Thousands of words have been written about the conflict in South Ossetia in the last few days and the answer tends to depend on whose side you’re on – do you reckon Vladimir Putin is an evil land-grabbing neo-tsar, or do you think Mikheil Saakashvili is an unpredictable and unreliable […]
As the Olympics get underway in Beijing today I’m happy to announce the launch of my latest website project – the campaign to get Twenty20 Cricket to be an Olympic sport at the London Olympics in 2012. I’ve been asked to work on the campaign by Murad Qureshi, a member […]
I’ve been going back and forth between the UK and Belgium for the last 10 months, and due to a change in circumstances I’m finally getting all the bureaucracy in order so as to stay in Belgium on a more permanent basis. First of all the flat. Sign the papers […]
The Assembly of European Regions reckons no-one takes the concept of subsidiarity seriously enough in Europe and so they have embarked on a campaign to do something about it. So they decided to get one of their staff to jump off the old bridge in Mostar while at the same […]
If putting up your relationship status on Facebook is a bit much for you, then how about making a marriage proposal via Google Street View? This must be the most unusual thing I’ve seen on the website entitled Google Sightseeing (an amusing site for wasting time online) that lists oddities […]
So the old saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining. So too it seems does the rather large cloud hanging over the EU as a result of the Irish No vote on the Treaty of Lisbon; the silver lining in this case is an Irish writer called Jason O’Mahony. […]
I always get worried when British politicians cite Sweden in their analysis of anything. It’s excellent to look to a country that’s a model of Social Democracy as an example, but the lessons learnt are often wide of the mark. It was Michael Gove that twisted Sweden’s ‘state schools run […]
This is the view at 0725 EDT at Ottawa International Airport. The plane pictured is the Thomas Cook Airlines Boeing 757 I was supposed to be flying on from Montréal Trudeau to London Gatwick at 1800 yesterday but almost 14 hours on we’re still not moving. OK, things go wrong […]
The campaign is BACK and bigger and better than before – visit the site here! OK, so the Atheist Bus pledge at Pledge Bank has expired, and 877 people promised they would give £5 to put an atheist ad on a London Bus. We were 3801 short. But hang on. […]
A few years ago – more by luck than judgment – I ended up as one of the DJs for most of the parties during my MA at the College of Europe in Bruges. The proper DJ had fallen ill, I had a load of MP3s, and I was asked […]
Richard Corbett is rightly enraged that the Daily Telegraph published an article entitled ‘EU mandarins force Peking duck off the menu‘. Just like all of these myths about the EU trying to do something there’s half a grain of truth in it, and the rest is complete crap. Essentially ovens […]
In the last week I’ve skated in three of the very best places it’s possible to imagine – along the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan, around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montréal, and along the St Lawrence River in Québec. The Manhattan and Montréal routes are super […]
