The Week

Leading article

Human wrongs

There is a danger in this week’s ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that Abu Hamza and four other Islamic extremists can be extradited to face terror charges in America. The danger is that it makes the court look reasonable and in doing so weakens the case for removing Britain from its jurisdiction.

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 14 April 2012

Home The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain would not violate human rights by extraditing to the United States five terrorist suspects: Abu Hamza, Babar Ahmad, Adel Abdul Bary, Talha Ahsan and Khaled al-Fawwaz; the case of Haroon Aswat, who suffers from schizophrenia, was adjourned. A car bomb was found at Newry, Co.

Diary

Diary – 14 April 2012

Last summer when I was staying with my friend India Knight in Cornwall she said I absolutely must join Twitter. Besides being a Sunday Times columnist, she is a Twitter queen, No. 73 in the Top Twit 100, with 57,000 followers. Better still, she has a ‘peer index rating’ — whatever that is — of

Ancient and modern

Ancient and modern: Going postal

The principle of the Royal Mail is far older than our youthful version, which was founded in 1516 by Henry VIII’s ‘Master of the Posts’ and made publicly available in 1635. When Xerxes, king of the Persians, realised the extent of the disaster he had suffered at the battle of Salamis (481 bc), Herodotus tells us

Barometer

Barometer | 14 April 2012

Local heroes The BBC spent £2 million on fares to allow London-based staff to commute to its new studios in Manchester. There are some well-known people who live in Salford: — Harold Riley, artist — Mike Sweeney, DJ — Andy Whyment, actor And some Salford-born people who moved away: — Alistair Cooke, broadcaster — Ben

Letters

Letters | 14 April 2012

Threatened Christians Sir: Douglas Davis’s article on the plight of Arab Christians (‘Out of the east’, 7 April) raised a very important issue. What a shame he cynically exploited their misery to perform a clumsy character assassination on Muslims generally. Conjuring sensational phrases like ‘judenrein’ to raise the spectre of 1930s German fascism, was not