!’ Because obviously, the only reason you’d put a bird in the House of Lords is to get her juices flowing, and then pounce. Obviously. Moth-eaten ermine does it for me, every time.
How do you win a political argument that you seem to have been losing for a long time? Some in the Labour party are quite keen to know the answer, given their membership may be about to elect as leader a man so far on its fringes that he only occasionally obeys the party’s whip. And while he may be the last person Labourites would like to listen to, David Cameron knows a thing or two about this, having spent the last five years as Prime Minister trying to fight a recalcitrant group of backbenchers... Читать дальше...
The news that a 55-year-old man collapsed and died while taking part in yesterday's Prudential RideLondon-Surrey 100 cycle sportive is a reminder of the challenge such an event presents.
The Government’s new plan to jail "rogue landlords" for renting out homes to undocumented migrants is an extremely unjust measure for everyone involved in the private housing market. As well as harming undocumented people and needlessly punishing those who rent to them, it will only make help fuel discrimination among landlords and letting agents.
Beyond the open door of her cavernous warehouse apartment, in a not-yet-quite-gentrified Brooklyn neighbourhood, Adrienne Truscott is standing at the kitchen island in a sequinned showgirl dress and a rubber horse’s head. “Oh, sorry, I was just about to take a selfie and post it saying: ‘Woke up like this’,” she laughs, pulling off the equine disguise, which is a visual gag to be employed in her new comedy hour, Adrienne Truscott’s A One-Trick Pony!, coming to the Edinburgh Fringe this week.
Right now, political parties are sorting through candidates to choose who's going onto the ballot for next year's London mayoral election. I have just one recommendation: select a compromiser, a bureaucrat. Pick someone dull.
Talk about memory is currently much in the air – getting it, improving it, losing it – and Nicholas Collon and the Aurora Orchestra entered this debate with their bold decision to join those musicians who play without the assistance of sheet music, by delivering Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony without that support.
Every so often, a scientific development appears with an immense potential for good, but at the same time it also carries great risks if misused, either accidentally or deliberately. So it is with a technology called “gene drives” which is a means of spreading genetic traits rapidly through a population of insects or other kinds of fast-breeding organisms, rather like a virus. It “supercharges” genetically modified genes so that they defy the normal rules of inheritance. Normally, GM traits would... Читать дальше...
Russia and Kenya, the two nations implicated most seriously in the latest doping allegations to rock the athletics world, have both hit back over the claims.
It’s an unfortunate fact of economics and finance that many different concepts seem to have been given the same name. “Current account”, for instance, refers both to someone’s regular bank account and also the difference between an entire nation’s income and expenditure. “Capital” can mean an individual’s financial wealth, the money that flows across national borders, and also, just to add to the confusion, a bank’s safety buffer.
