The extraordinary images from Japan over the past week evoke not only sympathy but awe. The damage wreaked by the natural disasters, in both human and economic terms, has been colossal. Entire communities have been reduced to little more than shattered glass and driftwood. The death toll is already well into the thousands, with more
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told the Commons that a no-fly zone over Libya was ‘perfectly deliverable’. Next day, G8 foreign ministers meeting in Paris failed to agree to one. Britain, France and Lebanon put a resolution to the United Nations. Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, said ‘We should not rush to judgment’ on
Recent cases over Christians refusing gay couples hotel accommodation and Christian couples wanting to adopt have brought Christian belief into conflict with the law. The Christians have lost. Lord Justice Laws, arguing in 2010 that Christian belief was ‘subjective’, laid a marker for those judgments by drawing a distinction ‘between the law’s protection of the
Midsomer and Soham The producer of ITV’s murder-mystery series Midsomer Murders was suspended after saying he didn’t want black characters on the show because it was ‘the last bastion of Englishness’. While many English villages still reflect Midsomer in their colour, it is over 200 years since a black man first settled in the English
On suffrage Sir: In his article ‘Failure of the Feminists’ (12 March), Paul Johnson asserts that some women would have got the vote in Britain well before 1914 if ‘feminists’ had been willing to accept property qualifications. In fact the stated aim of the major suffrage societies was to achieve the vote on the same
