Новости за 07.07.2015

The drama continues. There is a long tradition in the European Union of talks going on far into the night until the exhausted participants manage to cobble together some sort of agreement. But these talks about Greece are not like that. There is no obvious compromise that should and could have been reached with just a bit of goodwill.

When George Osborne first introduced a £26,000 a year benefits cap I was working as a community organiser for the unemployed, and saw the poorest people reeling from its impact. One day a man came to see me asking for help filling a form to claim benefits. I read out one of the questions on the form: what kind of work are you looking for, I asked?  Any work, he replied. Then he shifted in his chair, and began to cry.

Whether plagiarism or favouritism, George Osborne’s new assault on the BBC, accusing it of harbouring “imperial ambitions”, is a straight lift from a speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2009. The person delivering that address was James Murdoch.

According to a recent survey by YouGov, only 38 per cent of respondents said they had sex at least a few times a month, but 64 per cent of Britons said they wanted to have sex at least this often. In addition, 10 per cent said they wished to have sex every day, a goal which only 1 per cent admitted reaching.

Finally, the elephant in the room – or perhaps the pram in the hall – of the Labour leadership contest is being talked about.

Mental health is one of the biggest problems facing young people in the UK today. But according to former Health Minister Paul Burstow, under Michael Gove student welfare just wasn’t seen as the Department of Education’s “core business” and instead, Gove quietly downgraded the importance of mental health in schools. 

The difficult second album has nothing on the difficult second season, it seems. After a year in the murky, swampy backdrop of Louisiana with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, True Detective wiped the slate clean before season two, promising a new cast, a new location, and a new narrative to mumble through. Unfortunately, not many people like it.

We’ve become so used to the term ‘benefits’, we can’t see how misleading and dangerous it is. It’s misleading because in any other context, ‘benefit’ means advantage or profit; something extra; a special payment or gift, perhaps to reward good behaviour. It’s dangerous because when we frame social securities in this way, we move away from seeing them as basic rights and start talking about them as bounteous rewards. And consequently, we have paved the well-trodden path for discussions about incentives, who deserves what and who doesn’t. Читать дальше...

The biggest own goal of the Women's World Cup did not come from Laura Bassett, the Notts County defender who scored the now infamous injury-time own goal that ended England’s hopes of winning the Women's World Cup in Canada.

1. Ken Livingstone was a more impressive mayor of London than his successor, and here is a small measure of it. His response to the 7 July 2005 bombings was his finest two minutes, rhetorically. Via Steve Bloomfield.

It is interesting, following decades of public pleading that our stiff-mannered, silver-spoon-sucking MPs should behave like “real people”, that when everyday types such as Labour MP Simon Danczuk and his wife, Karen, push themselves forward, well, we’re not too keen on it.

As we continue to digest the wonder that is the driverless electric car, the experts now bring us a “platoon” of electric taxis, moving together in such perfect harmony that they can all but eliminate wind resistance and cut vehicle emissions. It should be ready by 2030, though no one has considered why a platoon of taxis is much use to anyone. Still, the principle seems sound enough.

We have reached the point when it would be much better for all concerned to end the madness and negotiate an orderly exit for Greece from the European single currency. Like marriages and commercial partnerships, what seemed a good idea at the time sadly sometimes turns out to be a contract made in hell. In those circumstances the best answer is to accept reality and move on.