Новости за 21.06.2015

The British public has been spared the sight of David Cameron leading us all in a group sun salutation – or a headstand – from the Downing Street rose garden or perhaps from the lawns at Chequers. In India, the homeland of yoga, people think it less strange when their leaders engage in activities that blend the physical and the spiritual, which is why there was no great feeling of amazement when the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, led a crowd of about 35,000 in a mass yoga session in Delhi. 

Arab unity has been the most hopeless aspiration of the Middle East. The idea that the Arab world – the Arabic-speaking, largely Muslim land mass between the Atlantic and the borders of Iraq and Iran – could turn into one confederated nation whose wealth, political power and armies would dominate the most strategic area of the globe, has proved to be as delusional as the European Union has turned out to be real. Until now.

When the reality is indescribably bleak, as it is for Labour, the instinct is to seek sanctuary in fantasy. So today we consider the possibility that, in September, Jeremy Corbyn will be announced as the party’s leader.

A bureaucratic screw-up or a mighty blow at press freedom struck by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s democratic Germany on behalf of an Arab dictator? Who on earth decided that German cops were going to pounce on poor Ahmed Mansour – one of Al Jazeera’s top journalists – at Tegel airport in Berlin on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by a regime which has just sentenced its previously elected President to death?

In his role as the poor man’s Tony Blair, David Cameron presumes to speak for the general public and for relatives of Iraq war casualties, writing to the Iraq inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot: “They, and I, had hoped for publication of your report by now and we are fast losing patience”. This should be the very least of Sir John’s concerns.

Parties have a tradition of vowing to slash spending on bureaucracy and benefits in election campaigns before quietly sheathing their swords once the heat of battle is behind them. It is a tradition that our would-be Iron Chancellor, George Osborne, seems determined not to follow. Having signed up the sometimes prickly Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Osborne has made it clear that the plan to cut another £12bn from welfare is going ahead, in order to restore what the two of... Читать дальше...

Father’s Day! Regular readers may recall that I never knew my father, Eddie, as he died when I was a 15-month-old baby , aged 41.

That the British are a nation of animal lovers is regularly held as a truism, except, of course, when we feel cheated by stand-in dogs on TV talent shows.

It is both a credit to the BBC’s commentary line-up and a sad indictment on athletics that we greet coverage of the sport with the hope that we can get some insight into the latest controversy as well as commentary on running, jumping and throwing.

As a nation, we don’t have as much sex as we would like, a survey has (somewhat unsurprisingly) confirmed.

What will the Dowager Countess make of plans to turn Downton Abbey into a musical? A scheme to transfer the most stiffly British drama on television into a stage show after it ends later this year would doubtless be greeted with outrage by the matriarch-cum-lynchpin of propriety.

In your article on the disappearance of the hen harrier from the English uplands (“Fight or flight? Rare hen harriers are disappearing from their nests near grouse-shooting estates’,” 14 June) the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust is quoted as calling on the RSPB to sign up to the draft Hen Harrier Recovery Plan, with the implication that it is intransigence on the part of the RSPB that is somehow responsible for the crisis facing this beautiful bird.

Make mine a Stella

few things inject such quiet pleasure into the working day as a refreshing cup of tea, made just the way you like it; conversely, few things are so dissatisfying as a cup of tea made the way you don't like it – which brings us to the quandary of the office tea round.

Alceste Diocletian Penumbra has been lecturing in Oriental Languages at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges since the late 1980s. He has known no other employment. Yet he would be the first to contend that language-teaching is by no means the chief interest of an exceptionally quiet and blameless life.

It is less than two months until the Edinburgh Festival begins. A time when those previously mentally stable lose control as they chase elusive 5-star reviews. I am a comedian and for years I lived the experience of Edinburgh vicariously through colleagues who went. I celebrated their success and cried with them over their loss. Ok that’s a lie, In the main I read with bitterness their success and smugness their failures, but whilst doing so I made myself a promise, I would only ever go when I believed I had something to say worth hearing. Читать дальше...