These are scary times at the BBC. After a decade of crises, the steady hand of Tony Hall has brought some calm and reassured the top brass, for now at least; but in the coming year a battle with a majority Tory Government looms, and there is every possibility that the Corporation will find its wings clipped. One of the causes of anxiety is that there are only 18 months left until the current Charter expires.
After the vote, Aung San Suu Kyi put the best spin she could on it. The Burmese parliament’s rejection of attempts to amend the constitution was “not a defeat”, she insisted, because “people knew the result they would get”.
It is little wonder that Michael Gove has kept an uncharacteristic low profile since his unexpected appointment last month as Justice Secretary.
The IMF position at the negotiating table in the current round of discussions with Greece highlights an institutional flaw in the international financial system (report, 25 June). The IMF was set up to address short-term payments difficulties, but it is increasingly being called upon to dictate long-term growth strategy. This has opened up a further fissure, divergence between policies that are publicly advocated by IMF economists as being conducive to economic growth and the policies that are... Читать дальше...
I write this column today from France, from the frontline of the battle between protectionism and free market economics, between traditional labour practices and the digital economy, between the old France and the new world.
The Americans who make comments loudly after a major incident have been unusually quiet since the shooting in Charleston, so they must be preparing for an even grander screaming session than normal.
David Groves was 56 when he died of a heart attack the night before taking his work capability assessment. His widow claimed that it was the stress that killed him. Terry McGarvey, 48, who suffered from polycytheamia, asked for an ambulance to be called during his Work Capability Assessment. He knew that he wasn’t well enough to attend his WCA but feared that his benefits would be stopped if he did not. He died the following day.
It’s Ramadan, and the BBC is marking it by releasing five new shorts on iPlayer under the rather Ronseal heading of “British Muslim Comedy.”
If you’re prepared to fall down an internet rabbit-hole for a little while, type Whose Line is it Anyway? in to YouTube. You’ll find Stephen Fry and Peter Cook rapping about having a baby, Tony Slattery and Paul Merton aping a children’s nativity and Robin Williams with a pom-pom on his head, among other things.
Thirty-two thousand children are languishing unnecessarily in 760 orphanages in Haiti. At least 80 per cent of these children have one or two living parents who want them, but have no access to health, education or social services in the community.
1. Lovely painting of Old Ford Road by Harold Steggles from 1931, via the East London Group, which features paintings by the group before the Second World War.
Fracking extracts gas by opening up fissures in shale rock. It also opens up a great many cans of worms. Wednesday’s chaotic deferral by Lancashire County Council of its decision on whether to permit the energy firm Cuadrilla to open a new UK fracking operation at Little Plumpton shows the complexity of the debate.
Before we condemn the government for the imposition of the “bedroom tax” on some of the poorest families in Britain, it is worth setting out why they did it.
Low interest rates and loose monetary policies are threatening the future of the insurance and pension industries by forcing providers to switch their investments into riskier asset classes, a damning report has warned.
Q. Does Salazar’s opus definitively prove his athletes were not doping?
The attention to detail was so relentless and fastidious that you can see precisely what leads Mo Farah to such unstinting devotion to the man who has turned him into a winner. We had waited three weeks for any sign of a defence from Alberto Salazar and these near 12,000 words were true to his reputation.
This is the most irresistibly joyous musical-theatre make-over of a much-loved movie since Billy Eliot. It does more for genuine Girl Power in the span of an evening than an eternity of Viva Forever! (the short-lived Spice Girls juke-box venture) could have achieved.