Scottish readers may be puzzled to see so many newspaper headlines about drought. Parts of the country, notably the Borders and the western Highlands, have already received one and a half times their normal rainfall for May. On Monday — as the water companies proposed seasonal tariffs to discourage customers from watering their gardens and
Home President Barack Obama arrived in Britain for a state visit, having fled Ireland a day early lest the ash cloud from the Grimsvötn volcano in Iceland engulf his aeroplane. In Ireland he met his eighth cousin at Moneygall, where he drank a pint of Guinness, said ‘I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we
Abysmally incompetent as Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke was in attempting to describe some new thinking about the law of rape, it did not merit the outrage of those who argued that rape is rape is rape and that is the end of the question. But the law is all about distinctions. Murder is murder is
Irish quarter Is there any such thing as a US president without Irish roots? The US genealogist Gary Boyd Roberts has researched the origins of all US presidents and concluded that 20 of the 44 US presidents had some Irish family connections. Half of these, however, have been within the past 50 years. — Until
Clarity? New Labour? Sir: I read with growing disbelief your leader ‘Lost Labour’ (14 May), but I now realise that it must have been intended as joke. ‘The tragedy of the Labour years was that so many good ideas were mooted…’; ‘The New Labour years can now be regarded as… a moment of clarity…’ You
