Society

The title of the worst deal in British corporate history is hotly contested. Glaxo and SmithKline were worth £107 billion on the day they announced their merger: eight years later, they’re worth £57 billion, and they’re not quite the ‘kings of science’ their chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier said they would be. Getting on for a decade after it paid £75 billion for Mannesmann of Germany in Europe’s largest hostile bid, Vodafone still hasn’t recovered. Capping both of those, Lord Simpson’s foray into the American telecoms industry after he took over at GEC and renamed it Marconi is always going to take some beating for the speed and thoroughness with which

Amazing: MI6’s former chief has denied that the intelligence service murdered Diana, Princess of Wales.

I’d actually thought Castro’s retirement would prompt more of this sort of nonsense. I guess we’re still waiting for Seumas Milne to pipe up in The Guardian. Still, the palm for the most idiotic thing I’ve seen goes to Chris Bertram: …And, of course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where

I think this is an advertisement for some kind of high-falutin’ weather forecaster. HEAD OF HORIZON SCANNING CENTRE   The Foresight Programme   London base – Competitive salary The Government Office for Science, led by the Government Chief   Scientific Adviser is located in the Department for Innovation, Universities   and Skills. Within this office the Foresight Programme strengthens   strategic policy making by embedding an evidence-based futures approach across government. Horizon Scanning (HS) is the systematic examination of potential threats,   opportunities and likely developments, including but not restricted   to those at the margins of current thinking and planning. The Horizon   Scanning Centre’s (HSC) main aims are

So The Chicago Sun-Times is to start running signed editorials. TAPPED’s Dana Goldstein thinks this is a “good move” and wonders why more newspapers don’t do this. I imagine she’s in favour of this on the usual grounds of “transparency” and “accountability”. But it’s still a silly notion. Clearly, Ms Goldstein can’t have written many newspaper editorials. If she had, she would know that it’s rather unfair to make individual leader writers put their names to editorials they’ve written but do not necessarily agree with. This is not, despite what you may think, a rare phenomenon. Even when one is fortunate enough to write a leader relatively free from interference