On Monday 16 October, ministers from the EU’s 25 Member States agreed to provide €2bn a year in aid to developing countries to help them liberalise as per the terms of the ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPA). Dubbed ‘Aid for Trade’ by the EU Commissioner for Trade, Peter Mandelson, the money was supposed to be evidence… [Read More]
Forget their constantly escalating estimated cost and the security nightmare of hosting them in the capital, a far more profound and compelling reason why London should not host the 2012 Olympics is that doing so seems likely to provide the perfect pretext for the construction of a giant mosque there able to hold 70,000 worshippers… [Read More]
Since, and because, the government down-graded Cannabis to a class C drug, its use among young people has substantially increased. So claimed Roger Davy, a West Yorkshire magistrate and national spokesman on youth courts, according to a a reort in today’s Times entitled ‘Cannabis is linked to rising child crime and harder drugs’. Britain is… [Read More]
Courtesy of the Simpsons, we Brits are now subject on the last night of every October to the annoying ritual of being disturbed by incessant door-bell ringing by small groups of young children dressed up as ghouls who are being conducted by one of their long-suffering mums on a charmless round of ‘trick or treating’.… [Read More]
One thing should be made clear from the outset about the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which now looks set to be passed by the EP in December and enter into EU law. The directive does not seek to regulate ‘linear’ audiovisual content, such as video clips and animations in news and press websites, blogs, video… [Read More]
Clearly, with every passing day, the Islamist terror threat grows ever more grave. It is also becoming ever more widely recognised, as increasing numbers awake up from their previous comforting dream that all such talk was merely ‘Islamophobia’ or else a guise by which the authorities here seek to justify grabbing ever more power to… [Read More]
Were it not bad enough that those responsible for London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games unknowingly chose to stage them during Ramadan, when Muslim competitors would be seriously disadvantaged, today’s Times reports their estimated costs have spiralled by so much as to have caused the early resignation of the man appointed to… [Read More]
I am struck by two adjacent news-in-brief reports in today’s Times. One is entitled ‘Islamophobic bullying fears’ and reports a rise in anecdotal evidence of bullying of Muslim schoolchildren in British schools. The other which is immediately below is entitled ‘Terrorism books’. It reports that a 22-year old woman from Southall named Samina Malik has… [Read More]
‘I thought I was paying to be educated by leading academics, not for a library membership and a reading list’. So complained one final-year history undergraduate at Bristol University, according to a story in today’s Times, upon learning that all he would receive by way of formal tuition this year for the £1,200 he had… [Read More]
However well or ill things in Iraq might currently be going for the US and UK, the question remains as to whether or not Bush and Blair were justified in going to war against Saddam in 2003. They claimed Saddam posed a threat to the west and its allies because of his WMD programmes. It… [Read More]