Новости за 24.09.2015

If things had gone to plan, Andy Burnham would have been basking in plaudits next Tuesday for an inspirational call to arms in his first speech as leader to the Labour Party’s conference.

The Hajj, nearly 1,400 years old, is the largest annual gathering of people on the planet for a religious purpose. As the fifth pillar of Islamic practice, the Hajj is an important part of Islam, obligatory for all Muslims who are financially and physically able to undertake it.

How dare he? The United Nations is turning 70 and just about any national leader you can name will be taking his or her turn at the lectern in the general debate next week at the start of this year’s General Assembly to extol world peace and prosperity.  David Cameron will not  be among them.

So much has been written and said about Michael Ashcroft’s biography of David Cameron, and yet so few people have turned their gaze to the real scandal brought to the surface by this piece of political agitprop. Not the question of whether the pig story is a porky. Or if the PM was once at a party where Class A drugs were being shared around. Or even the stunning allegation that Mr Cameron may be a bit posh. No, the most shocking aspect of this book is the light it shines on our corrupt, iniquitous, anti-democratic political system. Читать дальше...

The presumptions have been gloomy, verging on alarmist, as they so often are when the talk is of Russia. Satellite images suggest that Moscow has begun a military build-up in Syria, and this, according to a broad Western consensus, can only mean one thing: preparation for a more active – and necessarily more anti-Western – engagement in a country where Russia clings to its last Soviet-era foothold in the region.

Oh, you look so sweet, I thought, looking indulgently at my two sons. Angelic. Brotherly. Playing the fundamentally low-tech game of Subbuteo on the kitchen table (and being very on-message too, since apparently such old-fashioned games are back in favour).

Some people get confused by events in Syria, but they’re not that complicated. Quite simply, we need to bomb somewhere or other out there, like we should have done two years ago. Back then we should have dropped bombs to support the Isis rebels fighting against the evil Assad. But as we didn’t bother, we now need to put that right by bombing the Isis rebels, and protecting Assad.

What's a girlfriend-beating R&B singer gotta do to get a break around here? The troubled singer Chris Brown was freed from probation this year, only to have Britain, Canada and New Zealand deny him a visa due to his conviction for assaulting then-girlfriend Rihanna, and now Australia's hoping to rain on his parade, too.

Tourism has its roots in religious pilgrimage, yet mass tourism has transformed the pilgrimage.

‘Florida Man Disembowelled Girlfriend for Calling Out Ex’s Name During Sex’. It’s the kind of headline none of us hope to read while scrolling through our lunchtime al-desko reading material, but it’s been splashed across national newspapers – not to mention entertainment sites like People and Perez Hilton – this week as one horrific crime emerged. A man has been charged with first degree murder in the US after telling police he disembowelled his girlfriend. Maria Nemeth was found dead at the... Читать дальше...

I was reminded earlier this week of one of my favourite-ever recent anti-feminist numpties (sadly, as ever, there remains a depressingly plentiful pool from which to choose.)

The VW scandal, coming after no less mendacious ploys by some bankers, is a symptom of a cultural malaise which, if not treated, will spread further.

A #15secondshakespeare hashtag is circulating among thespians on Twitter this week, with actors giving spoken word versions of popular, often shallow, songs as though they were lines from Shakespeare, before nominating others to do the same.

"We need to turn a profit". This was Martin Shkreli’s shameless attempt to appeal to the supposed heartless capitalist in us all, as he made public his company’s decision to increase the price of Daraprim – a drug use by Aids patients and caner suffers – by 5,500 per cent.

I saw Catherine Tate’s latest comedy last week. It wasn’t on television, or in a theatre, but in a small independent cinema in south London.

When you imagine a typical day in the life of a teenage girl, you might think of catching the bus; flipping through messages on a smart phone; perhaps chatting with friends. But would sexism, harassment and degrading comments come immediately to mind? According to the results of a new survey, perhaps they should.

Steve Richards had a pop at the moral authority of the ‘centrist’ in The Independent this week. He suggested that using the term is simply one of the ways in which lazy people attack Jeremy Corbyn – something like ‘he’s on the hard left, but I’m a centrist’; or excuse George Osborne – ‘perhaps I don’t see eye to eye with him on everything, but at least he’s a centrist’.

The world-renowned architect Zaha Hadid has hung up during an interview with the BBC’s Today programme after a heated argument with presenter Sarah Montague.

The “new politics” my aunt. Having been found out as a same-old sexist with his top appointments, Jeremy Corbyn has persuaded some of his more gullible followers that he has kept his pledge to have equal numbers of women and men in his whole shadow cabinet – indeed that he has more women than men in his shadow cabinet. 

At the risk of appearing perverse, let’s start with a counter-intuitive proposition. The slowdown in China, far from weakening the global recovery, might actually help it become more durable.

Weird Al Yankovic has become a comedy phenomenon with musical spoofs of Miley Cyrus, Pharrell and more. As his world tour comes to Britain, he tells Alice Jones he loves poking fun at the inner circle