This email from Gordon Thomson, the London editor of Time Out, has passed across my desk.
We were excited and proud to be able to offer you direct access to all four main candidates on one platform, which would give you an opportunity to quiz them in person on their plans for our city.
Disappointingly, Boris […]

There are 650 million people with disabilities in the world; four-fifths of them live in the developing world. While much has been done in the developed world to improve the lot of people with disabilities and to bring us closer to equality, we are not there yet; things are that much worse in the developing […]

Nadine Dorries has posted another attack on an MP who supports abortion encouraging people to vote solely on that issue; this time, it is Barbara Follett.
In order to receive funding they have to support Labour party values, and be pro-abortion
This means that any potential candidate of faith, ie, Jewish, Christian, Sikh, Muslim or Hindu would […]

Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Beds and doyenne of the anti-abortion movement in Parliament, has been pressing for further restrictions on abortion for some time. I have no doubt that she sincerely holds those beliefs. However, it does seem that the strength with which she holds those beliefs is clouding her judgement. As […]

The Times has published the top fifty countries from Jane’s list of stable and prosperous countries. The top eight are, in order with their populations in brackets, the Vatican (800), Sweden (9.1m), Luxembourg (480,000), Monaco (33,000), Gibraltar (29,000), San Marino (30,000), Liechtenstein (34,000) and the UK (60.5m). If Sweden is included, those countries are less […]

Two British newspapers have admitted something quite remarkable; lying. The Daily Express and the Daily Star have respectively published apologies to Kate and Gerry McCann for publishing stories for which there was “no evidence whatsoever” (Daily Express, 19 March). It’s a shame that they didn’t print something in their apology with a greater degree of […]

I wrote here about the risks of drawing comparison between al-Qaeda and the IRA. An article arguing something similar from Henry McDonald is on the Guardian politics blog; I recommend reading it.
xD.

One of the pieces of advice given to bloggers most frequently is ‘blog regularly’. Suffice to say that I don’t blog regularly. Often, perhaps, but not regularly. Part of this is work patterns and tiredness, but I am working on improving quality and regularity of output. In the meantime, do please subscribe to the feed […]

The Rt Rev Joseph Devine, Bishop of Motherwell, has come out with some particularly putrid comments. According to The Scotsman (via New Humanist via Stroppy) and the BBC, the Bishop has said
“It is ever-present at the service each year for the Holocaust memorial, as if to create for themselves the image of a group of […]

I am no Pekinologist, but I am tempted to say, with apologies to Václav Havel, that
a spectre his haunting China - the spectre of what is known in the west as ‘dissent’
I wonder how much of the actuality in Tibet is reaching people in China-proper and how it is received by a people who (I […]