Britain, that country known for inventions such as the railway, football, the jet engine… and the Sonic Teenager Deterrent. This is the depths to which we seem to have sunk in the UK when it comes to dealing with problematic teenagers. See this summary from ITN, and this amusing piece...
Britain tends to be even worse at the Winter Olympics than in most other major sports championships. We don’t have much snow, we don’t have many ice rinks, and hence we don’t get many medals. Women’s curling is normally about as fun as it is supposed to get. But today...
Having spent time in Sweden that has such a ban already, and having recently been repulsed by too much smoking in public in Austria, it’s with great joy that I heard the news this evening that the UK will get a full smoking ban in pubs and restaurants. Further, MPs...
The row over the Muhammad cartoons in Jyllands Posten shows no sign of going away, and Libya has today announced it is closing its embassy in Denmark and will aim to cut economic ties with Denmark as the Danish Government has refused to criticise the newspaper – see the BBC...
Sometimes a certain story just manages to capture the public imagination. This weekend, London has been lucky enough to benefit from such a story – the Thames Whale. See the coverage from The Observer here, The Sun here, and then it even reached Dagens Nyheter and Spiegel. Saturday was a...
The Brits have apparently reached the point where their credit card debt is starting to decline, but according to this interesting article in USA Today, we still have an average of $5188 of credit card debt per person – about ??3000! Remarkable that is the average figure! Further, one in...
After months of nasty wrangling, it looks like the UK will finally get a full ban on smoking in all public places. The government has decided that MPs will be give a free vote on any proposals that go further than the previous botched compromise proposals that had advocated allowing...
He managed to beat Oona King in the East London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 election, standing for his ‘Respect’ party. There were plenty of strange stories of what his activists managed to get up to. But then he managed to win a massive libel case...
Barely a day goes past in London without hearing one: the wailing sound of a police siren. You hear the sirens so often that it becomes a bit like Peter crying ‘wolf’ – it is such a normal sound that people just tend to ignore it. This also applies to...
Downing Street policy analysts reckon that the UK electorate is presently behaving like a grumpy teenager: wanting responsibility, but not ready to handle it. They tend to view any attempts by the state to cajole or force them to do things as unwelcome authority, with the newspapers further fostering the...
All I seem to ever feel in the UK is that there are crackdowns on this and that in the name of security. So it is with some pride that I can today write an excellent and positive story about the UK: from today civil partnerships are legal in the...
A federal judge in Pennsylvania has ruled that it is unconstitutional to teach so called Intelligent Design in schools – read the articles from the Seattle Post and BBC. This is quite a landmark ruling, as Kansas and other states have pioneered the teaching of religious ideas about evolution and...