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WEB EXCLUSIVE: What fuels China’s Africa policy

Heidi Kingstone on the motivation behind China’s relations with Africa Steven Spielberg’s conscience finally got the better of him. The Oscar-winning director resigned as ‘artistic adviser’ to the upcoming 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics last night.  His “energy”, he said, “must be spent on doing all I can to help bring an end to the unspeakable crimes

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes | 19 January 2008

The news that the circulation of the Sun sank below three million in December, its lowest since the early Seventies, is a landmark. The moment that the Sun’s circulation overtook that of the Mirror, in May 1978, revealed a big shift in the political and social history of this country. No longer were the aspirations

Any other business

The military millionaires who control Pakistan Inc

Elliot Wilson says Pakistan’s economy is dominated by a ruthless business conglomerate that owns everything from factories and bakeries to farmland and golf courses: the army Sometime in late 2004, Pakistan’s all-powerful army made a curious decision. Under mounting pressure from London and Washington to capture Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Baluchistan,

The FSA is not fit for purpose

‘It is somewhat ironical,’ the chairman of the Financial Services Authority told the Treasury select committee investigating the Northern Rock crisis, ‘that one of the responses is to try to seek from the rating agencies even more work and even more assessment.’ The paradox intriguing Sir Callum McCarthy was the suggestion that credit-rating agencies, having

And another thing | 19 January 2008

Charles Lamb, writing to Joseph Hume at Christmas 1807 on the subject of ‘a certain turkey and a contingent plumb-pudding’, added, ‘I always spell plumb-pudding with a b, I think it reads fatter and more suetty’. As it happens, the big OED has found the same suetty spelling in a cookery book published in 1726.