Last week the United Nations still had no staff at Banda Aceh airport, which is the focal point for the tsunami relief effort in Indonesia. What could more graphically illustrate the miserable inadequacy of this once great body than its failure to act decisively following the Boxing Day disaster? It lagged behind the Americans and
‘What happened to him?’ I said, meeting the eye of a thin magpie through the bars of his cage. Andrew Meads, veteran bird rescuer and proprietor of Safewings wildlife sanctuary at Isham, near Kettering, Northants, related the following case history. A fortnight ago a man driving a stolen car suddenly lost control, mounted the pavement,
Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog
Robert Gore-Langton on R.C. Sherriff, the deeply untrendy author of Journey’s End, whose run finishes next month One of the more bizarre sights of last year must have been at a matinee in the West End. A major in the Royal Green Jackets turned up to see the hit production of Journey’s End, the first
Simon Heffer deplores the fashion for dressing down. It’s ugly and disrespectful and leaves men looking like idiots We all know that life under the Blair Terror can be pretty grim, but I am beginning to fret about the increasing signs of a collapse in national morale. I do not refer to the well-documented exodus
Douglas Davis reveals new evidence that Tehran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel, and argues that the mullahs’ nuclear facilities must be destroyed The Middle East is on the brink of going nuclear, and the rest of the world is fiddling or looking the other way. The United States is draining its energies in
‘Where have all the Methodists gone?’ This question, posed in the kind of fusty second-hand bookshops where those behind the counter actually read, or at least take an interest in, the wares they sell, led to a baffled silence. The toppling rows of volumes may have contained theses on John Wesley, or detailed accounts of
Max Hastings says it’s about time our leaders stopped playing political games and accepted that ‘international terror’ cannot be defeated by conventional military means If the leaders of the Western world want to do our security a favour, they could adopt a New Year resolution to economise on the use of the word ‘terrorist’ in
China has no exportable culture, she is militarily overrated and her economy is not as successful as it is cracked up to be. Martin Vander Weyer says it’s time we abandoned our superstitious dread of Beijing Mr Zhang Yuchen, a Communist party member and former official of Beijing’s municipal construction bureau, has just built himself
The rooftop view from the sixth-floor office of the chairman of the British Council — at the cheaper end of The Mall up against Admiralty Arch — encompasses the political landmarks of the new occupant. There’s the Welsh Office, for the man’s roots, halfway down Whitehall on the left; the office of the European Commission,
In the middle of December last year, five police officers turned up at the Welsh home of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National party, and arrested him on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. Griffin was driven to Halifax police station and forced to watch three hours’ worth of his own speeches, which the police
I live in a city of the dead surrounded by a city of the living. The great cemetery of Kensal Vale is a privately owned metropolis of grass and stone, of trees and rusting iron. At night, the security men scour away the drug addicts and the drunks; they expel the lost, the lonely and
Not much was made of Christmas at Chatsworth in the 18th and 19th centuries. Diaries and letters hardly mention it. Prince Albert’s trees and decorations took a long time to reach Derbyshire and would have been wasted on the December air because there were no children here for nearly a hundred years. At the turn
Somebody once said that the English don’t really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connolly’s characteristically over-elaborate ‘Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope’: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes,
On a Friday morning earlier this year I kept an appointment with Dr Mark Hamilton, a consultant physician and gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, to ask him about a bowel complaint. I was in two minds about whether my symptoms were significant enough to justify taking up Dr Hamilton’s time. It seemed
There is an old Jewish proverb that if God came to earth, people would start smashing His windows. After an initial period of loving Rowan Williams, the press and the Church are beginning to have their doubts. The man who was hailed as the complicated Welsh poet and the much longed-for Intellectual in Public Life
Andrew Gilligan on what the army stands to lose by adopting ‘Starbucks’ regiments W est Belfast in the autumn of 1982 was a bad place to be a British soldier. Booby-traps, like the one which destroyed Corporal Leon Bush, aged 22, of the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters Regiment, were routine, decidedly not news. Corporal Bush’s
Miami It’s a mild and tranquil December here in Florida, the headlines flickering with routine weirdness and depravity. Four years ago at this time, we were roiling in the acid-bath aftermath of a presidential contest that required 36 ridiculous days to resolve, and only then by a brazenly partisan vote of the United States Supreme
The sky was already murky at 4 p.m. when I locked my bike outside Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Inside, it was even murkier: wood-panelled corridors stretched off into the gloom, men in grey suits were wedged together, smoking Bensons and drinking bitter. No one looked even slightly like an Arch Priest of
Washington Two of the world’s most impressive spin machines are locked in deadly combat. On the one side is the mob that Hillary Clinton once called ‘the vast right-wing conspiracy’, a bunch of conservative US senators and congressmen, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and his New York Post, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and the