Новости за 02.07.2015

The SNP’s core message at the general election was that more nationalist MPs would mean a “strong voice” for Scotland at Westminster. Chris Grayling’s planned demotion of all 56 nationalist MPs to second-class citizens in the mother of parliaments, coupled with this week’s overwhelming defeat in the Commons on any move toward full fiscal autonomy, suggests the word “strong” is massively overplaying the reality of Scotland’s influence at Westminster.

Launching air strikes last August in Iraq to blunt the galloping advance of Isis across the country was one thing, but it was barely a month before the Pentagon alongside Arab allies expanded the campaign into Syria. The reasoning was clear. If Isis was ignoring the border between the countries, then so should we.

So the Greeks are going to vote Yes on Sunday. Fear. Humiliation. Patriotism (pro-European or pro-euro, we shall see). Or pragmatism, that great industrial powerhouse of European politics.  And so the EU, the IMF, the ECB, the lot – they will have won.  Greece – nil.  Delete the Second World War.

Many people will have woken up yesterday morning and felt a familiar sense of queasiness as they heard the news that England had been knocked out of a World Cup semi-final. But some may have been surprised at their level of disappointment; a sign they had invested more emotion in the women’s game than perhaps they had expected.

For a knotty constitutional problem that has vexed the finest minds for decades, the Government’s proposals for so-called English Votes for English Laws is a surprisingly elegant solution. The West Lothian Question, to use its older title, asked why an MP sitting for a Scottish constituency in Lothian could vote on, say, the organisation of the NHS in the rest of the UK, but an English, Welsh or Northern Irish MP would never be able to vote on a matter devolved to the Scottish Parliament. The notion of a double-majority ... Читать дальше...

It’s very generous of the International Monetary Fund and the banks to tell the Greeks that the government they elected isn’t allowed to do any of the things they were elected to do.

The Government must give further thought to several important areas before making a final decision on the Airports Commission recommendations.

Triumphalism is not a very edifying spectacle and it was, by all accounts, the distinct theme of the big Conservative fund-raising shindig held earlier this week at the Hurlingham Club.

One of the few aspects to deplore about British journalism – which is the best in the world, even allowing for the controversies engulfing it over the past few years – is the tendency to look at everything through our end of the telescope. Seeing every world development through the small-minded what-does-it-mean-for-us approach can make for depressing reading.

Here we go again. There has been an atrocity in foreign parts. The Government thinks it should do something, or at least be seen to be doing something. So it proposes a neat little application of the armed forces to inflict some punishment in the form of bombing from the safe distance of 30,000 feet. Honour saved; job done.

You can stay cool and stylish in the heatwave with an all-in-one. We've got it all buttoned up

Watching Amy in her early shows was like watching someone in another world. She'd hit a lyric or a melody and her eyes would roll back, her whole body would be so into it; you'd just look at her and know she was gone. The sad thing is that at that point she was only getting high from her music. Towards the end, when she got lost in the drugs and the alcohol, I never saw her perform like that again.

The 2015 Women’s Hour Power List is subtly different from the previous year’s incarnation. This year, instead of selecting women for their personal power, we are celebrating ten female figures who have the most 'influence' over the lives of women in Britain. 

It’s the advertising campaign that launched a thousand outraged tweets, along with guerilla attacks, newspaper splashes and bikini-ed protests from people keen to promote body positivity. So the ruling from the ASA that Protein World’s ‘Are You Beach Body Ready?’ advert is “not offensive” comes as a bit of a surprise to me, and I can only assume that the 70,000 people who signed the online petition that called to ban the ad feel much the same.

In July last year, Anas ‘Bader’ Hatem Qdeih, a seven-year-old boy already experiencing the fourth major conflict of his short life, was separated from his family as they fled with thousands of others from Israel’s bombardment of Khuza’a in northern Gaza. His mother and sisters managed to find shelter in a nearby kindergarten, but Bader was still running in the street when an artillery shell exploded nearby and his abdomen was cut open by shrapnel.

A candidate for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats has said that children's shows like Peppa Pig should have more homosexual characters.

“All women dress like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man ever does.  That is his.”  So declares a schoolmaster in drag during the lovely Wildean pastiche in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On. 

How did one school get its most disruptive pupils to turn up to an after-school homework club? By appealing to their feet. Sarah Cassidy hears why the Football Beyond Borders scheme is on to a winner

What’s the point of the Liberal Democrats? Maybe the party should just shut up and die. There is a coherent and enticing argument which says that a party formed through an alliance of parties in the heyday of Thatcherism has outlived its purpose, and whose existence is harming the very cause it was founded to champion. Such an argument might go on to say, very plausibly, that British liberalism is in a pretty good state: it’s just embedded within mainstream opinion, widely adopted by both Labour and the Tories... Читать дальше...