Electoral Freud (without the Freud)
Elections are very much in the ether at the moment. Japan has just got over it’s local elections, the UK has just had its own with a referendum on the…
Tiny Britain
David Cameron, the UK prime minister, is a racist. I do not use the term lightly because it’s a big deal calling someone a bigot, saying that they are irrational…
Road to hell is paved with hamburgers
Would you like relish with that court ruling? A Dutch McDonald’s employee is fired for adding an unauthorised slice of cheese to a burger. But a Dutch court rules for…
Not an unprecedented pile of bollocks
The news is full of the foiled airliner attack plot in the UK. The possible attack has as usual been followed up by an all-out assault on common sense and…
Hamburger madrasas
A friend sends me today a link to David Byrne’s blog. Byrne’s latest entry is about ultra-Christian, ultra-right wing community schools that conflate the Bible with a political agenda. Are…
Australia pulls peacekeepers out of Lebanon — a told you so moment?
Yesterday in this space, I speculated that Israel’s apparently deliberate and definitely fatal targeting of UN personnel in Lebanon might have been designed to force their withdrawal. Today, Australia announced…
Bush’s faulty intelligence
So Bush finally admits what the rest of knew before the war, that the intelligence about Saddam’s WMD was wrong. Here wrong should be read as ‘made up’, but don’t…
America’s banned weapons
What is the rest of the story? More than a year after the last battle for Fallujah, the US military has admitted using phosphorous weapons. There may be other nasty…
Spare a quarter, pal — it’s tough being the world’s only superpower
The United States is reaching out to its friends for aid for the victims of hurricane Katrina. The shops and supermarkets of the nation are stuffed to overflowing with food…
Bush to lead New Orleans inquiry
This is like putting the drunk driver in charge of investigating the car crash. Sept.8, 05