Новости за 15.07.2015

For an authentic flavour of reaction on the Israeli right to the nuclear agreement with Iran, this is from a Tuesday column on the website of the daily newspaper Israel Hayom. “The US government has been engaged in a delusional sword dance with Iran that will culminate with the death of all civilisation,” wrote Dr Haim Shine.  “The West is committing suicide... and it is now enslaved to the whims of the leading perpetrators of terrorism around the globe.”

When David Cameron was a newly elected leader seeking to rebrand the Conservative Party, a decade ago now, one gesture he made to demonstrate his green credentials was to have solar panels installed in his London home.

“Strikes? What strikes?” is probably the most rational reaction to the Government’s plans to tighten still further Britain’s labour laws – virtually unchanged from the Thatcher-Major era of reform, and famously described by Tony Blair as the toughest in Europe.

The evidence of mass migration is everywhere: boat loads of emaciated people adrift on the Andaman Sea, begging for water; exhausted refugees staggering out of the surf on Greek islands; desperate families breaking down the barbed wire fence separating Turkey and Syria to escape the battles being fought a few miles away. What are they fleeing from? Those who make it from Libya tell dreadful stories of beheadings, torture and rape, while there are reports of people being enslaved in jungle camps in southeast Asia and buried in mass graves. Читать дальше...

Among the thousands of words written before the election that turned out to be irrelevant – and I wrote many of them about the effect of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act on a minority Labour government – perhaps the most mistaken were those devoted to the subject of the Great Fragmentation of British politics.

If there was one statistic that could tell you everything that has been going wrong with how we raise our children in this country recent years, I  think I may have found it. If you want to know why British children are falling behind their peers in other countries in maths, have next to no social skills, are glued to their iPads and smartphones, and why their parents barely know anything about them except their names, then wonder no more. Here is the explanation: fewer than half of children aged... Читать дальше...

The integrity of the eurozone has been maintained, but at what cost, and why?

Do you have a particular gripe about modern women and/or society that you would like to pin down on an individual? Why not try everyone’s favourite socialite and scapegoat of the moment, Kim Kardashian. If you’d like to avoid constructively looking into the ills of popular culture as a whole, feel free to just write down your comments on a post-it note and stick it to her much-critiqued derriere.

David Cameron is being outfoxed, not only by the SNP, but by a sizable number of his own MPs who have decided to join the Labour Party in their opposition to the Government’s proposals which would effectively repeal the Hunting Act by the back-door. This is a humiliating climb-down from the Prime Minister and a clear admission that he simply does not have the support in his own Party to win the vote in the Commons, whether or not EVEL is in place.

In an act of political doublespeak, business secretary Sajid Javid described the purpose of Trade Union Bill - which has its first reading in the House of Commons today - thus: “Trade unions have a constructive role to play in representing their members’ interests, but our one nation government will balance their rights with those of working people and business.”

You assiduously slather them in sun cream and cram hats on their heads, but do you give their eyes the same protection? We've got it sorted

On the night of May 7, she symbolised a political earthquake, the 20-year-old who overturned a 16,000 majority and deposed one of Labour’s most experienced and respected MPs. Mhairi Black took the seat of Paisley and Renfrewshire South on a tide of nationalist fervour, and became the youngest person to take a place in the Palace of Westminster since the 17th Century. She represented the astonishing rise of the SNP, but was seen as little more than a curio, an anomaly, a one-off whose victory illustrated... Читать дальше...

The dancing in Badke goes from social celebration to claustrophobic exhaustion, and back again. Ten Palestinian dancers, with backgrounds from hip hop to ballet, hurl themselves joyfully into a wedding dance. They won’t stop, even when the power cuts out.

No one likes to be a party pooper, but in the Middle East, the international community giving a stamp of approval to Iran’s nuclear programme is not much to celebrate.

The number of UK students taking out payday loans in order to make ends meet is much higher than previously thought, according to new research.

Climate change is as serious a threat to humanity as nuclear war, according to a report on climate change commissioned by the Foreign Office. Which begs the obvious question – why isn’t the Government listening?

A Turner Prize-winning artist has been hit with a repair bill after he went on a “wholly inappropriate” axe rampage causing damage to a brand new £25 million theatre after his play got scathing reviews.

The hunting fraternity claims that those who are opposed to hunting wild mammals with hounds are “ignorant townies” hellbent on some class war. Such nonsense.

Watches, consoles, cameras and other tech will all be on sale

“The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” is how Oscar Wilde famously styled the sight of an English country gentleman on a fox hunt. Something of the same could be said of the sight of David Cameron, no stranger to a red coat, in full pursuit of the Hunting Act. And yet, having flushed out his quarry and in charge of a newly enlarged pack of slavering (mostly) pro-hunting Tory MPs, his prey is proving unexpectedly elusive.

Taken at face value, the deal between Iran and the major world powers to curb Tehran’s nuclear programme in return for an easing of sanctions is not merely to be welcomed. Just possibly the agreement – the culmination of a 12-year process – could signal the start of a thaw in relations between the West and, arguably, the Middle East’s biggest power, in the deep freeze since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Shows at Covent Garden's Linbury Theatre can be either glimpses of heaven, or hell on earth, and the in the past couple of years we've had examples of both. Turkeys like Ben Frost's mind‑numbing demolition of The Wasp Factory and Luca Francesconi's unspeakable Quartett have been offset by Georg Friedrich Haas's miniature masterpiece Atthis, and by the brilliant chamber opera which Philip Glass created out of Kafka's The Trial. This little underground theatre is a test-bed for shows which are either... Читать дальше...

However much Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and the Gulf sultans rage at the Vienna agreement, the Arabs at least will suspect the truth: that the Americans have taken the Shia Muslim side in the Middle East’s sectarian war.