Новости за 23.07.2015

"Smoker or non-smoker?" After "guilty or innocent?" it's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked – should you have the misfortune to be sent to prison. A staggering 80 per cent of prisoners smoke, but there's far more to their tobacco habit than mere nicotine: tobacco – "burn" – is the gold standard of the prison economy and cigarettes are branded indelibly into convict culture.

To be drawn in the Private Members’ Bill ballot after less than a month in Parliament was a big surprise, and having the chance to introduce legislation this early in my political career is a real honour.

The gallows stain Iran far more than the centrifuge. You can negotiate over a nuclear facility. You can’t reboot death. I’ve argued about this with an Iranian ambassador who is – or was – a friend of mine. How can Iran hang a woman when the world pleads for her life? Was it not for God to make decisions over life or death? There had to be temporal judgments, I was told. There had to be law. The laws of Islam, of course.

The Labour Party has lapsed into a crisis that was wholly avoidable and arises from a wilfully self-serving or inadvertent misreading of the party’s unexpected defeat at the election.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was the poster boy of the West when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. There were lavish gifts from the CIA, MI6 and the Saudis; tonnes of arms and tens of millions of dollars. Ronald Reagan praised him as a great hero; he was invited to tea with Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

According to policing minister Mike Penning, the Government’s strategy in the war on drugs is working because long-term levels of the abuse of illicit substances are falling. Whether you agree depends on how you interpret the word “working”.

Have you reached, or are you approaching, a certain age? Are you feeling beleaguered? Me too. It was around 2010 that the post-war generation first faced a battering for supposedly having it too good. The Conservative MP, David Willetts, wrote a book called The Pinch, subtitled How the baby boomers took their children’s future, and why they should give it back. A couple of young media bucks – Ed Howker and Shiv Malik – stirred the pot with their cri de coeur about being the “Jilted Generation”.

A story from Oxford caught my eye this week: the city council is now being forced to buy social housing outside its boundaries to house its homeless. The implications are enormous, but the reaction from the political classes? A shrug of the shoulders.

At last sensible Labour politicians are injecting some maturity into the leadership debate. To start with, Tony Blair’s aide John McTernan called anyone who nominated Jeremy Corbyn a “moron”, which is such a refreshing change from the divisive and childish approach of the Left.

Just when we thought the dizzying excess of London's luxury property market had reached its zenith, make way for Aykon Nine Elms - or, more accurately, the Versace Block. Middle Eastern developer Damac Properties and Versace will team up to renovate a 50-storey skyscraper on London's South Bank. The new development is a spectacular example of everything that's wrong with London's property market and a massive up yours to the millions of Londoners languishing in poor housing.

Female sex dolls have been around for years, and they still have a reputation as slightly grubby, dead-eyed ‘vessels’. You think of sex dolls, and the image of some lonely bloke in stained Y-fronts who names his doll Destiny and brushes her hair after simulated sex comes to mind. The whole thing is decidedly seedy – decidedly, well, unsexy - and the industry itself isn’t exactly winning awards for enlightenment when it comes to women’s needs. Providing mute, pneumatic lumps of silicone purely for male pleasure has... Читать дальше...

1) Isis is a relatively new terror organisation that has enjoyed a rise of astonishing rapidity – culminating in its capture of Mosul in June 2014

There is an acceptable face of creativity, and it’s white. That’s the message sent by Oh My Vlog!, a new magazine centred around YouTube celebrities. A quick flip through its pages and you’ll find mostly white faces looking back at you.

When the VMA nominees were announced on Tuesday, Nicki Minaj was not best pleased. Despite nominations for Best Female and Hip-Hop Video, her oiled-up, internet-breaking offering Anaconda didn’t make the Best Video shortlist. It left the rapper rightfully feeling snubbed – and she let Twitter know about it.

Most of the coverage of Labour’s leadership contest has focused on the candidates. But what about the people who will be choosing between Corbyn, Burnham, Cooper and Kendall? In May 2015, we surveyed 1,180 Labour Party members as part of a wider research project into party membership in the UK funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Here’s some of what we found.

Counter-intuitively, overbooking the seats on commercial flights is good practice for an airline and beneficial for passengers – so long as it is handled properly.

One of the marks of a politician who changed the weather is the extent to which their legacy is still disputed, and their views argued over, many years after they left office. Apart from Margaret Thatcher, nowhere has this been more graphically true in recent years than for Tony Blair.

John Whittingdale, newly appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is one of the more devout followers of Margaret Thatcher. As a young man he worked in her office, and was inside No 10 Downing Street at the time of her political assassination in November 1990. He has always been clear that he owes his career to the former prime minister.

I was 18 when I discovered the BBC World Service. Of course, Listen with Mother, Children's Hour, and Uncle Mac, had already long previously introduced me to the BBC Home Service. But the World Service was to prove a positive lifeline.